Debt, access, representation: all the easy topics

I’m trying to get a few thoughts down each week on my childcare days, while Arthur naps. They’ll be brief and may end abruptly.
 
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Ten years ago almost to the day I saw a show performed in my own accent, for the first time in my life, and it blew my head off. I wrote this piece about it for the Guardian, back when they used to publish writing about theatre. I look back on it now and think that the experience may have been one factor in a total transformation in my career that took place around then. It’s not long after that that I began work on my first solo show - somehow it was now ok to sound like this.
 
Ten years before that, I was at university, and well on the way to having lost my (working-class, Teesside) accent. At some level I must have been ashamed to come from where I come from, and I felt that in order to get anywhere in this industry I needed to pretend to be middle-class. That show isn’t the only thing that made me feel like I was legitimate as I was, but it was a big factor. It was more than ten years before my accent made its way home, and even now in this industry I often feel unsure it’s ok to sound like this.
 
Representation matters, and our stages will always be peopled by the same faces and voices if the same faces and voices are the only ones we represent. But representation is limited by access. Starting a career in theatre relies on often years of unpaid labour, and if you don’t have a laundry list of privileges you’re unlikely to survive this war of attrition. 
 
I say all of this knowing that I’ve scraped through this far no doubt thanks in part to the fact that my lack of class privilege is offset by my possession of every other privilege there is. And I scraped through this far only barely: I’ve written before about the experience of being heavily in debt, which is for many the only way through that initial bottleneck. Perhaps the most startling aspect of that period of my life is something I skirted around in that blogpost: due to the extent of the financial difficulties I was in, and a gap in a precarious work schedule, I ended up homeless for six months. In that blogpost I artfully describe us as living “a semi-nomadic lifestyle”. What that means is we didn’t have anywhere to live. At thirty, with success in the industry behind us, we couldn’t afford it.
 
At the time I rationalised this as making sense in the situation, and in that blogpost you can see that several years later I still bought this rationalisation. But homelessness is homelessness: we hopped from spare room to spare room, but we didn’t have anywhere to live. We were never on the streets, but I look back on this period ten years on and my sense memory is all about how exhausting and stressful it all was.
 
The other thing I didn’t piece together at that time, is that it’s just a couple of months after we found somewhere to live (a cheap room in a shared house in Armley, west Leeds) that I saw that show performed in Teesside accents. And I didn’t have to pretend any more. 
 
This industry is disgracefully difficult, and I don’t see it getting easier any time soon. But the least we can do is make sure everyone’s on stage, and that we deny no-one the means of getting there. And this goes way beyond money. The way we structure access to our industry, and the ways this inhibits real access, go way beyond that. But I’ll have to talk about that another time, because the baby’s waking up.