Staging Class Conflict in the UK Author: Liz Tomlin Affiliation: University of Glasgow Published online: Cambridge University Press, 06 March 2025 Online ISBN: 9781009394222 License: CC-BY 4.0 (Open Access)

Summary This Element focuses on the frequent staging of the most precarious fraction of the working class in the context of a theatre industry, academy and audiences that are dominated by the cultural fraction of the middle class. It interrogates the staging of an abjectified figure as a means of challenging the stigmatisation of the poor in political discourse, defined here as an ideological imaginary of moral and cultural deficit. The Element argues that in seeking to subvert such an imaginary, theatre that stages the abjectified subject may risk consolidating two further imaginaries of working class deficit that have been confected in political discourse from the 1990s to the 2020s. In conclusion, the Element reflects on the political potential of theatre that rather seeks to eradicate class descriptors, conflicts and hierarchies altogether.

1 Introduction This Element is one of the principle outcomes of my AHRC fellowship (2022–24), Figurations of working class subjects in UK theatre practice and policy. Over a period of eighteen months I engaged in dialogues with theatre scholars, sociologists, artists, producers and policy makers, identifying the multiple class inequities that persist throughout the theatre industry in the UK today. For this Element, I wanted to dig more deeply into the ideological implications of certain patterns that emerged throughout the research: the dominance within the theatre industry and audiences of those from a particular section of the middle class; the common recurrence of staged figures of precarity; the placement of this figure in antagonistic relationship to, or allyship with, the audience; and the popularity of autobiographical accounts of lived experiences of precarity. In my conversations with sociologists, I also became increasingly aware that defining class itself has never been more complex.

1.1 Classification There are many different approaches to class in current sociological thinking. These include use of the existing NS-SEC socio-economic classifications; development of new socio-economic schema to reflect changing trends in employment (Savage et al., 2015); and analysis that continues to emphasise the importance of cultural and social, as well as economic, capital, as introduced by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (2010). In addition, the intersections of race, gender, geography and age, among other factors, can no longer be ignored. Demographic research into social mobility, or the lack of it, also requires a distinction between class origin (most often assessed by the class of job done by the main breadwinner of your family when you were aged fourteen) and class destination (the classification of the job that you currently do). No definitions, including those drawn on in this Element, are authoritative, although some are more evidence-based than others. All are strategic, contestable, imperfect and incomplete categorisations of human subjects within which innumerable exceptions will always exist.

Moreover, the very act of classification is not a neutral, or merely descriptive, one. As Imogen Tyler cautions, all classificatory systems play a part in creating and legitimating ‘the forms of value, judgements and norms they establish in human societies’ (Tyler 2015: 507). This is where theatre and performance can productively intervene, as this Element will explore, by staging the fictions of classed identities precisely in order to expose their ideological slipperiness and subvert the normative values that classificatory systems can consolidate. Nonetheless, however double-edged, subjective and provisional sociological classifications are, they are tools that are sometimes necessary to address the reality of contemporary Britain, a country that is, and always has been, riven by class inequality, however that is precisely defined, understood, or even experienced. The easier-to-evidence material inequality of economic resources, educational opportunity, health chances and life choices is also driven by class stigmatisation and cultural and social practices of privilege and exclusion which are less easy to quantify but no less real. Without ways of identifying and naming those who benefit most from such inequality, and those who pay the biggest cost, political operations of redress or reparation cannot be designed or undertaken.

Since around 2015, there has been an acceleration, in theatre and performance studies, of interest in class inequality, which this Element will draw on, develop and interrogate. One significant departure from existing studies is my commitment to employing class fractions: more precise classifications than the categories of middle and working class commonly encountered in theatre scholarship. Such precision is not only valuable in its own right but also productively complicates the often assumed inter-class antagonism between these two broad class constructs that might rather conceal, as this Element will demonstrate, other nuanced and pluralistic inter-class allyships and intra-class conflicts that are critical to examine.

The class protagonists central to this study are, firstly, the cultural fraction of the middle class that, as I will evidence in Section 2, make up the majority of artists, audiences and academics who are the taste-makers and architects of the cultural field of consumption and, secondly, the most precarious fraction of the working class which has become an increasingly common figure of political concern on the stages of British theatre.

The descriptor of the ‘cultural fraction’ draws on Bourdieu’s historical division of the middle class into two fractions ‘defined by different asset structures, i.e., different distributions of their total capital among the different kinds of capital’ (Bourdieu 2010: 109). On the one hand is the fraction that is high in economic capital, but less endowed with cultural capital. Bourdieu includes, ‘industrial and commercial employers at the higher level, craftsmen and shopkeepers at the intermediate level’ (109). On the other is the fraction that concerns us here, those who hold relatively less economic capital but higher levels of cultural capital. This cultural fraction, despite variations in income, would incorporate most of those working in the cultural and creative industries, given the necessity for a degree in most jobs in this sector and the high levels of cultural capital held. The cultural fraction would also encompass the majority of those working at primary, secondary and higher levels of education as highlighted by Bourdieu (109), as well as other comparable graduate professions. Increasingly staged as antagonist to the cultural fraction of the middle class anticipated to make up the most part of the audience is the figure of the precarious subject, drawn from the most disenfranchised fraction of the working class. It is the complex relationship between these two class fractions that is the central concern of this Element.

Given the different uses, in political and philosophical theory, to which the term ‘precarious’ has been put (Standing 2011; Butler 2015: 15), it is important to note that my use of it here is drawing on a recent classification scheme devised by sociologist Mike Savage. The precariat fraction is the lowest of Savage et al.’s seven classifications and comprises the unemployed and the most precarious zero-hours workers (Savage, Cunningham and Devine 2015). In John Goldthorpe’s NS-SEC scheme, the precariat would align to the ninth and lowest category of ‘never worked and long term unemployed’.

1.2 Setting the Stage The subsidised professional sector of the theatre industry is the setting in which the relationship between these two protagonists will be explored. This sector is consecrated within the academy as the one in which aesthetic and cultural value is most highly regarded, given that it dominates the stages of the flagship national venues and regional theatres, and most often represents the nations of the UK on international festival and touring circuits. Unlike most sporting events, musicals or popular music, it is funded, or part-funded, by the state because it is implicitly assigned a cultural value for the nation that places it beyond ‘mere’ entertainment and, consequently, is assumed to be unable to attract sufficient mass-appeal to rely on solely commercial models of funding.

As I will evidence in Section 2, increased sociological analysis of all cultural and creative industries, as well as theatre and performance in particular, has produced research that conclusively establishes the dominance of these sectors (including, for the most part, their audiences) by those of middle-class origin, despite their public funding base comprising a combination of taxation and lottery proceeds drawn from the much wider population. The subsidised professional theatre sector is thus distinguished by class inequality, cultural currency and limited popular appeal. Indeed, as Bourdieu notes, in order to hold cultural capital, limited popular appeal is essential, as it constitutes, for those who do participate, the mark of distinction and evidence of a cultural taste that is more refined than mass cultural activity (Bourdieu 2010: 23). This necessity for, and acknowledgement of, cultural distinction makes the subsidised professional theatre sector a fascinating case study for class analysis as it establishes the very conception of the sector itself as a playground of high cultural capital consecrated, firstly, by state funding via the national arts councils and, secondly, by theatre academics who predominantly select from this field to establish curricula in university departments that confirm, for the artists and cultural leaders of the future, how and where cultural capital is held.

The stage that is set for the exploration of class conflicts in this Element extends beyond the plays and autobiographical performances that will be the key focus of this study. Rather, it encompasses various and complex classed configurations and antagonistic relationships of artists, audiences, those who are imagined to be absent or excluded from the theatre and those who make up the cultural and creative leadership of the theatre industry and related scholarly disciplines. Moreover, the analysis of performances will be undertaken in the context of class conflicts, both rhetorical and real, that are staged in the wider social and political conditions of the time. This contextualisation affords an ideological analysis of the conditions underpinning the aesthetic choices made, and reveals the possible political consequences of those choices on perceptions of class allegiances and antagonisms in the wider cultural and political field. Such consequences, of course, lead us full circle as they contribute, in turn, to the ideological conditions of production determining which future performances are most likely to be supported and made.

1.3 Political Context Section 2, Class Antagonisms and Alliances on the Political Stage, will set out the political context that provides the ideological backdrop for the performance analysis in the sections that follow. It will begin by fleshing out the figure of the cultural fraction of the middle class and introducing the creative subset of this fraction that comprises the theatre makers and academics who produce and analyse the work under examination in this Element. It will then highlight the alliance between the creative subset of this class fraction and the frequently staged figure drawn from the most precarious fraction of the working class. Given that this alliance grows out of an ideological imperative to challenge the stigmatisation of such a figure on the political stage, I will then chart the first of two political operations that are central to this study: the Labour Government’s (1997–2010) cleavage of the working class into ‘hard-working families’ versus an unemployed underclass who were increasingly stigmatised as figures of abjection in poverty porn documentaries such as Channel Four’s Benefits Street (2014), or satirical comedy such as BBC’s Little Britain (2003–2006). This stigmatisation, examined at length by Imogen Tyler, positions the poorest subjects in society as the abject ‘waste’ of increasingly cruel ‘neoliberal economic, political and social policies’ (Tyler 2013: 8). Historically, as Beverley Skeggs argues, the poor have always been seen less as unfortunate victims of an unfair economic system than essentialised as biologically degenerate and inferior human beings who are closer to animals and children than adult human subjects who have accrued the necessary cultural and moral values (Skeggs 2004: 37). Furthermore, Skeggs critiques Bourdieu’s own portrayal of the working class noting that ‘these subjects appear with negative capital, as lack, deficit, a void of value’ (Skeggs 2011: 502). Such stigmatisation is thus defined in this study as an ideological imaginary of deficit, and it is this ideological imaginary that the theatre-makers featured here seek to challenge through their staging of protagonists drawn from this class fraction.

The second political operation to be examined in Section 2 is that of a right-wing populism which has sought to divide the working class into those who ‘belong’ here (implicitly those who are white) and those who are ‘foreign outsiders’ (explicitly asylum seekers). In this rhetorical narrative, white working- and lower-middle-class fractions are hailed as ‘ordinary people’ and placed in antagonistic relations, not only with those classed as outsiders but also with the well-known populist antagonist, the ‘elite’, a rhetorical figure into which the cultural fraction of the middle class squarely falls. The danger for theatre makers and academics is the risk of accepting this confected conflict, and with it the populist narrative, in which those framed as their antagonists are assumed to hold the views that are attributed to them via the strategic and rhetorical figure of ‘ordinary people’. This, I argue, conjures up a re-directed ideological imaginary of moral deficit in which the figure of the white working- or lower-middle-class subject is no longer conflated with a figure of abjection, but of racist recidivism.

1.4 Three Ideological Imaginaries of Deficit The remaining sections of this Element will examine three different manifestations of the ideological imaginary of deficit through the analysis of selected plays and performances. The political imperative, of theatre makers and scholars, to challenge the stigmatisation of the most precarious fraction of the working class underpins much of the work explored in this Element and will be the focus of my analysis in Section 3, Staging the Ideological Imaginary of Deficit, through examinations of Gary Owen’s Iphigenia in Splott (2015), Kieran Hurley’s Mouthpiece (2018) and Chris Bush’s Hungry (2021). In each of these plays the audience is interpellated as complicit in the internalisation of the ideological imaginary of deficit and so in need of provocation, but I will suggest that this may not always be the case. The cultural fraction of the middle class that makes up the most part of such audiences has always been, as Bourdieu proposes, and I will further discuss, distinguished by its left-wing political leanings (Bourdieu 2010: 439). Thus, the majority of spectators are likely to self-identify as the political ally of the precarious figures staged, which can result in the evocation of new manifestations of the ideological imaginary of deficit, as the subsequent two sections will explore.

In Section 4, Artists and Agency, I examine, through Arinzé Kene’s autofictional performance, Misty (2018), and Scottee’s autobiographical performance, Class (2019), how one new manifestation of the ideological imaginary comes into play when the figures of precarity being staged, or narrated, are real people, or ostensibly so. Extending the self-reflective interrogation threaded through both pieces, and drawing on Katie Beswick’s (2019) work on authenticity, I argue that the ideological imperative for the cultural fraction of the middle class to ally with the figure of precarity is precisely what raises the risk of exoticisation. Narratives of authentic precarity become required by such audiences to afford them the pleasure of offering the allyship that confirms and consolidates both their own distance from precarity (in most cases) and their distinctive political identity within the cultural, rather than economic, fraction of the middle class. Given the risks of exoticisation, which both Scottee and Kene acknowledge, it is inevitable that the working-class-origin artists contracted to provide such accounts are, themselves, implicitly reduced to figures of cultural deficit, valued not for their craft or creative capacity, but only for the authenticity of their lived experience of precarity. Thus, regardless of the cultural agency they appear to be afforded by their place at the heart of the creative subset of the cultural fraction, there is a risk that the industry expectations that, often unconsciously, shape their origin narratives ghost a second manifestation of the figure of cultural deficit which, I propose, echoes Jacques Rancière’s (2003) figure of the shoemaker that successive philosophers have fought to keep out of the intellectual arena. Moreover, if the artist’s authenticated lived experience of precarity is presented, not as exceptional, nor as that pertaining to a particular fraction, but rather as a stand-in for that of the working class more broadly, there is a danger that precarity and at times its abjectification become synonymous with the working-class subject per se, thus reconfirming a middle-class imaginary of an always precarious, sometimes abjectified, working class.

In Section 5, Allyship and Antagonism, I will deconstruct the significant body of scholarly analysis of Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem (2009) to suggest that the lens through which the play has commonly been assessed is a classed lens that conceals how the allyship between the abjectified outsider and the cultural fraction of the middle class can be employed to vilify and demonise the life-choices and ethical perspectives of those who, in the play, are located as antagonists to the alliance of Rooster and the interpellated audience. These are the residents of the new estate who, while ambiguously classed by Butterworth, and variously classed by theatre scholars, are most persuasively understood as aspirational working or lower middle class or, in Dan Evans’ (2023) terms, the traditional fraction of the petty-bourgeoisie. This section will suggest that the nature of the classed representations in Jerusalem and the alliances and antagonisms invited highlight the dangers of an uncritical absorption of the antagonism confected by the far right between the cultural fraction of the middle class and the white working- and lower-middle-class fractions. The result is an evocation of a new imaginary of cultural and moral deficit in which the white working- or lower-middle-class figure becomes synonymous with bad taste, complicity with neoliberal consumerism, and racist violence.

1.5 The Political Potential of Declassification In Section 6, Making Theatre by Making Shoes (and Other Things) Together, I will depart from performances that stage class conflict to examine whether 12 Last Songs (2021) by Quarantine Theatre might offer different answers to the questions that this Element has posed. Might an avoidance of explicit class conflict, in favour of work which purposefully declassifies and equalises subjects from across the classes, offer an alternative mode of resistance to the ideological imaginary of deficit which relies on classification and distinction between the classes for its power? Here, I continue to think with Jacques Rancière, whose philosophy has been seminal in arguing against classification more broadly, and that of the working-class subject in particular. Ultimately, I suggest, alternatives are important because there are risks to the political operation of de-stigmatising the figuration of abjection, as highlighted above in 1.4, that need to be brought more sharply into focus. The interest of theatre makers and academics in the most precarious fraction of the working class is understandable and necessary, given the demonisation of such a fraction in political discourse. However, a focus on this fraction at the expense of broader fractions of the working and lower middle classes will ensure that the latter (who are minoritised in the theatre sector, subsidised theatre audiences and arts academia) remain occluded from the debate. Their concerns and critical perspectives will not be permitted to challenge the ideological convictions of the dominant class fraction, their representations will remain rare, and the classist barricades within which the cultural sector operates (Brook et al., 2020; Tomlin et al., 2020) will be further strengthened to resist any dilution of the political or cultural consensus that has evolved. This Element hopes, beyond the analysis featured here, to encourage its readers to seek out their own arguments to challenge and interrogate the ideological coherence of the sector. If we begin to pay close attention to the classed lens of our discipline, and the theatre industry itself, we might, as scholars, teachers, artists or students, start to expose existing classed hierarchies and make space for, and valorise, a greater diversity of classed perspectives and interventions. In this way, we will all be better placed to challenge and overturn the antagonisms that political rhetoric, on both the right and the left, has evoked, as the following section will now explore.

2 Class Antagonisms and Alliances on the Political Stage 2.1 The Cultural Fraction of the Middle Class It is of little surprise that audiences of subsidised theatre are chiefly comprised of individuals from the cultural fraction of the middle class. In Culture Is Bad for You, Orian Brook, Dave O’Brien and Mark Taylor evidence that audiences for drama are dominated by the professional and managerial class, outnumbering those in routine or semi-routine occupations by around 3:1 (O’Brien 2020: 84). Brook et al. also confirm the predominance, within ‘formal’ cultural attendance (which would include subsidised theatre), of the ‘higher professional’ rather than the ‘higher managerial’ class fraction of the middle class (97 my emphasis). This is unsurprising given that the higher professional fraction comprised of university lecturers, doctors and lawyers corresponds closely with Bourdieu’s cultural fraction. Furthermore, Brook et al. demonstrate that ‘Artistic and literary occupations have a particularly distinctive pattern of [cultural] engagement. They are the most engaged in the formal cultural activities that … are of interest to the smallest minority of the population’ (98). This sub-fraction of ‘artistic and literary occupations’ offers a more precise understanding of those who play a key role in this Element: the artists and producers who create the theatre and those working in related academic disciplines, often themselves former artists, who analyse and valorise it. These all belong to, what might be understood as, an ‘uber-cultural’ creative subsection of Bourdieu’s fraction, or a ‘micro class’ (Brook et al., 2020: 18) within the cultural fraction of the middle class more broadly. Moreover, there is ample evidence that those working within the cultural and creative industries are overwhelmingly of middle-class origin (Brook et al., 2020: 63).

The middle-class-origin dominance of creative occupations more broadly is repeated, if not accentuated, in research that extrapolates data on theatre in particular. In the 2016 Analysis of Theatre in England report, concern was expressed that ‘social mobility in the sector is not increasing; rather, it may be regressing’. In their study of the ‘class ceiling’ in the acting profession, Friedman et al. report that ‘73 per cent of actors in the GBCS [Great British Class Survey] … come from “middle class” professional or managerial backgrounds whereas this group constitutes only 29 per cent of the population … Moreover, only 10 per cent of actors in the GBCS … have parents who worked in semi-routine and routine employment, or who never worked, compared with 33 per cent’ of a representative data set (Friedman, O’Brien and Laurison 2017: 997). In The Director’s Voice, the authors reported that 79 per cent of the workforce was made up of directors ‘who come from what is categorised as either an upper-middle class or middle class background’, in contrast with only 27 per cent of the population as a whole (Hescott and Furness 2018: 22).

This cumulative research and advocacy has gained traction in policy terms, in England in particular. Not only has Arts Council England’s funding emphasis shifted towards a significant redistribution of funding in favour of areas previously under-resourced by cultural subsidy, but it has also now included socio-economic diversity in the cultural workforce surveys of national portfolio organisations, to sit alongside the existing protected characteristics of race, gender and disability. However, in his article, ‘Class and the problem of inequality in the theatre’, Dave O’Brien ultimately concludes that neither raising the visibility of class nor even acting on it to improve the demographics of class composition in the theatre industry will be sufficient to shift class discrimination which ‘is bound up with struggles over cultural expressions and what counts as legitimate’ (O’Brien 2020: 247). This is because the predominance of those of middle-class origin within the creative subset that comprises the cultural industries and related academic disciplines not merely is a demographic imbalance but also ensures that the behavioural norms, aesthetic values and ideological convictions of this subset wield near-hegemonic authority within the industry and academy – both what is produced in the first place and, subsequently, what is consecrated as holding high cultural value through academic syllabi and publications.

Brook et al. do not claim that these ideological convictions are monolithic, and they are keen to distinguish their micro-class from the ‘creative class’ of economic and policy analyst, Richard Florida (2002). Nonetheless, their research demonstrates that ‘[i]n Britain’s cultural occupations we can see a coherent set of values and attitudes that are liberal, left-wing, and in favour of welfare and security interventions … of all the industrial groups measured, people working in cultural and creative industries have the most left-wing, liberal, pro-welfare values’ (2020: 67). This is not, of course, to suggest that differently classed subjects, or workers in other industrial classifications, do not share such values, or to deny that there may be some individuals among the micro-class of creative workers who do not. The significant claim here is that in no other industrial group measured was there found to be so much ideological coherence among its workers. The dominance of a single class origin, within this particular industrial grouping, exacerbates the risk of a classed hegemony of shared norms and aesthetics which must then be protected from challenge, propagated and sustained. So long as the prevailing cultural legitimation of certain aesthetics, representations and ideological assumptions remains undisturbed, individual artists of whatever class origin will always be required to assimilate into the existing habitus, in order to succeed within it.

2.2 Allyship with the Precarious Fraction of the Working Class The conclusions of Brook et al. suggest that the left-wing political values shared by a significant majority of the creative subset, including theatre artists, would inevitably evoke empathy for the most precarious fraction of the working class. The political intention of staging figures from this particular class fraction is most commonly undertaken, as demonstrated in the plays examined here, to challenge mainstream stigmatisation of those who, as this section will go on to examine, are economically marginalised under the mechanisms of neoliberalism and have been culturally denigrated and abjectified in political discourse and the narratives of a hostile and influential right-wing media. The academic interest in plays addressing the plight of the marginalised would suggest that theatre scholars in the UK, for the most part, hold similar political convictions to the creative subset of artists. The evidence of any examination of scholarly publications shows a sector that has always leaned strongly to the left, but there has recently been a particular interest in theatre that deals explicitly with, and offers allyship to, the most economically disenfranchised subjects, as can be seen from significant British publications during the period in question (e.g. Jeffers 2012; Angelaki 2017; Fragkou 2018; Beswick 2019; Holdsworth 2020; Bartley 2020)