From yawn to outrage in London's theatre world
11th June 2011

Sadler's Wells, 'London's dance house', is the scene of this summer's most controversial show as twenty men, stark bollocking naked apart from flowing blond wigs, cavort across the laps and in the faces of a startled audience. It is a scene from a dance cutely titled A Little Tenderness, For Crying Out Loud! except the title is in French and the company is Canadian.

One reviewer described a tug of war as a naked dancer tried to wrest notebook and pen from his grasp. When that failed the dancer calmly removed the reviewer's glasses, gobbed a hefty mouthful of phlegm onto them and handed them back with a sneer. This reviewer considered he'd escaped lightly; less fortunate patrons were exposed to sustained assaults of close-range willie-wobbling and backside-baring.

The show caused an outrage on Twitter and business is booming. But it raises two questions. One: is this art? Two: don't theatres have rules about climbing on the furniture?

Defining art in London is as complex as the city's Underground system. Nowhere is it more obvious that art in the modern world serves two masters – aesthetic and financial. The city's artistic community strains for large 'C' creativity. Every actor, painter and dancer sheltering within these walls, every hobbledehoy with an ounce of wit, has only one desire – to become the Next Big Thing, to create the Next Big Movement, to establish the Next Big Brand.

But in London art is always – always – tempered in the crucible of hard cash. Art is an industry: the theatres, galleries and concert halls are the draw cards for millions of tourists and millions of pounds of investment so, at the end of the day, art must make a profit.

The force that mediates creativity and profit is risk. A few days ago the new director of the Institute of Contemporary Art was interviewed on BBC Radio 4. The ICA, at one time the most avant garde space in the galaxy and launching pad for Damien Hirst, Yoko Ono and the Pop Art movement, is on the ropes. The director was asked how he intended to revive the ICA's fortunes in a crowded market place. “We are going to take more risks,” he replied.

What he didn't specify was who will take the risks. Is it the artists, the investors or the audience, like the unsuspecting punters who went to see a nice evening of dance at Sadler's Wells?

In London's art world taking risks appears to be more about crossing boundaries of taste than about exploring new creative directions. Shock, sensation and outrage are invited, not as preliminaries to serious artistic debate (although that does happen, usually in the form of commentators lobbing opinions from fixed positions) but to attract the headlines and cyber-buzz that will secure the balance sheet.

For all that, the bulk of London's artistic output is determined by money-men and, like investors everywhere, they tend to stick with the familiar. West End theatres offer a conservative diet of musicals, drama and comedy. Old favourites are dusted off and given a fresh coat of paint; new shows follow the same undemanding formula. The big drawcard in the West End this summer is a centenary revival of the plays of Terence Rattigan – whose work had long ago fallen by the wayside, where it should have remained.

The major concert halls, opera houses and galleries follow the same pattern. Here are Mozart, Verdi and the Impressionists to delight the conservative and the novice, whose trip to London would be incomplete without taking in a 'show.'

Happily, between yawn and outrage there is a fertile strip of creative soil in London's art world, and after watching a ho hum production of The Cherry Orchard at The National Theatre recently Sylvia and I set out to find it.

On successive evenings we stumbled upon an Irish smorgasbord of family conmanship and, in a little walk-up theatre in Soho, a peculiar exploration of youthful awakening by four actor/musician ingenues. Neither show was flawless; both over-reached and under-performed, but we were inspired to debate their merits and messages all the way back to our hotel.

It is likely the creators of these shows see them as merely a springboard to bigger things. But if they are hoping to make the shift from Soho to Shaftesbury Avenue they should be prepared to become either more sensational or to be rubbed smooth to fit a low-risk commercial mould.