First of all I want to congratulate all of those who are attending this conference. The world of creating fair and equal access to our higher seats of learning is not only amongst the
most honourable thing one can do, but it is amongst the most vital. I don’t need to explain the impact on the nation’s economy, on the nation’s confidence that education brings, but it does one thing greater than that when it is arts education.

It feeds the engine room of a culture’s or civilization’s most important internal mechanism – that of introspection. For that is what the arts are – the mirrors of society – the ones that hold up that reflective material and ask is this what we truly look like? And if so, do we like it? And if we don’t – what are we going to do about it? Art is the medium of change – the catalyst for the debate that brings about change.

So encouraging and nurturing access from all parts of our society – to that blessed group of contributors, is what you are doing. And so I congratulate you on that work.

But my question today, is what are we truly giving them access too? Once in our world, are people judged on their terms or some spurious white middle class notion of what is ‘classic’ and what is not? What is great art and what is not.

The great August Wilson once said that reviewers should not be allowed to write about black plays until they have experience, intellectual experience of the world that forms the black narrative. The call and response of the church, the narratives of the street that has so formed the outlook and morality of many from the under classes. 

What happens to the art when it must always be skewed towards expositionally explaining away why X or Z is dramatic in this context? It affects the art – it no longer becomes this pure expression but something created to soothe the sense of alienation of those who critique it without the tools in the box to truly do so.

There was a time when I would say that one in three Black actors who came out of drama school had a nervous breakdown within five years or so. Why you may ask – well, drama school training is in essence about breaking you down and building you back up to be able to serve a director’s or playwright’s vision. So they left invariably their working class mannerisms behind and became like everyone else in the room – geared ready for a career of Shakespeare and Becket – but found themselves, no matter their talent level, on The Bill playing the fourth mugger from the left, year after year. They were no longer what they were – uncomfortable in their previous environments, not accepted in their current.

When I first did my play Elmina’s Kitchen, we had to search to find actors in their thirties and forties who could do an authentic black British accent.

My point is, we are successfully giving access to working class young people but what are we giving them access too? How lonely is the world? Most of us know, black or white, that feeling when you are the first one in your family to go to university, that feeling that someone is going to tap you on the shoulder and ask you what you are doing here, and you’ll be forced to leave – I know I do, even here today. So I suppose what I am saying here today is that access needs to go two ways.

We the gatekeepers need to start broadening out experiences of new and emerging cultures in our society, be they racial, gender based, even from our children – or else all we are creating in the next generation of artist are little mini-me – maintaining the status quo, not really challenging the assumption of white male middle class hegemony.

I returned home this morning to see that my new play was Critic’s Choice in The Telegraph, Financial Times, and The Independent.

I am not one that is fond of reading reviews. I used to say that I don’t read them, I certainly don’t for other people’s plays or films, or my own, I think I read the first four or five – get a flavour of what they are saying and then wait for people to tell me about the others. They always will. With words or without. Successfully received plays you can’t enter a building without people smiling at you – “Congrats on your notices,” people will say over and over again.

When not so keenly received a big blank wall of silence is the articulated form. “What do they know?” the bolder or closest person will say.

Helen, my designer, her work has not been recognised in the way that it should. She recreated in a realistic and then abstract manner the West Indian front room of my youth. Every person who lived through that era, smiled when they walked into the theatre and saw it dominated with bits from their youth. It not only added to the experience but also explained the inner nature of the character. If no major reviewer has been in a West Indian front room, does not know what the role the gramophone played in the household, the blue fish or the globe drinks cabinet – you can give it a good review but you have not reviewed it.

I close by asking us all when we are thinking about access for those who traditionally do not have it, that we also demand a change at the top – a change that can really appreciate what this new influx of talent brings with them.