Gove v the arts: let battle commence

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2014/jan/06/gove-arts-funding-cuts-first-world-war

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Jerome Kern's bittersweet song, They Didn't Believe Me, from the Broadway version of Edwardian hit musical The Girl from Utah, became one of the anthems of the men fighting in the trenches during the first world war. With good reason, because the song took on a double meaning, not only voicing the longing of a man for the girl he hopes to marry who is unbelievably beautiful, but also a stark reminder of how hard the British public found it in the early part of the war to accept the bloody reality of the slaughter taking place on Flanders fields. <br /> <br />Fifty years later this lovely ballad made its way into Joan Littlewood's Oh, What a Lovely War! at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, one of the many popular period songs that were used in a show that satirically pointed up the grim reality of a war whose horrors had already been documented in poetry, play and memoir by the men and women who were actually there. Oh, What a Lovely War which gets a major revival at the Theatre Royal next month, has been cited by education secretary Michael Gove as one of the artistic responses to the first world war to which he objects.

Writing in the Daily Mail he declared:

The conflict has, for many, been seen through the fictional prism of dramas such as Oh, What a Lovely War, The Monocled Mutineer and Blackadder, as a misbegotten shambles – a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite. Even to this day there are leftwing academics all too happy to feed those myths.

So was the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon, written during the conflict, RC Sherriff's great play Journey's End, written in the years after its end, or Vera Brittain's extraordinary memoir, Testament of Youth (1933), also the product of minds infected by leftwing academics?

Perhaps we should not be too surprised by Gove's clumsy attempt to take potshots at teachers and artists from the same barrel. It has happened before. Those with long memories will recall Norman Tebbit's attempt during the 1980s to get Theatre Centre's productions of David Holman's Peace Plays (which he hadn't actually seen) banned from schools because he claimed that they were propaganda for the cause of nuclear disarmament and the women's peace camps at Greenham Common.

One way to deflect dissent to government policy from the arts during the 1980s was to squeeze funding. Playwrights during the 1980s were muted in their response to Thatcherism. Mark Ravenhill once suggested that the rise of visual and physical theatre during the 1980s was an attempted response from a theatre community who felt silenced by the dominant Tory ideology (even Peter Hall voted for Margaret Thatcher believing she could sort out the unions, before realising his mistake). Of course there were some great oppositional plays during that period: Caryl Churchill's seminal Top Girls and prescient Serious Money both spring to mind. But a lot of the time artists were too busy talking about money – or rather lack of it – to make art.

Now we have another Tory administration which is squeezing the arts. Just before Christmas it was announced that arts organisations face a further 1.17 per cent cut in funding because of cuts to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) budget announced in the autumn statement. Times are very tough, but outbursts such as Gove's are a reminder of how crucial it is to tell the truth about what happened in the past, but also about history as it is being made.

• Labour condemns Gove's 'crass' comments on first world war

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