West Bromwich Operatic Society and the Fine Art of Musical Theatre
‘In a cozy corner of the electric flame department of the infernal regions there stands a little silver gridiron. It is the private property of his Satanic majesty, and is reserved exclusively for the man who invented amateur theatricals..’P. G. Wodehouse, The Gem Collector, Ainslee’s Magazine, New York 1909
The professional art world’s disdain for amateurs is pretty comprehensive – and unjustified. It’s hard not to see it as self-protection, a way to keep hold of the money and attention. The Arts Council of Great Britain ruled out support for amateur arts when it was setting its principles in the 1950s. That position has eroded a little since it gained funds from the National Lottery in the 1990s but remains largely in place: amateur artists need not apply.
One consequence is that policy-makers have a distorted idea of cultural life. In 2011, the Arts Council published a list of local government areas ranked according to people’s ‘engagement in the arts’, a calculation based on a single question in a household survey. Third from the bottom was Sandwell in the industrial West Midlands – an area I’d known for years through working with Jubilee Arts, Multistory and Black Country Touring and whose rich, diverse cultural life the Arts Council seemed not to know. So, with Multistory’s support, I began meeting some of the people involved in local culture with the intention of drawing attention to their work. When I met West Bromwich Operatic Society I knew I’d found the story. After all, they’d been producing theatre in the town since 1937 – almost a decade before the Arts Council was created.
That winter, I followed the company as they rehearsed and produced Mel Brook’s The Producers, a musical about putting on a musical. I got to know and admire this group of people who, like true amateurs, were motivated by their love of theatre and wanted to put on the very best production they could. They worked incredibly hard but my abiding memory of those months is happiness and laughter: this was a joyful experience and it was a great pleasure to be witness.
And the members’ ease in their artistic work gave me confidence to tell their story with similar creative freedom. Working with filmmaker Ben Wigley and photographer Kate Jackson, I found another way of thinking and writing about people’s artistic engagement. The resulting book, with a DVD of the film about the project, is one of those that I feel happiest with. It was a joy to work on, and I hope that can be felt in the final work. I hope too that it does justice to the millions of people who create art for the love of it.
- Download Where We Dream: West Bromwich Operatic Society and the Fine Art of Musical Theatre (PDF)
- Order the book and DVD from Multistory
François Matarasso 