An Off Piste Polemic

There's a lovely line in As You like It, where Rosalind says, I am a woman -- when I think, I must speak, and I'm finding myself uncharacteristically exercised by something I read in the Observer over the weekend, so although it is straying from my Creative Writing theme, I feel the need to let off steam.

Michael Boyd, Head Honcho at the Royal Shakespeare Company, was talking about the challenges for children performing Shakespeare. He commented,

"There is no getting around the fact it is difficult, but when children perform it, they conquer it and that means they own a bit of high-status culture."

Oooh dear. I have to say my heart sank. How can somebody at the pinnacle of the artistic life of our country talk in terms of owning high status culture? Culture isn't something that you own, for a start: it's something that you enjoy, or celebrate, or share, or explore. If you are talking of ownership, then straightaway you reduce culture to a commodity.  And if you're even thinking in terms of the status of culture, your cause is lost. This is not the language of the practitioner who speaks from the heart, but of a bureaucrat, or a marketeer. Theatre (and fiction) at its dizzying best is a magical kind of communion, the fusion of collective imagination, there's nothing more exciting.  I can't help thinking how impoverished we would be if all we had to enrich ourselves was high status culture, rather than the real thing.