OBAMA

On 4 November 2008, Barack Obama, a first generation Black American with a Kenyan father, became the 44th (and 1st Black) President of the United States: an event I'd never imagined to see in my lifetime. The world, for both Black and White, is changed forever. Now, anything, literally, is possible. No longer the need, as with Martin Luther King, to "dream". No longer can anyone say a non-White is incapable.

Rosa Parks taught us to claim any school as a right. Mohammed Ali taught us to have pride in ourselves - "Black is beautiful". Martin Luther King taught us to dream. Tiger Woods broke through a bastion of whiteness (golf), as did Lewis Hamilton (F1). Buy Obama has revolutionized our world. Whatever the fortuitous set of circumstances making his victory possible (disillusionment with the Republicans and Iraq, the economy, age), the fact remains he did it: less than 8 years from joining the American political scene as a Senator... and a mere step away from roots in a village in Kenya!

Only in America: it truly is the modern country (if the condition of modernity is the ability to re-invent yourself). And, in the process, restoring faith in the notion of democracy.

The hard part begins now, when he assumes office. Buy it matters little. He'd delivered a symbol to a world hitherto dominated by white Europeans. The tectonic plates are shifting as we live.

Hexham

Roman Fort town, serving Hadrian's Wall. Then the Augustinians came, leaving a wonderfully "homely" Abbey behind. Then a Methodist Church built facing sideways on to the Abbey, as if unwilling (abashed?) to look the Abbey square in the face. The Shalom bookshop is now in one of the buildings of the Church. And we come, into Queens Hall, to perform The Tempest.

Oh, the layers of England! We're in England's Border County (as Northumberland chooses to describe itself). Nearby is Wylam, George Stephenson's village - him of the "rocket engine" that proved an icon of Industrial England - I'd first heard of him in school in Nairobi.

A warm, generous audience: attentive, beaming with pleasure, intensely appreciative at the end. Here we end our tour of England: now the long journey back to London, where the latest Elizabethan theatre to be built (the Rose, in Kingston) awaits: fitting that we end the run of Shakespeare's last play in a theatre not unlike the Globe. We're all excited and apprehensive in equal manner.

I realise I love the Geordie accent - it has an earthy musicality that chimes with the terrain, all sweeping hills and sparkling rivers.

Buxton

St Valentine's Day and we're performing in the gorgeous, Frank Matcham designed Buxton Opera House. Such a joy of a theatre: from the raked stage, the actors get a sense of an intimate auditorium (it seats 1200), hanging on every word. The architecture lends a softness - its the only word that'll do - to the actors, knowing they don't have to push, only talk.

After the show, there's a post-show discussion, with a sizeable part of the audience staying behind (perhaps the bitter North Derbyshire cold induced them to linger on in the warm theatre).

Amongst the questions and comments:

• How d'you multi-role play? I'm interested in that.  'Thought 'twere really good. (A school-boy)
  
• Is Shakespeare really infinitely adaptable? (This from an usher, who'd taught English for 30 years. I find out later she takes umbrage with modern-dress versions. I'm not wholly unsympathetic to her view...)
• Thank you for your interpretation
• This was the definitive Tempest
• Do you think there's hope then? (After I'd talked about the London Bombings...)

Oh, "hope"! I could have melted into the floor. The young woman asked the question for all of us. The story of the Tempest is among those that can keep that flicker of hope alive - forgiveness, so simple so difficult.

When we retire to the hotel bar (there's a Singles Night going on) and some of the cast bemoan having failed to wish their loved ones a happy Valentine's Day, I reflect on my own slip of memory: on this day, at 7pm, 40 years ago I touched down at Heathrow from Nairobi. I was born anew, becoming a Black, a wog, a Paki, an Asian, a theatre director. Perhaps being born again is not an imperative confined solely to the migrant - but it certainly makes it easier! Thrust into a new life with little preperation - except the balaclavas my mother had wisely thought to buy in Nairobi market before setting off with us...

Darlington

Was Shakespeare against women? Why did you choose to make Caliban so sympathetic and not monstrous? Is this a colonial era play - reflecting the colonial times in Shakespeare's day?

Questions from the younger end of tonight's audience in Darlington (another full house). Who says the language of Shakespeare is inaccessible - though of course it is for some, just as for some theatre itself is boring.

Once again I'm reminded of the cuts - "you are amongst our favourite companies, and now we find all the companies we value have been cut. Where's the logic in that?" This from the venue. No doubt others will fill the void. But why go through such constant re-inventing of the wheel?

Great to see the changes in Darlington - quite a bit of public art. Late at night, in the deserted town square, some of the actors and I tried out the latest offering: lamp-posts that pulse in time with your heart-beat! Squeals of delight from us echo across the square. I wonder if some such machine could be rigged to respond to Shakespeare's metre? A thought... 

Swansea

We were at the Taliesin Arts Centre in Swansea today - tucked just off the main thoroughfare that runs along Oyster Bay on the "other" (posher, according to the locals) side of the River Tawe. A full house again, in this lovely theatre.  

The following morning, walking along Oyster Bay, past Dylan Thomas' old drinking haunt in Mumbles, the sun's fresh and clear in the sky. It feels sacrilegious to have a fag. Sulling a pure beauty. So I move off from the promenade and sit on a low wet wall in the carpark and light up. Self-confined in the sin bin. Which is how I feel after the 50% cut. Half my life has been hacked off. In the time that remains - I am 54 now - can I recover the half?

One of the things I've begun to appreciate of late is how much more energy I need: I'd only eaten 5 toasts washed down with weak coffee when I had my mope along Oyster Bay. Now, flush with my favourite Chinese (crispy Peking Duck), I'm aghast at the maudlin tone of the morning. What? Already given up? Don't given the so-called mandarins of the Arts so easy vindication of their decision - of course I'll fight on! Tara is, and always has been, more than simply a touring theatre company. It is an idea, that burns as critically today as it did during that long hot summer in 1976 when the idea was born. The idea of mapping the new post-War contours of this country. Contours that wind uncertainly between East and West. 

Yesterday, the Archbishop seemed to have lifted the veil on some of these uncertain contours, when he talked of the "inevitability" of some aspects of Sharia law being adopted within the legal framework of Britain. Whoa! In the hysterical responses to his musings, we see the dangerous rise in intolerance, characterized by a clear backing away from the sensibility of multiculturalism that shaped so much of post-War culture. The re-assertion of "core British values", as the PM is increasingly trumpeting, is worryingly close to what we'd hear from the National Front and the BNP in the 70s and 80s, when they talked of 'Britain for the British'. They meant white British only, of course.

I have always been against purities and authenticities - the 'pure blood', the 'authentic approach to Shakespeare's verse' - as arbitrary expressions of power. Life (and certainly modern life) is the in-authentic, impure "justle" of multiculturalism.  Why should the actions of 4 young British men, who bombed London commuters in defense (or glorification) of what they saw as their religion, discredit the sensibility of multiculturalism?

Royal Tunbridge Wells

Tempest toured this spa town, boasting a church to Charles the Martyr, on Tuesday and Wednesday. The venue? Trinity Arts - a lovely converted church, seating in excess of 200 people comfortably.

The story of Prospero learning again the human capacity for forgiveness, seemed particularly apt in this setting, as Shakespeare's words echoed through a packed auditorium.

Trinity Arts has had confirmation of a total cut of its Arts Council funding. What is going on? In the cause of some spurious "national" arts scene, regional theatres are being penalised for being too local. Does that mean "not metropolitan"? Is the Arts Council only concerned with provision in the cities? Who is the Arts Council serving? How can it say to us it wishes to see our touring work develop when it cuts the very spaces that are our partners? For local audiences the choice is clear: clog up the roads and drive to Brighton or whichever other nearest city, or flick through the proliferating "choice" on tv channels. 

It was a particularly rainy, grey day... I wonder how long this engineered climate is going to dominate me?

In Kendal, I am reminded once more how much Shakespeare is as close as we'll get in Britain to the ritual theatres of India. 

Sitting-in amongst the audience for The Tempest for the first time during this run, I am apprehensive at first, and not just because I am the only dark face in the completely full auditorium. All the neuroses that usually accompany press nights flood through me - what will they make of the production? Will they like it? Will there be walk-outs?

And then, behind me, I hear a group of middle-aged women talk about the play, reminiscing on their childhood. Slowly, as memory kicks in, they begin to recall specific lines - "Full fathom five thy father lies / Of his bones are coral made ... into something rich and strange"...

Next to me, a young man is quickly telling his girl-friend the bare-bones of the story: "There's this man Prospero - he was - I think - the Duke of - of Milan and his brother..."

Further down the raked auditorium, I see young children coming in with their parents, excitement mixing in with dread - what if its boring?

And then the lights go down and the play begins - lines carved over four hundred years ago come through the void once again, touching hearts, stirring memories, enthralling minds with their mystery.

The sacred contract - audiences and artists alike when working with Shakespeare - is forged anew. Much as in India, where whole sets of generations gather to watch a Kathakali performance. The repertoire, as with Shakespeare, is fixed. The memories of words and characters, as with Shakespeare, pass down the generations. Shakespeare's verse has a fixed structure (the pentameter) that actor after actor down the ages has to somehow fill. The face painting of Kathakali, coupled with fixed hand gestures, provide a "mask" that actors down the ages have to bring alive uniquely.

As the audience files out at the end, one woman asks "will you be able to come to us again, now that you've been cut?" How can I say no?

CUT!

Well, the long wait's over: Arts Council announces at its press conference in Hampstead Theatre its verdict. No great surprises: Bush, Northcott, Bristol & National Student Drama Festival win their reprieves (congratulations to them), while the rest - including Tara - wonder why we bothered engaging in the appeals process in a reasonable manner.

When you're in the death cell, there's no point being reasonable.

How does it feel to be chopped in half (Tara received a 50% cut in its funding, effective from this April)?

Maddening, enervating, depressive, angry... all the epithets and adjectives you can think of. What keeps gnawing at the heart is the sense that you've been found wanting - the work is not good enough to deserve continued funding. But then I have to remind myself this is ONE officer's opinion - its not peer opinion, is not audience opinion, it is not even critics' opinion. It is words scribbled by an apparatchik in a chic office. Who expressed serious concern about our quality and ability to produce middle-scale productions. (This at a time when packed houses around the country are seeing our production of The Tempest) 

What, in the wider context, does this cut to Tara represent? The days of 'cultural diversity' are numbered (a whooping great cheer from the Jeremy Clarkson's of the world, who seem to think the Arts Council is governed by political correctness and so is pouring money to unworthy ethnics. It's a lot worse and simpler than that, Jeremy: the Arts Council of today is simply an obedient lapdog of the government of the day. It's a 'Council': the 'Arts' in the title is merely a fig leaf).

How 'cultural diversity' numbered? Black and Asian led theatre companies form under 1% of the Arts Council's 990 regularly-funded clients: note, 1%. Not even a piss in the ocean. Within this mote on the Arts Council's cheek, in the present funding round, more than a third of the companies are effectively on standstill (receiving a 2.7% uplift - no one in the Arts Council has been paying much attention to the economy I see). Less than a quarter get uplifts (deservedly), 1 company is added to the RFO list (about time - a company in Bradford that Tara has been supporting for several years), and a third get cuts (including ourselves).

As the new Chief Executive said to us "Our proposals will lead to a slight drop in the number of regularly funded BME led organizations". Uhh - what did McMaster say? Here's a reminder: "We live in one of the most diverse cultures the world has ever seen, yet this is not reflected in the culture we produce, or in who is producing it...nothing can be excellent without reflecting the society which produces and experiences it". 

Hmmm... who's listening? Certainly not the Arts Council.

One thing we colonised instinctively learnt (I grew up in pre-Independence Kenya) was the dictum 'divide & rule'. The Arts Council, as a willing arm of the government, has imbibed the phrase as mother's milk. This evening I think of the vast majority of clients who are, at the very least, going to bed untroubled by the current funding round. And the relatively smaller number who go to bed with gnashing teeth (I'll just make do with coffee and cigarettes - which I had given up until before Christmas).

Was it Hemingway who gave us the phrase 'For Whom the Bell Tolls'? Whoever, its certainly apt now. I think back to when Temba were removed from the Arts Council's portfolio in the mid-90s, and of the troubles Talawa had more recently. Who's next, when apparatchiks hold such sway? How can we talk of Arts with people who despise artists?

Before I finish, let me make clear one matter: I would have gone to bed with a lighter heart if, while cutting Tara, the Arts Council could also have convincingly demonstrated its real (cash) commitment to cultural diversity. I'm afraid that phrase holds as much conviction as the 'consultations' bred by New Labour.