ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the enduring and universal issue of audience diversity in the performing arts, focusing specifically on the academically neglected area of social class and audiences. It asks why working class people don’t engage more in state-supported forms of culture. It briefly outlines attempts by cultural policy to address the issue of cultural attendance, and asks what the ‘problem’ is, and for whom it is a problem. It then goes beyond the rhetoric of ‘barriers of attendance’ and draws on Bourdieu’s work on class and taste to argue that the ‘cost’ of cultural attendance to working class people is much greater than the price of the ticket. Having identified the issue, the chapter argues that action to address this is particularly urgent at a time when social class re-emerges as an explicit focus of cultural policy, and when the cultural sector will need to reset following the Covid-19 crisis. To understand what can be done, it draws on the examples of four cultural venues that have successfully engaged with working class audiences: Liverpool’s Royal Court Theatre, Òran Mór, Glasgow, and London’s Hackney Empire and Albany Empire. It finds that these venues have allowed for a suspension of normal theatre rules allowing for working class norms and values to be expressed, and signalling ownership by, rather than exclusion of, working class people.
