It's time to scrap Rada

Scrap Rada. That’s all the drama school is good for now. The academy’s director, Edward Kemp, has described the body he leads as “institutionally racist”. The fashionable adverb, institutionally, is rarely defined, but it seems to imply that Rada’s founding principles are racially biased and that its teaching methods support the belief that certain ethnic groups are superior to others.

It also suggests that Rada’s staff and pupils, past and present, are guilty of racial intolerance. The list of culprits includes John Gielgud, Joan Collins, Roger Moore, Joe Orton, Adrian Lester, Indira Varma, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the late Diana Rigg and Rada’s current president, Sir Kenneth Branagh. Every one of them, apparently, absorbed a creed of hatred and division during their student years. That sounds a bit far-fetched, but it’s hard to place any other interpretation on Kemp’s words. A school which is “institutionally racist” must teach racism. Simple as that. Kemp’s revelation may have come as a surprise to Rada’s honorary fellows who include Anthony Hopkins, Glenda Jackson and Stephen Sondheim. When did they learn that Rada was pursuing the agenda of the KKK? Or did they know about it all along and just keep quiet?

Meanwhile the student-body has denounced one of the school’s most distinguished benefactors, George Bernard Shaw, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. The students have released an anti-racism “action-plan” which states, “this man spoke in support of eugenics”. What Shaw had to say on the subject was that “Many people would have to be put out of existence since it wastes other people’s time to look after them.”

That sounds pretty shocking, but it also happens to be standard practice in the NHS. Unborn babies are scanned at 13 weeks and if the foetus looks likely to develop an abnormality that could inconvenience the parents, a termination is offered. Every year vast numbers of unborn babies are aborted for precisely the reasons outlined by Shaw: “It wastes other people’s time to look after them”.

The students haven’t specified how their virtuous goal — spreading equality across their profession — will be met by erasing GBS’s memory. The proposal is that Rada’s 70-seat GBS Theatre will be renamed, presumably in honour of a BAME celebrity, but that too might be considered regressive. It promotes the idea that BAME youngsters are so timid and self-doubting that they can’t choose a risky career-path unless they’ve received assurances that someone who shares their skin-colour has led the way. Never be pioneers, only followers. Is that the right advice to give the next generation?

The students are also keen to ditch Restoration plays because of their associations with the British empire. This is a perilous route to go down. If imperialist themes are to be scrapped, then Antony and Cleopatra will face the chop as well, even though Cleopatra is the longest and perhaps the best role Shakespeare ever wrote for a woman.

In addition the students want to ban “master and servant” exercises from improvisation classes. This sounds like an obscure complaint, but any theatre-maker can see where it will lead. Ultimately the notion of “status” will be removed from plays altogether. Status, which means the uneven distribution of influence and authority between characters, is crucial to the effectiveness of a theatrical work. Power relationships are one of the unpredictable kinetic forces that send energy rippling through a scene and which give dialogue and action the sense of life that we instantly recognise. Without status, the relative values of the moving parts of a play will vanish. And so will the play’s ability to imitate the world we live in. Imagine a drama where every character held the same social rank, and had identical quotas of wealth, power, ambition, intelligence, sexual attractiveness and so on. It would be like a banquet involving 17 courses of porridge. The removal of master and servant roles is the start of an attack on drama itself.

Instead of resisting these moves Rada seems to support them. It has issued an apology, “for our inadequate response to the BLM movement”. Yet the academy must be aware that BLM’s aims include abolishing the police and overthrowing capitalism. It is hard to see how theatreland could function in this circumstances.

So although the social objectives of BLM — to eradicate racism — are rightly supported by everyone, its revolutionary politics look like an attempt to stifle the beating heart of the theatre.

Rada, bizarrely, has joined a plot to destroy the profession it teaches.