I’m a firm supporter of the arts. I must confess not in patronage, but at least in sentiment.
This sector in all its forms is an inseparable and valuable component of a civilised society, promoting among others intelligent discourse, an understanding of relevant issues affecting the people and championing positive change.
That’s why dictatorships abhor the creatives who tend to question things. Like journalists, they are regarded as trouble-making influencers best left isolated.
But their place in society is crucial.
Sadly, as most struggling nutrient deficient artistic practitioners will attest, they find themselves in a space with limited commercial potential to go it alone.
Take some of the more refined art forms such as theatre and ballet for example. This is rugger bugger and beer country, and the good creative folk simply do not attract enough bums to seats to elevate them above the fund-scavenging zone.
The reason, in my opinion, why people no longer go to theatre in numbers is that criminals and government miscreants provide constant and free theatre, brought to us via television right to our couches.
No need to dress up, fork out a lot of money for tickets, risk being mugged from or to the car parking lot, or being banged up by the countless drunken troglodytes roaming the roadways.
No, we can do theatre in comfortable and safe pantoffel and beer (or brannas and Coke) style.
And unlike proper, sophisticated theatre, there is no complicated plots and sub-plots to decipher. Everything is undemandingly straightforward that even the most brain cell deprived can feel intellectually empowered.
Take the current Thabo Bester saga that has kept the populace enthralled for a few weeks now – and there is more to come.
The plot: Convicted murderer and rapist escapes from maximum security prison.
For many months nobody is the wiser – apart from those who orchestrated the daring breakout.
The plot thickens. The audience learns that by sheer coincidence the condemned man was moved to a cell obscured from the CCTV cameras on the very night of the escape. And the one outside camera monitoring traffic movement inexplicably goes on the blink at the very same time. The dastardly crime gods at work no doubt.
A sinister vehicle enters and leaves the prison compound in the dark of night.
A fire breaks out in the hapless prisoner’s cell, a torched corpse is found and it is bye-bye bad guy – or so everyone thinks.
Not to a grave though.. no, to affluent Hyde Park in Jozi where he whoops it up in luxury with (now it becomes even saucier) a sort of celeb wannabe femme fatale. Bonnie and Clyde stuff.
The media sniffs them out, they flee to a foreign country, are tracked and hauled back.
Intermission. Act II – the trial…..
Quite recently it was the Zondo Commission. Before that the Oscar Pistorius trial.
And there will always be another Stander gang and tunnel bank robbers.
Formal theatre therefore, I’m afraid, simply cannot compete against the tsunami of crime and corruption offered to the masses for free.
That is why government has a duty to invest heavily into quality arts for the reasons outlined above.
They don’t and won’t, and we are poorer for it.
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