Who determines whether a play can get staged? In the unnamed authoritarian regime that serves as the dramatic backdrop for A Mirror, the answer is unequivocally the state. In this play-within-a-play – the premise is an illicit production put on under the pretence of a wedding – the ministry of culture signs off on the creative works that citizens are permitted to see; unluckier playwrights are sent off to the camps. Other forms of censorship are available too, including the civil servant all too happy to steer writers into replicating state-sanctioned narratives.
The production isn’t subtle but it does force the audience to confront what it’s like to live in a society with so little artistic freedom of expression. “Every mode of censorship depicted in A Mirror is practised somewhere in the world today,” Kate Maltby, deputy chair of the Index on Censorship, writes in its programme; billions of people live in countries where creating dissident art can land you in jail. But free expression is a spectrum; decisions over who gets state subsidies instil huge power in bureaucrats; and any artist worth their salt is highly sensitive to any whiff of being told what they can and cannot say. A row that broke out last week illustrates just how much free expression in the arts remains a live debate in the UK.
It started when the magazine Arts Professional picked up on a hitherto barely noticed update that Arts Council England (ACE) had made to its policies a couple of weeks earlier. ACE is responsible for distributing £540m of taxpayer and........