SELLOUT: Interview with playwright David Lane

Bethany Stuart spoke to David Lane, playwright of the groundbreaking play, SELLOUT, which he hopes will spark debate about the higher education system.

David Lane is an Exeter graduate turned playwright with eight years of experience teaching at various institutions. His experiences revealed certain uncomfortable truths about the higher education system bending to the will of an increasingly capitalist society.

SELLOUT
Image credit: The Northcott

His new piece of political theatre – SELLOUT – brings to the surface these realities in the hope that they gain a platform for debate, not just amongst students and those intrinsically connected to the education system, but on a national scale. With the upcoming performance at the Northcott Theatre, Mr Lane was enthusiastic to communicate with the students, for whom his work is especially relevant:
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Can you sum up SELLOUT in one statement?

All the things you wanted to know about your lecturers’ workplace and its critical impact on you – and some that you probably didn’t.

Whilst most of us would consider the implications of an increasingly capitalist higher education system from a student perspective, from your experiences teaching what can you tell us about the implications for lecturers?

…Burnout, disillusionment, a managerial culture choking their ability to engage fully with scholarly endeavours, reduction of people and their work to numbers and ratings, a utilitarian view of what education is for (getting a job, rather than discovering knowledge that illuminates the world and how we live) and at worst, an environment that encourages feelings of fraudulence, loss of confidence and bullying. Put all of that together inside the person who’s standing in front of you trying to teach, and you have a problem.

You state that the “universities are mutating in a capitalist world” – do you think there is anyway to prevent this, or is it inevitable?

If I knew the answer to that I’d go and file it at Westminster! I think the job of a playwright is to dramatise recognisable human experience by communicating it through stories that engage an audience, so that’s my priority.

David Lane, Playwright of SELLOUT
Image credit: David Lane

Other than your own experiences, did anything else inspire or influence the thought-process behind SELLOUT?

It has been inspired by about 10% of my own experience and 90% everybody else’s. This play began when students on one of my modules were seeking to confide in me some feelings about their course and their tutors: but as non-permanent staff there was little I could do about it, so I spoke to a trusted colleague. What he described in response was much of what I have already mentioned, but he also handed me a fantastic paper by an academic called Andrew Sparkes, titled ‘Embodiment, academics, and the audit culture: a story seeking consideration’.

Sounds pretty dry, but he had converted various pieces of evidence from lecturers’ experiences of being continually ‘measured’ into a short fiction narrative that showed me the other side of the story: that the work culture was incredibly damaging to the values many lecturers had, and their health and happiness too. This kick-started a much longer consultative research process…Playwriting is a craft and requires rigour so it’s been a long process.

 If the audience leave with just one message, what would you like it to be?

Stick it to the man even when the man is still kicking you when you’re down.

Is it especially important to you that SELLOUT is performed at Exeter in the Northcott Theatre?

Yes, for two very different reasons. Firstly I’m a graduate of the Drama department here at Exeter (2001) and I remember going to the Northcott to see performances, so to have a play up there, even just a reading, is really exciting. Secondly, very recently I’ve learned that the paper Andrew Sparkes wrote also kicked off a series of accusations of a pressure-cooker working culture at Exeter University so it feels rather relevant that the play is getting an outing here.

 In recent years you mentored a member of EUTCO, what advice would you give to aspiring playwrights?

Can I steal some advice? The best I was given was from Sarah Dickenson, a former dramaturg of Theatre 503 and Soho Theatre in London: ‘don’t get it right, get it written’…Nobody can teach you how to start – you have to do that bit yourself…Oh, and have something to say that people will want to sit in a dark room for two hours and hear your actors banging on about…theatre is a hard enough sell as it is, so if you’re going to write something, make it worth your audience’s while.

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The Northcott Theatre will be showcasing SELLOUT in a one-off reading on Friday 24^th January at 7.30pm to raise awareness so that it can become a fully-fledged production, allowing Lane’s eye-opening and relevant message to spread nationwide.  As Mr Lane so aptly stated, let’s all go “stick it to the man” and get involved in the politics of a system which has such a huge influence over our futures!

Buy tickets from the Northcott here.

 

Bethany Stuart

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Ben Bradshaw: Unrealistic and Populist?

Deputy Chairman of Exeter University Conservative Future Chris Carter claims that Ben Bradshaw showed the same unrealistic and populist approach currently used by Labour’s leadership in his recent interview with Exeposé Features.

Ben Bradshaw’s views appear to be typical of the approach used by Labour against the coalition: there is plenty of criticism of government policy but no realistic solutions.  Bradshaw is described in the article as “down-to-earth” yet this stands at odds with his laudation of Labour’s aim of getting 50% of young people into higher education, whilst this may seem to be a charming and noble objective it once again shows a failure to recognise reality. The reason why the UK was in such a dire economic situation at the beginning of the decade was that the governments of Blair and Brown made ridiculous promises to impress the electorate and then attempted to fulfil them by spending and borrowing more and more. This, as any adult with a basic grip on reality would tell you, is not sustainable. People know that they cannot keep borrowing money without a realistic plan to repay it, yet Labour believes that the same basic rules do not apply to governments.

“The simple fact of the matter is that higher education is meant to be exclusive by its very nature; if everyone in the country had a 2nd in Marketing then the degree itself would be worthless.”
Image credits: Niklas Rahmel.

The simple fact of the matter is that higher education is meant to be exclusive by its very nature; if everyone in the country had a 2^nd in Marketing then the degree itself would be worthless. Labour’s policy towards higher education has not only been economically harmful but also damaging to the degrees and higher education itself. The large number of universities and the generous funding they received from Labour has led to a countless array of useless degrees ranging from David Beckham studies at Staffordshire University to Surfing Studies at Plymouth University. If Bradshaw is right that higher education should be paid for by the government is it really fair that ordinary taxpayers should have to fork out on such worthless courses?

By making students pay in part for their courses the government is encouraging them to think about both their willingness to do the course and also the usefulness of the degree in their later lives. Students should not just think of university as 3 years of drinking and partying with a couple of lectures thrown in for good measure. Rather, they should consider the value of the course they are applying for and how it would be relevant to getting a job later in life and then choose one accordingly. This, more than anything else, would help make the UK workforce more competitive in the global economy as students would come out of university with a sought after degree and hence be more attractive to future employers.

Youth unemployment is indeed an issue and as demonstrated above sending more off to university is not the solution. Instead the government needs to focus on improving primary and secondary education so that teenagers who finish secondary school are given the best chance to succeed in the highly competitive job market. The current reforms initiated by Michael Gove are indeed aiming to achieve that and I for one think that the education minister deserves praise for his efforts to focus schools’ attention on the main subjects of English and Maths, which have been neglected for easier subjects for too long.

For those who have left school with minimal qualifications, thanks to years of neglect under previous governments, then I support the use of the carrot and stick approach. For the carrot I support the government’s deregulation of the labour market, red tape is preventing companies from employing more young people, and through its encouragement of training schemes and internships. Labour and many teens may scoff that many of these are unpaid and so don’t count, and so aren’t worth doing. This is precisely what is wrong with the younger generations, a willingness to pass on jobs and opportunities which they regard as ‘menial’ and ‘beneath them.’ This is the reason why youth unemployment is increasing, the older generations are taking any opportunity for employment they can get whilst younger generations are not. To try and solve this culture of expectancy I support the stick approach whereby young unemployed people have to work for their benefits rather than just accept them as a free hand-out.  It is all very well for Bradshaw and Labour to talk about how bad youth unemployment is but how much do we hear about focused and realistic solutions? Very little.

Bradshaw has long prided himself as being different from most Labour MP’s and in some ways he is. He at least didn’t go to Oxbridge, yet his rhetoric and policies, or lack thereof, shows the same popularity seeking approach advocated by Labour’s leadership. A lack of serious substance and realistic objectives show that Labour still has not learnt its lessons from the recession that they caused and why they still cannot be trusted to govern.

N.B I found the Lib Dems “direct deceit of the electorate” very amusing coming from someone who had served in Blair’s 2001-5 government.

Christopher Carter

Do you agree with Christopher’s characterisation of Bradshaw? What proportion of young people should be going into higher education? Leave a comment below or write to the Comment team at the Exeposé Comment Facebook Group or on Twitter @CommentExepose.