It can be pretty frightening going to see a play.
At least, that’s what Bush Theatre seems to think, which has published a “self-care” guide for one of its shows.
I first discovered the production Lady Dealer through Facebook. Nowadays I get advertised a huge amount of theatre and artistic content on social media – mainly because of my Substack series Woke Waste (below) – where I investigate examples of taxpayer-funded wokery (as I am to do in this piece).
The algorithms are consequently convinced I am an avid consumer of the arts (which I am, incidentally, just not woke art, meaning I rarely buy tickets).
Almost every time I see a play now I can predict it will be woke in some way.
Lady Dealer looked okay, though, on the surface:
For Charly, every day is the same: neck some coffee, answer the phone, sell some drugs. The flat she once shared with her ex, Clo, is now the base of her growing business. And she’s fine with that. She’s fine! Charly is fine.
I can’t say I was rushing to buy a ticket, but it was a relief to have a break from the usual themes of woke: transgenderism, climate change, race, or all of them intersecting through a non-binary lens of eco trauma.
But not so fast. When I scrolled down the page I saw this:
A self-care guide
Until I opened Bush Theatre’s guide, I thought ‘self-care’ was something Gen Z-ers said when putting on a scented candle before recording a TikTok video about their mental health. But it seems trigger warnings have been rebranded as ‘self-care guides’ – and there’s worse news: these are even longer than original trigger warnings (this one being 12 pages, in fact).
Bush Theatre’s explains:
This document contains information about ways to look after yourself before you visit.
(You’d think you were headed to a remote cave inhabited by rabies-infected bats.)
It adds that its self-care guide has been informed by another organisation (more on this later):
Thank you to Clean Break for bringing their care practices, including Self-Care Guides, to the Bush Theatre during our co-production of Favour (2022). Clean Break is a theatre company working with women with lived experience of the criminal justice system or at risk of entering it.
“The concept of self-care comes from the Black Feminist movement. Self-care is important because it’s about recognising that we experience discrimination and oppression because of how others react to who we are, or what we’ve experienced.” — Clean Break
In writing this document, we were also inspired by recent approaches taken by several other companies, especially the Nouveau Riche and Royal Court teams.
Bush Theatre’s self-care guide goes on to offer warnings that Lady Dealer contains “fatphobia” and the “depiction of alcohol consumption”, along with other dangerous content.
There’s also a warning about “herbal cigarettes”:
And helplines to call (“Hello, I’ve seen a herbal cigarette!”)
Plus, here are practical steps audiences can take if pushed to the brink by herbal cigarettes and fatphobia, such as “breathe” and “find some nature”:
Think we’re done yet? Nope.
It turns out that Clean Break has made numerous self-care guides tailored to different shows. For instance, if you’re seeing the play Dixon and Daughters, you might need first aid (mental health first aid, that is):
Clean Break has also kindly turned “content warnings” into symbols, so you can eventually become adept at recognising triggering content:
Here is a particularly dangerous scene – as told through the symbols for ‘addiction/alcohol /mention of drugs’, ‘sexual violence/child sexual abuse’, ‘prison/criminal justice system’ and ‘problematic mother-child relationships’. Got that?
The strange thing is that Clean Break is, forgive the repetition from above, a “theatre company working with women with lived experience of the criminal justice system or at risk of entering it”. But it treats imprisonment and criminal justice experience as an area that needs ‘Content Warnings’. It’s like a supermarket giving a content warning about trolleys, or someone warned about seeing their own face in a mirror.
Best not to ask questions, though.
In addition to recommending Clean Break, Bush Theatre has also acknowledged The Royal Court Theatre (RC) and the company Nouveau Riche as leaders in the self-care guide space.
Here’s RC guidance for its play Sound Of The Underground, described as:
Legends of the London queer club scene come above ground to take over the Royal Court Theatre. Part-play, part-raucous cabaret, part-workers’ manifesto, join eight underground drag icons as they spill the tea, free the nipple and fight the shadowy forces that threaten their livelihoods. Bring some change. Tip generously.
It sounds kinda fun – that’s until you find out that the play contains “Discussion of pay disparity and financial hardship”.
Helplines are provided if you struggle with, say, “the effect capitalism has on the queer community”. You can also reach out to organisations like Stonewall:
Then there’s Nouveau Riche, an Associate Company resident at Broadway Theatre, which published ‘self-care’ guidance for its play For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy by Ryan Calais Cameron at New Diorama Theatre.
The guide reads:
We know this show might be challenging to engage with for some audiences, especially if you’re affected by the content.
In an analysis of racism, racial discrimination and racist stereotypes, the show explores a group of characters whose experiences include violence, toxic relationships and forms of trauma including sexual abuse and child abuse. There are themes of suicide and suicidal ideation throughout.
Content warnings include “toxic masculinity”:
I have a feeling that I could go on pasting self-care documents forever. But let’s get to the crunch: how much is this costing taxpayers?
Woke Waste tot up time
To add, as I’m sure you don’t need spelling out, there’s no specific ‘self-care guide’ budget figure. So I’m going to present how much each theatre is receiving in total from taxpayers. Below I’ve pasted:
- The number of Government grants the theatres have received since 2019 (logged on the Charity Commission website, a register of charities in England and Wales)
- Arts Council England (ACE) funding per year for its 2023-26 Investment Programme
£4.19 million – Bush Theatre (titled Alternative Theatre Company Limited)
ACE annual funding: £656,234/ total for three years: £1,968,702.
———————–
£453,640 – Clean Break
ACE annual funding: £220,173/ total for three years: £660,519.
———————–
£13.15 million – The Royal Court (The English Stage Company Limited)
ACE annual funding: £2,236,073/ total for three years: £6,708,219.
———————–
Nouveau Riche
As an associate company resident at Broadway Theatre, Nouveau Riche doesn’t appear to have similar accounting figures.
But it’s worth saying that Broadway Theatre itself has done well out of taxpayers over the years – receiving a £7 million makeover, funded by Lewisham Council, in 2022.
This month Lewisham Council and Nouveau Riche are also to hold a new “Black and Global Majority Arts Festival”.
All in all (considering the total taxpayer funding for the companies), a lot is being spent on theatres producing trigger warnings – oh sorry, I mean ‘self-care guides’.
Conclusion
The problem with these theatres is one that’s rife across the public sector and publicly-funded arts: a lack of secularism, just not in the way we conventionally consider it. Secularism is, of course, the separation of state and religion. But a new religion or ideology has been enshrined in our public institutions (and in many private institutions too), in which documentation like self-care guides act as quasi-scripture, and pronoun badges as symbols of having been baptised into all things woke.
State funding is, in my view, the oxygen that keeps woke alive. We can complain about woke all we like, but nothing will change until we starve it of this. Were state funding removed from organisations that inflict woke ideology on Brits, market forces would extinguish or at least severely diminish their ability to survive. It is telling that, even when given huge amounts of state funding, the arts sector is always ‘on its knees’. Probably because audiences don’t want to see plays about Joan of Arc being non-binary (as was the case at The Globe).
I began my Woke Waste series to shed light on every type of taxpayer-funded wokery, partly as an exercise for myself (I have been shocked by the extent to which taxpayer money is used for woke ends) but also to spread public awareness. I believe this is the main step we need to take to control the issue; to know the bills, and to ask for a refund and rethink from our politicians. I have also started listing ideas for how to remove it from our public institutions, which I think is actually doable – despite the extent of the problem (think the woke equivalent of Japanese knotweed across the U.K.)
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Brilliant! Thank you.
This is certainly why I continue to subscribe to this site; an oasis of sanity in a weird, weird world.
And the central premise is spot on. Britain is such a weird out at the moment because of the size of the public sector……and the public sector is run by Abilene’s Paradox (thank you: today’s round up).
The Abilene Paradox revisited – how we have turbocharged groupthink in the workplace and what to do about it
Blair’s Britain: socialist fascism, probably by accident………
Excellent piece of investigation. Is it any wonder that this is the “none of the above” election?, when politicians tax us to death and then waste it on this pathetic, infantalising nonsense.
I always thought self care was about personal hygiene, clealry not these days, self care appears to be fostering a race of weak, scared, pathetic self decalred victims who need to be nursery nursed all the time.
As Oscar Wilde said a play will be either good or bad and the audience will decide.
There is nothing offensive or difficult that cannot be dramatised in the right way to make the audience think about the subject and The Father and The Producers are good examples of this.
Great piece ,keep up the good work
, it’s amazing that no such care was available before or after The Jabathon ! The Hypocrisy is overwhelming !!!…
Good point Freddy.
I believe “Informed Consent” has been deleted from the medical lexicon has it not?
.. and First, Do No Harm.
How did human beings ever evolve in the first place? There was no one to warn us of the dangers of the damp cave. No one to provide therapy for our fear of Sabre Toothed Tigers. No phoneline to talk us through the trauma of losing our 3 kids to a pack of Hyena’s who ripped the guts out of them in front of us.
Why would a play about relationship issues of a Lesbian criminal after a sudden power cut look like a relief from anything? Looks like the (obviously female) author revisiting her past group therapy sessions for want of anything else to do.
Ain’t got nothin’ to say but gonna talk a lot, anyway!
“Self-care advice – Breathe”. I find breathing is an excellent self care tool – just to keep alive.
Quite partial myself.
I am a big believer in supporting the arts but not where nonsense like this is concerned. This level of wokerarty is sinister and malevolent and taxpayers should not be used to fund this crap. If the theatres responsible for this grotesquery had to fund this rubbish without grants it would cease within a month.
There are two words for the audiences visiting these plays / shows : Grow Up.
I have always been puzzled by the term “lived experience.” Would it’s opposite be “dead experience?” If so it strikes me as being oxymoronic.
Surely living is synonymous with experience.
The opposite would be hearsay or book learning. Obviously, everybody has a lived experience but this individual lived experience is usually not about the really important issues of our time, like the unspeakable terror of the gay adult entertainment performer who’s denied entry into the kindergarten (assuming this was still the case). That’s a lived experience of anti-trans discrimination while the typical member of polite society will only have heard of such horrific abuses.
It’s a deliberate distortion of the English language I think. It seems to mean a few things – the most important being that how certain favoured victim groups view and interpret the world trumps hard evidence and the “lived experience” of people not in those favoured victim groups. Another attempt to deny objective reality which keeps coming up with inconvenient truths.
Thanks tof
Hear hear!
Personally, I’d be far more worried about being mugged coming out of the Bush Theatre or Broadway Theatre in Catford than any of the “self-care” bollox they’re banging on about.
I’m shocked that this article didn’t have a trigger warning! I’m now traumatised at the amount of Taxpayers (my) cash spent on this, and I’n not sure which of the many funded support groups I should call
Brilliant
I love “the arts” but my default assumption until I see strong evidence to the contrary is that anything new will be woke and is to be avoided. There’s plenty of old stuff that I have not seen or read – great stuff that will last me a lifetime.