James McAvoy is wrong – the arts are better off without subsidy

The season of cringe-making acceptance speeches at arts awards ceremonies is nearly over, thank heavens. But it hasn’t passed without a most fatuous contribution from James McAvoy as he accepted a nomination for best actor at the Olivier Awards this week. He should have stuck to sobbing and thanking his agent. Instead, he launched a feeble and trite attack on the government for supposedly thwarting social mobility by failing to fund the arts. According to McAvoy’s thesis, ‘Art is one the first things you take away from society if you want to keep [people] down.’

It’s true that several of the British stars in prominent recent films attended private schools — something that McAvoy says doesn’t bother him, even if it has upset shadow arts minister Chris Bryant. But that isn’t for want of drama courses at state schools. Last year, 76,000 students took a GCSE in drama, far more than took Economics (5,400), Latin (10,000), German (60,000) and not all that short of the 97,000 who took IT and the 137,000 who took Physics. Putting drama at the heart of the curriculum, as many schools have done over the past couple of decades, may even be part of the social mobility problem.

Paul Roseby, director of the National Youth Theatre, has asked for drama to be taken off the national curriculum — not because he doesn’t approve of children acting but because he thinks the GCSE is seen as a soft option. Instead, he suggested drama ought to be integrated into other subjects. His intervention predictably raised howls of protest from drama teachers fearing for their jobs — and who equate the school curriculum with the artistic life of the nation. When state schools entice children into taking subjects which have little chance of making them more employable, a great disservice is done.