Counter‑Culture or Counter‑Productive? The Class Ceiling Debate
Trae Walsh in Drifting at Southwark Playhouse Borough. Photo by Mark Douet
For years, the cultural sector has repeated the same hopeful claim: that things are getting better for working‑class actors, writers and audiences. But the evidence — and the lived experience of the people actually trying to build careers — tells a very different story. Today, despite countless initiatives, programmes and funding pots, class inequality in the arts is not improving. It’s getting worse.
Recent data shows the scale of the crisis. Working‑class representation in the creative industries has collapsed: the proportion of working‑class actors, writers and musicians has halved since the 1970s, and sits at just 8.4% today. Even as organisations celebrate rising representation across gender, race, disability and LGBTQIA+ identities, socio‑economic inequality remains stubborn, unaddressed and often unmentioned. The sector knows the problem exists — but refuses to confront it where it matters most: job creation, access to established venues and long‑term career progression.
What has grown instead is a huge funding machine centred on creative development, particularly for young people. Workshops, taster days, bursaries, labs, placements, shadowing — every year hundreds of emerging artists are funnelled through well‑intentioned programmes that help them discover or refine their creative practice. These initiatives are not harmful in themselves; many are genuinely valuable. But they overwhelmingly prepare people for an industry that simply does not have the jobs to take them on.
This disconnect creates a brutal cycle. Working‑class artists complete programme after programme, building skills and enthusiasm, only to find no paid work waiting for them on the other side. And the message they receive — implicitly or explicitly — is that if they want to make theatre, they must do it themselves. Not on established stages with marketing teams, infrastructure, access schemes and ticketing systems, but in pop‑ups, found spaces, back rooms, community halls or working men’s clubs.
This is the new “counter‑culture”. It is vibrant, creative and often necessary. But it is increasingly positioned as the only place working‑class creatives are expected to occupy. Rather than challenging the exclusion baked into the mainstream theatre ecosystem, the burden is pushed back onto the artists themselves: raise the funds, find the venue, do the marketing, subsidise the work with your own time or money — or do it unpaid.
In effect, the more the sector invests in counter‑culture, the more it lets established institutions off the hook. Theatres with multimillion‑pound buildings, decades of public subsidy, specialist staff, national profiles and loyal audiences are not being asked — or required — to put working‑class creatives on their stages. Instead, the narrative becomes: if you’re working‑class, your aspirations can only go as far as a pop‑up. Theatres become sites for the already‑privileged, while working‑class artists are nudged into parallel spaces with less visibility, fewer resources and limited pathways into the wider industry.
The consequences ripple out to audiences too. Contrary to assumptions, working‑class audiences do want to attend established theatres. They value the experience, the sense of occasion and the reassurance of quality that traditional spaces provide. Many save to go to the West End. Yet they are routinely overlooked in audience development strategies. Meanwhile, community‑based or pop‑up theatre may create important moments of engagement, but rarely builds the long‑term ecosystem that established venues are designed for — multiple points of entry, repeat attendance, progression routes and sustained cultural participation.
Career progression suffers too. Agents, directors and casting professionals are far less likely to attend work in ad‑hoc or community spaces. A credit at the National Theatre can change a career; a credit in a church hall rarely does. The result is a two‑tier system in which working‑class creatives are expected to remain in the “alternative” tier indefinitely.
This is why investment in job creation — not just development — is essential. And it’s why we focus on holding established institutions to account. Working‑class artists deserve to make work in the very spaces their taxes support. They deserve to be hired, platformed and paid by the venues that shape our cultural landscape. Community spaces matter. Counter‑culture matters. But without breaking open the doors of mainstream theatre, we risk building a new class ceiling instead of tearing the old one down.
We don’t need more first steps. We need the next steps — the ones that lead to professional work, recognised credits, long‑term careers and representation on the nation’s major stages. That is where change happens. And that is where the fight for class equality in theatre must be focused.