The Unmaking of the English Working-Class Actor (Preview)
by J. E. Smyth

In this Platinum Jubilee year, I am not the only Prisoner of the Motherland looking at the U.K. through the bottom of my empty pint glass and wondering what happened. Seventy years pissed away, and we’re still subjects, not citizens, and the English working class has less of a chance to escape poverty than when Winston Churchill was prime minister. Ah, class. That word that so many American tourists believe they encounter only on package holidays to London—a term that Yank liberal democracy and capitalism made quaintly irrelevant. With heavy industry outsourced to China, unions toothless relics, and everyone with credit cards, mortgages, mutual funds, and an almost useless college degree, who needs class? It was a socialist, downright un-American term to be held at arm’s length, even in the universities, replaced by more marketable ways of dissecting society—race, ethnicity, sexuality, and even gender. Class has just not been trending.

But the English working class is not just a concept in a forgotten history book (please don’t forget E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, 1963). It still exists, more real than any imagined “British” identity beloved of the middle-class Establishment. There was and still is a world outside of Westminster, country houses in the neatly manicured Cotswolds, and the cloistered privilege of Oxbridge, a world where people barely survive on paychecks for long hours and low pay, the Bank of Mum and Dad can’t or won’t cover debts, house ownership is an impossible dream (unless you want a fifty-year mortgage), and university a waste of nonexistent money. It’s sometimes called The North or Toxteth, Liverpool, or even Hackney, and you probably won’t be able to understand the lingo (remember Terence Stamp’s run-in with a DEA officer in The Limey, 1999?). There might even be working-class members with accents from Lagos or Bucharest or Kraków in your posh West End hotel, and though their names will be on their uniforms, you probably won’t see or hear them.

For a brief time in the 1950s and 1960s, English working-class voices were seen and heard on stages and screens all over the country—Guinness, Osborne, Delaney, Storey, Sillitoe, Atkins, Marsh, Courtenay, Caine, Stamp, Finney. We still have the work of Ken Loach (most recently Sorry We Missed You, 2019), but Harry Potter, Downton Abbey, and The Crown are the Great British franchises that rake in the global cash now. And the acting profession is too expensive for all but the rich.

The Unaffordable Arts
You wouldn’t think it to look at the Heritage Country Home Tours and Great Man biopics so popular with PBS and American streaming services, but the U.K. is crippled by historic levels of inflation, child poverty, flatlined salaries, and nonexistent promises of “leveling up” from the likes of NYC-born, dumb blond Tory, Boris Johnson.

Nowhere has the chokehold on income and opportunity been more lethal than in the arts sector. Budgets for secondary school and university-level subjects in fine, performing, and literary arts in England have been cut to the bone so many times since the Conservatives came to power in 2010, there’s no flesh left on the corpse. At more than £9,000 per year (about $11,000, and double that thanks to the extortionate student loan rates), a university degree is increasingly out of reach for English untouchables of any sex, gender, or color (Scottish- and Welsh-born students attending university in their home countries are fee-free). English undergraduates—many of whom were the first in their families to get a degree—used to pay around three grand until 2010, with key student expenses being housing and trips to the pub. About one-third of all students then were from working-class backgrounds.

Since new tuition fees were introduced in England, white working-class student numbers have nosedived and student numbers for Drama A-level (university entrance exams) have almost halved. Now the hypothetical working-class Guildhall School of Music & Drama or Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) student will have upwards of £60,000 in student loans to pay back after graduation and barely enough to afford even the scurviest of London holes to sleep in. And if our twenty-first-century graduate is ever set loose on paying audiences? Even before the pandemic, nearly seventy percent of English actors made less than £5,000 annually. That would have been a respectable income back in 1952, but now you’d need at least two extra jobs to fund your dreams of making ends meet (forget stardom).  

Historically, acting and, more exceptionally, writing were two professions where working-class men and women could break the barrier between invisible labor and applaudable skill. The future of anything looks bleak these days, but it is particularly grim for working-class talent trying to find a place on stage and screen…

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVII, No. 4