The Brexit vote has been a “huge wake-up call” for the arts to realise they are not reflecting the lives and experiences of much of the UK, the National Theatre’s artistic director, Rufus Norris, has said.



Norris told a BBC Radio 4 debate on Tuesday the NT had initiated a nationwide listening project that would involve one-to-one conversations with people from all backgrounds and all persuasions.

“Art always responds to the time,” he said. “And this has been a huge wake-up call for all of us to realise that half the country feels that they have no voice. If we are going to be a national organisation we must speak to and for the nation. Our principal response initially is to listen: to listen to that voice and art will follow from that.

“We are an art house, we’re a theatre and we are going to be making work – quite what the form of that will be we will discover.”

The listening project, Norris said, would ask questions such as: “What are British values? What are your values? What do you think about where you live and what is the Britain you want to live in?”

The cultural community was overwhelmingly in support of staying in the EU during the referendum, with one poll, for the Creative Industries Federation, putting the figure at 96%.

The live radio debate for the BBC arts programme Front Row was exploring what kind of cultural response there should be to Brexit. The novelist Val McDermid said people in the arts had to take some responsibility for the “fact there is this huge stratum of disaffected people. A lot of people who voted to leave did so as a protest vote: they felt dispossessed because they felt disregarded.”

She said artists in the last decade had ignored the rise of things they were uncomfortable with, so there had been a build up of emotions that had not had any creative release.

Norris said there was no doubt the arts had been surprised by the vote to leave. But the novelist Dreda Say Mitchell, a leave supporter, said: “If the arts community was so shocked, is the arts community out of touch?”

Phil Redmond, the Brookside and Grange Hill creator who chairs National Museums Liverpool, said the arts disconnect was also down to the creative community retreating to London. He asked the audience at the Royal Society of Arts in central London: “Why are we all not talking in Salford, or if you can’t quite make Salford, what about Birmingham? Or go to the easiest place to get to in the world, which is Crewe.”

The designer Wayne Hemingway said that what to do next was currently the liveliest debate in the arts and it was an important one given the importance of the sector to the UK economy. “Britain has been seen as the creative nation, bar none, in the world,” he said. “Suddenly people in Berlin, Brooklyn in New York, in Johannesburg are rubbing their hands together ... all of a sudden Britain is devalued.”

He feared a drain of younger artists to cities like Berlin instead of, say, Manchester, and predicted some form of “youthquake” as young people became more engaged with politics. “We have to take something positive from it. We can’t go round in mourning for very long. The creative industries are brilliant at turning sows’ ears into silk purses – that’s what we do – but it is going to take some form of revolution. We will solve this but it will be a youthful rebellion of sorts.”

McDermid predicted something along the lines of the punk revolution of the 1970s or the rave revolution of the late 80s, saying “we need something to galvanise us”.

Aside from the practical concerns over what freedom of movement changes might mean for individual organisations, and what would happen to the money some get from the EU, there are more existential questions about what the mindset of the arts should be.

Norris believed the vote would be a catalyst to increase collaborations with arts organisations in Europe and further. “We are a world leader and we are not going to give up that position,” he said. “For us it is going to spur an increase in our collaborations with European partners and our international work. Being isolated is bad for culture and is very bad for society and there is no way we are going to go down that path.”

Asked what the cultural landscape might be like in 10 years as a result of Brexit, Mitchell said: “The culture and the art we look at will be much more representative of the Britain that we live in: more black faces, more working-class types of art, more regional representation.”