Social Housing in Performance

The English Council Estate on and off Stage

Katie Beswick, Mark Taylor-Batty, Enoch Brater, Mark Taylor-Batty, Enoch Brater

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781350178816
• eBook ISBN: 9781474285193
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

This book explores the ways that council estates have been represented in England across a range of performance forms. Drawing on examples from mainstream, site-specific and resident-led performance works, it considers the political potential of contemporary performance practices concerned with the council estate. Depictions of the council estate are brought into dialogue with global representations of what Chris Richardson and Hans Skott-Myhre call the 'hood', to tease out the specific features of the British context and situate the work globally. Katie Beswick's study provides a timely contribution to the ongoing national and global interest in social housing. As the housing market grows ever more insecure, and estates are charged with political rhetoric, theatre and socially engaged art set or taking place on estates takes on a new potency. Mainstream theatre works examined include Rita, Sue and Bob Too and A State Affair at the Soho Theatre, Port at the National Theatre, and DenMarked at the Battersea Arts Centre. The book also explores the National Youth Theatre's Slick and Roger Hiorns' Seizure, as well as community-based and resident led performances by Fourthland, Jordan McKenzie, Fugitive Images and Jane English.

1

Quotidian performance of the council estate

We are constantly framing our experience of the world through representational systems. To interact with others we require a shared language, and even our visual experience involves a kind of literacy as we learn to interpret the conventions associated with photographs, cinema, paintings, street signs and so on. These systems are necessary but also dangerous. They lead us to believe that the world is a fixed and orderly place and that we occupy a privileged position of stability and coherence within it.¹

(Kester 2004: 20)

*

My personal experience is my mum and dad. I think both of them were brought up on [an estate]. Or in one. So, they’ve always – until they got married really – lived in council housing. Obviously, this is years and years and years ago. So I grew up with their stories of how they were brought up. And they would paint a very lovely picture in a way: of community and everybody knowing each other and happy times, really, on the whole. But of course, media today – because we do get fed don’t we, media, whether we like it or not? If you were to say ‘council estate’ to the Daily Mail or the papers or something [laughs] it would be a negative thing wouldn’t it? Because so many of the images we get from them, or words we hear about them, aren’t good. You know, they’re either sink estates, or they’re in need of repair, or they’re being pulled down. And the people in them: there’s always something wrong with them, or they’re poor and they don’t have many chances or opportunities, you know?

(Interview with audience member, Off the Endz, September 2011)

*

The first episode of People Like Us (BBC Three 2013) is introduced by an enthusiastic continuity announcer: ‘It’s been named the most deprived estate in Britain!’ he tells us, almost breathless with excitement. ‘And Harpurhey is the location for a new real reality show on BBC Three!’

The programme opens with tinny, buoyant music and a montage of moving images played in quick succession, narrated by an upbeat voice-over.

A tower block looms as the camera pans across it. Unaccompanied children roam suburban streets on bicycles. Parents sit on doorsteps drinking lager from cans as they rock their infant children in pushchairs.

‘They say this area’s just full of rough families’, a cheerful young woman with a broad Manchester accent, immaculate make-up and thick false eyelashes says to camera. ‘But I don’t think it’s such a bad place.’

A teenage boy falls backwards from the roof of a van onto which he is loading used mattresses. A mother and son argue aggressively with each other, sat side by side in a pair of worn brown armchairs. Someone lifts a Staffordshire bull terrier, its jaw locked around a thick rope noose, into the air and swings it in circles.

‘There’s a well-known local expression’, an older gentleman wearing thick, plastic-rimmed spectacles and a fair-isle sweater tells us. ‘“They’ll steal the shit out of your arse.” Not because they want it’, he explains. ‘Just so that you haven’t got it.’

An overweight man is handcuffed and led towards a police van by a swarm of uniformed officers. A group of drunken teenagers cavort provocatively with one another at a wild house party.

‘Are you the neighbour from hell?’ an unseen interviewer asks a flame-haired teenage boy.

He shrugs. ‘Probably, yeah.’

A youth with a skinhead haircut stands on a dilapidated street and watches a tarantula crawl across his t-shirt. A newly married couple is showered with confetti. A woman in a hospital bed cradles her newborn baby.

‘Youse might think you know people like us’, the same cheerful, immaculately made-up young woman says, ‘but you don’t know nothing yet!’

*

There is no doubt that the representation of council estates across popular news and screen media has served, in the main, to denigrate estate space and ‘other’ those who inhabit it – despite resistance to stigmatizing narratives from academics, journalists, online commentators and residents themselves (Allen et al. 2014, Jensen 2014: 5). As numerous scholars have shown, council estates and their residents are made regularly to perform in service of the dominant, neoliberal discourse surrounding poverty, welfare benefits, labour and capital: a discourse in which the council estate resident is positioned as pathologically lacking and morally deficient (Gidley and Rooke 2010, Tyler 2013, Shildrick 2018). But, as the above description of the opening sequence of the BBC Three reality television show People Like Us demonstrates, these popular estate representations, while ultimately producing negative, stigmatized discourse about estates, often operate through a paradoxical synthesis of the mundane and the sensational, producing an aesthetic in which residents’ lives are depicted, at least on the surface, as both dismal and exotic, ‘other’ and ordinary.

People Like Us is one example of so-called ‘poverty porn’ (Jensen 2014) – sometimes called ‘prole porn’ (Adiseshiah 2016: 150): reality television programmes that expose the ‘real’ lives and lifestyles of Britain’s poor working classes. In recent years there has been a proliferation of such shows, in which the everyday lives of ‘the poor’ are filmed and edited for the titillation, outrage and consumption of viewers who are assumed to live differently (and better). Such shows exploit ‘the prurient fascination [with] just how badly behaved the poor have become’ (McKenzie 2015: 12). Estate-focused poverty porn is a subgenre of a wider field of ‘[m]‌akeover programs, reality crime shows and observational documentaries’, which serve to ‘[represent] the socially subordinate as shameless scroungers, overdependant, unproductive, disruptive and unmodern’ (Nunn and Biressi 2010: 143). In these programmes, as in other estate representations, the estate location comes to signify the classed identity of the subjects.

A cursory glance at the titles and content of a range of estate-focused poverty porn highlights how such programmes feed into the creation of estate space in the public imagination, stigmatizing social housing residents while depicting their lives as paradoxically quotidian and sensational, mundane and salacious – an aesthetic I call ‘sensational mundane’:

•Council House Crackdown (BBC One 2015–2018), in which investigators track down and evict social housing tenants illegally subletting their homes;

•How to Get a Council House (Channel 4 2013–2016), in which viewers follow the complicated process by which people become social housing tenants;

•Britain’s Weirdest Council House (Channel 4 2016), in which the ‘unique’ décor of a series of ‘creative council tenants’ is showcased;

•My Million Pound Council House (Channel 5 2015), in which we are shown the ‘very desirable’ homes of owner-occupiers (as opposed to social tenants) on a number of British estates; and

•People Like Us (BBC Three 2013), in which we follow the lives of young people in Manchester’s Harpurhey district over the course of a summer.²

These ubiquitous, everyday representations influence how viewers come to understand estate spaces and, despite being televised and therefore physically removed from the estate site, nonetheless make up part of the experience of estate space at the level of the ‘quotidian’.

Exploring the intersections between theatre, race and the law in America, Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson has proposed that ‘overlapping and often contesting narrative and dramatic protocols akin to aesthetic forms of cultural production’ operate to structure and produce ‘formations such as the law, politics, history, nation, and race’ (2013: 4). He argues that aesthetic practices serve as ‘vessels for the mediation of legal, political, historical, national, and racial knowledge’ (2013: 4). Chambers-Letson’s work evidences that such knowledge production is especially important in the formation of marginalized subjectivities. Indeed, knowledge about council estates – including their legal, political, historical, national and racial formations – that is created and circulated by ‘overlapping and often contesting’ representational and narrative forms is central to the continued marginality and exceptionalism of estates and their residents. The ‘deeply entangled’ realms of ‘social structures’ and ‘aesthetic practices’ (Chambers-Letson 2013: 4) serve to foster our understandings about how the world of the estate works at the level of ‘the real’:³ representations of the ‘sensational mundane’ estate space and social structures (such as policy and the law) operate in a perpetuating cycle, which is visited on the physical spaces of estates and has tangible impacts upon the lives of residents.

As the statement (‘a real reality show’) of the continuity announcer who introduces People Like Us suggests, much of the appeal of poverty porn shows lies in their supposed relationship with ‘the real’. Such programmes are marketed on the basis that they offer ‘authentic’ access to places and people regularly alluded to in the newspaper press, depicted in television programmes, films and literature, but often marginalized and therefore hidden from mainstream culture. Although of course estate residents themselves are likely to consume poverty porn television, the rhetorical structures and content of the programmes position council estate residents as ‘other’ to the decent middle class who are euphemistically positioned as the viewing majority. In other words, estate poverty porn sets up a voyeuristic relationship in which – as the tongue-in-cheek title People Like Us infers – the estate and its residents are presented as essentially and eccentrically different from ‘you’, the imagined viewer.

Poverty porn television programmes are one example of a category of estate performance that I refer to in the taxonomy offered in the introduction to this book as ‘quotidian’. Whereas Chambers-Letson applies the term ‘quotidian performance’ to make clear the distinction between ‘every day acts of self-presentation’ and ‘aesthetic works of cultural production’ (2013: 6), my use of the term is intended to encompass a range of performances that intervene at and beyond the level of the ‘every day’. Unlike the other categories offered in my taxonomy, where the term ‘performance’ refers fairly straightforwardly to theatrical and other cultural practices, the quotidian category encompasses a messy range of self-presentation and cultural production practices. My use of the term ‘quotidian’ therefore embraces the ‘confusion’ that Chambers-Letson proposes exists between the cultural and artistic spheres (2013: 6). I consider how the behaviour of residents and its mediation might be understood ‘as performance’ (Schechner 2013: 9) in a variety of ways. My ‘quotidian performance’ category straddles Richard Schechner’s continuum, in which ‘both every day and specialized cultural domains’ exist ‘at the opposite pole[s]‌ of everyday life’, but ‘with especially small gradations in between’ (Pitches 2011: 4).

I am interested in the ways that representation in popular media and cultural forms distorts and often erases the boundary between the everyday and the ‘culturally produced’, working performatively to create estate space, producing ‘that which it claims merely to represent’ (Butler 1999: 5). Thus, this chapter considers how estate space and those who inhabit it are performatively represented in everyday depictions in the newspaper press, on television, in film, documentary and in literature, and also the means by which residents and others are called to perform in myriad ways in response to such depictions. This type of enquiry necessarily calls into question the complicated relationship between the real and the represented.

Figuring the real

Using the ‘trialectic’ model I presented in the introduction, I explore below quotidian performances of the council estate through an examination of the representation of three ‘real’ council estate residents who became notorious over the past decade or so. The residents I have selected, ‘deviant mother’ Karen Matthews, charged with kidnapping her own child, pop star Cheryl Cole, and Mark Duggan – the young man whose death at the hands of the police sparked the 2011 England riots – demonstrate how representations of ‘the real’ are leveraged to reinforce dominant understandings of the council estate: how ‘real’ people underpin the creation of what Tyler calls ‘figures’. This is a term she uses ‘to describe the ways in which specific “social types” become over-determined and are publicly imagined (are figured) in excessive, distorted and caricatured ways’ (Tyler 2008: 18). Tyler draws on cultural and media examples in which working-class groups are categorized according to reductive stereotypes, thus reinforcing dominant understandings of the poor working class that circulate in contemporary culture. She describes how, for example, university students ‘have been absolutely instrumental in the fabrication and corporealization of’ the ‘chav’ figure:

For over a decade now, Britain’s students have held ‘chav nites’ in which they dress up as chavs. Female students carrying plastic bags from cut-price food superstores, push cushions under tight tops to feign pregnant chav bellies, and drink cider and cheap lager, enjoying the affect of being imaginary chavs.

(Tyler 2013: 166)

According to Tyler, this kind of everyday cultural (re)enactment of the lives of the poor allows ‘those who use, invoke or indeed perform this name [chav] to constitute themselves as “other than poor”’ (Tyler 2013: 167).

Tyler’s method of analysis, which I build upon below, involves ‘tracking the repetition of specific figures within and across different media’ in order to understand how ‘representational struggles are often played out within highly condensed figurative forms’ (Tyler 2008: 17). As she explains,

we should understand mediation not only as representational (in a more structuralist sense) but as a constitutive and generative process. A figurative methodology makes it possible to describe – zoom in on – appearances of a figure within specific media and contexts, whilst also insisting that it is through the repetition of a figure across different media that specific figures acquire accreted form and accrue affective value in ways that have significant social and political impact.

(Tyler 2008: 18–19, original emphasis)

Tyler’s figuring allows us to see how ‘classed figures serve as shorthand for classed discourses which have real consequences in the social world’ (Gidley and Rooke 2010: 103). Tyler proposes that her ‘figurative’ analytical method requires a synthesis of the material and the semiotic; as she argues, ‘signs and signifying practices are understood as having material effects that shape the appearance of and our experience of others’ (Tyler 2008: 18).

While Tyler tends to take broader condensed ‘figure’ categories – the ‘chav’ and ‘chav mum’, for example (2008 and 2011) – as her point of analysis, my study reveals the way real people become figurative, forced to span the blurred lines between fiction and reality and serving to reinforce the idea that representations based on gross stereotypes are rooted without contention in ‘the real’ (see also Gidley and Rooke 2010). My analysis mobilizes Tyler’s model by unpacking how ‘real’ figures become authenticating apparatus: these ‘authentic figures’ are used as material examples that come to signify the supposed ‘truth’ underpinning broader, condensed categories such as the ‘chav’.

Tracey Jensen suggests in her article exploring poverty porn that the rapid production of media representation and commentary occurring in the contemporary media climate can have ‘a flattening effect on public discourse’ and serve to create ‘doxa’, which make ‘the social world appear as self-evident and requiring no interpretation’ (2014: 1–2). The three examples I examine in this chapter serve to demonstrate how the quotidian lives of estate residents are figured within this culture of rapid production and commentary as ‘sensational mundane’, creating estate doxa through the intertextual figuration of exceptional cases across media. The three examples I use highlight some of the dominant tropes of estate representation that I will...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Three places: A preface
• Introduction: The council estate, definitions and parameters
• 1 Quotidian performance of the council estate
• 2 Class and the council estate in mainstream theatre
• 3 Located on the estate
• 4 Resident artists
• Conclusion: Three thoughts
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright Page