Who can afford the expensive gamble of going to see a play that you might not like? | Tomiwa Owolade

A friend started working at the fancy cinema chain Everyman. One of his perks is that he gets free tickets, which can cost over £20 each.

I’ve never been, but apparently it’s a luxury experience: comfy chairs, food and drinks delivered to your seat. Still, £20 feels steep. There are London cinemas where a ticket costs less than a tenner. And surely the point of going to the cinema is to enjoy the film itself rather than the experience of watching it? But when I think about theatre tickets, my complaints dissolve. Some plays charge over £200 for a seat: £20 seems like peanuts.

Going to the theatre should be more expensive: you see the actors in the raw vulnerability of the stage. But should it cost 10 times more? Absolutely not. If you see a film you dislike, it’s annoying. If you see a play and you dislike it after having the misfortune of paying to get good seats, it’s rather more than an irritant. At a play a few months ago, my companion and I were the only people under 40. Most of the audience looked much older. Theatre tickets are increasingly a privilege only the rich and old can afford.

The very best plays are unmissable, rich, wonderful and worth every penny. But it’s a big gamble paying the hefty price so many theatres charge. Choosing between whether to go to the cinema or the theatre, nine times out of 10, I pick the cinema.

Caste struggle

I was disappointed by Ava DuVernay’s film, Origin, which explores a black American historian’s investigation into the source of racial inequality. My problem was primarily about its form. I found it didactic. It was like a documentary rather than a drama, trying to advance an argument rather than tell a story. But it did offer a fascinating insight into the caste-system in India.

A BBC News feature written by Divya Arya interviewed young women who have taken to Instagram to talk about their caste-identities. One of the interviewees was Shivi Dikshit. The 24-year-old is of Brahmin caste and proud of it: “I want to propagate the values we practise,” she told Arya, “and dispel myths about my community.” She is opposed to inter-caste relationships and believes Brahmins are superior to other groups. Brahmins are at the top of a system that goes back 3,000 years in India. The group at the bottom are Dalits (or untouchables). Arya also interviewed Seemi Milind Jadha, a young Dalit woman who seeks inspiration from the scholar and politician Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. Ambedkar is a character in Origin. From an impoverished and Dalit background, he became one of the authors of India’s constitution.

DuVernay’s argument in the film, which in itself dramatises the life of the scholar Isabel Wilkerson and her bestselling 2020 book Caste, is that all forms of racial prejudice around the world are ultimately caste-systems of oppression. These systems pit one group of people that are designated as polluted against another group that are seen as pure.

This is an interesting thesis because when we think of racial oppression, many of us instinctively think of white people oppressing black people: in particular, we think of white Americans oppressing black Americans, from slavery to segregation and the legacies of these two evils today.

But India has a population of over 1 billion people and many millions of migrants around the world. If DuVernay’s film expands our knowledge of caste oppression, it will have performed a salutary service, even if I don’t think it works well as a film.

Strike with confidence

Jude Bellingham is not yet 21 and he is already the best player in one of the best football clubs in the world. England has many excellent players who have had great individual seasons at top clubs in Europe this past season. They should be going into the Euros with confidence, not hope.

Tomiwa Owolade is a contributing writer at the New Statesman

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