What’s A Young Theatre Artist To Do?

When the UK’s repertory theatre system collapsed in the 1970s “visionary artists ran to the fringe and reinvented their art form from scratch.” But how did those artists support themselves? They went on the dole. And some of today’s best-known artists got their starts that way. Today the dole has been replaced by a system that requires full-time availability for paid work. “To bend the rules and do creative work while ‘signing on’, as we all did in the mad years of early Thatcherism, is no longer possible.”