Most theatre is more interested in attacking the old institutions from the Age of Ignorance – the Church, the family and the nation. As composer James MacMillan once put it, we have a ‘cultural regime which adjudicates artists and their work on the basis of how they contribute to the remodelling, indeed the overthrow of society’s core institutions and ethics’.16 What replaces those institutions? The same one that just happens to fund theatre – the state.
