On Sarah Frankcom
By: Atri Rohan Banerjee
Tags: Drama School, The Stage, Sarah Frankcom, Lamda, Theatre

With regards to the still developing case of Sarah Frankcom and the allegations made against her at LAMDA, I realise I’m probably not the best person to comment. Certainly, I’m not a neutral person. Yet I offer my thoughts because I care about Sarah, I care about LAMDA, and I care about the health of our drama schools, our theatres, our industry.

Sarah has been a mentor, a colleague and a friend for the best part of four years now. In that time we have made four shows together, and are in the process of developing a fifth. I’ve worked with her at both the Exchange and at LAMDA. I owe a huge deal of my practice and craft to her; the lessons she taught me; her faith in me. I owe much more to her too, outside the rehearsal room. At times when I’ve been in personal crisis, she’s been there with kindness, strength and love.

The story reported in The Stage yesterday is of course, then, highly emotive for me, as I’m sure it must be for the many people whose work Sarah has influenced across her career. These people now, understandably, feel a need to stand by her in solidarity in the face of these allegations and what is, in my opinion, an inflammatory article. I felt the same need yesterday. However, I hesitated: the dangers of social media, of clickbait headlines, of knee-jerk, vituperative Tweets means that complexity is flattened and space for ambiguity is taken out.

I hope in discussing this, then, to acknowledge an important caveat that is found in ambiguity. Two things can be true at the same time. Namely

a) we can deeply love and admire people

b) the people we love and admire can cause very real and serious harm

It is right and fair that employees should have the right to make complaints, and for those complaints to be taken seriously by boards and senior management. Power should and must be held to account, and in this, personal testimonies are useful only up to a point.

Having said all this, we can still take issue with the way this has been reported. We all know from experience that our leading cultural organisations can be backwards and stuck in the past. We know, too, that Sarah was appointed to LAMDA with the intention of making radical change: this was the very reason the board appointed her. That radical change included shifting the school away from ableism, classism, racism, misogyny. To create a more inclusive, accessible organisation. This is evident in the work Sarah did with the building. For example, the reduction of audition fees by 75%; the work programmed for the students; the teachers and artists she invited in.

The Stage article privileges this letter to the board written by two former members of staff and highlights, unhelpfully, the incendiary language used (“toxic”, “corrosion”, “overbearing”). This represents only one side of the story. While of course this inquiry should be allowed to take place, in due process, this smacks to me of an old guard taking issue with the new direction the organisation was headed in, and how the world was changing around them.

As Sarah said herself in an interview with Lyn Gardner:

“It is exciting but dismantling is difficult too. Many people are resistant to change, they like things to stay the same. Sometimes it can feel particularly difficult when on a daily basis we are all living through a changing world. But you can’t not do it because it’s difficult.”

Those words are the Sarah I know. Perhaps, invariably I will defend her. I am not ashamed of that. I can also support her while acknowledging the complexity of the situation. I don’t know what happened at LAMDA, nor of course do I know any of the ins and outs of employment law. I have no doubt that it’s a complicated, messy business.

Fundamentally, though, the Sarah I know is an artist and leader of deep integrity and moral fervour who I genuinely believe wanted to change LAMDA, and by proxy the whole industry, for the better. The conversations we had about decolonising the canon, and the resistance this was met with, exist in my memory as a smaller example of the kind of arguments she must have been having day in, day out.

This sort of stuff hurts. Of course Sarah had power in the situation. But there is power too in the cultural monolith, the entrenched structural hegemony that would squash any challenge to the status quo, that would silence and stifle the voices that are trying to create change and a more equitable society. And there’s no way Sarah has more power than that.

And perhaps most importantly, this stuff hurts us all, and distracts from the task at hand — trying to make our industry and the world a better place. We are in the business of imagining better futures. The journey is difficult and long and requires plenty of creativity and resilience. We all deserve care in that.

I am angry at the way the story has been told and angry at the lack of care taken. Let’s hope that everyone involved gets the care and love they need, and, if she feels able and willing, Sarah gets a chance to say her side of the story as well.