A theatre director recently told me that he would not be applying for the currently vacant job of artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, because he wasn't sure what any of the three words in the organisation's name mean any more: monarchy, Elizabethan authorship and permanent acting troupes are all concepts currently in flux. In the same way, anyone seeking to promote "British culture" – a key marketing concept in the year of the 2012 London Olympics – faces the problem that the definition of the United Kingdom is contracting while the definition of culture is expanding.
Many things that would seem to qualify for a notional British pavilion in an entertainment fair soon require to be subject to qualification. The X Factor is definitely British – but is it culture? My Week with Marilyn, set and filmed in the UK with an English director (Simon Curtis), but an American lead actress (Michelle Williams) and production, is definitely culture – but is it British?
There is an easy temptation to hanker back to a time when national and creative boundaries were more simply delineated. Artistically, 2012 will be dominated by two veterans of our academies and libraries: William Shakespeare, chosen as the focus of the Cultural Olympiad, and Charles Dickens, whose bicentenary falls in February. These are undisputed British – or, at least, English – cultural icons of the kind you would expect to find on banknotes.
But they died in the 17th and 19th centuries respectively and – although both were by instinct political radicals and creative innovators – time and the attentions of the education system have turned them into conservative brands, safe entertainments. The worship of Shakespeare and Dickens is a heritage reflex; that the two writers will now double as symbols of Britain in an Olympic year is problematic for two reasons.
First, there is the problem of familiarity. For British artistic directors to announce their intention of exploring Shakespeare and Dickens is rather like the owner of a fish shop declaring that next year's menus will focus on seafood. Three of the most publicised events of 2011 – Catherine Tate and David Tennant's Much Ado About Nothing, Michael Sheen's Hamlet and Lenny Henry's The Comedy of Errors – give the Cultural Olympiad the problem that audiences may feel rather as if the 100 metres has been staged 12 months early. It is also a frequent complaint of TV critics that the drama schedules – of the BBC in particular, but also of ITV – have become too dependent on Dickens adaptations.
Apart from the risk of this over-reliance on two writers (with Jane Austen sometimes employed as an impact substitute), their dominance has had the unintended but severe consequence of disenfranchising generations of non-white acting talent. Because the stories of Shakespeare, Dickens and Austen, reflecting the society of their times, are largely populated with white parts, we have faced the depressing spectacle of huge talents raised or trained in Britain having to emigrate to make their names: Clarke Peters, Chiwetel Eijofor, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Thandie Newton, Idris Elba and Sophie Okenedo have all found better roles in the US or Australia; other cultures are less dependent on period remakes.
Okenedo, admittedly, benefitted from bold casting as Nancy in a 2007 ITV Oliver Twist, and this necessary corrective continues. It's also a relief to hear that next year's BBC Shakespeare season, under the control of director Sam Mendes, will feature colour-blind casting – now standard in theatre. The World Shakespeare festival, running from April to September, will also approach the plays multiracially.
Get the airport novels ready
It is perhaps unsurprising that pop – with its Brit School performing academy, and an awards ceremony called the Brits – displays the most confident definition of Britishness. You could argue that this elusive concept can be heard in a single word of Adele's Someone Like You: that moment when she delivers the word "instead" as "instayered", in her hybrid north/south London vowels.
The significance of this one note is that many previously exportable British stars (Middlesex-born Elton John, Anglo-Scot Rod Stewart, Stoke-on-Trent's Robbie Williams) adopted a mid-Atlantic voice. Adele, however, has gone global while continuing to sound defiantly London. Three high-profile rappers – Tinie Tempah, Dizzee Rascal and Chipmunk – have imported an American form but given it the distinctive twang of Britain's biggest city. Unlike other areas of the arts, the casting of a London Olympic gig would be relatively straightforward, although these singers are specifically English (not British) in manner and subject matter – the continuation of a musical strain that includes Ray Davies, Damon Albarn and Lily Allen.
And it's on this question – of which flag to put on the badge – that the sweat really starts to pour down the foreheads of the cultural commissioners. In a recent article, the outgoing head of the civil service, Gus O'Donnell, predicted that the breakup of the UK is now a real possibility – an issue largely ignored by politicians and newspapers protective of the Queen, or nervous of traditionalist voters. This potential fracturing has dramatic implications for the arts.
As actual or psychological independence accelerates in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, it may be that the concept of British culture is becoming an impossibility. Certainly, the BBC, despite moving output and personnel to Salford and Glasgow, struggles to provide one schedule to fit all. At both the BBC and ITV, regional opt-outs have increased, especially in the areas of news and current affairs. Stories about Westminster policy are now unlikely to apply across what we used to call the country. Next year's television coverage of the Olympics will inevitably inflame complaints about the English metropolitan bias of the supposedly national broadcasters.
Equally, it is now impossible to imagine anyone writing a convincing state-of-Britain novel or play, while a state-of-England or state-of-Scotland fiction (see AL Kennedy, Ali Smith and Alasdair Gray, among others) remains a manageable prospect.
Several English writers have, either consciously or subconsciously, produced fiction that feels perfectly timed for 2012 copyright line and to be on sale at the airport when the Olympic tourists fly in. Provocatively released on the eve of the games, Martin Amis's Lionel Asbo is billed as a savage anatomisation of contemporary culture, which its author, perhaps emblematically, will fly in from American exile to promote.
Amis's intentions were apparent in the initially announced title State of England – which might also serve as the sub-title of John Lanchester's Capital, coming out in March; the book involves tensions between the super-rich and super-poor in London. Two successful crime writers will also explore unwelcome visitors to London: John Harvey's Good Bait turns on foreign gangsters in the capital, while Simon Kernick's Siege features terrorists storming a Park Lane hotel.
Cinema has provided many of the talents leading the Cultural Olympiad: Danny Boyle and Stephen Daldry are involved in the opening ceremony, while directors including Mike Leigh have made specially commissioned short films. This makes sense: despite the long history of failures to establish a version of Hollywood in the UK, a "British film" remains a recognisable entity in a way that a "British novel" or "British news bulletin" does not.
Tom Hooper's The King's Speech, and the entire output of Mike Leigh, Ken Loach and Terence Davies are all exemplars of British culture. Yet the complication is that large financial contributions are required from the US or Europe, while a film's success is still largely judged by its reception in the US. The economic crisis that has made Britain more politically insular and suspicious of Europe has left its culture ever more dependent on co-funding.
It is also more divided. The idea of someone from England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland all going into the same building at the same time used to be the classic structure of a joke. These days it could be culture department policy. The biggest arts festival the UK has seen in decades will struggle to disguise these divisions.
