Vote for Isaac. He will make a difference.
I've really had my fill of elections. Whatever calamitous route the decision made on June 8 takes the country down, the real sense of relief on the morning of Friday will be that the campaigning, the endless platitudes, the oft repeated right-wing stance, the lefty Facebook rants, will ease and although there will be a large portion of people who won't get what they want, at least we might feel we have made a step forward.
So this is probably not the best time to mention that the actor's trade union, Equity, has some forthcoming elections coming up. Not normally something that would ever make me blog, but on this occasion, there is someone I want to talk about.
I have to say I’ve never really been a great fan of Equity. I just
don’t get it. It may be that as a prospective
actor in the 1970s, Equity represented the biggest barrier to me fulfilling my
dreams. At that stage it was, like many other trade unions, a closed shop.
Entry was strictly restricted and getting an Equity card was probably the
biggest obstacle you faced as a young actor coming out of drama school.
There were various ways around it. You could submit a clutch of
contracts gained from dubious cabaret appearances
in nightclubs, care homes, and pubs - many of whom had probably never staged
entertainment in their history. The repertory theatres each had a limited
number of Equity cards to give away and they were highly sought after.
I became an Equity member because of a mistake in Equity’s own
administration. Appearing as a featured extra (Captain of the Guard) in “The
Sleeping Beauty” for the London Festival Ballet for one week at the Manchester
Opera House, I was going to take a gamble. I submitted my contract to Equity
and sat back and waited. Three months went by and I received no reply. I picked
up the phone to ask about my application. They had no record of it and asked me
about the work. I told them and
10 days later, my provisional Equity card in a reasonably flimsy red
leatherette wallet arrived in the post. A fellow drama school student had done
the same job with me, but who hadn’t been so forward in his approach to
Equity, now applied. Sadly, the union didn’t lose his application and he was
told that the work did not qualifying for Equity membership. Mercifully he
didn’t grass me up.
I’ve never really
had cause to use the services of the union, and the constant calls to political
arms that I get from it irritate me. Indeed, while mainly working as a director
during the early 1990s, I left it for a period of six years.
Coming to write my
two books, “So You Want to Be a Corporate Actor?” (2012) and “The Working
Actor” (2016), gave me cause to
interview Equity as part of my research and find out a little more in depth. The interview about the corporate
market for my first book was not very satisfactory. Equity seem to have little
knowledge of actors who work in this area, and certainly the person I spoke to
seemed surprised that anybody managed to earn a living from it. When told that many
actors earned a much better living working in the corporate market than they do
in theatre and television, the response was “Oh well, fancy that”. No concern that Equity don’t really have any guidelines for actors working in the
market, and that their one intervention into the world of role-play some eight years
ago only managed to lower the average daily rate paid to actors.
Young actors graduating from drama school these days do not have to
join Equity. The union may say
it is a badge of your professionalism, but then so does Spotlight, a service
that provides a much more tangible benefit to a professional actor.
Yet thanks to the excellent advice of Louise Grainger, Equity’s head
of marketing, training, and events, I was made aware of a whole range of
services Equity now offer that make membership an almost foregone conclusion.
The job service - regular information on fringe, educational, and drama
training jobs updated daily; tax and benefit advice; insurance services; career
advisers; public liability insurance –In my case essential when working in the
corporate market, and the premium alone for buying this from another provider
is equal to what I pay as an Equity subscription each year.
So, while I still do
have a great problem with the political side of Equity and the emails that
exhort me to take to the barricades and march, I can now see the benefits of
membership.
Therefore it’s
particularly impressive to see a young actor who wants to use Equity to help other young graduates. Isaac
Stanmore is standing for membership of the Equity young members Council. He is
not political. He’s not on a soapbox ranting about austerity. He wants to be
part of the union to help make young graduates entering the profession more
aware of how beneficial being an Equity member can be and just what the union
can do for them in practical terms.
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| Isaac Stanmore |
And unlike the candidates in the current general election, he is doing
something, and not just talking about it.
He’s built a website that will calculate your holiday pay due on
Equity contracts in line with the guidelines. As somebody who was exceptionally
surprised ten days ago to receive a lump sum of holiday pay at the end of a
fringe contract, this website alone is a real boon. This is just one example of
the sort of thing that Isaac wants to do if elected. Not adopting a political
standpoint, but practical solutions that can help young people have a more
effective career; that can educate them as to their rights and as to exactly
what is available for their Equity subscription.
That’s why I
seconded him in the upcoming Equity elections.
So please - don’t throw your ballot paper away as
so many people normally do. Open it up and find Isaac Stanmore. Give him the
vote that I believe he so richly deserves.
He will make a difference.
Vote for Isaac Stanmore
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