“RUGBY union is a middle-class sport,” a leftie friend told me recently. I should prefer football, he insisted, which is “working-class opera.”

Now, apart from repudiating his daft claim — as a rugby fan, I’m an old Arms Park groundling, rather than a Twickers toff — he got me thinking. Why isn’t opera “working class”?

Vox pops on the topic were called for, so I stood outside the Lidl supermarket in Feltham, my regular choice for such journalistic groundwork, where you get a decent cross-section of the public. Remarks like: “It’s never about real life, is it? It’s always royalty” and “No-one writes operas and plays about ordinary people,” seem to sum up the resistance to what's on offer in our theatres.

Those views are not true, of course. Reviewing shows over the last year, I've seen performances about friends falling out, lovers cheating and teenagers struggling to find their way. True, there was one about Napoleon but even that reminded me of my first editor at the Rhondda Leader.

Still, negative stereotypes are enough to keep us from trying an experience. Is there a class divide, tainting people’s expectations of the arts? Some social commentators would have us believe that few define themselves as working class, now that we’re all fooled by social bloody mobility. Is this a class question at all?

I recall my response to the theatre version of the film Rita, Sue and Bob Too which I reviewed for the Morning Star a few months ago. The bleak lives of its working-class characters seemed played for laughs and it felt cartoon-like.
 

I came away, grumpily looking up a quote from writer Tim Lott, who’d used, in the Guardian, an extraordinary phrase which stuck with me. Pondering on working-class writers, he’d said: “There are no writers out there any more to bring us bulletins from the lives of what is probably the largest single group in society.”

Who, in the name of arse, is the “us” in that statement? Is it the middle and upper classes who consume and enjoy the arts and rely on “bulletins” to inform on the lives of others?

In the same piece he cited the late novelist Alan Sillitoe, thereby hammering home the old stereotype, when in fact the writer rejected labels. I check with his son, David, who tells me: “He didn’t like the ‘working class’ label. He told me 'an artist has no class' and he didn’t want to ally himself with any school of thought. He just did what he did, popular or not.”

Discovering Sillitoe’s work was for me an entry point to many more novels and films. Reading The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, aged about 10, was a revelation — this voice resonated even more than Dylan Thomas’s had.

In more recent years — my Welsh bias showing — I’d look to the works of Rachel Tresize, whose stories are harrowing and witty. Last year, she wrote We’re Still Here, about the threatened closure of Port Talbot steelworks, basing it on interviews with workers, union reps and local people.

And then there's playwright Gary Owen — Welsh, too — the author of Killology, with its victims of an exploitative economy and Iphigenia in Splott, a scream of anger against the impact of austerity. Its unlikely heroine was played by Sophie Melville, a fine young actress, who says she didn’t think theatre would be her calling because it might be too posh and she wouldn’t understand it. I’m glad she got over that idea.

Owen studied at Cambridge. “I’d never really moved outside a working-class context before, it wasn’t a place I fitted in with very well,” he tells me. “Now I work in a very ‘rarefied’ profession but the work isn’t, because I write about real people.”

He’s currently working on a new play, also set in Splott. Judging by his previous output, I think my neighbours in Feltham would like it.