True, Queen Sonja is a broad-minded, arts-loving royal consort rather than a reigning monarch. And the American actor-singer, dramatist and drag artist Taylor Mac — who opened this year’s festival with the queen in the front row — described that turn precisely to point out how safe most of his allegedly “transgressive” work is compared to hard-core avant-garde performance (in his words, “I’m just putting on eye-liner”).

All the same, postcard-pretty Bergen has a reputation as a fairly conservative city. The choice of the multi-talented travesti satirist Mac to headline the festival’s opening day did make gentle waves among the burghers of the wealthy port. Mac, who delivered an abridged version of his epic A 24-Decade History of Popular Music in a succession of surreally elaborate costumes with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra as his backing band, later said that the queen had told him that his show was very different from her usual entertainment. Properly regal understatement. Yet, after a night of camp, glitz, smut and intermittent magic, we still all stood formally in the vast Grieghallen until the royal party had departed.

Context is everything. During Pride month, bandwagon-jumping corporations now proclaim their sexual inclusiveness and gender flexibility with the same unctuous, hand-wringing zeal that would once have led them to advertise — well, a royal warrant or patronage by the nobility. Every investment bank, coffee chain and sportswear brand wraps itself in a rainbow flag — just as Saudi Arabia bans the same motif to remind us that globalisation has strict limits. Even within the tolerant West, however, you don’t need to travel too far to find places where razzle-dazzle, gender-bending spectacle may still create a frisson of unease.

Later this month, Mac and musical partner Matt Ray will perform songs from a new project “celebrating queer luminaries throughout history” at the Public Theater in New York — a marriage of venue and genre roughly as subversive as a solemn Latin Mass at Brompton Oratory. Move a little way outside metropolitan comfort zones, though, as Mac did in Norway, and the treacly clichés of mainstream diversity-speak pick up some spice and bite again. Especially as Mac always makes audience participation a key element of his act: pointless when you’re preaching to the choir, but capable of sparking a crackle of agitation or alarm when public and performer may not share the same cultural space. Although, as he admitted in a post-show discussion, “The only person I knew I wasn’t going to call up on stage was the queen.” But he did (inadvertently) summon the city’s former mayor.

I had come to Bergen in search of more traditional musical fare: a stupendous recital by the great, locally-trained soprano Lise Davidsen with pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, for example. Taylor Mac’s show came as a welcome, surprising — even slightly nostalgic — reminder of a time when camp still kept its edge, when drag queens did not bask in the same aura of respectability as actual queens, and when bids to escape sexual orthodoxy might still bring risk and peril. Mac (born Taylor Mac Bowyer in California in 1973) is no run-of-the-mill drag star.

A garlanded playwright, actor and songwriter he has written a sequel to Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus from the perspective of the clown who has to clean up after the slaughter (Gary) and, most recently, transformed the last hours of Socrates into a philosophical queer musical (The Hang). In A 24-Decade History of Popular Music — a moveable feast re-edited to suit venue and occasion — he appears clad in the steepling motley baroque of the outfits created by his designer Machine Dazzle, or else spotlit as a near-naked middle-aged cherub stranded in his lonely, frail humanity.

Mac comes across as part-topical stand-up, part-cabaret diva, and part-pantomime dame. The songs, cherrypicked from the 246 numbers that filled the original, day-long show premiered in 2016, span the social history of American popular music. With Ukraine on all minds, the pity of war and the patriarchal forces that drive men to wage it haunted his Bergen outing. So we had blistering renditions of the Civil War anthem “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”, Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall”, and even an ironic-yet-sincere “Keep the Home Fires Burning” (written, as he should have pointed out, by a gay Welshman, Ivor Novello).

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Satirical patter punctuated the music as Mac lured not just individual audience members on stage but whole demographic subdivisions of the house. At one point he invited every man from 14 to 40 (front-line fighting age) and coaxed them, in pairs, to support each other as they rested as tired troops did in the trenches of the Western Front. Even in enlightened Norway, he noted, some of this stage army found that public tenderness a tough call — but they enlisted all the same.

This recruitment of the audience works best — as he later suggested — when spectators harbour a degree of ambivalence towards him, his ideas and his show: “I want that person who’s maybe a little uncomfortable but game.” Audience participation can have a sacrificial, even fascistic tinge. I’ve seen Barry Humphries, in Dame Edna Everage mode, humiliate over-eager fans who naively craved a spell in the spotlight with the housewife superstar. This felt much less hostile, chiefly because Mac doesn’t simply want to preach to the converted, or outrage the easily-offended. Rather, he turns mixed feelings into fuel.

In a contemporary culture that demands an all-or-nothing, with-us-or-against-us commitment to creeds, causes and “communities” (real or imagined), Mac plays deftly on uncertainty, curiosity and hesitation. Hence a polite, tolerant but somewhat strait-laced city might suit a show like this better than the usual citadels of conventional diversity. In Britain, I’d like to see him play Cheltenham or Harrogate rather than Brighton. After all, that’s where most people still — figuratively — live. (Coincidentally, a report issued last week by the anti-polarisation think tank More in Common finds that a majority in Britain takes “a nuanced, compassionate approach” to transgender issues, and feels remote from the “divisive debate” that grabs headlines and drives online fury.)

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Mac’s mischief, irony and generosity seem far removed from the drilled and anxious conformism of sex-and-gender ideology today. Witness his exemplary response to an interview question about identity politics from writer Garth Greenwell: “Ugh! Bleh! Ah! Ugh!” Exactly so. As he then explained, “What I mean is, if you spend a lot of time defining who you are, you’re not spending that time paying attention.” Like all good performers, he pays attention, and makes us do so.

Mac is a bit too young to count as a veteran jester. But his sardonic distance from the verbal and emotional straitjackets of institutional liberalism does carry the salty tang of an earlier, less pious age. Even down to his droll choice of a preferred pronoun. It’s “judy” (as in Garland). Use it, as earnest academics and critics have, and you join his act: audience participation again. I did consider it for this article (“judy places judyself in the tradition of the court fool, while judy’s work draws on the styles of Italian commedia dell’arte”, etc) but couldn’t quite keep a straight face.

Mac’s style and sensibility has its roots in a period and place when sexual dissidence brought few corporate plaudits or academic honours. His awakening came during the shame, stigma and dread of the early Aids epidemic. He talks movingly of going for the first time to a gay march in San Francisco in 1987 — and seeing lines of men in wheelchairs pushed by friends and partners. As an actor, playwright, singer — and cross-dressing cabaret performer — in New York from the early Nineties, he belonged to the generation that worked fearlessly to defy the shame, erase the stigma, and overcome the dread.

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Often mocked and vilified, Mac and the other impolite, in-your-face campaigners of those days helped disseminate correct information, kickstarted research and treatment, and so saved or improved the lives of millions, irrespective of their sexual orientation. The idea of rebuilding in the wake of calamity has sustained his writing ever since. In A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, that theme embraces the trials and triumphs of communities from plantation slaves to Jewish tenement-dwellers, not just sexual minorities. Yes, the notion of solidarity among the downtrodden has its sentimental, wish-fulfilment side. It still makes for a more eclectic, invigorating show than the smug, prickly tribalism that marks much satire today.

Above all, Mac aspires to do more than hug his allies and repel his foes. He stages, and so tries to dissolve, polarisation rather than feeding off it as most “radical” art does. He has said that “practically all my works are little fever-dream prayers asking the audience to wonder together rather than be in suspicion”. He doesn’t require endorsement from an audience and welcomes all reactions, “even if you hate the show” (though, in my experience, only performers sure of their talent ever have the chutzpah to make that claim).

Mac thrives on blurred, divided responses not just in his public but in himself. In Bergen, the most entrancing moment came not in some belted high-octane version of a reconditioned standard (though Patti Smith’s “People Have the Power” did raise the roof), but when he ushered the local Edvard Grieg Choir on stage. They sang, a cappella, the lovely 18th-century hymn “Jesus Christ the Apple Tree”, a favourite of American Baptists: “The tree of life my soul hath seen/ Laden with fruit and always green/ The trees of nature fruitless be,/ Compared with Christ the Apple Tree.”

Meanwhile, Mac reflected on the beauty of the melody, the less-than-beautiful record of some power-abusing churches, and the odd urge to prove faith by downgrading nature itself. WB Yeats wrote: “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” Most “progressive” performance lazily contents itself with rhetoric. Taylor Mac sometimes touches poetry.

The theatre, and tragedy particularly, offers a median between outright confession and conscious, rational (which is to say flawed or at least untrustworthy) understanding.

The tragedy is like the story around the campfire and, just like the joke, frees us from rational consideration. In listening, we are transported into another world. “Once upon a time”, just like “there were these two guys”, not only reassures but instantly bypasses our, necessary, quotidian concerns with our own position, well-being, and self-image.

In hearing these mystic incantations, we relax, because we know the story is not going to be about ourselves. Should we suspect, in our unprotected state, that we are actually listening to a cautionary tale (that is to say, to an advertisement), the spell is broken, and we must bring our self-protective capacities to bear.

Here we are like the radio listener, as the host describes the humiliation of some public figure, when he segues, unannounced, into a commercial for internet-image protection and we realise we were hearing an ad.

When we thought we were getting a bedtime story.

The bedtime story exists to address the child’s fear of the night and his understanding of his own frailty. He is not called upon to face it and to deal with it through reason (“There are no such things as monsters”), but he is soothed by a mechanism bypassing his frail consciousness, and his equally frail capacity to be soothed by the same. Which frailty the child shares with us all.

To address his fears by saying, “So remember, never be changed into a wolf”, is to make the same error as putting on plays with a “message”. These are a terrible misuse of the theatrical moment. As are the “talk-backs”, transforming an evening at the theatre into an English class.

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As free speech disappears like Jimmy Hoffa, producers and theatregoers are left with fear. Not only has a mechanism for relief been suppressed; the art form has been pressed into service of the repressive mechanism.

The theatre has long been turning and now, on its (potential) revival, will be found to have turned into the arena for the proclamation of right-thinking. The proclamation, that is, of the reign of the goddess Reason, that is, of mob rule.

We have seen, on Broadway, the usual forms of comedy, drama, and tragedy supplanted by the pageant. A pageant is a celebration of human accomplishment, intelligence, grace, or luck — finally of human power over nature or circumstance. It exists to celebrate a person (the birth of Galileo), a place (the founding of Des Moines), or an idea (National Farm Week, the Munich Rally).

It is a perfectly reasonable excuse for a performance and addresses our need for togetherness. But it is the opposite of the drama. Finally, it’s just, for good or ill, “the high school play”. We attend to applaud the notion presented in the pageant’s title. We will not and cannot experience those emotions nor, then, that catharsis for which the theatre has always existed. We will not leave the pageant cleansed, calmed, surprised, laughing, weeping, thoughtful, or disturbed. And we will not leave having had the burden of our consciousness momentarily laid aside.

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We know that he who rises refreshed from his prayers has had his prayers answered. Our prayers have, similarly, been answered in leaving the magnificent ballet, concert, or indeed football game: our burden had been lifted for a time. The pageant, however, answers not our prayers but the prayers of others. They, for good or ill, for whatever reason, civic pride, the hope of gain, the quest for adherents, have staged what is, finally, a demonstration.

The pageant has long supplanted the drama on Broadway, for the reasons following. Seventy-five percent of the Broadway audience are tourists. They come, legitimately, seeking an experience. They come to Broadway exactly as they come to Disneyland. As in that happiest place, they do not come to risk their hard-earned cash on a problematic event. (They might not like the play nor appreciate being “challenged”; they might just want a break after a day of shopping.) But no one need doubt that the teacup ride will function as advertised.

The knowledgeable Broadway audience, in the days of Odets, Miller, Williams, et cetera, is long in their graves, and their grandchildren basking in Scottsdale.

The middle-class New Yorkers (and the working class) supported the growth of the American drama. The tourist is not paying to do so, any more than he would pay to go to an amusement park with thought-provoking roller coasters.

Most plays are no damned good. The only way to write a play is to write a lot of plays. One learns through putting it on in the garage, in the storefront, off-Broadway, et cetera, trying and failing in front of a paying audience. There is no other way to learn how to write a play.

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Off Broadway, off-off-Broadway, are no more. The regional theatres have long devoted themselves to developing a subscriber-ship, “outreach”, “social consciousness”, and other means of destroying the possibility of attracting actual, ardent audiences.

No one says to his or her spouse, “Look online and see if there are any plays supporting the notion that (FILL INTHE BLANK) are people, too.” Or, “Get dressed, because, though you wanted to stay home and have a beer, it is the third Tuesday in the month, and we have to go use our subscription tickets to see some play.”

(By the way, what greater pleasure than recognising, of whatever event, that one is, at the moment, happier at home, and the tickets, whatever they cost, can go hang?)

Finally, to write a good play requires talent. There is not a lot of it around.

It was, I believe, Milton Friedman who, stunningly, said that the free market must exist to entice the able to reveal their abilities. If one has no possibility, in the theatre, of doing anything but staging platitudes, the talentless will (and do) step up, but the inspired have no reason to do so. The reward of the talented is unfettered creation.

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The painter or composer may work in solitude. The creation of the dramatist is complete only with the addition of an audience. He is writing for them. To create, in them, a transformative experience (the laugh, the gasp, dead intent silence, or tears) is the greatest of thrills.

The hack is unaware of the existence of talent. He may happily take his pointless facility to producers happy to put on a show of no more actual worth than the monochrome canvases beloved of museum curators.

The New York Times, our newspaper of record, and the liberal media, in conjunction with the schools and colleges, insist that nothing shall be said or staged which does not express “right thinking”, that is, statism.

Outreach, education, diversity, and so on are tools of indoctrination. So, for example, are marine boot camp and the Bar Mitzvah. But art is the connection between inspiration and the soul of the observer. This insistence on art as indoctrination is obscenity, denying and indicting the possibility of human connection to truths superior to human understanding, that is, to the divine.

This is an extract from Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of A Free Lunch by David Mamet. 

© David Mamet 2022