Polanski’s Green Party is a party for the heirs of the student activists of the Sixties and Seventies, for whom it was an article of faith that “the personal is political”. And so it’s fitting that a slogan T-Shirt should have caused the greatest crisis of Polanski’s leadership so far. On Monday, he shared a post on Instagram showing one of his supporters wearing a black T-Shirt with a guillotine on it — with the caption referring to the XTC song, “We’re only making plans for Nigel”. “If I were to post anything as inciteful”, responded Nigel Farage, “then I would expect to be arrested, and so should Polanski”. Polanski was quick to delete the post, which he shared just 19 days after Ann Widdecombe’s murder, and to declare that he “unequivocally does not support this type of dangerous message”. But the police are now looking into it — and free-speech hypocrisies aside, Farage is surely right to sense a double standard.

It’s tempting to see all this as just another sign of Polanski’s immaturity, of a piece with his goofball grin and his Hackney house share. That’s true — but what’s even more striking is how his callowness has endured into middle-age. He may not look it, or act it, but Zack Polanski is 43 years old. That makes him seven older than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and nine older than Zohran Mamdani, with whom he is often flatteringly compared. He may be old enough to have some faint memory of Thatcher, and certainly remembers Section 28. If, by some strange stroke of fortune, Polanski were to become prime minister at the next general election, he would enter Downing Street about the same age as John Major did in 1990. The Green Party is achieving most of its success among Gen-Z. But its leader is only a millennial by the skin of his famous teeth.

Aside from making his wardrobe even more embarrassing, that gives Polanski something rare in politics — a life before. Since he burst onto the political scene, the picture of that life has been gradually filled. What we find is a protean creature, a sentient Ship of Theseus. His first name changed and his surname changed, for independent reasons. When David Paulden became Zack Polanski, really he should have become Zach Polinsky: Polinsky was the ancestral Jewish name, and Zach, not Zack, is the Jewish character in Goodnight Mister Tom. Between that first reinvention and his election as Green Party leader in 2025, there was a phase of Corbyn heckling, Conference gospel singing, and Clegg-Cameron Coalition boosting. But across all this — and his infamous chapter as a hypnotherapeutic breastmaxxer — there has been one constant thread: Zack Polanski was an actor.

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Acting is what turned him into a political animal. Studying drama in Wales and then in Atlanta,  his political approach to theater goes all the way to a country whose current politics Polanski admires, and with which he wants Britain to form an alliance to replace Nato: Brazil. The Brazilian dramatist Augusto Boal developed the Theater of the Oppressed back in the Seventies. It was based upon his compatriot Paulo Freire’s book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which was published, as one might expect, in 1968. A long-haired Leftist with a New York education, Boal was kidnapped in 1971 and tortured by Brazil’s far-Right government. He was then able to develop his theories of drama and politics during a 15-year exile. He then returned to Brazil on the collapse of the dictatorship, before being elected a city councilor in Rio de Janeiro. There he introduced something called “legislative theater”, a form of participatory democracy where stakeholders and policymakers share a stage to “co-create innovative and effective solutions to complex challenges, promoting equity, creativity, and fun”. Government by “participatory theater”: has a more obnoxious regime than this ever been devised?

In Boal’s plays, the spectators give way to “spect-actors”, who interact with the actors on stage. Regular spectators in regular play are, you see, passive, bovine, clouded by false consciousness, if you are an orthodox Marxist, or mauvaise foi, if you are of a more existentialist persuasion. Spectators have no power: or, rather, they do not know what is in their power. “Spectator”, Boal concluded in his manifesto, “is a bad word! The spectator is less than a man and it is necessary to humanize him, to restore to him his capacity of action in all its fullness”. For him to become a real man, he first has to act; the spectator must become spect-actor.

This, then, was the apprenticeship of Zack Polanski, his rehearsal for revolution. The Green Party website declares proudly of its leader: “Before entering politics, Zack worked in community theater, specializing in Theater of the Oppressed with marginalized communities to help them tell their own stories”. He first joined the Liberal Democrats, in fact, because the Theater of the Oppressed somehow opened his eyes to the injustice of First Past the Post. Polanski’s theatrical politics gave him the impression that politics is, so to speak, all for show; politics is a morality play, where a scenario of oppression awaits its interruption by a do-gooding “spect-actor”. When he is asked to summarize his outlook, he reaches for the phrase “radical compassion”. It is not enough to “be kind”; the spect-actor has to be kind, radically.

In practice, though, this also means that the only imperative in Polanski’s politics is to be (radically) compassionate to others. There are no conflicts, no trade-offs, no difficult decisions. In many ways, his worldview is as anti-intellectual as it is anti-political; there is no room, really, for serious ideas. If only the billionaires and the Israelis and Donald Trump were more compassionate, if only Britain would prove its compassion by stripping its wealth for the benefit of the global south, opening its borders to more immigrants, and promptly dissolving itself, then all will be well. It is, in short, an immature worldview — and one shallow enough that it can be displayed on a T-Shirt.

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“When people ask for solidarity, the only authentic response is to give it”, as Polanski says in the context of trans rights. The obvious follow-up — that sometimes the interests of different people can collide, and therefore that choosing where to give “solidarity” is necessarily political — simply wouldn’t occur to him. The old binary between actor and spectator was collapsed in favor of another, a binary of justice and injustice, where the dividing line could be easily drawn by any “spect-actor” endowed with the requisite powers of compassion. Even before Polanski, the Green Party liked to fantasize about “citizens’ assemblies”; there is more than a whiff here of Boal’s “legislative theater”. It is always assumed, and with Polanski it is no different, that such assemblies would move towards something resembling the Green Party platform.

But Polanski’s “compassion”, his “solidarity”, only extends to the right kind of people. The guillotine T-Shirt makes that clear. In the end, his anti-political posturing gives way to a bracingly political worldview: he knows to extend “solidarity” to his friends and to withhold it from his enemies. He arguably shared the guillotine image because he’s inured to that strain of abrasive humor so common on the Left: “Eat the rich”, “Punch a TERF”, “the only good fascist is a dead fascist”. If so, he wouldn’t be the first Leftist to land in trouble once such slogans have escaped containment. One young Oxford student is currently awaiting trial for chanting “Gaza, Gaza, make us proud, put the Zios in the ground”.

This is the underlying power of Polanski’s anti-political politics. It gives you, clearly enough, an enemy. With the other parties, with the unjust status quo, he tells you, you really are a mere spectator of the world, a plaything of a venal class of billionaires. You are a passive audience. You yearn, if not for revolution — if not for the guillotine — then at least for that classic 1968 watchword: “agency”. Little wonder Polanski likes to describe himself as an eco-populist; and he has learned certain lessons from the Right-wing populism he is reacting so viscerally against. The message of the Theatre of the Oppressed, and of Polanski’s Green Party, is ultimately to “take back control”. Polanski is dressing up that old formula in such a way as to appeal to people like his younger self: recent graduates floating about, guided only by a vague sense of “social justice” and a lingering artistic ambition. The only way to escape the matrix, Polanski tells them, is to become “spect-actor” instead of “spectator”, to get up on stage. They must, in the end, become political — even if only by throwing on a T-Shirt.

It’s one of a number of lines that makes its way from Stephen Beresford’s 2014 film Pride into the fabulous new stage adaptation at the National Theatre. Beresford and his co-writer, Matthew Warchus, have transformed the classic Brit-flick portraying the then-unlikely union between working-class communities and metropolitan progressives during the miners’ strike into a piece of bombastic and campy musical theater. It lands in a political milieu markedly different from the 2014 film — and certainly from LGSM’s Eighties heyday. In recent years, the story recounted quite faithfully in Pride has become a political fable of the kind beloved on the Left. Like the Jarrow Crusade, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Peterloo Massacre, the Paris Commune, and the Spanish Civil War before it, it is a somewhat melancholic story of a social movement that is said to have succeeded in history’s long vista — in spite of near-term defeat.

But where Pride’s story differs from the parables of the Left canon is in the split fortunes of the LGSM coalition. Britain now is a far-cry from the widespread homophobia of the Eighties, whose officials responded so shamefully to the HIV epidemic. When the young today are told of how Manchester’s chief constable James Anderton — “God’s copper” — described gay men affected by HIV as “swirling about in a human cesspit of their own making”, they are rightly disgusted. Thatcherism failed to suppress gay rights. Within a generation, her Conservative successors would go on to denounce Section 28 and legalize gay marriage, David Cameron declaring this — in an admittedly small pool — to be “one of the things of which I’m proudest”.

But Thatcher and her heirs did succeed in shuttering British heavy industry and neutering the political weight of organized labor. Britain’s breakneck deindustrialization process was faster than any other nation; even the collapsing Soviet Union wasn’t so extreme. It is now a country where skilled manual work has become a niche career choice. Outside London are countless communities that have never recovered from the offshoring of their local industry.

It’s hard not to wonder how LGSM’s visionary founding member Mark Ashton would feel about how things turned out. Mischievous as well as driven, as a young man he spent a six-month stint in the King’s Cross Conservative Club undercover in drag. Played by Jhon Lumsden in Pride, he radiates a manic confrontational energy, simultaneously pithy, erudite, roguish and possessed of a rare moral clarity. When asked why a group of gay people should come to the aid of people who persecuted them growing up, he phlegmatically retorts: “Because miners dig for coal, which produces power, which allows gay people like you to dance to Bananarama till three o’clock in the morning.”

Ashton instinctively connected social liberty and class struggle. Millions of Brits were gay and millions worked in industry, and it was clear how contributions to the economy and social life of Britain linked the two. It would be difficult to draw the same threads together today. How does one link a piebald economy of casualized work, AI data centers, Deliveroo riders, vape shops and photovoltaic cell installers with the remaining contested battlegrounds of social liberty? It isn’t quite so clear how each of us contributes to the life of the other anymore.

Still, it is worth challenging the narrative that has emerged, particularly since the Brexit referendum, that these two core components of the old Labour vote — the urban progressives and the traditional working class — are somehow fundamentally opposed. The commonplace bigotry that I encountered at comprehensive school in a former pit community in the Nineties is dying. Indeed, polling by the likes of YouGov consistently disproves the stereotype of the bigoted, provincial “gammon” who has bewitched progressives since Brexit. People living in Britain’s social mobility cold-spots, characterized by the ghosts of production lines and shipyards, are no more likely to feel animosity towards the non-straight population than people anywhere else. Where homophobia is more prevalent is within religious communities, which leaves the modern progressive with difficult scales to balance, as those people often don’t resemble the middle-aged men of post-industrial England who have become their Ur-baddie.

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I saw the heartbreaking effects of this homophobia first-hand in 2014 — the year the movie Pride was first released. I was a key-worker in various homeless hostels in London. One was for young people in Sydenham where roughly half of my young charges were the disowned teenage children of homophobic parents — all of whom had been taught by their religious leaders that their children’s sexuality made them evil. Each case file would come with a letter from a parent containing words to the effect of: “I do not support my child’s lifestyle. They are no longer my child.” This social and familial ostracization used to be a common part of the gay experience in Britain; activists like Ashton fought so hard to overcome it.

The continuation of such attitudes within highly religious communities is a reality that most modern progressives mostly prefer to ignore. When, in 2019, a school in Birmingham was subject to a months-long campaign of picketing by Muslim parents outraged at a curriculum encouraging acceptance of LGBT+ relationships, most progressives seemed keen to shuffle the episode under the carpet. False claims that mimicked the worst of post-war-era bigotry whirled around social media: the school had a “paedophile agenda”, staff were “teaching children to masturbate”, and children were “being indoctrinated” into homosexuality. The campaigner Amir Ahmed said that children were being “conditioned to accept (gay relationships) as a normal way of life”, while the Imam Mullah Bahm pronounced the school’s headteacher was a “shatani” (a devil) who “needed to be broken”.

There is little sign at present that Left progressives are prepared to challenge such bigotry today; those who did turn up, tying messages of solidarity to the school gates, later went to the police after being pelted with eggs by the protestors. If Zack Polanski, whose Green Party is buoyed by a defecting Muslim vote after Labour’s Gaza failings, is following LGSM’s lead of building solidarity partly as means to a cultural end, he’s doing so very quietly. Meanwhile, Tribune, the magazine built by pioneering feminists like Labour MPs Ellen Wilkinson and Barbara Castle, is now owned by the same religious-conservative businessman whose Islam Channel has been fined by Ofcom for, among other things, advocating acquiescing to marital rape as a religious duty.

In this light, the ethical ethos that Ashton and his comrades held themselves to seems almost alien. LGSM were willing to put in hard yards to convince others they were on their side. Today, according to the pollsters More In Common (and anyone else who has spent any time in progressive circles), the group denoted as “Progressive Activists” are now the most insular citizens in Britain. They almost exclusively socialize with people who agree with them — and they are also the ones most likely to think those who don’t agree with them are morally deficient.

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Rather than drive hundreds of miles with donations for the skeptical but depressed villages of Britain, contemporary progressives stick to their own. They are the type to respond to national news of racial tensions in the depressed estates of Teesside by organizing a night-time vigil on the other side of the country in Walthamstow. They write, read and display dense, self-flagellating books about the difficult and intellectually taxing work of “not being a racist”. They swap Labour councillors for Green councillors in cities already full of Low-Traffic Neighborhoods and car-use penalties, reacting with shock when the small council budget allocations that aren’t already taken by elderly care don’t allow much in the way of revolutionary change.

In many ways, this is a politics of resigned indignation. One that has given up on Britain’s potential and instead built a members-only club inside of her major cities. The Mark Ashton of 1983 would surely feel a sense of disappointment. Progressivism may hold the kind of cultural dominance that previous generations could only have dreamed of — but it has also become an insular subculture. Outsiders are, if not the enemy, irrelevant.

Pride’s relevance today is in the contrast it sets out between LGSM and the modern activist. Rather than cultivating the necessary humility to find common purpose between groups of people, a culture of social media-incentivized extremism and righteous indignation has turned many on the Left into sniffy inquisitors, not entirely convinced that the poor are good enough people to be worth helping.

The National Theatre is Pride’s second stop after a stint in Cardiff. It isn’t clear whether the play will then go on tour, but it’s worth noting that if it does, it’s unlikely to visit the parts of Britain permanently broken by the end of the miners’ strike. Though it is a play that would be ideal for neglected England, it might be almost exclusively applauded by an audience of comfortable Londoners. I wonder whether that is what Ashton would have wanted.

***

Pride is at the National Theatre until 12 September. Friday Rush tickets are available.

Understand this grubby, ink-stained world, and it’s tempting to see the 1986 Wapping Print Strike as inevitable. The battle between Rupert Murdoch and his unionized printers ended with those old-fashioned presses replaced by sleek digital alternatives. Yet if the shift looks inevitable in hindsight — as a victory for technology over tradition, of progress over Luddites who refused to move with the times — there was nothing unavoidable about its broader impact. Not only did Murdoch’s new presses mean a radically slimmed-down workforce, it also altered the whole tenor of Left-wing politics, and we’re still living with the consequences today.

Before Wapping, print unions dictated which papers got printed, when and by whom. When, in May 1984, The Sun tried to run a photo of Arthur Scargill with the caption “Mine Führer”, the printers downed tools. When the edition was eventually published, there was a blank space where the picture should have been, accompanied by a text reading: “Members of all The Sun production chapels refused to handle the Arthur Scargill picture and major headline on our lead story. The Sun has decided, reluctantly, to print the paper without either.”

Possibly because of the sector’s heavy unionization, there was an “us-and-them” feel to journalism: with the editorial staff on one side, and printers firmly on the other. Even a paper’s editor wasn’t allowed to set foot in the machine room, which was strictly reserved for unionized workers. But when Sun journalists went on strike, printers walked through their picket lines day after day. Because of the specialist knowledge required, because of the urgency of getting a paper out on time, and because of decades of bargaining, it was just assumed that printworkers controlled newspaper production, and that’s how it was always going to be. They were in charge.

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During the Wapping dispute, though, the nation watched as printers were powerless to stop even a single copy of a single edition of a single paper going on sale. They stood not just defeated, but delegitimized, the fragile limits of their powers starkly exposed. Combined with the failure of the miners’ strike, this loss swept away the Labour-aligned trade union movement which had defined postwar Britain.

At the center of events was Brenda Dean, the media-friendly leader of the Society of Graphical and Allied Trades. A huge print union — it boasted over 200,000 members in 1980 — Dean was elected SOGAT’s head the year before the strike began. She also had the distinction of being the first woman to be elected as the leader of a major industrial union anywhere in the world, in a sector entirely dominated by men. Dean was herself elected on a program of industrial reform, and soon became a formidably articulate voice on British TV screens. Acutely conscious of her image, she spent time ensuring that her appearance was always immaculate, turning her bright blue dress into a signature look.

Opposing her was Murdoch. Initially inheriting a single Adelaide newspaper from his father in 1952, he soon created a thoroughgoing Australian media empire. In the Sixties, Murdoch moved into the British market, buying The News of the World and then The Sun, which he turned from a worthy (if boring) Leftist broadsheet into a mass-market tabloid. By the early Eighties, he had added The Times and The Sunday Times to his stable, giving him a powerful foothold across the British press.

But by the time of Dean’s election, Murdoch’s patience was wearing thin. He knew he needed to eliminate the unions, and he used their willingness to strike against them. Aware that he couldn’t construct a state-of-the-art computerized printing plant in secret, he told the world that his new Wapping facility — a decisive move away from the old Fleet Street model — would be used to print an entirely new paper: The London Post. He then goaded his printers into a strike, offering them far worse terms and conditions than they were used to. As soon as the strike began, he sacked the printers en masse, replacing them with workers he’d secretly trained in Southampton. Murdoch must have imagined that the dispute which followed would last only a few months. Brenda Dean had other ideas, rallying her members with a cry of “Mr Murdoch is trying to smash our union!”

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She had a point. Murdoch aggressively road-tested Thatcher’s new anti-union legislation. Among other things, strikers were now forbidden from picketing anywhere other than their old places of work — the now dormant facilities in Fleet Street. So-called “secondary action” was made illegal too, meaning non-printworkers couldn’t refuse to handle Murdoch papers. And once the demonstrations at Wapping began, the Metropolitan Police were quick to ensure that the lorries left the plant safely. In the interests of that safety, hundreds of people were injured and one teenager killed.

Yet after months of militancy — and a year of Murdoch’s four papers being printed in Wapping — it became clear that SOGAT’s battle was lost basically as soon as the digital presses started rolling. It wasn’t simply that the new technology was more efficient, allowing the same output with a fifth of the workforce. More fundamentally, the dispute cost the unions their authority. It taught employers that confrontation worked, and that a determined proprietor, armed with new machines and new legislation, could execute a complete end-run around organized labor.

And where Murdoch started, others followed. By 1990, every national newspaper which had previously been printed using hot metal on Fleet Street had moved to computerized facilities, often in the Docklands. Other unions found their hands were tied by the new legislation too. The Liverpool Dockers strike of 1995-1998 remained almost entirely isolated; in the Seventies, it’s easy to imagine other workers downing tools in solidarity.

Altogether, these actions tipped the economic balance of power away from workers and towards employers, eroding participation in collective bargaining arrangements. As for the country at large, it was hard not to feel as though socialism had lost the intellectual argument. In earlier decades, capitalism and socialism were the titans fighting for Britain’s soul. Yet once both the miners and the printers had taken on the Right and lost, it became clear that organized labor could no longer set the agenda.

This unsurprisingly had an impact on the Labour Party. It had, after all, been founded by trade unions. But after Wapping, union membership declined sharply, and the tone of Labour’s rhetoric shifted from opposing plutocratic tycoons to merely tempering their influence. The 1983 manifesto talks about large-scale nationalization, even (perish the thought) withdrawal from the EEC. Compare that to its 1992 successor, which emphasizes competence and fiscal responsibility. Then, in 1997, Tony Blair won the vote to replace Clause IV of Labour’s constitution, dumping a commitment to public ownership that had endured since 1918.

1986 may not have been the only pivot on which this new world turned, but it was surely decisive. From then on, the Left stopped arguing that a socialist Britain was a fair and prosperous Britain, and was instead reduced to trying to curb capitalism’s worst excesses. As for Rupert Murdoch, he didn’t just win the strike. He helped re-write the political map of the UK. In the Print, the play we’ve written about the dispute, isn’t just an account of a thrilling battle for power. It’s also a warning.

In 1986, computerized presses meant that 1,000 people could produce four national newspapers. With the rise of the internet, that looks almost quaint. Now we barely need newspapers to be printed at all, as most journalism is consumed on screens. And now, in 2026, we face another turning point, as AI means people are barely even needed to write the articles. The unions of the Eighties might have been flawed, overreaching and at times even absurd — but they had the power to stop a runaway train in its tracks if necessary. We might soon look back on that power with envy.

***

In the Print is showing at the King’s Head Theatre in Islington until 3 May.

The Young Vic’s current revival of Arthur Miller’s 1994 play Broken Glass and Howard Jacobson’s latest novel Howl seem at odds. One is a tragic portrait of desperate denial in the shadow of Kristallnacht in 1938, the other a dark comedy that unravels the absurdity of socio-political fault lines in present day London. The same question lies coiled at the heart of both: how do Jews process, survive, and make meaning of the antisemitism that is again becoming eerily ubiquitous? 

Broken glass has a deep resonance in the Jewish psyche. At the end of a wedding ceremony, the groom stamps on a glass, its shattering symbolizing the fate of the Temple in Jerusalem. The melancholy of destruction and exile haunts us even at the happiest moment of our lives. Then there’s the broken glass of Kristallnacht, the opening salvo of anti-Jewish violence perpetrated by Nazi paramilitaries — and it’s that image that lingers in the backdrop of Arthur Miller’s 1994 play of the same name.

In Broken Glass, Sylvia Gellburg, a Brooklyn housewife in 1938, wakes to find her legs paralyzed with no physical cause to be found. She has been reading the news obsessively, unable to look away from stories of anti-Jewish violence from Germany. Her paralysis, her doctor diagnoses, is psychosomatic, her body symbolically absorbing the collective trauma that American Jews around her choose to ignore. 

But Miller resists cookie-cutter moralities. He suggests something more multifaceted. Sylvia’s husband Philip is a self-hating Jew, proud of being the only Jewish employee at his firm, but secretly longing to sublimate his Jewishness and blend into WASP New York. He would rather not be Jewish at all. All the while, Sylvia’s paralysis becomes the symbolic expression of a community that cannot contend with its inability to recognize and stop its own persecution. Barbarism begins at home.

Theater’s greatest strength is always its audiences. There is no mediation, no screen to look away from or book to clasp shut if things get too intense. We cannot help but be confronted by what we watch. We are in the same room, breathing the same oxygen as the world conjured before us. But it is a two-way street. All the background noise melting in our minds from our daily lives echoes onto what we see on stage. It is what allows us to revisit and revive plays year after year, finding new meanings in what we watch. As the world changes, so does the art. 

There is usually a sense that when a theater dredges up a lesser-known work from the back catalog of a famous writer the play will need to prove its relevance. Death of a Salesman, for example, is a bona-fide classic whose dramatic worth speaks for itself and can be wheeled out without much directorial intentionality. The less popular ones need to reel its audiences in and Broken Glass’s hook is obvious.

British Jews have been destabilized not only by October 7, but by the subsequent rise in antisemitism, violence in Gaza, and the shrugging shoulders of indifference from non-Jewish friends and colleagues. Many sense a gulf between the duality of Anglo-Jewish identity and the question their future in Britain. So a new production of Broken Glass at the Young Vic should rattle all of us to the core. Why doesn’t it? 

The antisemitism of 1938 and 2026 may share ostensible similarities, but the fundamental strands of its DNA have evolved. To the modern antisemite, the image of the Jew is not one of wandering alienation, or of shtetl poverty. It is one of colonial violence, racism, insatiable blood lust. How would the Philip Gellburgs of 2026 try to assimilate and win the affection of their gentile colleagues? Perhaps they would drape a keffiyeh around their necks and declare themselves anti-Zionists, just as Philip must performatively distinguish himself from the other Jews as if to say there are Jews it is permissible to abuse, and they are not like me.

In 2026, then, Sylvia’s paralysis metastasizes into something more provocative. Perhaps Broken Glass chides us for failing to recognize burgeoning antisemitism in our own time. Or perhaps Sylvia’s paralysis can be flipped on its head: instead of images of dead Jews beaten up and bloodied on Berlin streets, we are bombarded with images of dead Palestinians, stuck in wrecked buildings or hounded out of their homes by gun-toting settlers. Like Sylvia, we, collectively, might be paralyzed, unable to prevent more horror, more bombs, more war, the death count always ticking up. The guilt persists, but now it is inverted, no longer about the suffering of Jews but about that of others.

We can find a sturdier answer to what Miller would make of antisemitism today not in Broken Glass but in The Crucible. His masterpiece has served as a theatrical Rorschach Test since it premiered at the height of McCarthyism. Its central mechanism maps the hysteria of accusation, the social contagion of fear, the destruction of the individual who refuses to collaborate. But its eternal relevance lies in how it applies with equal force across the political spectrum, wherever mobs bay for violence and crowds swarm with the thrill of self-righteous violence. 

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Humor is the tried and tested Jewish mechanism of metabolizing pain, and Miller for all his brilliance was not renowned for his sense of humor. His plays are anchored with unrelenting gravity, offering no door through which the audience might open to catch some air. Even Shakespeare understood the necessity of comic relief: the gravedigger in Hamlet who cheerfully philosophizes about death while digging Ophelia’s grave, or Macbeth’s porter, who drunkenly ponders the relationship between alcohol and erectile dysfunction whilst the meat grinder continues whirling. Shakespeare uses humor, not as ornamentation but as a structural necessity to release just enough pressure so that the tragedy can hit harder. 

Jacobson, by contrast, utilizes humor not as relief from the weight of darkness but as a way of exploring it. He is one of Britain’s foremost comic novelist, recognized with the Man Booker Prize for The Finkler Question in 2010, a novel that used wit as a scalpel to dissect the neuroses of British-Jewish identity and the self-consciousness of assimilation. His comedy reaches beyond examining the meaning of British Jewishness, to encompass modern masculinity, multiculturalism, intellectual vanity, and the stories we delude ourselves with to avoid confronting who we really are. Howl is an organic extension of that project, except the stakes feel higher now, and the silences after the laughter has passed echo louder. 

Howl directly grasps the nettle of post-October 7 anxiety and blurs the line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Behind the protagonist Ferdinand Draxler, a Jewish headmaster of a South London school, looms the inheritance of trauma from his mother’s survival in Nazi death camps, and ahead of him is his own daughter, a pro-Palestinian activist. At a chance encounter between opposite sides of a demonstration, she denounces her father as a colonialist Zio pig. Draxler starts to unravel into madness, crumbling under the weight of both history and the future. 

For Jacobson, the unbearable can be survivable precisely by refusing to treat it as such. One episode sees Draxler chance upon protesters gluing their hands to a portrait of Peter Paul Rubens’s Samson and Delilah at the National Gallery. Samson famously pulled down a Philistine temple, collapsing it upon himself and his captors, and is therefore complicit in genocide. That or, Draxler wonders, the protesters might have conflated Rubens, the Flemish artist, with Reubens the kosher deli on Baker Street. Soon it is clear that Draxler relies on wisecracks as medicine to soothe the pain of his fracturing relationship with his daughter. The pain of a family split down the middle has cleft his heart in twain, not just because they disagree politically, but because the gap between them is too insurmountable. 

The ancient Greeks insisted on pairing tragedy with comedy because they are two faces of the same truth. The truth for Miller and Jacobson is that the gravest danger antisemitism poses is not only violent persecution, but the splinters that shatter the self from within. Philip Gellburg destroys himself trying to dissolve into a society that will never fully accept him. Ferdinand Draxler is the mirror image, destroying himself by retreating from a society he refuses to accept. 

Or maybe the lesson from the Greeks is that however bleak it gets, we can always find room for silliness. Mel Brooks has a joke about Greek tragedians: a tailor asks an ancient Greek “Euripides?” The Greek replies: “Yeah, Eumenides?”

You might think, then, that the best place for a writer to be is as far inside the language he is using as possible. But that’s not really true. The writer needs to feel language like a second skin, but if he pushes this too far, it will end up feeling more like a set of old clothes — too familiar to engage attention. If he’s too much on the outside of a language, by contrast, he will know its grammar and vocabulary, but not its rhythms, tones and textures. And so writers must be constantly engaged in a double act — they must pay attention to language, but also to the world it registers.

The playwright Tom Stoppard occupied that most privileged of vantage-points, being simultaneously inside and outside of a language. He inhabited English more fully and deeply than almost any of his artistic compatriots, partly because he came to it as an émigré. For the expatriate, language can never be taken for granted and Stoppard never lost a sense of its freshness and strangeness. He occupied this inside/outside position in his life as well as his art: lionized by the Establishment but never quite at home there. Those on the outside can sometimes see more than the insiders, and often in a satirical light, but as Oscar Wilde discovered, they may have to pay a high price for doing so.

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Wilde could never quite decide whether he wanted to join the English aristocracy or to put a bomb beneath the lot of them. Stoppard, who dined with Margaret Thatcher and rode to hounds, seems to have been plagued by no such dual alliance. But it does invade the language of his drama, as language is at once a taken-for-granted medium and an object on which loving care is to be lavished. Much English theater is marked by this ambivalence. One of the nation’s best-loved comedies, for example, is Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops To Conquer, which concerns the trouble which ensues when a couple of gallants mistake a private house for an inn. In a sense, Goldsmith himself was similarly confused, treating the public space of Britain as though it were his home, which it wasn’t (he came from County Kildare and studied in Dublin). And there were times when Samuel Johnson’s group, of which Goldsmith was a member, made his alien status abundantly clear to him. It’s hard, though, to see how “English” stage comedy would have survived without Irish immigrants: Richard Steele, Thomas Sheridan, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, J.M. Synge, Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan… All of these men lived at the conjuncture between two cultures, allowing one to show up the strangeness of the other — and something of the same can be said to a limited extent of Stoppard.

The outsider or semi-outsider is always tempted to outdo the insiders at their own game, which is no doubt one reason why Tom Stoppard enjoyed a spot of grouse-shooting. This simultaneous baiting and imitating of the insiders was also true of Wilde, who was an English aristocrat in the way that only a non-English non-aristocrat can be. For him, imitation was both flattery and mockery. He acted himself far better than anyone else could have done, and, like Stoppard, frequented many a country house party, even though he believed that Ireland should rule over Britain and not vice versa. Joseph Conrad fled from revolutionary upheaval in his native Poland, rather as Stoppard was the child of parents in flight from the Nazis, and ended up as a sailor in the British merchant navy. One consequence of this transition was to remold him as a highly conservative pseudo-Englishman, patriotic and patriarchal, plus Anglais que les Anglais.

The same was true of TS Eliot, who was born in Missouri and became a Tory Anglo-Catholic in England. Eliot remarked of his fellow American, Henry James, that he was a European in the way that only a non-European could be, which also applies to Eliot. All these writers brought to a highly insular United Kingdom a range of experience to which it had been largely closed, and went on to produce major art on this basis. It’s one of the few forms of immigration of which the British have approved, though there are doubtless those among them who regret the fact that we outsourced our art to a bunch of foreigners for whom free verse is perilously close to free love. Other outsiders, notably James Joyce, passed disdainfully over the UK and headed straight for Paris. Authors such as Stoppard, Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul belong to the tail-end of this tradition. If you hail from somewhere beyond Britain yet make a significant contribution to its cultural life, you’re as much in line for a knighthood as an MP who has served his time on all the right committees.

Tom Stoppard was no Anglo-Catholic Tory, though, but a mainstream, middle-class liberal. This was the social world in which he moved, which makes for a tedium far removed from the flair and brio of his plays. It was where he was most utterly unoriginal. He cherished the usual middle-class liberal pieties and was much exercised by the issue of freedom and censorship, though not conspicuously by such questions as poverty, unemployment and exploitation. There’s always something a little self-serving about artists championing freedom of speech. It’s a vastly important matter, to be sure, but one might be rather more persuaded of the fact if some of those who advocate it also turned their attention to political questions less bound up with their own lives. Stoppard had some urgent comments to make about political freedom, but none which we hadn’t heard before.

There’s one way, however, in which he flouted liberal pieties without anyone really noticing. He first came to fame with the magnificent Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, in which one of the jokes is that the eponymous characters are impossible to tell apart. This isn’t supposed to happen in British theater, preoccupied as it is by “character”. You have to have rich, complex, well-rounded, highly individuated characters if you’re to end up outside Buckingham Palace shyly displaying your gong. Aristotle, however, didn’t agree. In his view, what mattered in the theater was the dramatic action, on which, so he claims, character is a kind of “coloring”. No gong for him, then. He can even, he tells us, imagine a drama without any characters at all, a fantasy which Samuel Beckett would later put into practice.

Stoppard also transgressed the conventions of British theater with his passionate interest in ideas. The British don’t much care for ideas, which like cheese and wine are largely the product of freedom-loving foreigners — and which might encourage people to think in ways which end up endangering the stock market. They enjoy biography instead, since it’s more “human” to hear about what a great sculptor had for breakfast than to indulge in a lot of fancy aesthetic talk about their art. Stoppard’s Arcadia pushes against this prejudice as obstinately as it can — though I’ve seen members of the audience shaking their heads in bemusement. There are also times, however, when the humor and wordplay defuse the power of the ideas, rendering them more consumable. Like all good liberals, Stoppard knew when not to go too far.

Stoppard’s work is celebrated for its wit — a form of humor which it seems you don’t have to work at, and which is, therefore, more appropriate to the English gentleman than the honest bourgeoise. It can be a form of frivolity, but one that redeems itself from the merely vacuous by its agility of mind. It can be funny and coruscatingly intelligent; it can convert the serious into the sportive, but it can also be stinging, rapier-like, combining style and poise with a devious form of aggression. The gag, by contrast, is more impersonal, more capable of being passed from hand to hand and less expressive of a unique individual. We relish witticisms partly because they jolt us into thought, but also because they seem apposite, spot-on, hitting off a truth at a single casual stroke. Wit is the enemy of sentiment and empathy, laced with a hard-boiled quality which puts it a long way from the tear and the twinkle. Gags or jokes are sporadic events — but the wit or dandy is never off-duty. Their permanent mild amusement is possessed by those remote from the grind and rigor of this world, an everyday form of art admired for its well-crafted form as well as for its scintillating insight.

Aristotle speaks of the “great-spirited man”, by which he means not a hero but an individual whose life has gone supremely well. Virtue for Aristotle is a kind of success — not just success in the way Jack Nicolson might understand it (though Aristotle thought it included getting one’s hands on the best theater tickets), but also in the sense of having enjoyably fulfilled one’s powers and capacities. From the outside, this would seem true of Tom Stoppard. Yet all authentic achievement probably draws at some deep level on damage, anxiety and failure, so it’s fitting that the final work of this superbly accomplished artist should be Leopoldstadt, in which he poignantly explores his own Jewish origins. Not to know for sure whether you are a Jew — it is a hesitation between identity and non-identity which today’s so-called identity politics surely needs to confront.

Stoppard, though, was multiply disqualified from the Nobel. First, there were the scores of plays, film treatments and bon mots, all too obviously designed for the enjoyment of others. Popular without being populist, Stoppard’s career consisted in exercising an astonishing capacity for giving pleasure to millions of people. His plays were precision-made exhibitions of his own striking capacity for a kind of high-intellectual screwball: hard to devise, but not hard — not really, despite what people say — to appreciate.

That that is not a glib trick, but an unusual gift, is suggested by how few writers show much inclination to follow his literary or commercial example. Part of Stoppard’s trademark effect was to flatter his audience in the presumption that they were in on the joke, however esoteric. That alone — Stoppard’s talent to amuse — would have registered as a big no-no to the Swedish Academy.

It can’t have helped, either, when it came to judging his literary accomplishment, that Stoppard was so obviously at ease with his own talent and success, seeming to find it neither a burden nor a distraction. He was a global star, would commute if need be by Concorde, and each summer hosted legendary fête champêtres to which he would invite Harrison Ford, Alfred Brendel, Mick Jagger, the Duchess of Devonshire, and no more than 500 or so other close friends. “There is a god,” Stoppard once reflected, “and he looks after English playwrights.”

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Perhaps the Swedish Academy, party to a widespread but pretentious prejudice, felt that true artists are not supposed to be so glamorous and palpably well-adjusted, nor so candidly attuned to the possibility of commercial reward. When asked by the press to explain what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, his first major theatrical hit, was “about”, Stoppard is said to have replied: “It’s about to make me very rich.” At the height of his fame he became the well-rewarded script “doctor” of Hollywood producers — not just for Shakespeare in Love, for which he asked, and received, a $1 million repair-job fee — but also blockbusters such as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

That the last in that franchise is arguably the best is in no small part due to Stoppard’s expert doctoring. Not every job had so much room for remedy. While he was working on Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, he was less a script doctor than a battlefield surgeon. But even here, his trademark humor remained. Teased about whether Shakespeare would have written screenplays, Stoppard replied unembarrassedly. “No, he’d have rewritten them.”

And then, to pile discredit upon discredit in the eyes of the Swedes, there was Stoppard’s first career as a journalist, and worse still the damaging fact that he seems to have enjoyed it. According to an early interview, young Stoppard conceived of himself, in the late Sixties, as having “no higher ambition than to make a gaudy mark in Fleet Street”. Reporting on a regional paper, he felt delighted by the decidedly parochial glamour of “flashing his press card at flower shows”.

He was, briefly, the only motoring correspondent in the land unable to drive (“I used to review the upholstery”). And even then, too, there were early symptoms of the incipient dilettantish condition that critics would later claim to detect in his plays. Applying for a job at the Evening Standard, Stoppard found himself put on the spot by then-editor Charles Wintour who, perhaps doubtful of the true extent of Stoppard’s declared interest in current affairs, asked him to name the sitting Home Secretary. “Look,” came the prototypically Stoppardian parry, “I said I was interested in politics, not obsessed by them.”

Yet for the Swedish Academy, there remains something worse, much worse, than all these faults — the easy fame, the non-neuroticism, the indiscriminately wielded and brilliant talent. That was Stoppard’s resolutely anti-political aesthetic self-conception. Art, according to him, was not politics by another means. In contemporary theater, it is difficult to think of another writer who proved so clearly their ability to take art seriously without moralizing on its importance.

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The ability to articulate a robust aesthetic theory is not a precondition of artistic virtue. But Stoppard’s was remarkably accurate in broad outline, and one he established early in his career. He was suspicious of the facile subjectivism about values that had been popularized in Britain by A.J. Ayer’s account of logical positivism, and which Stoppard ridiculed in his play Jumpers. In later life, he explicitly identified himself as a value “realist” in the philosopher’s sense of the term. He loathed communism, not least for its gratuitous imposition of extraneous social objectives onto the autonomous domain of intellectual creativity, and was repulsed by the homegrown anti-Western demonstrations of 1968. By the Eighties, Stoppard had committed the ultimate act of bien pensant sacrilege: he had expressed a sneaking admiration for Margaret Thatcher.

Stoppard was essentially a bourgeois artist, proudly owning the implications of the label, progressive literary cliches be damned. His discomfort with smuggling social commentary as literary creativity was an intrinsic, rather than incidental, feature of his outlook. Stoppard’s signature love of verbal play and “brittle” dialogue — his effort to make already erudite characters speak a notch or two more quickly and intelligently than anyone would in real life — was a natural development of his dislike of “the political”. At the same time, his rejection of naturalism was controlled enough to prevent his work degenerating into what he referred to, with apparently equal disdain, as “that child’s garden of easy victories known as the avant-garde”.

In a remarkable New Yorker profile of Stoppard, written by Kenneth Tynan in 1977, the playwright’s self-image as defiantly antithetical to political art seems to continually prickle his interviewer. It is “deeply embarrassing”, Stoppard insists, when a piece of work fallaciously assumes that it must be important simply because it gestures at some urgent social or political issue. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he adds of the heyday of kitchen-sink realism, “because when I started to write you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that.” “[My plays] must be entirely untouched by any suspicion of usefulness,” he adds with Wildean flair. “I should have the courage of my lack of convictions.”

By contrast with Wilde, too often seduced by the allure of paradox to articulate his background ethic in a clear way, Stoppard could easily switch into admirable frankness: in the end, he announced, he stood for “Western liberal democracy, favoring an intellectual elite and a progressive middle class and based on a moral order derived from Christian absolutes”. Many literary elites have attempted, both in Stoppard’s day and sense, to tell themselves a more extravagant story; Stoppard may have had too much intelligence, and easy access to his own mind, to sustain that kind of self-deception. “It’s a sheer perversion of speech,” he insisted, “to describe the society I live in as one that inflicts violence on the underprivileged. What worries me is not the bourgeois exception but the totalitarian norm.”

Already pronounced in Stoppard’s day, the collective cultural obsession of filtering aesthetic appreciation through a narrow range of social and psychological preoccupations has become one of the basic tenets of progressive art. It is tempting to think that many of these assumptions are now so widespread as to be scarcely noticeable, all while silently guiding judgments of comparative prestige, worthy subject-matter and literary seriousness. Stoppard’s shimmering, abstract verbal play could be all too easy to dismiss as symptomatic of a limitation, somehow meretricious or shallowly cerebral: making his plays, as one reviewer put it, into wonderful “Fabergé Easter eggs”. Though never Nobel-prized, the degree to which Stoppard was generally prized by the public suggests they didn’t poo-poo that dazzling gift.

The odd thing about flattery is that it works, even if you know that’s just what it is. Even Trump can reach beyond his own swollen ego long enough to see that all those scarlet tunics and rows of gleaming fish knives aren’t purely for aesthetic effect, yet he relishes them all the same. One is reminded of the physicist Niels Bohr, a convinced rationalist who used to display a magic icon on his house to protect it from evil spirits. When asked whether he really believed in such nonsense, he replied that it was reputed to work whether you believed in it or not.

In the eyes of many beyond the United States, Trump is a walking assemblage of all the most unpleasant qualities of the stereotypical American. Rather as the British at their stereotypically most repellent are snobbish, two-faced, cold-hearted and likely to let you die in a ditch so as not to interfere with your privacy, so Trump is loud, brash, crass, arrogant, greedy, philistine, aggressive, and pathologically upbeat. (Some of my best friends, I should add, are American. My children, for example.) Trump is the American equivalent of a Frenchman who has a ring of onions round his neck, a troop of mistresses in tow and can’t stop shrugging his shoulders.

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We know that Trump is fond of Britain. In fact, there’s something a little Scottish about his sandiness of hair and complexion. It’s therefore not unreasonable to assume that he’s a devotee of Shakespeare, an author who, with his usual prescience, has much to say about the 47th ruler of the American Empire. There’s a lot about The Donald in Hamlet, for example. One of the mysteries at the heart of the play is why its protagonist takes so long to kill his step-father, Claudius the King, knowing that Claudius has murdered his own father and then married his own mother. Every time he comes near to dispatching the usurper, however, Hamlet’s hand is mysteriously stayed.

One solution to the enigma has been proposed by the Freudians: the hero can’t do away with Claudius because he subconsciously finds in him an image of himself. In killing the prince’s father and marrying his mother, Claudius has done just what the oedipal Hamlet himself unconsciously wants to do. Murdering the king would thus turn out to be self-slaughter. It’s not a solution likely to appeal to the British, who have common sense rather than a subconscious. But Hamlet was a foreigner, and foreigners, lacking our own self-understanding, may possess desires of which they’re unaware. The theory may look weak when applied to Hamlet and Claudius, but it’s strikingly relevant to the relationship between Trump and Vladimir Putin. Why is every threatening deadline suspended or quietly ditched? Why is it taking him so long to recognize that the man is a crook and a killer, who poisoned Alexei Navalny just as Claudius poisoned Hamlet’s father? Clearly, because Putin is the tyrant Trump longs to be, the alter ego he can’t shake off, the shadowy brother for whom democracy is just a sick joke and law must bend to power.

One might also detect a touch of Nigel Farage in Shakespeare’s Prince Hal. Both men hang around taverns, and both do so to project an image of themselves as “Normal Guys”. Hal is a Right-wing populist who courts the common life in the form of Falstaff, a boastful knight, and his cronies so as to use this inside knowledge for the ends of power when he finally becomes king. Once he ascends to the throne of England, he will turn on Falstaff and cast him off, just as Farage will sell out the ordinary people on whose back he hopes to climb to power. (He once said  the worst thing about running Ukip was having to work with low-grade individuals.)

Then there’s Macbeth, who was Scottish and would probably have liked golf. He might also have been sandy-haired. As a monarch he’s rapacious, brutally ambitious and has a brisk way with his enemies, though his wife refuses to take a back seat à la Melania. Given how Lady Macbeth ends up, Melania may well have made a wise decision. Macbeth also feels that without consolidating his kingly power, he lacks identity and is perpetually unfinished, his life being merely a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing. Shakespeare is worried about people whose identity is so protean and mutable that there’s nothing solid or definitive about them (the Pucks and Ariels of this world, along with the Macbeth witches); but he’s also troubled by those stolid souls who aren’t able to be anyone but themselves. Some characters have too little selfhood, while others have an excess of it. He seems to believe that this conflict is built into the kind of animals we are.

All this is, among other things, a reflection on Shakespeare’s own profession as an actor, which involves projecting oneself into others without losing grip on yourself. Only a strong self can take on another. Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream wants with Trump-like infantile greediness to perform all the parts in a play staged within the drama, but the joke is that he can’t be anyone but himself. Hamlet hasn’t a clue who he is, which strikes Polonius’s advice to him (“This above all, to the own self be true”) as pointless and pedantic as most of what he says. What if your true self is a serial killer? Have those who mouth the postmodern mantra “I like to be myself” paused to consider this question? Being themselves is precisely what’s wrong with a lot of people.

Othello is magnificently capable of being himself, but for the same reason, incapable of empathizing with anyone else. He is in love with his own burnished, mouth-filling rhetoric, a splendid actor who thinks of himself as entirely authentic; whereas Trump, for all his love of the theatrical and spectacular, can’t act at all. His lack of flexibility in this respect is also a lack of humanity. Yet the devil is a shape-shifter too. Othello’s devious adversary Iago can assume any persona he chooses (“I am not what I am”), which is why he can bring Othello down. (Trump has a certain low cunning about him, but our own home-grown Iago is surely Peter Mandelson.)

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There are also parallels between Trump and King Lear, one of which is that the latter goes mad while the former is slightly touched: think of those sudden grimaces and surreal digressions. Lear is a despot who “hath rather slenderly known himself”, while the President is a would-be autocrat whose only flash of self-knowledge to date has been to reply to a journalist who asked him why he didn’t drink. “Can you imagine what I’d be like if I did?” came the response.

The difference, here, is that Lear is a tragic figure, whereas Trump is not. To use the word “tragic” is to claim that Lear can find out who he is only by being hauled through hell. Only by being hacked down to nothing can he become something. In the depth of his madness, or is it his sanity, Lear rounds on the Fool and cries in agony, “Who is it who can tell me who I am?” Trump wouldn’t even understand the question, let alone be able to give an answer. King Lear is about the horrifying process to which someone as cocooned in false consciousness as Trump would need to submit in order to be saved.

Speaking of salvation, Trump was described by one of his acolytes as “a proud Christian”. He is, in fact, no more a Christian than Paddington Bear, whatever he may consider himself. You can’t just take someone’s word on the question of whether they are a Christian or a fan of Taylor Swift or a Manchester City supporter. People who claim to be Swifties, but have never heard her sing, and wouldn’t recognize a photo of her — like those who claim to support Manchester City but have never watched them play — are either lying, self-deceived or have no grasp of the concept of supporter. Much the same goes for claiming to be a Christian.

The so-called Beatitudes of the New Testament single out several groups of people as particularly blessed: peacemakers, the poor, the meek, the merciful, those who are persecuted, those who hunger for justice. Trump has a word for these people: losers. And, of course, he’s right. This is no way to get on in life. In fact, it’s the quickest way to become an abysmal failure, rather like the founder of the Christian movement. The Gospel has Jesus warn his comrades that the world will hate them and murder them. Much of the world also hates Donald Trump, which is about all that he and Jesus’s followers have in common. The current power structure is threatened by love, wants to do away with it, and looks at the moment as though it’s winning. It’s just that for tragedies like Lear, what looks like losing may actually be in some well-nigh incomprehensible way the only true way of living — which is to say, in the end, the only way of succeeding.

This particular dire warning accompanies a fringe production on stage at the Traverse theater, exploring what happened when a young Australian with an autoimmune disorder started taking cross-sex hormones. Thoughtfully, the performer will also provide a “relaxed” and “low-sensory” version of the work upon request. But if that all sounds a bit too much — or indeed, not quite enough for especially hardened souls — then what about the play at the same venue which comes with an audience self-care pack, listing suicide helplines for those affected? Or — for a real flash of cold fear down your back — what about a night out with “themes of discrimination or hateful language… strong language/swearing, distressing scenes, references to death and some audience interaction”? Oh please God, no — never audience interaction.

It’s not just experimental dramas that now come bristling with disclaimers; more canonical productions are taking a risk-averse approach too. Famously, Chekhov told aspiring playwrights that if they decided to hang a rifle on a wall during the first act, it should have been fired by the end of the story. Viewers of the forthcoming star-studded production of The Seagull are spared any remaining suspense in this regard: the ticket site advises that there will be “gunshot sounds and references to suicide”. At Glyndebourne this season, The Marriage of Figaro came with the information that “at several points, characters of lesser status are subject to unwanted sexual advances and physically aggressive behavior” — almost as if Beaumarchais’s mordant class satire was just a regrettably outdated accompaniment to some nice singing.

As Wittgenstein might have asked: what is this language game of trigger warnings, and what is it really doing? The philosopher told us not to take words at face value, but to look and see how they are actually being used. An early point to note is that, in fact, the fashion is now for “content warnings”, not “trigger warnings”. One can only assume that this is to stop people being triggered by the word “trigger”, with its grim intimations of gun-based violence. At the moment, the sinisterly foreboding “warning” survives unscathed; but it is surely only a matter of time before it too is replaced with something more relaxed and low sensory.

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At first glance, the lists of potential menaces on theater websites can seem confusing, mixing up different kinds of threat. Is the audience supposed to be protected from a kind of mental health hazard like a bang or a shock, potentially producing unwilled trauma responses in an overactive amygdala? Or is it more a question of guarding against moral hazards: problematic behaviors the spectator might unwittingly emulate, unless sternly warned off first? The very 21st-century answer is that, of course, it is both. For the main, perhaps even the only, justification for declaring something a moral hazard these days — transphobia, power imbalances, hateful language, or whatever — is that it was a mental health hazard to some vulnerable people first.

But let’s be honest: it can’t really be about harm-reduction, can it? For nobody seriously believes that the theater can be quite that exciting. In my youth, plays were relatively boring things that parents or teachers made you sit through once a year, when what you really wanted to do was go to the cinema. The idea that you might be scarred for life by some unnaturally loud proclaiming, the odd bit of dramatic writhing around, and some judiciously applied lighting and props would have been ludicrous — as it is surely all the more so to generations raised on Netflix gorefests. And here the exception proves the rule: surely not every young dramatist can be the new Sarah Kane. If you were being cynical, you might conclude that the whole thing is a sneaky way of drumming up trade for a dying art form, by encouraging the idea that spectators might feel something visceral. (“Depending on your lived experiences, this performance may trigger memories of loss, grief, or bullying,” speculates another festival event, rather hopefully.)

The official explanation given for such notices is that they allow people to emotionally prepare for what is to come, the way you might steel yourself just before abseiling down a cliff or jumping out of a plane. But since you are not in fact going to be doing anything death-defying, but rather sitting in a cramped seat for a couple of hours casting surreptitious glances at your watch, it is possible that dire forecasts of impending emotional assault set some people up for anxiety where there would not otherwise have been any. And that, fairly predictably, is what several studies have found: trigger warnings have a tendency to increase anxiety rather than reduce it. Staying true to the ethos of the project, this awkward fact would seem to require that such warnings be given separate, prior trigger warnings of their own — and so on ad infinitum — rendering the whole process unmanageable for harried producers.

Further evidence that content warnings are basically fake news is that the theater-makers who use them go ahead with their shows enthusiastically anyway. If the concern about the potential for serious harm to audiences was genuine, then, being ostentatiously high-minded and responsible people, they surely would not proceed at all. Superficially, you might assume trigger warnings are a bit like medico-legal disclaimers for pharmaceutical products: they list possible side effects, and thereby empower autonomous agents to decide whether to take the risk or not, getting artists off the moral hook. But — to put it bluntly — pharmaceutical products save lives, a fact which can offset damaging side-effects. Dramatic productions, despite the traditional thespian gush, do not. I’ve been to some highly enjoyable productions in my time, but none of them were worth sustaining serious psychological injury afterwards.

So when makers plow ahead with a supposedly dangerous play, the obvious implication is that they don’t really believe their work might wreak lasting emotional havoc after all. And in this suspicion, they are surely correct; for, as many a philosopher of art has noticed before them, even highly aroused emotional responses to fictions are not like their counterpart responses to real life.

The most obvious difference is that, as already noted, the theater is not as intense. Even in the depths of imaginative engagement, an easily-accessed part of your mind knows that what you are watching isn’t really happening right now. It’s for that reason you can eat sweets while watching someone being murdered on stage, which otherwise might seem a bit callous; or wipe away the tears as you leave the theater, and start thinking about dinner instead. Admittedly, the best productions engage viewers much more deeply than this; but even when they do, audience responses are self-controlled in a way that emotional reactions to parallel real-life situations would not be.

A related difference is that emotional responses to theater — and, incidentally, to even the scariest film thriller — are often enjoyable in a way that raw emotion in the wild is not. Aristotle noted this strange fact about tragedy, despite all the accompanying pity and fear. Centuries later, David Hume vividly described the “unaccountable pleasure, which the spectators of a well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety, and other passions, that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy”. Why this should be, exactly, is up for debate; but I like the Aristotelian idea that, in engaging with dramatic art, you are “purifying” or “refining” your otherwise untutored emotional responses in a controlled imaginative environment — which is one gloss on his famously vague idea of catharsis. And the process of emotional refinement is deeply enjoyable because it involves valuable self-mastery, even if at the same time it feels somewhat disturbing, scary, or sad.

But if that is roughly right, then all of the traditional aspects of the spectator’s experience are still crucial for the process, without trigger warnings getting in the way. You have to display willingness to tolerate anxiety; to experience the shock of the gun going off, or the discomfort of a violent argument, or the sudden nihilistic horror of a suicide on stage. In a nutshell, you have to stop acting like a massive toddler, treating a play like it’s a balloon that might pop unexpectedly and make you cry. You have to power down your amygdala, and get your pre-frontal cortex deep into the narrative, so you can become intrigued, blindsided, disconcerted or enlightened by human complexity, and so learn new things, both about the world and about yourself. And you can’t do any of that properly if you already superstitiously read a priggish synopsis when you bought your ticket, trying to shore up your mind against artistic ambush later on.

This was a play that people talked about, and not just theatre people but regular people — mothers taking their teenage daughters as a way to warn them about the vicious adult world, husbands and wives weighing the claims of the accuser and accused, women whispering to each other: this is how it is. So what that Prima Facie was, in some regards, more a lecture than a play? It was a lecture that audiences were hungry for.

Now, Miller is back with another one-woman show (well, nearly one woman: there are also two small roles for men) about rape and the law, once again directed by Justin Martin. Inter Alia at the National Theatre stars Rosamund Pike as Jessica, a judge/wife/mother/feminist whose roles overlap, conflict and — by the end of the play — tear her apart.

We first meet Jessica as she bawls the line “the fucking PATRIARCHY!” into a microphone in rock-goddess pose. This is the Jessica of the courtroom: a magnetic performer, a take-no-bullshit queen who uses her place on the bench to make her courtroom a “moral” place. She knows all the tricks that barristers use to trip up victims, and she takes a personal pride in her ability to undermine them, sometimes by simply reminding the complainant that she can take her time to reply (“soft skills,” boasts Jessica). She sees herself a trailblazer for women in law.

But we also see her struggling with the second shift. She tells us how she massages her barrister husband’s ego, sore from the fact that she was appointed a judge before him. And then the big twist, though you can see it coming a mile off: her teenage son Harry is accused of rape, and we learn that he has stumbled his way into the sleazy vortex of the “manosphere”. (Once again, great timing from Miller, given that this is the hot take engine of the moment.) Suddenly, Jessica finds herself relieved by the iniquities of the system, strategizing to discredit the victim, trying to convince her son of the fine distinctions between “moral” and “legal” guilt, full of grief for the innocent boy she once had. At this point, is she a mother or a judge? The insinuation of Inter Alia is that she cannot be both.

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Miller’s method in both plays is brutally effective: animate the political question by turning it into a personal one. It’s also got the sadistic logic of a Dante-esque punishment. How can the thrusting girlboss barrister learn the consequences of her actions? By having her raped so she has to experience the dock from the other side. How can the lean-in lady understand the limits of her worldview? By making her son into a predator and forcing her to fail both maternally and professionally. The sins of the system are visited on the individual woman.

In fact, Miller is so keen to make things hard on Jessica that she inadvertently makes things easy on the audience. The bits of the play that really bristle with energy are when there is doubt about what Harry’s done. When he’s first accused, he tells his parents this is all a mistake. He had consensual (albeit drunken) sex with the girl, but he didn’t rape her; he wouldn’t rape her, he wanted her to be his girlfriend. There is a possibility that this really is complicated, one way or another.

The peculiar nature of a rape conviction, as the play explains in one of its most public information-sounding exchanges, is that the difference between guilty and not guilty rests not in the defendant’s actions, but in what the jury thinks that the defendant thought was happening in the complainant’s mind. If a jury believes that an accused man genuinely and reasonably believed that the complainant consented, then that man cannot be guilty of rape. It is, as Harry’s father says, an offense where both parties can be telling the truth in their version of what happened.

But Harry isn’t telling the truth. By the end of the play, he’s admitted to his mother that he did rape the girl — and not only that, he did it when she was asleep. Now he wants to confess to the police, and Jessica has to decide whether to support him in doing the right thing and ruining his life. A dilemma for Jessica, but not for the audience, who now have access to the objective truth of the incident. This unlikely act of conscience lets the audience off the hook.

While you feel for Harry in his initial confusion and terror at being accused, there’s always the moral peril that you are extending your compassion to a sex offender. Confirming that he is, indeed, a rapist might seem to further implicate the audience; but because he is a contrite sex offender seeking to make amends to his victim, sympathy seems merited. And anyway, can he really be blamed when his parents left him to wander in the deep dark forest of the internet? A harder-edged play would make the viewer squirm more.

Like the TV show Adolescence before it, this feels like an artwork that squares up to the terrible truth of male violence and then ducks the punch. A more ambiguous Harry would be more frightening, but also closer to the truth of what rape is. A boy who genuinely believed, reasonably or otherwise, that what he was doing to a girl was what she wanted. A boy who could be both truthful and dangerous. A boy who didn’t need to perjure himself to be morally guilty and legally not guilty at the same time. As much as Miller’s work wants to confront the nightmare of justice for rape victims, this is the place it cannot go.

Perhaps that’s inevitable. Miller is a dramatist, meaning she is great at exposing the razzle-dazzle of the courtroom, and relentless at uncovering the inner lives of her female characters. She’s less adept at getting into the secret brains of men. But that, legally speaking, is where the crime of rape takes place. It is not what happens to a woman’s body that distinguishes sex from rape: it is what happens in a man’s mind, and Miller’s plays have no access there.

In the National Theatre gift shop, you can buy an Inter Alia tie-in tote bag, bright orange and printed with the play’s opening line: “The fucking PATRIARCHY!” This feels very 10 years ago: very Beyoncé dancing in front of the word “FEMINIST”, very “I’m with her” shirts for Hillary, very pre-#MeToo. It’s a throwback to a time, as brief as it was illusory, when the permanent triumph of feminism seemed so close that it could be merchandised into existence. Instead, there was a pussy grabber for president.

By the end of Inter Alia, Jessica’s defiant roar is obviously hollow — when she has to make a choice between her principles and her family, she is the fucking patriarchy. But off the stage, glib slogans and self-affirmations are all there is to offer. As provocative and effective as Miller’s plays are, it is their female characters who are put on trial. Without a serious effort to understand men (including, especially, the most dangerous men), the critique of male violence is an empty project.

The second time, the whole place went dark. The only illumination was the eerie glow of emergency lighting. Once again, the curtains closed, and the stage manager begged for our patience. After a couple of minutes, the house lights returned, but the hiatus dragged on until the final, apologetic, announcement that, after a total of three power cuts, the show couldn’t go on. Like the cast and crew, front-of-house staff coped perfectly, and as promised our tickets were refunded within hours.

Resorting to a local pub, our party discovered that the theatre over the road had cancelled their show before curtain up — again, because of power cuts. I later discovered that half a dozen West End shows had experienced power cuts that night. One of our group had recently been at Glyndebourne, which also had to cancel a performance because of power outages, prompting some snide commentary about that opera house’s lone wind turbine. 

Ironically, the report into March’s power outage that closed Heathrow Airport for a day had been published that very morning. So I became curious: was Glyndebourne’s often-mocked wind turbine unfairly blamed for the power cut that hit the opening night of Saul? Was our power outage a fluke, driven perhaps by the heatwave making unreasonable demands on the grid? Are theatres, with their energy-hungry lighting and special effects, particularly susceptible? 

Or is this a wider problem? Is the UK’s electricity supply becoming less reliable? That is a question which, it turns out, is hard to answer. Anecdotally, stories of power cuts lasting from a minute to a week seem to be more and more frequent. Small outages don’t even make the news: hardly anyone reported the show cancellations we experienced. But power suppliers give only generic answers, and theatre managers don’t want to comment at all.

We can piece things together, though. First, Glyndebourne. The opera house was not relying on its solitary wind turbine when it fell prey to power outages. Instead, said UK Power Networks, which maintains electricity networks across much of England, the outages were the result of a local fault. The half-dozen West End shows affected by power cuts the same night as ours were all in the same electricity distribution area, and that outage was down to a cable fault — rather than being weather-related. So the heatwave is off the hook.

But do theatres still — as they did back when I wielded a spanner and could tell you the catalogue numbers of my favourite colored gels — draw so much power from the grid that a poorly designed lighting rig can unbalance the substation?

The answer to that one is more complicated. 

Lighting technology has transformed in recent decades. LEDs have replaced most of the incandescent bulbs that would put out enough heat to burn a careless technician’s fingers. Rob Halliday, a stage lighting designer, calculated that the change could reduce the total energy demand for one performance by more than a quarter. The lighting for one musical could be done for less than 90 kilowatt-hours per performance — about the same wattage that Transport for London uses to transport 600 people for one kilometer. So it takes more electricity to get us all home than to entertain us.

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Perhaps more importantly for electricity suppliers, the energy demand has evened out, as peak power requirements have fallen to less than half the pre-LED levels. Curtain calls, when all the lights are blazing, are the moment of highest electricity use — but even if all West End shows had their curtain calls simultaneously, the local substations should be able to cope better than twenty years ago. 

On the other hand, Halliday pointed out to me, as theatre productions become more spectacular, with more special effects and dynamic staging, other energy-hungry equipment like winches and motors may be eating up the spare power. Then you have to add the ordinary building lighting, heating, bar and ice cream fridges, possibly air conditioning, and stage lighting starts to fade into insignificance. 

It nevertheless seems unlikely that theatres, compared to other public buildings, transport systems, and street lighting, are especially demanding of electricity suppliers. The latter are responsible for more than a quarter of local authority energy bills, which explains those authorities’ willingness to follow theatres in replacing older street lights with LEDs.

Which leaves me with my final question: was my party just unlucky, or is the UK experiencing more power outages? 

In the West End alone, Halliday tells me, “there have been a number of occasions I know about where there have been genuine power problems”. London is, after all, a tangle of tunnels, wires and pipes snaking around cellars and basements, with no definitive guide to what goes where. This is a tall order for anyone trying to maintain critical energy infrastructure, let alone repair it in a hurry. Many of the buildings are also old, with idiosyncratic wiring, though theatre wiring may be refurbished more regularly than, say, that of the Houses of Parliament. 

But on the other hand, it’s always easy to blame power when a problem is a technical one that’s specific to the building. Halliday tells me a story from decades ago: a failing show was closed shortly after opening for extensive rewrites and re-rehearsal, and “the excuse they gave to the public on that occasion was power problems”. A few days later, there were actual power problems in the building. “So we ended up with a generator parked outside, and the electricity board said, ‘Well, I’m sorry, we’re not covering the cost of this, because we read in the press that there were power problems, and you didn’t tell us.’”

UK Power Networks reassured me that “the electricity network is 99.99% reliable” — but that would leave a one-in-10,000 chance of failure at any time. And with millions of customers, that means plenty of room for problems. Halliday, like me, has the impression that UK power infrastructure is struggling to keep up with changing patterns of supply and demand. 

Decades of under-investment and planning delays have left the UK power grid out of date and sometimes struggling to cope. Old electricity power plants are shutting down faster than they can be replaced by new ones, leaving us regularly reliant on imported energy. Supply from intermittent renewable sources, requires different distribution infrastructure to keep the electricity flowing steadily when demand also fluctuates. Failure to regulate the frequency and voltage of power supply caused the massive Iberian Peninsula power outage earlier this year, according to a Spanish government report.

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May 2025 saw another power outage that hit multiple London Underground lines, on this occasion a National Grid cable fault that caused a fire at a substation. And of course the March substation fire caused Heathrow Airport to close for a day, with enormous impact on airlines and travelers, though no casualties. That catastrophic failure was traced to a known fault that went unrepaired for nearly seven years, compounded by the age of the substation and Heathrow’s assumption that such an event was a low-probability.

Are electricity suppliers complacent about the reliability of their systems? They maintain otherwise. UK Power Networks recently upgraded the Leicester Square substation to increase current reliability and future capacity. They’ve also adopted a “new technology” to reduce power cuts — consisting of steel support trusses for the poles carrying overhead power lines. You may giggle, but the power failure that hit Glyndebourne could perhaps have been prevented by such reinforcement. In general, suppliers are trying to anticipate and prevent unplanned power outages.

Nor are theatres content to relegate power outages to “low-probability events”. They don’t want to lose a single performance, says Halliday, so insurers insist on building redundancy into technical systems: sending the audience home, and refunding tickets, is the last thing they want. For every West End show’s lighting desk, “there’ll be a backup one sitting under the table, live, tracking along, ready to go. And other departments do that as well.”

Some theatres have back-up power supplies. Glyndebourne switched to battery storage when power outage hit Saul’s opening night, but in the absence of wind to turn the turbine, it wasn’t quite sufficient to finish the show. One newly-built London theatre has a generator on the roof, in case of power failure: clearly already enough of a problem in 2022 to merit an entire back up power system.

For Halliday, the question is why more venues don’t couple battery storage with solar panels, as festivals are starting to do. “I’ve become a bit obsessed with solar power,” he says. “It baffles me every time I walk past the National Theatre, for example, which is a big giant expanse of space that’s beautifully lit by the sunshine all day long. Why is that not covered in solar panels?”

So perhaps the unfairly maligned Glyndebourne windmill is not such a terrible idea. If the electricity distribution system fails, venues with their own generation and storage capacity will be able to say, “the show must go on”. Whether the transport system will still get us home afterwards is another question.

The show they see on an opening night will consist of two things in existence prior to rehearsal: the actors, and the script. The actors don’t need to discuss the script, they understood it when they read it. They don’t need to zhuzh up their performance through elaborate analysis, they just need to show up and speak up — the subsequent performance will be appreciated on their ability to do so, and on the worth of the script. No performance can enhance a bad script, and a good one needs no help.

Prior to the Twenties, the director was known as the stage manager. It was his job to block the actors such that the audience could see them and hear them, and they didn’t trip over the furniture. “Louder, faster, pause here, don’t fidget while the other fellow is speaking”: these were the panoply of the director’s tools.

But the cobb salad of psychoanalysis and the method replaced the stage manager with the director. His job was to analyse the script psychoanalytically, and lead the actors in a month-long encounter group called the rehearsal process. None of it made any difference to the audience, save that the self-consciousness the charade engendered in the actor, transformed him from performer, to lay analyst. After all, anyone reading a play text understands it sufficiently to appreciate the interactions. And the better a play is, the less it needs a set — Shakespeare plays just peachily on the radio.

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So past simply staging, then, in his responsibility to the audience, how might the director (ex-stage manager) be of use to the actor? In one thing: a subtle alteration of the actor’s intention. The fellow playing Iago understands that he is going to avenge himself on his boss by falsely accusing Desdemona. The actor might play a scene revealing the false clues to Othello as “conveying a favour”; the director might suggest, rather, that he play it to “refute a false claim”. The words are the same, but the intention (known as the objective) is somewhat different, and the change will influence the performance subtly.

Note that in neither case is the actor asked to “feel” anything, or to “believe” anything, he is simply asked to reimagine the objective.

The Crispian speech in Henry V is the greatest in our language, “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…” It can be played as an exhortation to a crowd, or as a quiet pledge to fellow warriors. The determination of intention can influence performance. Inversely, when baffled by performance in human interactions we can seek clarity by determining intention. For example, Obama’s stated goal was “Hope and Change”; Harris’s seems to be “Joy”. The only intentions inferable from the slogans was obfuscation and the desire to seduce.

Our objective in the Second World War was the destruction of fascism. In Vietnam it was “to win the hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese people — a task for which the Armed Forces were horribly ill-suited; and no one has creditably explained why we invaded Iraq to find “weapons of mass destruction”, which, even if they had existed, posed no threat to the United States.

Our Middle East objective, under the direction of Obama, Biden and Harris, has been opposition to the Jewish state, under the heading of adjudication of the conflict. But a conflict on which external rules are imposed is not a war, it is a duel — ultimate power, thus, displayed by neither party but by the referee. The very term “The Peace Process” indicates an acceptably interminable engagement. Peace is never brought about by a process, but through breaking one side’s will to continue fighting.

After our administration’s abandonment of Israel, the Netanyahu government has, correctly, decided to cease not only its subservience but its acknowledgement of “world opinion”, destroy its enemies, and, so, bring peace to Israel. For “he who dictates the terms of the battle dictates the terms of the peace,” as Napoleon said.

The Terms of the Battle, in stage language, are the Objective. Determined here not by a director, but by an interested referee. Those in the Middle East were dictated to Israel by America, in service to Iran, a criminal folly which led to October 7, and the ebullition of world antisemitism.

Now, various of the good-willed are calling for bookstores to boycott the works of Jewish authors who do not denounce the Jewish state. I was approached to sign a petition decrying this brutality, and to supply a quote. My heart sank, not at the savagery of Sally Rooney and the woke mob, but at the notion that a list of names could decrease savagery.

I, of course, signed the petition to fight antisemitism, but washed up short and queasy thinking of a quote.

I’ve always bragged that I could write in a car crash, but was unable to add my wisdom to this good cause. I wondered why, and determined this: it is pointless to “fight” antisemitism — it presupposes an ongoing (thus extendable) process.

Our objective should be to stop antisemitism.

As Jew hatred is a delusion, it cannot be stopped by any appeal to reason. No exhortation will convince, only the application of dissuasive force to those enamoured of brutality.

My responses have included visiting Israel, to show the flag, and voting for Republicans who will defund institutions permitting the violation of Jews’ civil rights, remove the institutions’ tax-exempt status, and prosecute those threatening and assaulting Jews.

The definitions that work best are deliberately imprecise. Love is “kind of like when you see a fog in the morning… before the sun comes out” (Charles Bukowski); or “a bright stain on the vision, blotting out reason” (Robert Graves); or “the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real” (Iris Murdoch). A friend of mine, after considering the question, produced his favourite cookery book, from which he had entertained countless friends and family. Love is a different thing to each of us, and everything to all of us. It leaves us enormously vulnerable: we know what it is for sure when we lose it.

In recent years, neuroscientists have tried to explain love in terms of the brain chemicals that accompany it, which have a powerful influence on our behaviour. Is that sufficient? Can this thing that “looks not with the eyes, but with the mind”, as Shakespeare had it, really be understood as a neurological condition?

This question is at the heart of Lucy Prebble’s play The Effect. It tells the story of two young people who enrol in a clinical trial for a new antidepressant. During the trial they fall for each other and then worry whether what they’re feeling is real or merely “chemical”, a side-effect of the drug. Things get even more confusing when one of them learns she’s on a placebo, which convinces her that she can’t possibly be feeling for her lover what he feels for her. If love is a drug, can a drug lead to love? Not while you’re still on it, she seems to be saying.

The Effect is fraught with existential angst about the nature of emotional health and how we interpret what we feel. We learn, for example, that the clinical psychiatrist who is running the trial suffers from long-term depression, a condition she has chosen never to be treated for: she believes that the drugs don’t work, and in line with a particular strand of philosophical thinking views the illness as a grand existential tragedy or the natural state of things. The central conundrum — is love authentic if it’s manipulated by chemicals? — is never fully answered, though the ending gives us pause when the protagonists walk off hand-in-hand and drug-free into their uncertain futures looking a lot more loving than they did at any time during their chemical romance.

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At a certain level, love is all about chemistry. Neuroscientists have found that different kinds of love are associated with different hormones and neurotransmitters. Sexual desire is driven by testosterone, whose main purpose seems to be to encourage us to have sex with as many partners as possible. Romantic love, that giddy, obsessive state designed to win us the affections of a particular partner, is the brain’s dopamine reward system on overdrive — a hit for every Whatsapp message returned, every infatuated thought of the beloved. Meanwhile, those warm feelings of security and connection characteristic of long-term attachment are marked by increased levels of vasopressin and oxytocin.

None of this really cuts it as an explanation. Reducing love to its neural correlates may tell us something about how the brain affects behaviour, but it doesn’t work as an answer to the important questions about what it all means. It doesn’t begin to account for the vastness of the enterprise.

We can learn a little more from a different area of science: psychology. Over the past four decades, the psychologist John Gottman and his team have studied thousands of couples at their “love lab” in Seattle to try to understand the ingredients of a successful partnership. They claim they can predict to over 90% accuracy whether two people will stay together simply by watching the way they communicate: how they manage conflict and how empathic they are towards each other. In the strongest relationships, positive behaviours towards the other person (humour, affection, empathy) outweigh negative behaviours (criticism, defensiveness, contempt) by at least five to one. Love is kind: we can agree on that at least.

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We can agree also that kindness, and therefore love, requires selflessness, a deliberate reaching beyond ourselves in recognition or consideration of another. Iris Murdoch called it unselfing, the capacity both to imagine the lives of others and to find them beautiful. It is quite different to the popular idea of love as some kind of union or fusion, the notion that two lovers must complete each other. This is upselfing rather than unselfing. Not only does it set impossibly high expectations, it also regards a relationship as a vehicle for satisfying our own needs. Such an approach is unlikely to lead to love. Better to start with the thought that the other person may want something very different from us, and then do our best to provide it.

For all our selfless efforts and good intentions, some love affairs may simply not be destined to turn into loving relationships. It can be very difficult to find someone with whom we are truly compatible. How can we raise the odds of picking a winner at the start?

Psychology can help us here too. Certain shared traits have been found to be indicative of strong relationships. For example, couples who stick together tend to share a similar level of general intelligence, and a similar level of attractiveness (as rated by others). Psychological studies have also demonstrated the importance of shared values. Values are a measure of your moral and cultural outlook, the way you see the world. Disagree too much in your attitudes towards things like fidelity (are you happy for your partner to sleep around?), idealism (liberal or conservative?) and family (how important to you are your relatives?) and you’re in for a rocky ride.

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A few years ago, I ran a dating website called 21Pictures where we paid close attention to these kinds of findings. The aim was to use insights from psychology to give people the best chance of meeting someone compatible. We designed the website to match people on their core values, rather than on their interests, habits, and other preferences that most dating sites rely on (these are far less significant to compatibility). We also encouraged users to make more intuitive choices by getting them to describe their lives in pictures, since pictures are better than words at conveying the kind of contextual information that potential partners find useful. We wanted to make online dating as much like real-world dating as possible. 21Pictures ran for just a couple of years and had only a few hundred active users, but we had some success: at least one couple who met on the site ended up getting married.

One thing we pondered at 21Pictures but never had enough data to investigate was the extent to which people’s expectations for relationships or love are shaped by their background or culture. Evidence from anthropologists suggests there is an effect, though only up to a point. Culture seems to have an influence on the kind of person we prefer as a mate: for example, young people in China, India and predominantly Muslim countries prefer their partner to be chaste, in Western countries not so much. Likewise, the relentless idealisation of romantic love that permeates the West is less evident in Asian and other collectivist cultures, which emphasise family ties and community responsibility over individual gratification (at least publicly).

In general, however, anthropologists believe that the basic experience of love is universal, driven by innate biological mechanisms. One study from the Nineties found that romantic love was commonplace in 147 of the 166 cultures it looked at (the researchers said they failed to measure it in the other 19 due to “ethnographic oversight” rather than cultural norms). The expression of love can be thwarted temporarily by the dictates of totalitarian regimes (China under Mao) or religions (the Christian Church in Medieval times), or by the constraints of mental illness. But as a possibility, it seems to be indestructible.

This transcendent quality of love is heartening since it is perhaps the one enduring truth that everyone can agree on. Love is as universal as grief. The inevitability of it unites us all, even as we struggle to understand it.

What was her objective? We actually don’t know. She seems to be enjoying toying with the notion of loss. And we may enjoy her antics, as they are part of a series of serio-comic sketches. The Cherry Orchard does not have a plot.

Death of a Salesman is a series of sketches on a theme equating regret with loss. What is Willie Loman’s problem? He is not a very good salesman. Arthur Miller wrote of De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves that it was as if someone had photographed the human soul. But, for all its worth, one cannot say the same of Death of a Salesman. We come away having seen a play about The Other (with the exception of the scenes with Biff). This Other’s problem is that he’s a bad salesman, and we may, if we like, feel sorry for his state. But which of us actually has sympathy for another’s problems? (Part of the attraction of the Problem, Illness, or Diversity play is its invitation to convince ourselves that we do.)

The southern writer can present his regional emotionality as a party turn (Thomas Wolfe), or it may be the genius outpourings of an actual tortured soul, like William Faulkner or Tennessee Williams. Mark Twain wrote that Ivanhoe was the book which ruined the South. This most famous of knightly tales grew out of the romances of the Jongleurs, Lancelot, Roland, and their mélange by Walter Scott into his creation of The Lost Cause. His was the eradication of Scottish Culture in the defeat of the Stuarts. The Southerners (Scots-Irish in the main) grafted that tragedy onto their own.

When Tennessee Williams was born in 1911 in Mississippi, many veterans of the civil war were still alive. His parents’ generation all suffered under Reconstruction. They, additionally, were descended from Huguenots, French Protestants exiled in the 17th century; and, to conclude the entertainment, he was — for that time necessarily — a closeted gay man. And a poet.

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In A Streetcar Named Desire, which debuted on Broadway 75 years ago this week, what does Blanche long for? An imaginary past. What is her particular problem? She longs for an imaginary past. And she’s a whore.

Do the events in the play amount to, or are they structured around, a plot? Not particularly. But the poet is pregnant of his cause, and we are the beneficiaries, moved, if I might, not by the tragedy of Blanche, but by that of Tennessee.

Freud wrote that music is polymorphous perversity, which I understand to mean it moves us through the progression of notions which have no referent in logic: although the feeling they engender is exactly like that created by an enlightening syllogism.

The highest paid production staff in vaudeville were the Routiners, who would structure the evening’s seven acts into a whole emotionally similar to that of an actual drama: The opening production number, the duet, the rope-twirler, the slapstick clown, and so on, culminating in the headliner and the serio-comic act to send us on our way. That’s what Chekhov does in The Cherry Orchard.

Streetcar is less abstract. It is a melodrama. Here the characters are assigned qualities by which we may recognise them (white hat vs black hat; red nose indicating the drunk; ample form and high-flown speech, the Matron, flightiness, the Ingénue, and so on), given the theme of sexuality, and then allowed to play.

I never understood the plays of Eugene O’Neill. It was explained that his father was a drunk and his mother a dope fiend, and I began to understand his concerns; but I didn’t care, as the plays bored me.

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He paid his obeisance to that form no doubt taught by Professor Baker in his Harvard Drama course. But what did Professor Baker ever write? Nothing that I know of. But he had read a lot, and, no doubt, imparted his theories to O’Neill, who discharged the debt by the compliment of becoming academic.

Chekhov’s progenitors were the comics of the music hall, and the short stories he read and famously wrote. With the growth of wide-circulation magazines, the late-Victorian era created a grand market for the short-story writer, Chekhov and Tolstoy among them. Chekhov’s plays are, each, more similar to a collection of short stories with the same characters, than they are to conventional drama. He was creating — consciously or not — something which he had enjoyed, and practising it in a different form.

Tennessee’s forebears were The Romantic Poets, and he may be said to be the last of their line. There exist some few works about not the ineffableness, but about the agony of loss. Tragedy cleanses, as it affronts us with the human condition; which, here (as opposed to mere drama) we recognise unavoidably as our own. But no one feels sorry for either Othello or Desdemona. They are mechanical parts of a tragic progression. One would, as soon, be reduced to tears by Beethoven, and then feel sorry for the violin.

But we feel the loss of Thackeray’s Henry Esmond, and that of Frederic Henry at the death of Catherine in A Farewell to Arms. Does one feel sorry for Blanche? We may go as far as “too bad”, but that’s as far as we’ll go. Does one feel sorry for the author, a creature of Loss? I don’t think so, as he got to write a magnificent play, and to reap all the benefits on offer thereby.

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Streetcar, like The Sorrows of Young Werther, concerns a hero who is (one or both) just of too fine sensibilities to live in the world, or has a screw loose. But romanticism seems to be compounded of Love, Longing and Death, written by the non-artist we’re left with a love story, about a Jock who Cried.

Tennessee, by his own admission (to me) was addicted to rough trade — as if it required a ghost from the grave to tell us that. The addiction is an unquenchable longing for that imagined-as-male. Whether this is the male one feels he can never become, or him he can never have, is moot — one is not going to find this love in the arms of a whore, and, so, one is doomed to perpetual repetition, failure and loss.

Tennessee-as-Blanche imagines males with their clumsy, rough fingers, as raping, beer-swilling, poker-playing bowlers. She is, at once, the longing vessel and the professional — the rough-trade.

Gay drama in straight drag was taken up by Truman Capote 14 years later as the romantic comedy Breakfast at Tiffany’s; and two years earlier than Streetcar, in Noel Coward’s drama Brief Encounter. The first ends in a marriage possible as the couple is presented as heterosexual; the second, in a heart-rending abandonment of the affair as the couple (in underlying truth) are not.

At the end of Streetcar, Blanche goes nuts, which is neither a victory over her situation, or fate, nor an acceptance of her failure — it is a convenience allowing the play to end. The end of the play is the continuation of the Poker Game, or “men go on, amusing themselves with a male game not only in spite, but in ignorance, of the depth of women’s anguish”.

I beg pardon for the psycho-sexual dismemberment of a great play. Streetcar is dated, but at some point it will cease being dated.

Julian is the protagonist of Paul Schrader’s 1980 masterpiece American Gigolo, made in the golden age of the erotic thriller. He’s played, and overshadowed, by Richard Gere, who made history as the first leading man to get full-frontally nude in an American studio film. This was another golden age, after all — of sexual freedom — between the invention of the Pill and the horrors of the AIDS crisis.

Why was Julian like this? Why was he so talented at languages, and suave, and erudite; and why was he so into making older ladies feel good? Why was he selling sex, anyway? And what about that murder he was framed for? Nobody cared. The plot was always secondary to the style, merely a support structure for a case study in early Eighties seduction. The point of Julian, if there was one, was his narcissism: he’s a shiny shell draped in Armani suits, who may well have absolutely nothing inside. Later, Schrader actually disavowed Julian a bit, calling him “really just a thin guy”, superficial without knowing it. In that way, maybe, he represents that brief, proto-Reagan paradise: a little stupid, a little evil, but kind of cool.

He was a man of his time, but now, Julian is back. Showtime has created an American Gigolo miniseries, out last week. A hodge-podge of sequel, prequel and remake, the show seems so singularly hellbent on destroying its source material that one wonders: why on Earth was it made? Schrader is apparently wondering, too: though credited as a “corporate consultant” on the final product (his salary was $50,000), he has called the show a “terrible idea” and vowed not to watch it.

A wise choice. Julian has been reimagined as a generic, pitiable, weeping loser, a superannuated sad sack in disgusting hoodies with greasy hair. He’s 45 years old. He’s played by Jon Bernthal. And he shares nothing but a profession with the original character. Julian’s sexiness, it seems, doesn’t work with the archetypal protagonist of prestige television: the sensitive man obsessed with his childhood.

Viewers of the original American Gigolo didn’t care why Julian did what he did. But the new show insists on providing us with a hackneyed backstory, in the form of shot-for-shot flashbacks. Sometimes, there’s the same footage twice in the same episode. Here’s the post-prison Julian grabbing a fence; here’s him doing so as a poor boy in a generic Dust Bowl setting, with his extremely simple mother. Oh, there he goes sleeping with her friend. Fetish understood. And then we find out why he sells sex: a mysterious French-speaking brunette named Olga shows up to the family shack in an extraordinarily short tweed skirt suit, asks to look in his mouth, hands his mother an envelope, and tells him she’ll be waiting in the car. Julian asks his mom: “What?” She sobs: “You’re gonna go to Hollywood and you’re gonna be a big star!” He again asks: “What, Mom?” She screams: “You need to get the fuck out of here right now!” He’s then sent to, it would appear, a high-class gigolo camp.

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To ensure that the audience can congratulate itself on watching virtuous prestige television attuned to the havoc wrought by toxic masculinity — not the reality shows that their less successful cousins watch — Julian must now have “feelings”, “trauma”, and “pain”. To ensure the creators have ten hours of material, in a business model premised on streaming audiences no longer leaving their homes, or even their beds, to consume “content”, he must also have an incessantly — and very slowly — rehashed “past”.

It is difficult not to see the new American Gigolo as the latest absurd iteration of the media’s anxious, obsessive search for trauma, victimhood, and injury in what, until now, have been recognised as happier chapters in the American story. As Mike Hale has aptly put it in the New York Times, it “remakes an era-defining film for the current age of victimisation”. The whole point of the original Julian was that he was young, confident, and the sexiest man imaginable, a man so alluring that the gorgeous wife of a prominent politician would risk literal death to be with him. But the new Julian is a bundle of pathetic clichés of the repentant male: “I’ve done dumb things.” “I’ve hurt people.” “If I sat on your feet, would you feed me?”

Low-effort psychology, apparently, is a key tenet of prestige television these days — as is box-ticking political lip service. American Gigolo has been reinvented to conform to our current sexual mores: all the sex in this tragic remake are more ferarum and a little rough. In the original, the only BDSM scene, which completely turns off Julian, is orchestrated by a disgusting creep who murders his wife. The whole film revolves around Julian’s sexual tenderness and care toward his love-hungry customers. But whatever! Now it’s hot for a traumatised male to “explore” kink and subsequently cry about how he’s caused “pain”.

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And perhaps it’s impossible to emulate the sexiness of the original American Gigolo at a time when sex is regarded as suspect, and “sex workers” themselves embody an inscrutable mixture of saintly victimhood and feminist triumph. Plus, the day-to-day of today’s young escort is a lot more mundane: see Pacho Velez’s performatively boring portrayal of sugar babies in his recent film Searchers, just staring at their iPhones as they scroll through options. That’s a lot less compelling than the original Julian Kay sliding into fancy lounges and waiting for a lady with big earrings to walk over with her cocktail.

The new American Gigolo is, then, as representative of its moment as the first one was. The late critic Mark Fisher wrote about the cultural exhaustion of the 2000s, of the inability to create new artistic forms. In the decades since the Reagan era, he argued, with crash after crash punctuated by booms of ever more inequality and precarity, society became increasingly fearful of the future and ambivalent about the present. Culture, therefore, could be nothing more than a tranquilising and unchallenging rehash of stale nostalgia. American Gigolo is a case in point: its creators, I suppose, vaguely remembered American Gigolo as cool, thought other middle-aged people would, and most importantly, couldn’t think of anything better to make.

The series is part of a larger and more depressing trend toward anodyne, cookie-cutter, sad-sensitive-male remakes. Most cynically, perhaps, is the tendency — part of streaming services’ “microtargeting” strategies based on harvesting demographic data — toward clumsy, politically correct updates of exciting black media. Amazon’s 2021 Coming 2 America, a sequel to Eddie Murphy’s beloved 1988 film, is so lazy it de-ages the actors using CGI to recreate scenes from the original; but for contemporary audiences, it inserts unwieldy references to women’s rights. The 2019 Netflix film Dolemite is My Name likewise stars the now 61-year-old Murphy. Here he portrays Rudy Ray Moore, stand-up and Blaxploitation director best known for Dolemite (1975). In both films, Murphy’s lines are far less shocking than in his Eighties triumphs.

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What made the originals funny would never be acceptable today: the humour of Coming to America largely rode on Eddie Murphy’s “African voice”; the humour of Dolemite rode on the Blaxploitation genre’s radical redeployment of Black stereotypes. Today, they have been revised to cleanse the edginess, anger, and discomfort of their originals, in the relentless march to neutralise everything that could possibly risk controversy. Like the woke-washed American Gigolo, the rehash of Dolemite includes absurdly stiff, laundered dialogue. A toothless liquor store haunt says: “Hotel Dunbar: that used to be the centre of Black arts and entertainment.” Snoop Dog, as a Rasta, turns down Murphy’s music: “Sometimes our dreams don’t work out, brother.” The original Dolemite is pretty much known for his catchphrase “Do-lo-mite!” (like “Dy-na-mite!”); now we must suffer Murphy saying things like: “I don’t have a lot of good memories of back home.”

Not even the Classics are safe. In fact, they offer the most absurd example of this bleak trend. Robert Icke, who has been described as the “great hope of British theatre”, has decided to turn the earliest extant work of Greek tragedy, set approximately 3,000 years before the invention of psychology, into another struggle session about trauma. In his adaptation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, during a sold-out West End run, Icke had Orestes recount what he experienced after the end of the Trojan War to a therapist, in a move so inappropriate that even the Guardian called it “neurotic”. In the adaptation’s New York run this summer, Agamemnon was a selfish politician making cynical remarks to a television journalist about how difficult democracy is — despite the fact that the play was set in a pre-democratic era. The adaptation has been dubbed a “masterpiece”.

Most astonishingly, every reference to Greek gods was gone: in their place, Agamemnon, the infamously selfish and infinitely brave antihero of Greek epic, was talking about how his religion “helped” him cope and how he wished he could spend more time with his family. At his trial, Orestes protested that people who’ve been hurt in turn harm others. Yes: the leading British theatrical talent of our day has taken Aeschylus’s timeless and unsurpassed poetry about divine prophecy and replaced it with pabulum about how “hurt people hurt people”.

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Taken together, these terrible cultural offerings reveal the unrestricted seepage of cut-rate therapy and its wooden jargon into the very furthest reaches of history. The past has been terrorised and defused, and audiences no longer, apparently, are considered adult enough to consider events without a pre-packaged trauma narrative to delineate who’s good and who’s bad. The gigolo must be sad; Dolemite must be wounded; and even the House of Atreus must be analysed with all the subtlety of an Instagram self-care post explaining “PTSD”.

The impact is palpable: in a major way, the purpose of art is to show that a past existed, and that it was different from the present. These bowlderised and ham-fisted revisits brainwash viewers into a terribly misleading idea: art has always been one way, as has psychology, as has politics, as has religion, as has everything. “Source material” is less marshalled into new interpretations, more colonised into uniformity. It is a sad day when Julian Kay, Dolemite and Agamemnon somehow all have precisely the same thing to say: “I’m in a lot of pain, and I’m sorry!”

Feminists are outraged. Joan has long been treasured by the women’s movement, as a rare example of a woman who escaped her narrow allotted life and changed the course of history. One of the largest ever Suffragette marches, comprising some 40,000 women in 1911, was headed by a protestor dressed as Joan. For many in this camp, a “non-binary” reimagining of Joan isn’t “exploring gender”, but “an extension of the dull, patriarchal line that women don’t have a history”.

But it’s also true that — as Globe artistic director Michelle Terry argued in response to the uproar — reimagining and even fabricating history for new audiences is a noble tradition, with Shakespeare himself a leading exponent of the art. Shakespeare, Terry says, “did not write historically accurate plays… [but] took figures of the past to ask questions about the world around him. Our writers of today are doing no different.”

When Joan was born in 1412, France was roiled by the Hundred Years’ War: a bitter conflict with not only the English fighting for dominion of the country, but a parallel civil war between competing French ruling factions, the Armagnacs and Burgundians. The town across the river from Joan’s birthplace supported the Burgundians, while hers supported the Armagnacs. Children would come home bloody from fistfights over competing loyalties to Armagnac king or Burgundian duke. Meanwhile, most actual fighting was done by mercenaries, who prowled the countryside robbing peasants for food, fuel and treasure in lieu of the pay they seldom received.

The year Joan reached puberty, such a band swept through her village of Domrémy, stealing cattle and setting fire to the church. That was also when her visions began; three years later, she left home under a pretext and travelled to the French King, demanding to see him and offer her aid on the strength of her visions.

The broad outlines of what happened next are well-known. Joan, dressed in men’s clothing, was granted an audience with the French King Charles. Clad in white armour, she helped lead his troops to a number of victories, and marched with Charles through lands held by the hostile Burgundians to his coronation at Reims. She was eventually captured by the English and forced to recant, before changing her mind and proclaiming her beliefs, finally dying on a heretic’s pyre in 1431. Her mother Isabelle worked to clear her name; in 1456, she was declared a martyr; in 1920, she was canonised.

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Shakespeare’s three-parter on Henry VI, which gives an account of the later part of the Hundred Years’ War from an English perspective, includes the figure of Joan. And what Terry politely calls asking “questions about the world” might more cynically be called Elizabethan ruling-class propaganda. Even 150 years after her death, a political enemy of England as significant as Joan couldn’t have been glamourised on an English stage, any more than the BBC could glamourise Vladimir Putin in a docudrama today.

Instead, for Shakespeare, Joan is a “trull” (Elizabethan for “slapper”) or “puzzel” (“filthy whore”) who summons legions of demons to aid her quest for victory over the English. After capture, she denies her own father (a heinous act in Elizabethan terms) before trying to avoid execution by claiming to be pregnant.

So if Elizabethan elites were fixated on England’s geopolitical fortunes, and reimagined Joan negatively in that light, it should be no surprise that today’s reinvention of her aligns with another central modern elite fixation: pretending we can identify our way out of biology. And in this sense, the Globe’s new production is a continuation of Shakespeare’s propagation of ruling-class ideology.

But reading the Bard’s heavily sexualised hatchet-job alongside other literary Joans — including the one currently causing all this fuss — also points to a broader question she raises: over how, as a woman, you can juggle your own desire to have political agency, and men’s desire to have… you. Even today, a young woman simply existing in a public space seems enough to prompt (at least some) men to look past whatever she’s trying to do and focus on trying to shag what she is. But the problem is an ancient one — and acutely difficult to navigate if you’re female and want to get anything done.

Joan is unusual among medieval female saints in how active she was: a more typical female saint might wall herself up in a cell as an anchoress, starve herself to death, or become a literary and musical polymath while running a convent. Few such figures engaged directly with the world, let alone in as kinetic a sphere as the battlefield. So it’s no coincidence that literary depictions of Joan that cast her in a negative light often do so, as in Shakespeare, by questioning her chastity. Take Voltaire’s La Pucelle D’Orleans, a racy 1730 poem in which Joan is nearly seduced by a flying donkey, and which so scandalised the satirist’s peers that it wasn’t published until 1899. In brief: for women, to the extent that you’re perceived as fuckable, you’re neither a worthy opponent nor a feasible brother-in-arms.

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Among women on a mission, the response until recently has been to remain sexually unavailable. This strategy long predates the medieval Christian emphasis on chastity: in Greek myth, it’s epitomised by the Amazons, reportedly tattooed, pot-smoking Scythian warrior women dedicated to Artemis, goddess of hunting, chastity and war. The Amazons were said to wear trousers, cut off one breast to use a bow better, and keep men only for procreation and slave labour. And their unavailability was key to their power: when the Amazons are defeated it tends to be associated with one of them falling in love with a man. In the legend of Heracles, for example, the Amazon queen Hippolyta willingly gives him her “girdle”, only for the other Amazons to be roused to attack by the goddess Hera, in which struggle Hippolyta is killed.

Hippolyta appears, too, in Shakespeare’s work — except that in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, she’s been defeated by Theseus, stripped of her weapons and is now a charmingly submissive bride-to-be. The context has led some critics to suggest the Bard was dropping heavy hints that, as many at the time believed, the reigning monarch Elizabeth I should get married and do as her husband told her.

But Elizabeth never married, and — like Joan — instead made virginity a key part of her personal brand. Rather than risk the inevitable arguments about whether or not she should obey her husband, she danced nimbly across legal and social convention concerning sex roles, monarchy and authority, referring to herself as “queen”, “king” and “prince” as well as “woman” and “virgin”.

Historian Marina Warner has claimed that Joan was driven to angry tears by the taunts her English enemies flung at her, calling her virginity into question. She, like Elizabeth, understood the lesson of the Amazons: mixing sexual action with the military kind tends to go badly for the woman. But where Joan and Elizabeth solved this by building a public persona around chastity, I, Joan perfectly captures the 21st-century alternative strategy. Instead of safeguarding female agency at the cost of sexuality, we must now pretend that it’s possible to retain both sexuality and agency, by opting out of being female.

In two narrow senses, then, a “non-binary” Joan is profoundly conservative. Firstly, it’s the latest in a very long line of literary reworkings of an ambiguous historical figure, in light of contemporary high-status beliefs. (Here, too, Elizabeth has also now also been retrospectively rendered “non-binary”, for the skilful ambiguity with which she navigated her unusual constitutional role as female wielder of an authority exclusively reserved for males.) It couldn’t be more fitting that I, Joan should be staged at the Globe, modern replica of a theatre where Shakespeare himself re-imagined Joan to propagandise for a different set of ruling-class political priorities four centuries ago.

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Secondly, this reimagining is implicitly conservative in the downbeat answer it offers to a problem as old as recorded human history: that of war, sex and women’s agency. Can women both fight and fuck, without suffering the fate of Hippolyta? What we learn both from Joan, and later from Elizabeth, is that you can get some way with strategic androgyny. But the Amazons also teach us that wherever agency and femaleness collide, the key is in staying unavailable: if you put out, or are even perceived to put out, the game is up. And the miserable interpersonal chaos of #MeToo, along with its negative aftermath for women’s productivity, suggests that even today this remains somewhat true.

Opting Joan (and indeed Elizabeth) out of this mess by claiming to have transcended sex is, in effect, to stick one’s fingers in one’s ears in the hope that this asymmetry will go away — or at least in the hope that it’ll enable those females who opt for this strategy to enjoy personal agency without having to opt out of having sex.

Does this work? Well, maybe, in a way, but more in the sense of displacing or mystifying than abolishing sexed dynamics. I struggle to believe that “non-binary” Joan would be depicted on theatre posters naked from the waist up save for a dirty binder were she a male rather than a female “non-binary”. Even those officially committed to “queering” the past still know perfectly well which type of undressed body draws the eye.

And between all these lines today, we can just about read the real taboo: one that’s emphatically not about “queering” gender, a move that could not be more tediously Establishment in 2022. Rather, it’s the noble “no” at the heart of the Amazonian mythos, as well as Joan’s extraordinary blend of high spirituality and military action, and Elizabeth I’s political persona. It is the only form of specifically female power that’s truly culturally off-limits today: virginity.

Minutes before the show was due to begin, a flustered woman emerged from one of these doors exclaiming angrily that there were “men pissing in front of everyone”. Given that the show we were about to watch was Diary of a Somebody, John Lahr’s 1986 adaptation of Joe Orton’s diaries, I couldn’t help but wonder who Orton’s targets might be in the context today’s eternally baffling culture wars. Would it be the kind of woman who was clearly upset at having to wash her hands in full view of male genitalia, or would it be the authorities at the theatre who expect her to do so and would presumably brand her a “transphobe” or a “bigot” should she complain?

This revival of Diary of a Somebody includes a running joke delivered by Mrs Edna Welthorpe, an alter-ego of Orton who would write to the press and to theatres in the late Sixties to complain about his plays. She emerges from time to time at a window on the upstage wall, a kind of choric figure expostulating on the evils of our hero. Her words are lifted verbatim from the letters that Orton dispatched under her name. For instance, her letter to the Telegraph described Entertaining Mr Sloane (1964) as an “endless parade of mental and physical perversion”.

Such satire feels more relevant than ever when one considers how the new puritans of “Critical Social Justice” often give the impression of emulating Mrs Edna Welthorpe, with all their talk of how libraries ought to be “decolonised”, their pruning of supposedly offensive comedy shows on streaming services, and their attacks on “problematic” representations in art and literature. In this, Orton had an advantage over the satirists of our time. While he was lauded for lampooning the establishment and breaking taboos, writers who do so today are likely to be chastised by critics and the doyens of the industry for failing to toe the line.

Consider the responses to the West End revival of Jez Butterworth’s award-winning Jerusalem. “Should the play be revived?” writes playwright Bea Roberts. “I’m not sure. I read the script again recently and there’s a lot that feels dated: the laddish chat about ‘birds’ and the racial references… I understand it’s a safe bet for producers, this big, much-loved hit — and I loved it too. But at a time when theatre is grappling with questions of diversity and representation after Black Lives Matter, and when we’re seeing the rise of nationalism post-Brexit, doing a play about defending the homeland and Englishness seems ill-judged.”

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Roberts is far from alone in her belief that it is the responsibility of the dramatist to reinforce voguish and ephemeral trends. It seems unlikely that a work as genuinely subversive as Orton’s What the Butler Saw (1967) would ever be commissioned by a major theatre in the current climate. Early drafts would require a thorough going-over by a “sensitivity reader”, and doubtless a director with concerns about how theatrical productions ought to send the “correct message” would mangle whatever glimmers of genius remained.

I’m exaggerating, but only slightly. I have spoken to actors who have found that valuable rehearsal time is often now occupied with interrogating the morality behind the texts, and how the first session begins with each cast member declaring their preferred pronouns. Many avid theatregoers have been turned off because so many productions feel more like sermons than works of art. Critics in the mainstream press are now regularly assessing drama on the putative “message” of the piece, or whether or not they approve of the way in which characters are represented. The star-rating system has always been fatuous, but is especially so if marks are docked for insufficiently diverse casting.

None of which appeared to bother the best critics of Orton’s day. That his appeal has endured is, of course, partly due to the mystery surrounding his gruesome death, the event that Lahr’s play steers us towards with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. In 1967, Orton was beaten to death with a hammer by his lover and mentor Kenneth Halliwell in their small Islington flat. In his suicide note, Halliwell wrote: “If you read his diary all will be explained. KH. P.S. Especially the latter part.” Yet the final pages were missing.

Some believe that Orton’s agent Peggy Ramsay took the diary from the murder scene and may have removed the final section, possibly to protect someone’s identity. Friends of Orton have testified that he was having an affair and was on the brink of leaving Halliwell, but the man in question has never been named. The theatre critic Michael Thornton was informed by police that he was mentioned in those final pages, and that they had been withheld because they “contained sensitive information about persons still living”. If true, this would scupper the theory that Ramsay censored the document, and would suggest that the solution lies buried in police archives.

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Nico Rao Pimparé’s excellent production does not linger over the death itself, or indulge in a crude re-enactment (this was the major failing of Simon Bent’s 2009 biographical play Prick Up Your Ears at the Comedy Theatre in London). Rather, we are left with the image of Orton as he was in life; a puckish and defiant figure who revelled in the joys of his own sexuality. There is no deus ex machina of the kind we remember from What the Butler Saw, no figure from the heavens descending in a great blaze of glory to provide a satisfactory resolution. The final entry in Orton’s diary ends abruptly, cut off mid-sentence; so too the story of his life.

It was his promiscuity that may have been the catalyst to Halliwell’s mania. Orton would leave his diary around the flat in the knowledge that his lover would read his accounts of sexual exploits with strangers. This is also why its reliability cannot be trusted. Orton wrote these entries knowing that they would one day be published, and nothing satisfied him more than exasperating the prigs and pearl-clutchers of his day. As he noted when revising What the Butler Saw, “sex is the only way to infuriate them. Much more fucking and they’ll be screaming hysterics in next to no time.”

It was arguably Orton’s time in prison that consolidated this desire to provoke, and that appears to have been the driving motivation in both his life and his work. Orton and Halliwell served six months for defacing books at Islington Library. The pair would add semi-pornographic images to dustjackets, or rewrite the blurbs in the hope of shocking unsuspecting readers. He later claimed that prison “crystallised” his sense of “something rotten somewhere”, and that “the old whore society really lifted up her skirts and the stench was pretty foul”.

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While comedy tends to fare badly with the passage of time, relatively recent productions of Orton’s farces have proven hugely successful. The 50th anniversary production of Loot at the Park Theatre in 2017 was one of the best I have seen, and was enhanced immeasurably by a live actor playing the corpse that is stripped naked and bundled about the stage in the escalating mania. It was quite the contrast to the 2012 production of What the Butler Saw at the Vaudeville Theatre, whose fatal misstep was to allow the characters to find their own lines funny. If Orton’s farces aren’t played straight, they simply don’t work.

There are no likeable characters in What the Butler Saw; Orton sees humanity as a parade of degraded creatures, slaves to baser instincts, whose only value rests in being figures of fun for us to pruriently observe. The title invites us to imagine a butler taking a moment from his duties to peer into one of those seaside peepshow machines, popular in Edwardian England. This is what his “betters” get up to behind closed doors. Through his treatment of themes such as police brutality, institutionalised abuse, incest and necrophilia, Orton strips away the patina of respectable society. Whether one finds this cynical or not, it is undeniably funny.

True to the golden rule of comedy, revivals of Orton’s plays are all about the timing. And now that the theatre industry appears to be so ideologically captured, what better time for writers to pick up where Orton left off? In his day, the Lord Chamberlain would ensure that potentially subversive material would not make it to the stage. Today, theatrical practitioners have taken on that role for themselves, embodying the kind of prissy moralisers that Orton took such pleasure in skewering. Mrs Edna Welthorpe is back — and it won’t be long before her skirt gets lifted.

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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By William Deresiewicz

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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American education needs a revolution

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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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How artists lost their courage

By Jess De Wahls

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

That’s not to say elitism wasn’t a problem back then. Working-class people, if they appeared at all in books, films or plays in the early fifties, were — as Listener magazine said in its review of Honey — “comic or loyal, or more frequently both”. But by 1958 that situation had slowly started to change. John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, staged at London’s Royal Court in 1956, was the ripple that quickly turned into a “new wave” of stories about a restless generation of young working-class upstarts.

In the era of the post-war welfare state, journalists were also giving working-class life more attention. In 1957, Michael Young and Peter Wilmott published a study of life in the modern East End, Family and Kinship in East London. Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, issued the same year, was based on his own working-class upbringing in Hunslet, Leeds. Both books became surprise bestsellers. Their authors were driven by a belief that working-class people possessed a rich culture, and by their concern that the communities from which that culture sprang were threatened by the well-meant intentions of post-war politicians — in particular the replacement of inner-city streets with out-of-town council estates.

But on the whole working-class people’s prospects were looking up. This was the era of a brand-new welfare state and near-full employment. Free secondary education meant Shelagh, who died exactly ten years ago, was the first person in her family to remain at school beyond the age of 14. In 1957, the Conservative Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, claimed that the British people “had never had it so good”. There were more (though still very few) chances for working-class people to have their voices heard.

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Who created the self-made man?

By Selina Todd

A modicum of economic security and the political rhetoric of opportunity were the foundations on which Shelagh constructed her youthful dreams for a life different from her mother’s. She wanted fame and fortune — but failing that, she wanted and believed she could create a life focused on creative endeavour. She had no deference, no sense that the arts were not for the likes of her; the state told her she was worthy of education and investment.

Still, she was unsentimental about the welfare state, and even more so about the working-class community that Richard Hoggart lovingly described. Her debut focuses on Jo, a working-class teenager who lives in Salford with her single mother, Helen, and who becomes a single mother herself after a brief affair with a black sailor. As the pair barged onstage, carrying suitcases as they “flitted” from one rented room to another, they ripped through any romanticism about working-class life.

“What’s wrong with this place?” asks Helen ironically, as she and Jo survey their new home, a bare flat in a Manchester lodging house. She answers her own question: “Everything in it is falling apart, it’s true, and we’ve no heating — but there’s a lovely view of the gasworks, we share a bathroom with the community and this wallpaper’s contemporary. What more do you want?” In the fifties — a “selfish decade,” argued the Labour politician and architect of the NHS, Nye Bevan — “community” was too often a euphemism for overcrowded homes and enduring poverty.

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By DARREN 'LOKI' MCGARVEY

Shelagh knew that women in Salford were lucky if they got modern décor and good neighbours; that wasn’t, she suggested, enough. She was the first post-war playwright to suggest that women had minds and desires of their own: a radical proposal in the fifties. The anti-heroes of the so-called “kitchen sink” novels and plays that pre-dated Honey — Joe Lampton in John Braine’s novel Room at the Top (1957), or Arthur Seaton in Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) — were all men.

Meanwhile, advertisers, educators, policymakers and psychologists told women that they were luckier than their mothers. Clad in New Look dresses, they could spend their lives making happy homes for their hard-working husbands and their healthy children — the citizens of Britain’s brave new future. But Honey showed that this life was beyond the means of thousands of women who, like Jo and Helen, continued to live in overcrowded slums.

Even more radically, Delaney suggested this was a life that women did not want. In Honey, Jo finds solace in her friendship with Geoff, a gay art student, who is keen to make a home for her and the baby. He voices the standard medical opinion of the time: “Motherhood is supposed to come natural to women.” Pregnancy was meant to render women docile, maternity to fulfil an innate femininity. But Jo rages against her fate. “My usual self is a very unusual self, Geoffrey Ingram, and don’t you forget it,” she says. “I’m an extraordinary person. There’s only one of me like there’s only one of you.”

More than a decade before the Women’s Liberation Movement emerged in Britain, Shelagh suggested that women were unfulfilled by marriage and motherhood. In the novels and plays written by male authors of the 1950s, women hold back ambitious young men. But in Honey, the male characters are keener on marriage and domesticity than Jo or Helen. The woman want love — but they want some freedom too. They know that the comforts men associate with domestic bliss are the result of women’s hard work. They refuse to be compliant; “we enjoy it!” Helen responds scornfully when Geoff tells her off for rowing with Jo. Resentment and anger at their shared dependency, the fallibility of their bodies, and their lack of choices are riven through their relationship; but from that shared experience also springs love.

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By Julie Bindel

A Taste of Honey was championed by Joan Littlewood, who, with fellow communist Ewan MacColl, had established Theatre Workshop in Manchester in the 1930s. But Delaney’s assertion that working-class life wasn’t all affluence and happy housewives caused a furore. There was an attempt to suppress Honey before it was even staged. At a time when all plays were subject to censorship, Theatre Workshop was required to submit Delaney’s manuscript to the Lord Chamberlain for inspection. The official charged with reading it called the play “muck” and proposed banning it. “I think it’s revolting, quite apart from the homosexual bits,” he wrote. “To me it has no saving grace whatsoever. If we pass muck like this it does give our critics something to go on.”

“After some misgivings,” his office grudgingly passed Honey, but only “because it depicts such a sad collection of undesirables it will not do the public any harm.”

A Taste of Honey premiered at Theatre Workshop on 27 May 1958. Almost all the press dismissed the play as a flop, its content vulgar and its author untutored. The Spectator declared that Honey’s only redeeming feature was that “it is not scholarly anthropology observed from the outside through pince-nez, but the inside story of a savage culture observed by a genuine cannibal”. Most of the Right-wing press was more damning. “Once, authors wrote good plays set in drawing-rooms. Now, under the Welfare State, they write bad plays set in garrets,” sneered the Daily Mail. The depiction of women incensed many journalists. The Salford Reporter, in Delaney’s hometown, oscillated between denying the existence of single mothers and slums, and asserting that, even if they did exist, this “sordid tale of a prostitute’s daughter” certainly wasn’t suitable theatrical fare.

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But theatregoers from working-class Stratford did not agree. Builders, labourers and office workers told a BBC news crew that Honey was “about people like us, isn’t it? Real life”. And Shelagh’s appeal crossed class boundaries. Carol Dix and her friends were 13-year-old middle-class grammar schoolgirls in the Midlands when Honey was staged. They’d never have been allowed to see the play, but they were preoccupied with its author: “The women’s life-style we noticed, and wanted to copy, were bohemians like Sheelagh [sic] Delaney,’ they later recalled in a collective memoir.

Her youth and notoriety meant Shelagh regularly appeared in the press and on television throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s. She liked to dress comfortably, attending interviews wearing, as the Daily Mail told its readers, fisherman’s sweaters and “paint spattered jeans” — very unlike the glamorous Hollywood icons of the cinema, or the lipsticked housewives of women’s magazines. This made her an icon for those girls who wanted more from the world than a wedding dress, but weren’t sure what, or how to get it. Some of them went on to create the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s.

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Meanwhile Honey became a box office hit, transferred to London’s West End in 1959, and enjoyed a Broadway run in 1960. It has been performed across the world ever since. In 2019, the play enjoyed a successful revival as a National Theatre touring production, sadly cut short by Covid. That the performances, including the premier in Salford, were sell-out shows that Honey still resonates today. We’re back in a world where government rhetoric is often at odds with the harsh reality of poverty, and women struggle to care for the vulnerable without proper material support.

But Honey speaks to a wider constituency than even the many who are directly affected by precarity. By placing women centre stage, it asserts both their commonality and diversity. Their commonality, because they are the sex that can reproduce — a fundamental fact that disrupts both Helen’s life and Jo’s, and which even today, in an era of freely available birth control and legal abortions, affects women on a daily basis. But as Shelagh shows, this doesn’t mean they can be reduced to their bodies, “cervix havers” or “chestfeeders”. They have diverse ambitions and dreams, the potential to do much more than the world often allows them by virtue of their sex.

Honey reminded us that those often considered marginal to political debate and artistic endeavour — working-class people, especially women and children — were the majority of the human race, and therefore worth listening to. “I write as people speak,” said Shelagh. Ten years after her death, allowing women to speak and to be heard is a struggle feminists are still waging.

Two things. As these are not philosophies but tricks, they are less likely to affront; one can always say of a trick (and what are techniques but elaborated tricks?), “I just learned this last week…”

First: when the baby gets you up in the middle of the night, do not look at the clock. Anyone who’s had children will nod in understanding — you’re up anyway, why pay twice?

The second trick is The Designated Criminal.

My notion of hell is the cross-country road trip with the whole damn family. Here everything, of course, is always going wrong. Some kid is complaining, spouses are feuding about directions, and all is misery. Now this traveler and now that offends against reason and good order and everyone ends up blaming Father, who, as the sole voice of reason, will now turn belligerent. Hot, tired, weary, angry, thirsty and lost, the car rolls on.

How to get from Coast to Coast? Appeals for calm (from Mother), obedience (that’s right), fellow-feeling, and so on will not avail. But a technique (trick) may. It is The Designated Criminal.

On setting out the family must establish a rotation. Each car member, then, on his appointed day, will be The Designated Criminal. On his lucky day, everything that goes wrong in the car is his fault. The affronted family are happily then leagued against the diabolical offender in their midst.

It works like a charm.

But The Designated Criminal may also be practised as oppression. For there are families and other organisms which employ the technique not as a means of maintaining esprit-de-corps, but of exercising control. Here the criminal is designated once and for all time, and will live and die in his chains.

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The narcissistic fall of France

By Michel Houellebecq

In the co-dependant family one child or parent is always in the wrong. We have all seen it and some have been taxed with participating in the loathsome farce: that Dad is a fool, Mom is a dunderhead, Little Bob is a lazy good-for-nothing, Little Suzy is a pre-pubescent whore and if she doesn’t wear more modest clothes she will end on the street, and so on.

And we know of the continual indictment of The Jews, the Witch Trials of Salem and McCarthy, the chattel slavery of Black Americans, and the continuation of that vile racism as the indictment of Whites.

The mechanism of the Designated Criminal can be used both for social equilibrium, in the car, or, politically, for disruption of the body politic. The first case, The Orderly Rotation of Blame, is the essential engine of democracy. The Game’s Rules (The Constitution) are designed to ensure the periodic exchange of power. The Ins and the Outs, and their adherents and dupes, may not understand the transfer of power as a game; but they are involved in one as much as the folks in the station wagon.

The motorists enjoy a process which elevates family unity over individual discomfort; the voters, the self-importance of saving the world from mindless fools. But it’s the same game.

If played according to the rules the rotation of power promotes the health and longevity of the organism. The Ins are allowed to tax the limits of legitimate incumbency, the Outs to misuse the permitted latitudes of opposition. And then, as in a football game, offense and defence shift.

But what if the game is not played according to Hoyle?

What if a player or contingent takes advantage of the rules themselves to achieve a goal other than balance? What if put-upon Dad, for example, says, “I know which Young Traveller is today’s Designated Criminal, but Samantha has just done something so egregious that I am going to suspend the rules and humiliate her”.

Readers will feel the affront of the interjection. As will not only young Samantha, but the whole family. For they had agreed to suspend their individual feelings in favour of group unity. And Dad has just proclaimed that they were fools to do so — that they had made a bargain which, it seems, the car’s driver reserved the right to abrogate, and, thus, that anyone may be the next-accused.

Now, the once-happy car, all occupants free to enjoy not only the trip but the game, are forced into co-dependence. The game is over, and the Ref (of whose existence the car was previously unaware) has ruled that actual indictment of the other is now the order of the day and those not supporting the new rule will suffer. The enjoyment of Free Speech has been superseded by the necessity of obedience to power. The car has just experienced Terror.

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The occupants, now, do not know what the new rules are, but only that they, having been changed once, may continue to be changed at will, by those possessing or bidding for power. Now, rather than the joy of improvisation (of the communal comedy), the rule of silence, obedience and denunciation is in force.

This is the state of the sick, co-dependant family. Here it is not that some things may be false, but that all things must be false. For if the subordinate members do not know what is and what is not permitted, they must devote themselves, in preference to any productive activity, to protection from power.

Far worse than the frowns of the car which does not know The Designated Criminal we now have the false smiles and the sad head shakings of the sick family, which is to say, of the Left.

When we know that it’s our turn on the electoral ducking stool tomorrow, we, when in power, may moderate our behaviour. In a crumbling Democracy, the power-mad, like Dad taking the reins, have come to the Dictator’s realisation. That is, “Wait a second. All I have to do is rig it so I can hold my seat indefinitely”. This, of course, is the aperçu of most every politician from dogcatcher to President, down through time. (George III said of Washington that if he chose to relinquish the Presidency he would be the greatest man who ever lived.)

***

One cannot credit the Politicians of the Left with even the delusion that they are Doing Good. And, if they do, then what? They did not take an oath to do good, but to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.

Must they come to bend and break the rules in favour of 1) their good ideas, 2) the necessity of staying in office, 3) theft? Of course. That’s why we have elections. To roll the dice. The co-dependant, terrified society comes to think that, having achieved the perfection of leadership, it’s a grand idea to call it quits, abolish the electoral college, mail ballots to everyone on earth, require no voter identification, import new voters, and so on.

Just as the inspired politicians see that perpetual hegemony might be had by mere suspension of their Oath; their dupes, the electorate, learn to suspend their reason, and substitute hatred of the indicted for their new-found fear of power — a fear so powerful it must be relegated to the unconscious.

Just like the children in the car.

When Dad trashes the rules he changes the whole point of the exercise. The building of family happiness and unity (which, we assume, was, after all, the whole purpose of the trip) becomes an indoctrination; and, the child sees, safety must now be his primary concern. He may keep silent, or join in the condemnation of Little Trevor, but should he object, “what about the Game?” he is, most certainly, now the new Criminal.

Our electorate is split into the affronted Right and the supine Left. Those who wish to preserve our Constitutional Republic, its rules, and the culture from which they spring, are indicted by those in momentary power (both political and asserted) ad-lib.

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Will magic defeat America's elites?

By John Michael Greer

There is no merit in supporting various contemporary blasphemies (“Birthing Parent”, and so on). Unless they are untrue. The merit comes from the affiant’s vocal sacrifice of his reason, and, so, of his self-respect, in support of The Cause.

This is the contemporary terror. Not that we’re faced with the enormities, the crimes, delusions, and lies of a Politician (when were we not?), but that we are now frightened of whomever was screaming last.

From “New Business Item 39” posted on the National Education Association’s website on July 5, 2021: “The N.E.A. will provide an already-created, in-depth study that criticises empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeniety, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarcy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of oppression at the intersections of society.”

This is the country’s largest Teachers Union. What do these words mean? That the teachers will be put in charge of criticising. Whom? Whomever the N.E.A. designates.

And how might one, however convinced, ensure that he will not transgress the rules? There are no rules, for the categories are infinitely expansible. (Larry Elder, an African American running for Governor of California, and a lifelong champion of America and of his race, was called “the Black Face of White Supremacy,” L.A. Times, August 20, 2021.) And what in the world are “the intersections of society”?

In Woody Allen’s film Sleeper (1973) he is transported to the future. There he learns that the world he knew came to grief in 1989. He asks how and is told: “A man called Albert Shanker got his hands on a nuclear warhead.” Albert Shanker was the head of the United Foundation of Teachers, and then the American Federation of Teachers.

This may be the rock on which the Left comes to grief: the insistence on infecting one’s children with hatred. Young parents four generations away from The New Deal are insisting that they will not abandon their children to the blasphemies of the N.E.A. and its servitors, the Democratic Party. They are finding that there is a mechanism created to protect them from a despotic government, and that it is The Constitution and the organisations derived therefrom.

It is not incumbent on us Jews to prove we do not drink the blood of Christian Children, nor of white American citizens to apologise, nor of citizens to assert their loyalty to various confederations of thugs, and shriek heresies and treason or risk blacklisting as “of insufficient zeal”.

What does it mean to be “cancelled”?

It seems to mean that some group asserting power has mobilised its forces in social media and that their indictments have, in turn, been echoed and endorsed by multitudes. But we all know, or should know, that the controllers of the algorithms are constantly aware of and manipulate our prejudices through their presentation of that called information.

Fear of the heretic is spread through social media, but who knows, and how could one know, that the numbers and the tweets are real? One cannot. They are pixels on a screen which stampede the fearful into actual action against the indicted.

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Would the controllers of the blogosphere stoop to such subterfuge as cooking the numbers? They limit access to their outlets ad lib, banning any person or idea they do not endorse. Why would they not also warp the number or content of the blogs to suit or, indeed, confect them? (I worked, for a year, as a Contributing Editor (utility man) at a very prominent national publication. One of my duties was Letters to the Editor. This involved not only answering but writing them. I assume the practice was universal and that it continues in the new media.)

I live in a liberal neighbourhood outside of Los Angeles. The residents here are miserable. Traditionally it was Not Done to acknowledge each other’s presence on the streets. A “good morning” uttered to a fellow dogwalker was considered as if one had exposed oneself. (This latter, in fact, now accepted as a permitted practice of the Homeless.)

Since Covid, the masked or the unmasked cross the street to avoid each other, glaring.  Signs on the homes proclaim that Love Is Love, but the residents hate and fear each other. Nancy Mitford wrote of the Liberals, “they are all so unhappy, and all of their plans fail so miserably.”

I was elected a non-person by the Left many years ago. It’s uncomfortable, and it’s costly and sad to see the happy fields in which I played all those decades — Broadway, book publishing, TV and film — fold up and Hail Caesar, but there it is.

The question for the young is: what kind of country do you want for your children? The question for the aged (myself) is: “what did you do in the War, Daddy?”

I’ve been involved for near 50 years in dealing with folks in the mass. It was not a social experiment for me, but a game: The Theatre. I learned very young that the correct study of the dramatist was neither his own feelings, nor those of the actors, but the attention of the audience. I understood that it was not my job to teach them anything, nor to induce a feeling in them, but to perform a sort of magic trick — to understand their behaviour in order to control their concentration. Why? In order to give them a treat. Just like a magician.

I sat with them night by night and year by year, and it was a joy to feel their conjoined attention, and to learn from it and its absence how to improve the play. As Billy Wilder said, “individually, they’re idiots, but together they’re a genius”.

The horror of the last year’s slide into despotism has showed me the reverse of the medal.

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By David Hockney

Watching the good play, the audience suspends its reason in order to be entertained — at Hamlet, as much and identically with watching a woman be sawed in half. The audience enjoys the trick while knowing, and because they know she is not going to be harmed. Just as they know Hamlet’s Dad is not coming back from the dead.

But just as the techniques of stage magic are identical with those of the confidence game, the understanding of the dramatist — that the mass can be suggested, and, so controlled —is the same as that of the Dictator. Here fear replaces happy anticipation; and, as we see, outrage at the indicted masks an unavowable fear.

The children in the car must immediately come to support the new regime or risk abandonment. The protection it offers is illusory (as who knows who will be next), but the illusion, to them, is preferable to knowledge of their powerlessness.

In the mass the alternative to submission is blacklisting, poverty, censure, et cetera. Finally, this is the same alternative offered to the children. They may court protection from fear only by remaining submissive. Just like the Electorate.

© David Mamet 2021

“It was an awful crime,” the British journalist Andrew Anthony wrote later, “but it was also, as its perpetrators would have known, an awesome televisual event.” Anthony, for his part, was in a bar in London’s Soho, transfixed to a television screen with a gasping crowd. “There was something disturbingly pornographic about the need to see more and different angles of the impact over and over again,” he noted. “I’ve never understood the question: ‘Where were you when [fill in the significant historical event] happened?’ Because the answer is almost always: ‘In front of the television.’”

Now, two decades on from the attack, the answer is almost always: on a smartphone, into which television and much else, including the spectacle of international terrorism, has since disappeared.

Terrorism, too, has changed dramatically since 9/11, and in ways that are closely related to the rise of the smartphone and the global proliferation of social media. Most obviously, its style has become more immediate and intimate. Had the 9/11 hijackers possessed smartphones, we wouldn’t have had to rely on network television for footage and speculative commentary.

The hijackers would have live-streamed their depredations inside the planes in real-time, disseminating the footage on Facebook, just as Brenton Tarrant did in 2019 when he slaughtered 51 Muslim worshippers in two Mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. We would have seen their wolfish smiles as they terrorised the passengers and attacked the pilots and flight attendants. We would have heard them shout “Allahu Akbar” moments before the impact, and we would have seen cockpit footage of the planes plunging into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

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But of course we saw and heard none of this, and Martin Amis could only write about how “That second plane looked eagerly alive, and galvanised with malice, and wholly alien”. But what about the chaos inside the plane, as it came, in Amis’s words, “sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty”?

On 11 September, 2001, we could only imagine it — or, mercifully, try not to. Today, we don’t have to imagine what it’s like to be in the midst of a terrorist atrocity, because terrorists are all-too-eager to show us their POV. Nor do we have to imagine what it’s like when a prisoner is beheaded: thanks to ISIS, we can now see this up close and in High Definition. Like gonzo porn, terrorism’s new ruling credo is to show everything. Indeed, terrorists have become auteurs of a horrifying new type of theatre, where the myth of the snuff movie becomes a grim reality.

Yet paradoxically, at the same, terrorism has also become less spectacular. When Osama bin Laden dispatched the 19 hijackers who pulled off the 9/11 attacks, he knew that the whole world would be watching, and it was. Indeed, he didn’t just want to murder vast numbers of innocent people, but to create what the sociologist Douglas Kellner has called a “mega-spectacle”.

And he was unquestionably successful in that. On NBC, within minutes of the second plane slamming into the South Tower, one eyewitness, gasping for breath, told news anchor Matt Lauer via a telephone line: “It looks like a movie… I’ve never seen anything like it.” Lauer concurred, describing the footage as “the most shocking video tape I’ve ever seen”.

No terrorist group since 9/11 has carried out an attack of such lethality and ambition or produced a propaganda image as symbolically potent as the collapse of the Twin Towers. This, chiefly, is because the soft targets of civil aviation have decidedly hardened: today, you can’t take a hip-flask on a plane, let alone Mace and a four-inch blade. Mass surveillance has also made it much harder for terrorists to plan and coordinate large-scale attacks.

More crucially, the US invasion of Afghanistan, which killed nearly 80% of al Qaeda’s core members in that country, meant that the group no longer had a sanctuary in which to plan future terrorist attacks. With bin Laden and his chief lieutenants scattered and on the run, al Qaeda’s terrorism shape-shifted into something less terrorising: what Marc Sageman called “leaderless jihad”.

This was the jihad of the self-financed and self-trained terrorist whose headquarters was his bedroom. It was the jihad of the “jihadi next door”, who, to their neighbours, were just ordinary guys, if a little quiet and reserved. While these “inspired” killers proved deadly, they lacked the skills, resources and support to wreak havoc on the scale of 9/11; their jihad was more squalid than spectacular.

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By Naama Kates

In the summer of 2014, when ISIS rose to power in Syria and Iraq, that all threatened to change: the leaderless jihadis now had a leader (Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi) and territory (the caliphate) to profess allegiance to and defend. Some of them returned to Europe, carrying out large-scale attacks in Paris and Brussels. Jihadi terrorism, for a short period, became “directed” again.

Even so-called “lone wolves” who had never been to Syria or Iraq could communicate with ISIS operatives online and receive operational guidance and support from them. Others, who had neither been to ISIS-controlled territory nor received guidance from the group, nevertheless took “inspiration” from it, using cars, trucks, or knives to conduct killing sprees against random civilians in Western cities.

Today, this seems to be the dominant form of jihadi terrorism in the West: low-tech, amateurish attacks devoid of any real logic or political rationale. Indeed, this type of terrorism seems more performative and personal than instrumental and political.

What, for example, was the point of Usman Khan’s rampage at Fishmonger’s Hall in London in November 2019? What set of political demands did Khan have? Given that Khan’s violence was directed at those associated with the “Learning Together” programme, a liberal-minded prison education initiative he took part in, and given his desire to become a martyr, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that Khan’s motives were more personal than political or a complex combination of both. Perhaps terrorism has always been like this, but in its current incarnation it seems that the gap between terrorist atrocities and real-world politics has never been so far apart.

Yet as terrorism in the West has become more banal and less lethal, the response to it, in contrast, has become insistently more hysterical. ISIS, as the recent attack in Kabul has demonstrated, remains a potent threat in Muslim-majority countries, but its military defeat in Syria and Iraq has massively hampered its ability to direct and inspire attacks in the West.

This has left a large void which our over-bloated security state and counter-extremism industry has tried to fill by amplifying the threat of far-Right groups. Not so long ago they were sounding the alarm about the dangers of “slick” online ISIS propaganda, and how vulnerable young people were being radicalised by it. Today, widely respected extremism scholars are sounding the alarm about far-Right online “echo-chambers” and writing feverish articles on: “How parents can learn to recognize online radicalization and prevent tragedy – in 7 minutes”.

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You can't deradicalise every terrorist

By Liam Duffy

While far-Right violence is certainly a serious issue in America and Europe, it’s nonsensical to compare it to the far greater global threat of jihadism – or to exclude 9/11 from your calculus in an effort to show, as one terrorism expert recently did, that “excluding the coordinated attacks of 9/11, domestic right-wing terrorism has caused more harm to American citizens at home than radical Islamist attacks over the past two decade”.

It’s also hysterical to believe that far-Right terrorists are using the internet to turn children into white supremacist terrorists, or to think that a meme or an ironic joke “can be a gateway to extremist views”. This is part of a deeper confusion, where the counter-extremism industry, instead of focusing on specific violent groups and their kinetic threat level and capabilities, has sought to expand its remit (and potential revenue) by inventing useless and nebulous categories like “hateful extremism” and “extremist narratives”.

The cartoonish notion that terrorists are “hateful” has somehow caught on among policy-makers post-9/11, but it has little to do with how and why people decide to kill themselves and others in service to a sacred cause. While hate and reductive thinking are clearly bad, they’re useless as predictors of terrorism, which, as every terrorism scholar knows, is rare and committed by very few individuals.

Perhaps the most obvious manifestation of today’s confusion about terrorism came after the breaching of the Capitol Building on 6 January, 2021. “This is terrorism,” scholar John Horgan gravely tweeted on the day of the riots. Kathleen Belew, another expert, was similarly emphatic and self-certain, tweeting on the day of the riots and about the rioters: “They are certainly anti-democratic, since they are using terrorism to attack fair electoral process. The word you want, I think, is fascist.”

But whatever happened on 6 January, it wasn’t terrorism; if by terrorism we mean, in accordance with standard non-politicised definitions, violence aimed at civilians to achieve some political goal. No civilians were deliberately targeted and harmed in the Capitol building, except for one of the rioters who was shot dead by the police. According to the FBI, the motives of the vast majority of the rioters were unclear since they had not given any thought to what they would do once they were inside the Capitol building, and there was scant evidence of any plot or coordination among them.

The world has changed markedly since 9/11, and in no small part because of it. Terrorism remains a potent global threat. But we should not overstate the threat, still less pretend that people who disgust us with their ideas and hatreds are really terrorists.

“Terrorism is theatre,” the seasoned terrorism expert Brian M. Jenkins observed more than 40 years ago. He was referring to how terrorist atrocities “are often carefully choreographed to attract the attention of the electronic media and the international press”. He was right about that, but I doubt that even someone as prescient and sharp as Jenkins could have envisaged an act of terrorism as theatrically spectacular as 9/11.

Today, however, terrorism is still a spectacle, while no longer being all that spectacular. Indeed, while terrorists continue to horrify us with their violence and contempt for life, most — like the fool who tried to blow up a group of gendarmes on the Champs-Élysées in 2017, but only managed to asphyxiate himself after the gas canister in the car he was driving failed to properly explode — will be half-remembered and enjoy no infamy whatsoever.

Oh well. That, presumably, was then. This is the depressing now, and it’s the people who claim to be on the side of culture who are pressing for the measure of it to be, not “Is it good?” but “Is it useful?”. And because we live in an era of relentless individualism, the only kind of useful that counts is making you — the unique and precious consumer — into a better person.

I came across a splendidly disheartening example of this in publicity for a new book called Wonderworks by Angus Fletcher, which publisher Simon & Schuster says “shows how writers have created… engineering enhancements to the human heart and mind.” Sounds terrible, I thought, and so I read some of Wonderworks. And it was even worse than that.

Fletcher wants us to think of literature as a technology. Specifically, as “an innovation for troubleshooting our humanity”. It’s a thesis that comes with a dusting of neuroscientific talk about how “literature’s inventions can plug into different regions of the brain”, and a lot of purple prose. “The medicine men may have run out of unguents and potions; the heavens may have vanished or grown cold,” he writes. “But still, literature could fix hearts and lift souls. That, in brief, is why literature was invented and what it was invented to do.”

Oh really? This is what those of us in the business of literary criticism call “a heck of a claim”. Was the poet who wrote Beowulf  “fixing hearts and lifting souls”? Of course not. What they were actually doing was telling a baller story about fighting a big snake, imbued with reflections on feudal loyalty and vengeance which are semi-impenetrable from the society we live in now. That snake fight is forever, though.

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The empty promise of pop psychology

By Sarah Ditum

Was Aphra Behn trying to “fix hearts and lift souls” when she turned out Oroonoko? I am pretty sure that what she was in fact doing was getting rich, given that she wrote for a living and wrote a lot. Were the patrons who sustained literature before the arrival of commercial publishing in the “heart-fixing, soul-lifting” business? No; they were displaying their wealth and culture to other wealthy, cultured people — and good on them, frankly.

It’s not that literature can’t be personally uplifting, or even morally improving; but when you insist that this is what literature is for, you make a claim that sits at odds with the manifest intentions of most writers and readers. Why do I read? Largely because I hate to be bored, and books are my favourite way of not being bored. (Also, a little bit, because I like people to think of me as someone who reads books.)

There is some psychological research suggesting that reading fiction helps people to exercise their empathy, perhaps leading them to act more generously. Whether those findings are robust and well-replicated, I don’t know, and I’m not really sure whether it’s necessary to make any claim stronger than this one on literature’s behalf: reading stories forces you to spend time inhabiting someone else’s subjectivity — Joan Didion, sinisterly, described writing as “an imposition of writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space” — and doing so might make you better at imagining the inner life of other people.

But here’s the kicker: if it works, it only works because you’re thinking about somebody other than yourself. To approach literature in the way Fletcher urges us to — as a shortcut to self-improvement which can help you “unfreeze your heart” with Samuel Beckett and “lessen your lonely” by reading Elena Ferrante (both genuine chapter titles, I swear) — is to approach it thinking only of yourself. It’s a solipsism utterly destructive not just to the enjoyment of fiction, but also to the quasi-medical benefits that Fletcher is touting.

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Confessions of a female journalist

By Sarah Ditum

Still, he’s hardly alone in his efforts to turn art into cure-all. Reading Lloyd Evans’ recent broadside against the “pleasure-free zone” of contemporary theatre, I discovered this quote from Matthew Warchus, artistic director of the Old Vic: “Fiction doesn’t have to be just a diversion or a pastime. It really can change individuals and societies for the better. Intelligent entertainment is a transformative necessity, not a luxury.” Sounds terrible, I thought, although as I haven’t seen the “intelligent entertainment” Warchus was referring to, I can’t give any judgement there.

But also, I don’t want to see anything that’s being touted as a “transformative necessity”. I like being diverted. I appreciate a show that passes the time. Leaving the auditorium and asking myself “did this change me individually and society as a whole for the better?” sounds very, very tiring. Theatres are uncomfortable enough already with the terrible seats and inadequate toilet situation; I don’t see why they should start pressing on my conscience as well as my bladder. Do you know what people actually like? Cats and The Mousetrap, that’s what people like.

Yet the most fun I’ve had at the theatre has often been very uncomfortable indeed. It’s just that the discomfort has been dramatic, rather than didactic: the strain of being made to feel for two different people at the same time, of holding both sides of an argument in your head at once. The next thing I’m going to see is a revival of David Mamet’s sexual harassment two-hander Oleanna. It will probably make me furious. I can’t wait.

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Philip Roth's carnival of desire

By Boyd Tonkin

I suspect that any play aiming to “change individuals and society for the better” isn’t going to invoke that kind of tension. Instead, it suggests some of the dreary issue-based theatre I’ve diligently sat through — the kind of play that knows what a good person would think, and is enjoyed by audiences made up of the self-identifying good. You come in agreeing and you leave agreeing, and actually, nothing is transformed.

The “useful” approach to art is the shortest way to hollow it of any purpose at all. If you’re trying to “energise your life” (another Fletcher chapter title, Lord help me) you should probably have a spoonful of peanut butter, and not — as he prescribes — read Frankenstein, which is a novel and an achingly tragic one, rather than a self-help tract. If you want to uplift the state of the nation, don’t watch a play, go into politics.

But if you want to read a novel or watch a play, you should do it for pleasure. It should feel like a luxury, rather than an obligation. It should be something that you invite to occupy your attention on its own terms, rather than conditional on its ability to fix you up — and if it doesn’t occupy your attention, you can bail at the interval or after the first fifty pages. Perhaps art will improve you as a person. But if it can’t entertain you, I don’t see why you should give it the chance.

Back in August 1592 plague had broken out in London and, fearing that plays might be super-spreader events, the city closed its playhouses, keeping them shut for two years.  It was not the first time: thirty years earlier, in 1564, the Lord Mayor had worried that “the great and frequent confluences, congregations and assemblies of great numbers and multitudes of people pressed together in small rooms” was a key factor in the spread of disease. The Bishop of London, Edmund Grindal, wrote the same year that “there is no one thing” that “is more like to have renewed this contagion than the practice of an idle sort of people, common players, who now daily set up bills [adverts for performances], whereunto the youth resorteth excessively and there taketh infection”. As we all know, the authorities like to blame the young for spreading illness.

In times of disease, performances were often cancelled. “For the avoiding of Infection”, the Lord Mayor wrote in 1569, “all great resort, assembly, and concourse of people assembled and drawn together by reason of any plays, interludes or other shows should be forbidden”. Serious breakouts of plague, lasting several months, swept through London every few years between 1570 and 1583. But the theatre was never completely closed. By the end of this period, the Lord Mayor was writing, “one very great and dangerous inconvenience” was “the assembly of people to plays, to which do resort great multitudes of the basest sort of people, and many infected with sores running on them, which be otherwise perilous for contagion”.

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For almost ten years after 1583, plague outbreaks had been more manageable. The 1592-94 pestilence was therefore a shock both in its suddenness and in its duration, and theatre people were of course not immune. Margaret Brayne was amongst those who died in this vicious resurgence of the disease — a woman who had helped to finance, build and run at least one of the earliest London playhouses, the Theatre. She may also have helped her husband John to build the oldest Elizabethan playhouse that we know of, the Red Lion, the pair helping to invent theatre as an architectural space.

But plague presented opportunities for those willing and able to pursue them. These were the years that Simon Forman started to build a public reputation by working as both doctor and magician in plague-stricken London districts. Through these early years of fame, Forman established a distinctively early modern reputation that spanned medicine, psychology, astrology and necromancy. He would later become much consulted by ordinary and famous Londoners, becoming an early modern celebrity.

Likewise, other professionals used this year as an opportunity to grow their profiles. The book publisher Joan Broome printed a play in 1592 and explained to her readers in a preface that “Since the plays in Paul’s were dissolved, there are certain comedies come to my hands by change”. In other words: the playhouse on London’s St Paul’s Cathedral site has now been closed, and I am therefore publishing some of its plays. Here a professional woman responds to closure by treating it as a business opportunity. Play publication increased widely in these years, and is a key reason why these texts survive today: in some ways we have plague, and the consequent theatre closures, to thank for the development and our knowledge of the period’s drama. And though we don’t know when Shakespeare’s writing career began, these were the years in which that writing started to make itself known, both onstage and in print.

But other Londoners found themselves utterly without work — and there was no furlough scheme in the 16th century. In 1593 the London watermen, who made money ferrying people across the Thames, petitioned the government for the reopening of the Rose playhouse in Southwark. These men depended on the audiences for much of their income: a reminder that it is not just the hospitality and entertainment industries that suffer at a time like this, but all those who enable the public to get out and about.

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By Ed West

It’s worth remembering, here, that early modern playhouses were the product of an enormous rupture in society: the English Reformation. As Catholicism was cancelled, its religious spaces were confiscated by the state. Many of them became stages for a new kind of English theatre. The Theatre and the Curtain, for instance, were both built outside the London city walls in Shoreditch on former monastery land; in the city itself there was Blackfriars, whose name records the Dominican Order who used the venue before the Reformation. Closures, cancellation and societal shifts laid the groundwork for a dramatic revolution.

And in many ways early modern theatre companies were much better placed to respond to challenges than today’s. They were lighter on their feet, always touring, and in their early years only rarely took up a long-term residency in particular playing venues. This gave them enormous flexibility and meant that when a particular part of London or the country was affected by plague, the company could just go somewhere else.

Moreover, early modern performance took place outdoors. Even the large amphitheatre spaces, of which London’s modern Globe is a replica, did not have roofs, and though theatre historians have often explained this in terms of the natural lighting it provides — which allowed companies to avoid the expense of candles — this is also a very sensible ventilation system in a time of plague. We generally think of modern theatre as happening in buildings, but perhaps we need to embrace the rich tradition of outdoor performance as we explore theatre under Covid.

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The stage is set for theatre's rebirth

By Barney Norris

Early modern actors also had a rehearsal and performance schedule that would make most modern practitioners panic. Whereas today’s theatres often stage a single play for months at a time, early modern theatre companies constantly rotated their offering, sometimes putting on as many as ten different plays in a single fortnight. They were able to do this because they thought of both rehearsal and performance in terms very different from the dominant model in contemporary Anglo-American theatre today. Rehearsals were often about agreeing who would be onstage when, where people would stand, leaving the finer details — often considered to be the very stuff of rehearsal nowadays — to be worked out during the show itself. This means that early modern drama was much more amenable to improvisation and much less centred on text than the theatre we know.

One of the reasons that theatres will find it difficult to reopen under Covid is that rehearsal periods take place across several weeks, requiring a company to finance periods of rehearsal for a show that may never get to open. The planning time is itself now the problem; taking inspiration from the early modern precedent may be a way out of this impasse. Outdoor playing, innovation and more improvisation would make public entertainment more viable as we enter our second year of living with Covid. Fluidity and change have always been core parts of theatre’s business model. After all, the industry took shape at a time of plague.

The point is to be there, to see drama erupt in front of you, to feel whatever you feel — bored, irritated, hysterical, awed — because of what real, quick-pulsed, accident-prone people are doing in same room as you. This is why recorded or even streamed theatre has never seemed enticing to me. Why watch something on a screen that can only be a flattened version of the living play?

Then, the last time I went to the theatre — between the lockdowns, to see a revival of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal at the Theatre Royal in Bath — it felt like a performance of a different sort. The temperature gun at the entrance. The nervous milling to avoid breaching social distancing. The smothering muzzle of my own warm breath trapped under a mask (which, as much as I accept the necessity, I’m never going to find pleasant). The emptiness of the place, with seats deliberately unbooked so we were all well-spaced.

As happy as I was to be back, it was inevitably strange. And the strangeness leaches from the audience to the stage. The audience, self-conscious about the whole business of being an audience, can’t play its part quite the way we should. There’s a bristle of tension in the room, but only partly directed at the business on-stage: however fraught the three-hander of adultery and deception is, it’s now in competition with the persistent worry that just being here might kill you. Up in the balcony, we fluffed a couple of our cues, coming in too late with the laughs the actors had earned, taking too long to share the ripple of emotion through our socially distanced seats.

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The tragedy of Britney Spears

By Sarah ditum

Can theatre come back from Covid? Early on in lockdown, an acquaintance who works in theatre described his business — with surprising sanguinity — as doomed, given that it subsists on “old people sitting together in the dark”. The average age of a theatregoer is 52. The largest group is those aged 65-74. From a coronavirus point of view, it could only really be worse if the theatre held special sway with profound asthmatics. Then, to make your margins, you take that audience and stack it elbow-to-elbow, except you can’t do that anymore, so you find ways to eke those margins out.

That, presumably, is why the Theatre Royal chose its reopening season, which it billed as a run of “modern classics”. Betrayal, Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, David Mamet’s Oleanna: all plays with recognisable names and bankable writers, but also, all plays with tiny casts and simple staging to keep costs down. Then the second lockdown came before Copenhagen could begin. As December looms, theatres are looking at missing out on the financially critical panto season. Many expect never to open again.

And this is, arguably, not such a tragedy. In May, Igor Toronyi-Lalic of the Spectator made lots of theatre people very angry by suggesting that theatre closures could be an opportunity for a sclerotic industry to revive itself. “The idea that institutions set up 50 years ago, sometimes 100 years ago, sometimes 300 years ago, are inevitably the ones that will make sense of the future is something that must at least be debated,” he wrote, and the logic is hard to dismiss.

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The stage is set for theatre's rebirth

By barney norris

Theatres struggle on in august buildings that are barely fit for purpose and often impossible to renovate because of their listed status. Their seats are uncomfy (a million curses on the stalls at the National Theatre), their loos inadequate, particularly for women (if you ever go to the Bristol Hippodrome, I recommend going nil by mouth for the day before). All the glorious history of these places can’t disguise the fact that a lot of them have something of the white elephant about them.

Then there’s the puzzle of theatre’s culture. Audiences aren’t only disproportionately old, they’re also disproportionately white (92%, as opposed to 87% of the population overall, although this is also connected to the age of the audiences and the fact that BAME Britons skew younger). This tends to bother the people who make theatre, who are nearly all of the left and feel a moral responsibility for their art to be inclusive. The punishment for perceived failure can be sharp, yet the audience continues to be ageing and white. “Inclusivity” seems, perversely, to function more as a code word marking the theatre insiders than as a principle towards which concrete advances are made.

(A possible example: a few years ago, I went to see a play about commercial surrogacy. Anyone watching might have congratulated themselves on the fact that it had a multi-ethnic cast and posed troubling questions about privilege; but it centred on a white main character agonising about her whiteness, and the audience seemed to be mostly white people similarly experiencing feelings about being white. You could say it was formally inclusive while being dramatically exclusive. It was also quite boring.)

In terms of audience recruitment, theatre should have a great advantage, which is that most of the population will attend at least once in the course of their education. But it’s not enough to get people through the door — theatre has to win them over as well. When the National put on Macbeth recently, it sold well (thanks to Macbeth being a GCSE set text) but reviewed badly: Rufus Norris, artistic director of the National, explained that this was because although the play works best in intimate theatres, it needed to be accessible to the largest possible audience given the school crowds. So they put Macbeth on the biggest stage, and it felt bloated and remote rather than claustrophobic and doomed. If that’s your first taste, why would you go back for more?

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China's modern genocide

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The demands on theatre can feel impossible. Be modern — while being constrained to ancient, inconvenient building. Be relevant to the nation at large — without alienating your existing audience, who after all are all you can rely on. Be accessible — although you can never be cheap, because a live show always comes at a certain cost, a certain risk. All this threatens to smother what theatre is: in the critic Kenneth Tynan’s words, “basically a means of spending two hours in the dark without being bored”. Perhaps a wave of creative destruction is exactly what’s needed.

Because while a bad play is a very sorry way to spend an evening, when good theatre happens, there’s nothing else like it. The audacity of every part — actors, stagehands, lighting, sound — coming together in front of your eyes. The thrill of knowing that your reactions are a part of the work that exists this night.

A revival of Peter Shaffer’s obscene Equus left me haunted by divine violence, dreaming about horses: what I’d watched had the power of not just drama but ritual. I think, often, of the terrible assembly of the crinoline around the Queen at the end of Robert Icke’s Mary Stuart, and how no other art form could have made that particular nightmare real. For more of that, I think I could learn how to be an audience again, even in these strange conditions.

A few weeks ago, for instance, the headlines told us that an episode of Fawlty Towers was being removed from circulation for its use of racist language. It was. But briefly and from only one platform, UKTV, during which time it remained freely available from Britbox, Netflix and iTunes. After a few days, it returned to UKTV, uncut and affixed with a brief warning about the script’s use of racial slurs that would be unquotable on this page. Predictably, the noise around the story prevented the discussion of the much more urgent and subtle question upon which it turned — how should broadcasters manage the consequences of our new and perhaps perverse expectation that the popular culture of five decades ago should be instantly and eternally accessible?

In the 1920s, movies that were more than six years old were customarily dumped in a bath of hydrogen peroxide, melted down with other plastic trash — gap-toothed combs, discarded Xylonite dentures — and recycled as waterproof paint. Now we confer immortality on every moving image, and expect it to be preserved, archived and streaming on our phones. Our grandparents were never made uneasy by the culture of the past: they’d already forgotten it. We, however, have abolished cultural amnesia. Puzzling out that paradox, however, takes more journalistic effort than cutting and pasting one of John Cleese’s angry tweets.

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Enough with the crazy talk, Eamonn Holmes

By Matthew Sweet

This week, though, British comedy provided the field for a much more interesting and enjoyable battle — one that might even suggest a way of resolving these skirmishes. On Monday, Oliver Dowden, the culture secretary with the Rank Charm School manners, provided a deus ex machina ending for a drama that had been rumbling since the moment, a fortnight previously, when a widely-anticipated rescue package for the arts sector failed to appear. The empty space was filled with energetic campaigning by playwrights, directors and actors, worried by the not-unreasonable suspicion that Boris Johnson was about to do to the theatres what Margaret Thatcher did to the mines.

But on Monday morning, Dowden waved his magic wand and promised the imminent arrival of £1.57 billion — some of it in actual money. Then the examination of the detail began. In his round of media interviews, Dowden was asked if the Christmas pantomime season might yet be saved. His answer was a rueful one. It looked difficult, thanks to the epidemiological challenge posed by a noisy inter-generational entertainment involving shouting, singing, and the violent agitation of soap bubbles and wallpaper paste.

It was a realistic answer and it made me sad. It also made the European arts correspondent of the New York Times sad. But not for the same reason. Matt Anderson was disgusted. He tweeted his disgust in block capitals, which made him seem even angrier than John Cleese. And when others pointed out to him that the financial stability of many British theatres was guaranteed by a successful pantomime season, he went the full Abanazar. “If that’s the most important art form for the health of the sector,” he declared, “there’s something wrong with the system.” He might as well have said it under a green light and then flounced off with a peal of diabolical laughter. Theatrical Twitter raised its handbag to its chest and told him that his snobbery was showing.

I may have hissed a little myself. Pantomime produces no disgust in me. It gives me a delicious form of historical vertigo. When I watch a pair of comics perform the wallpaper routine, or the plate-smashing sketch, or some business in a dark forest with a luminous ghost, I know I am in touch with the deep history of British culture; that I’m watching choreography and gags that were first worked out over a century ago. It also makes me part of an audience that is being sounded out on the length of its cultural memory. At the Manchester Opera House in 1992 I saw the celebrated dame Gordon Peters manoeuvre 2,000 people into hooting out the second line of You Made Me Love You — a song from 1913. (“I didn’t want to do it!” they chorused, as if Pavlov had conditioned them.) I’ve also seen those echoes fail: at the Catford Broadway in 2008, I was the only person in the stalls who knew that “Hi-de-Hi” should always be followed by “Ho-de-ho!”

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By Barney Norris

Pantomime emerged from the Harlequinade, an Anglicised 18th-century version of the Italian commedia dell’arte. Thanks to the 1737 Licensing Act, which permitted only the two Royal Theatres, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, to feature plays with dialogue, the Harlequinade concentrated on song and wordless slapstick — executed most effectively by its Clown character, a figure of misrule who sat on babies, prodded people with red hot pokers, and sometimes abseiled up the set on a rope of sausages.

In 1843, the Theatre Regulation Act changed the rules on stage dialogue, triggering the mutation of the form. The silent clowns of the Harlequinade remained silent, but their show underwent a fusion with another popular theatrical genre — the “extravaganza”, in which myths and fairy tales were used as a frame for satirical, pun-filled comedy. Even if the story was set in Ancient Greece or medieval England, a steam train or an omnibus might move anachronistically over the stage — which explains why Widow Twankey’s laundry in Old Peking is always equipped with coin-operated washing machines. The airlock between these two styles was provided by an event that also remains a feature of modern pantomime — the transformation scene, in which, for instance, the pumpkin becomes a coach, or a magic lamp is spotted in a cave full of jewels.

These developments have produced a theatrical form of impressive sophistication and complexity. Pantomime smashes the fourth wall, bends time, space and gender, combines acrobatics, physical comedy and satire on local and national subjects. In 1993, the film director Lindsay Anderson went to the Bath Theatre Royal to see his old friend Robin Askwith, who had played one of those Maoist schoolboy revolutionaries in If…. (1968). The show was Dick Whittington. Askwith’s co-stars were June Brown from EastEnders, Ian Botham and a pair of magicians called Richard and Lara Jarmain. Anderson’s verdict: “Very Brechtian.”

And if you scoff at the idea of the British intellectual in the panto audience, this too is part of the tradition. In 1874, John Ruskin went five times to see Cinderella at Hengler’s Circus, and then to Drury Lane to catch Jack in a Box; or Harlequin Little Tom Tucker and the Three Men of Gotham who went to Sea in a Bowl. In this production, a princess disguised as Bo Peep led a flock of mechanical sheep across the stage and then caused a forest of magic mushrooms to rise up:

You see at present everywhere among us,
A mushroom, popularly called a fungus.
I do but strike my crutch and with this plunge, I
Reveal the funny figures of the Fungi.

Ruskin went straight from the theatre to write an essay contrasting the child actors who skipped through the fairyland of the Drury Lane stage and their hungry equivalents on the streets of Covent Garden. He imagined England itself subject to a transformation scene, in which its street children occupied their own Drury Lane pastoral, instead of “rolling on the heaps of black and slimy ground, mixed with brickbats and broken plates and bottles”.

The man from New York Times endured this week’s boos and hisses with grace. I hope, however, he paid no heed to the little knot of culture warriors who imagined that a political motive explained his lack of enthusiasm for watching veteran comics and X-Factor runners-up throw custard pies at each other. “People like him don’t want to be deeply connected to our history,” one insisted. “They prefer to rewrite it.”

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By Matthew Sweet

It’s an odd charge. Rewriting history is what historians do for a living. It’s also why pantomime is still here, using 16th-century Italian performance style and stories from the Brothers Grimm and the Arabian Nights to produce topical entertainment that has always enjoyed the freedom to jettison any elements that fall from favour. (Blackface and yellowface vanished along with gags about Mafeking and ration books; the dame and the ghosts remain.) Its history usually defies those who accuse it of abandoning its traditions. Critics who complained that Julian Clary was too rude for Snow White at the Palladium probably didn’t know about all the cock puns in the Drury Lane panto seen by Ruskin in 1873. Those who grumbled about Frank Bruno’s presence at the top of 1990s panto bills had, I suspect, never heard of Daniel Mendoza, the celebrity bare-knuckle boxer who appeared in Aladdin at Covent Garden in 1778.

But why would they? Unlike sit-coms set in the aspic of UKTV, pantomime is mutable, agile, and always renegotiating its relationship with the present day. At the 2019 panto at the Palladium, Nigel Havers got the biggest laugh of the night by climbing out of a bear suit and declaring: “If Prince Andrew is in tonight … THIS is sweat.” At the 2016 Sleeping Beauty at the Hackney Empire, Gavin Spokes’s Dame Nanny Nora trolled on stage in a frock divided between the EU flag and the Union Jack and declared: “I like a bit of both.” In the 2018 Aladdin at the Catford Broadway, as Theresa May suffered another Brexit deal defeat in Parliament, Wayne Rollins’ Abanazar declared: “I will rub this magic lamp and plunge the country into chaos!” Then he paused. “On second thoughts…”

Everyone got it. And the audience, in that moment, seemed a lot less divided than the country.

Within a few years of even the most successful show in the world opening, only traces of that show will be left behind, and the best record of what made it extraordinary will only exist in people’s memories. A playtext might be published, leaving a record of what was said, and the production might transfer and run in the West End for a while, but it will always close eventually. Revivals will happen, new versions for new times, and the creatives who were part of the first productions will go on and do other things, but they’re rarely, if ever, seen together again.

Imagine a world where bands only ever played their latest albums, and all previous albums could only be heard on bootleg live recordings, no one could ever hear the real thing again. That’s the theatre.

Bearing this in mind, you can understand the elation of many when it was announced on St George’s Day that Ian Rickson was going to direct Mark Rylance in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem again next year, over a decade after they first told that story together. For a great number of theatregoers, Jerusalem ranks as the most extraordinary night they’ve spent in a theatre, Rylance’s towering, Eric Cantona-like portrayal of the lead character, Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron, the most compelling thing they’ve witnessed.

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These kinds of shows rarely come round again. The key creatives are too busy, with too many projects and calls on their time, and they’ve done the thing, anyway — they’re happy to move on. But Rylance and Rickson are going to revisit their greatest work, while still at the peak of their powers, after a decade when everything and nothing seems to have changed in England. It’s a truly amazing opportunity for audiences to experience something many of us thought was gone.

Jerusalem tells the story of a man about to be evicted from his caravan in a Wiltshire wood by the Kennet and Avon council. It’s about people living on the wild edges of society, and people who’ve fallen into the meat grinder of precarious rural life. It’s about the lure of the lawless, the country’s rebel spirit. It’s about England, in an ambitious way that few writers attempt and even fewer avoid embarrassing themselves in the course of attempting. But Butterworth did it triumphantly. Very few theatremakers living now will ever produce anything as good as this show was in its first production.

There’s a bit of the Tyson Furys about the play. Fury, widely thought to be the world’s best heavyweight boxer, is principally interesting to me because, like the folk singer John Martyn, he shows us that talent, like love, doesn’t always behave well, but lands wherever it falls instead, indiscriminate as lightning or Covid-19. It’s the idea Peter Shaffer explored in Amadeus — that genius is not necessarily accompanied by refinement, modesty, self-awareness, common sense. Genius just happens — sometimes to a boxer in a Bolton gym, sometimes to a folk singer with heroin and alcohol dependency issues, sometimes to a sex-crazed Austrian man-child. And sometimes it emerges in a play that seems to celebrate troubling things (one major plotline in Jerusalem centres on the whereabouts of the local May queen, who has gone missing on the day the new May queen should be crowned).

I had my own reservations about Jerusalem after I first saw it a decade ago. Growing up in Wiltshire, where the play is set, I and many others felt that Butterworth’s high octane, technicolour version of our world seemed in part like an effacement of our reality, which really had more in common with the work of Shane Meadows than the world of this play.

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Jerusalem didn’t set out to represent our reality, of course — with its comedy vicar and Morris dancing, the play is more reminiscent of Alan Bennett or Martin McDonagh’s subversion of theatrical tropes in plays such as Habeas Corpus or The Beauty Queen of Leenane, its real references are in the theatre more than they’re in the real world. However, in a culture that paid no attention whatsoever to the world we came from, to feel that the one story set among us didn’t quite tell us right was a strange thing.

People who contributed to workshops during the play’s development have told me that the man they think Rooster is based on used to hang around the gates of a Wiltshire school, causing parents to drive in at the end of the day and collect their kids rather than letting them walk home, and ended up going to prison for several years for offences which were not entirely unrelated to this behaviour. To some, the play also effaces the impact of what he did. But this brings me back to Tyson Fury — Butterworth wasn’t trying to respectfully chronicle a Wiltshire community. He was writing about England’s rebel heart, asserting that the centre of our identity is actually to be found at the margins, in the woods, like Robin Hood.

Michael Billington has written of Jerusalem as a year zero for a golden period in contemporary British playwriting — so how will the play look to us, as it returns to an English theatre scene it so electrified once before? I think its darker themes will seem more prominent than they originally did. The MeToo movement and Jimmy Savile will make the unsettling story of the May Queen at the heart of the play ring out very clear indeed, and I wonder if that will turn the play into more of a challenge, a provocation to those who see it and enjoy it — a way of asking what exactly it is that they enjoy.

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Perhaps the play will even seem like an exploration of the darkness and deformity at the heart of England, in the tradition of the late, great Irish writer William Trevor’s novels, like the Whitbread Prize-winning Felicia’s Journey, which laid bare the rottenness that ran through so much of English life long before we’d heard the whole truth about Savile. I also think the play could seem sadder as well.

The hope glimpsed at the end of the play, that one day on this benighted island someone might find Drake’s drum, begin to beat it, and rescue us from the state we’re in, seems to me to have been more or less extinguished by a decade of austerity, a realisation of the climate crisis and the arrival of the coronavirus. Jerusalem might seem now like a story about people who, if they were in our capital, would all live in places like Grenfell Tower, and a man who hasn’t woken up yet to the hopelessness of that predicament, who is still left beating the same old drum.

What Jerusalem will show us above all is the England that is under threat. Here we all are, being obedient and doing what the state says, remaining indoors and preparing to accept unprecedented surveillance into our lives, as the price, poignantly enough, for our liberty.

Jerusalem seems to me like a howl in the face of that: an insistence that there are parts of us all, the part we recognise in Rooster Byron, that still can’t be policed. We’re going to need to work out how to protect and cultivate that aspect of ourselves, as we adapt to this new normal. Returning to Butterworth’s great play will afford us an opportunity to think about that.

How the sector comes back will be determined in large part by the policy government takes towards restarting the economy. A serious programme of investment to stimulate the UK out of recession will prompt a dynamic response from the theatre: it’s one of the sectors where the UK leads the world, full of brilliant people who can be relied on to respond to energy from government with energy of their own. The alternative route, saving our way out of debt, will create a slower, more cautious environment. Whatever happens, though, the sector is going to be worse off.

Senior figures at the Arts Council have publicly acknowledged that some organisations will go to the wall. Indeed, this has already started: Square Chapel Arts Centre in Halifax went into administration a week after closing its doors. Some of the diversification that’s taken place across the sector in the past decade, resulting in a proliferation of excellent theatre venues each with a distinct artistic identity, could be undone, as quality is concentrated into a smaller number of organisations still able to pay top rate and pull a crowd. These theatres will continue to make great work seeking to interrogate the world we’re living in with the same fierce purpose that’s characterised the industry for so long.

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But of course, other producers will respond by cutting corners and cutting staff, paying less and playing things safer. The nature of ‘playing it safe’ may be unexpected, though. You’d assume a steady diet of revivals led by sit-com stars, but rather than a conservatism of tone, we could see a conservatism of scale, catering for smaller audiences. Some theatres may also seek to safeguard their futures and demonstrate their relevance by redoubling their commitment to their local communities, acting as social hubs where our atomised country can reconnect. A theatre is a place where workshops happen as well as plays, and it may be that an increased emphasis on this is welcomed by people looking for places to process what they’ve been through.

The West End and large-scale touring theatres could face major challenges. Even before the coronavirus, touring theatre in the UK was reaching a critical point, with productions having to be pulled due to lack of sales. If audiences are cautious about coming back to the theatre, this, allied with an inevitable fall in the international tourist trade, will make the books much harder to balance. This may mean we end up with white elephants around the country — large theatres that can’t find shows to keep them open.

This would hit many regional theatres reliant on touring, but there may be ways in which regional communities also benefit from this crisis. Artists who’ve sacrificed quality of life in order to live in flats or rooms too small for their needs in the major cities where there’s work may choose to review whether they’re doing the right thing; many more will be forced to, as scarcity of work drives them to cheaper postcodes. If that happens, it will impoverish the cities those artists leave, but it will make the places the artists move to livelier. Creative people make things, and investment and subsidy do follow, even if they sometimes take a while. There may be towns that catch fire as a result of this crisis.

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The industry will have questions and concerns. The theatre has been doing great work in trying to broaden the range of voices we hear from, and represent the whole of society on its stages. It will take careful, targeted investment to ensure this remains at the top of the agenda. The better heeled will inevitably come through this stronger, and underrepresented groups seeking to overcome socioeconomic imbalances in order to be heard will need additional support.

Many artists, and indeed the Arts Council, may also wish to reflect on the fact that when the music stopped, it became clear that what arts subsidy principally really funds in the UK is buildings and administrators; almost all the people who were suddenly destitute were artists, and almost all the people who still had a means of paying the rent worked in the production offices. The current emergency may draw more attention to Art Council’s efforts to find ways of funding artists more directly.

This is a vulnerable moment for an industry in which the UK is the envy of the world. The theatre is going to need to restate its value as we face straitened times, because the subsidy model all the great art and revenue generation of the past 70 years is built on is a recent invention, and could easily ebb. It’s heartening to see MPs and peers lobbying on behalf of the creative industries, with calls for a forum to explore specific government interventions on behalf of the sector; it is to be hoped that these calls have the desired effect, because the theatre, like every other creative industry, is going to need support.

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What the theatre will need above all, though, is an audience which recognises that shared experience lifts us up out of loneliness and makes our lives more than they can be on their own. In that respect, this is a once in a generation opportunity for the theatre to truly matter: to provide a traumatised nation with exactly what we need. The theatre is a space where one person listens to another. That’s all it really is. The rest is windowdressing, sometimes even profiteering.

John Heilpern’s book Conference of the Birds, following the director Peter Brook across Africa as he developed his show of the same name, shows us that many of the trappings of the professional theatre are additional and separate to the central act. The return of live theatre, whenever it comes, could be an opportunity to set some of those trappings aside, and take a central role in reconnecting the world.

But I’m going to let you into secret. Part of the thrill is annoying people. Let me put it this way: if you don’t enjoy the idea of people reading your paper and spluttering with indignation, you’re in the wrong job. A newspaper that doesn’t challenge its readers — that simply reflects their views — is not only going to be soporific. It’s also betraying the very idea of a free press.

In which context, let me introduce you to Alistair Smith, the editor of The Stage.

On Friday and Monday, Mr Smith published two pieces from freelance writers on either side of a debate about the Old Vic theatre’s loos. Within minutes of the pieces appearing on The Stage’s site, they were removed. When you find out why, you learn much about the state of public debate and modern issues of free speech.

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As it happens, a year or so ago I was sitting in the stalls of the Old Vic with my wife. Sitting next to her was Sir Tom Stoppard. After the interval, my wife made it back to her seat with just seconds to spare. Sir Tom turned to her, looked at her knowingly, and said words to the effect of: “Aren’t the women’s toilets here a disgrace?” So I was aware before this week’s controversy that there was an issue.

Last week, the theatre announced that it had dealt with the problem. Its solution, however, was to remove the male and female signs and replace them with gender-neutral cubicles and separate urinals. It will now be up to individuals which they use. After a crowd-funded refurbishment, there are now 44 lavatories; previously there were 22. Of the 44, 26 are sit-down loos and 18 urinals.

The Old Vic doubtless considers it has taken a thoughtful step in the battle against discrimination against trans and non-binary people. In reality, it has made things worse for women. Biological women cannot — do I really need to point this out? — use a urinal. But biological men can use a cubicle. So there are only 26 toilets for biological women — and they need to mingle alongside the men (let me be delicate here) preparing to use the urinals.

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But the issue I bring to your attention isn’t the rights and wrongs of the Old Vic’s new toilet policy. It is how The Stage has chosen to cover it.

The Stage commissioned one piece arguing in favour of the Old Vic’s move and another, by the writer Sarah Ditum, opposing it. Her article was headlined: “A theatre with inadequate women’s toilets is a theatre that doesn’t care about women.”

You can read the piece on her website, because it is no longer on The Stage’s. Mr Smith removed both articles, according to a statement by the newspaper, because it had received “strong responses” from readers that in posting two pieces putting different views the paper had “only polarised the debate further”. But Ditum’s is a mild and rational piece, with not a word of criticism, stated or implied, of trans and non-binary toilet users. It is about the needs of biological women.

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It is difficult to overstate the spinelessness of Mr Smith’s decision. This was not a debate about the rights and wrongs of, for example, incest or compulsory euthanasia at the age of 60, where one side of the argument is, one might say, controversial. It was a piece about lavatories for women.

In reality, the issue is not even about those facilities. It is about the visceral hatred and abuse that pours forth from some of the more vocal trans activists when anyone dares to question whether there is a difference between sex and gender, the former being biological and the latter, perhaps, a social and cultural construct. And how those in positions of influence — such as editors — react to that noise.

When Ms Ditum’s piece appeared on The Stage, it was met with the usual abuse that any discussion of these always receives (this piece will, too). She was attacked as “anti-trans” and “transphobic”.

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According to the paper: “We have received strong responses from our readers against both articles. We recognise this was an error on our part and would like to apologise. As a result, we have decided to remove both articles from the website.”

Dear God. What is the point of a newspaper if not to prompt strong responses? An editor afraid to publish an article that some people disagree with is an editor who, surely, should be questioning what he or she is doing in the job.
But cowardice is the least of the problems. Because if editors, who decide what does and does not go into a publication, make that decision on the basis of who shouts the loudest, we really are in trouble.

And as Ms Ditum has said of what happened to her piece: “The Stage pulled it (and the companion piece) in response to complaints about me, without forewarning me, thereby giving credence to false accusations against me — but more importantly, denying coverage to a fundamental matter of women’s access to public space. The editor has told me he had no issue with any part of my piece and apologised, but this in no way compensates for the gross editorial cowardice on display.”

The Stage and its editor have now, entirely as a result of their own behaviour, become a symbol of the wider problem of how modern mores dictate that certain arguments may not be made, certain groups may not be offended, and certain issues not raised. And we all worse off for it.

Anyhow – I relate this conversation because of what my acquaintance said next. “The problem is, Douglas,” he replied, “the theatre is not the theatre.” This is the sort of thing that catches the attention.

“So what is it then?” I asked back.

“It thinks that it is a think tank,” he said. An insight that very much made my evening.

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Once you realise this, you can see why so many theatre people are involved in rather histrionic forms of politics (see Vanessa Redgrave, Mark Rylance et al). If you believe that you possess exceptionally important insights into political affairs, then it is possible that being restricted to a short run at a small and unpacked theatre may frustrate you. You may even come to ruminate that the medium through which you have chosen to communicate with the world is not the perfect medium for the transmission of political ideas.

It got me thinking about what else might be said to fall into a similar category — to consider which sectors are not doing what people on the outside think they are doing. I could reel off a long list of such institutions, but foremost among them is the publishing world.

It is perhaps inevitable that people see trends most clearly in sectors that they know. It is for that reason, among others, that I was not surprised to read that Professor James Flynn’s new book on free speech has been cancelled.

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Those interested in the full story can find Flynn’s own account published by the excellent Quillette. But the nuts and bolts are that Flynn had written what sounds like a rigorously scholarly work called In Defense of Free Speech: The University as Censor and Emerald Press had scheduled it for publication in its September 2019 catalogue.

There the publishers had said:

“In Defense of Free Speech surveys the underlying factors that circumscribe the ideas tolerated in our institutions of learning. James Flynn critically examines the way universities censor their teaching, how student activism tends to censor the opposing side and how academics censor themselves, and suggests that few, if any, universities can truly be seen as ‘good’.”

But, then, in June Professor Flynn received an email from his publisher saying that they were regretfully no longer able to publish his work.

“Emerald believes that its publication, in particular in the United Kingdom, would raise serious concerns. By the nature of its subject matter, the work addresses sensitive topics of race, religion, and gender. The challenging manner in which you handle these topics as author, particularly at the beginning of the work, whilst no doubt editorially powerful, increases the sensitivity and the risk of reaction and legal challenge.”

Emerald then gives two main reasons for refusing to publish the manuscript. First, that the work “could be seen to incite racial hatred and stir up religious hatred under United Kingdom law”. Though keen to stress that they were aware that there was no such intent on the part of the author, the publisher did add that because of “modern means of digital media expression…The potential for circulation of the more controversial passages of the manuscript online, without the wider intellectual context of the work as a whole and to a very broad audience — in a manner beyond our control —represents a material legal risk for Emerald.”

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That is an extraordinary thing in itself. For it is true that the online world can pick up a piece of anything and make it into a worldwide social media storm. But the simple job of all grown-ups — let alone grown-ups who believe in free speech — in such a situation is not to bow to the storm, but to say, “So what?”

Emerald had another justification at hand.

“Secondly, there are many instances in the manuscript where the actions, conversations and behaviour of identifiable individuals at specific named colleges are discussed in detail and at length in relation to controversial events. Given the sensitivity of the issues involved, there is both the potential for serious harm to Emerald’s reputation and the significant possibility of legal action.”

The only possible interpretation of these words is that in recounting the outrages at various colleges and universities in recent years (such as the assault and hospitalisation of Professor Allison Stanger at Middlebury College in 2017), some of the authorities who had culpability for such actions might have been named. And some of them might have minded being named. And some of them may have sued.

This is familiar terrain. In 2006, the book Alms for Jihad by Millard Burr and Robert O Collins was published in America but not in the UK; it was believed that Britain’s libel laws would make it possible for at least one of the wealthy individuals named in the book as having provided material support for terrorism to sue. That may have been a legitimate fear then (since the slight reform of the libel laws in Britain it is a slightly less serious fear today). And it may be an illegitimate fear now (just how many millions will an American academic be willing to burn in the UK courts to deny something that is true?). But it is also a pusillanimous decision and one which any publisher should be ashamed of themselves for conceding, let alone kow-towing to.

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But that returns me to the point I started off at. Which is that what Emerald’s weaselly communication actually offers is a weaselly reminder that to a great extent the publishing industry has stopped being a place for the fair and free exchange of ideas. It has instead, in significant part, become a body which believes that its job is in some way to hold the line on what is acceptable discussion and what is not.

If that line were put around, say, Holocaust denial materials (as it is) then that may be all well and good. But in recent years much of the publishing industry in countries such as the UK, US and Australia has seen fit to attempt to anathematise views which are held by large swathes – even majorities – in the general public.

I happen to be fortunate enough to be published by a publisher (Bloomsbury Continuum) which is most certainly not subject to such censorship or self-censorship. Indeed Bloomsbury publishes writers ranging from me to Laurie Penny, who could not in any way be described as bedfellows. Which is as it should be. But in the publishing industry this is no longer the norm.

When my book, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, was published in 2017, I heard from a very wide range of people in the publishing business. One of the most telling (but not unusual) tales came from someone who worked at one of the other major publishing houses. This person asked their boss whether he had seen how well The Strange Death of Europe had been selling. Yes, he conceded that he had noticed. And did he remember this person mentioning to him some time before that they really should have published something on the immigration question? Yes, the boss conceded. But they still wouldn’t do so. Why, he was asked, since the profits were obviously there? “Because we,” he stressed, “wouldn’t want those readers.”

I suggested that this person tell their boss to inform their shareholders at the next shareholder meeting that they were not, in fact, running a ‘for-profit’ organisation but rather some sort of NGO which aimed to police the borders of the culture.

That is not the case with all publishers, thank goodness. But it is the case with some. And Professor Flynn seems to have had the misfortune to have been made vulnerable to one. May he be successful in finding another publisher who wishes to live up to that tradition of true dissent and dispute which is one of the finest traditions of all.