The Roman Tragedies - The Illusion of Participation

The Roman Tragedies

This photo is unusual for a theatre blog - I took it myself.  In Ivo van Hove's production of The Roman Tragedies, many of the rules about theatre and spectatorship seem to be thrown out of the window.  You can take photos.  You can tweet about the show as it unfolds through its six-hour span, and the tweets are flashed across the stage during set changes.  You can move between seats, and onto the stage, where you sit in close proximity to the actors.  You watch the performance both live (at various distances) and on live filmed relays, both on the large screen above the stage and on the many TV monitors around the space (including, if you like, in the foyers).  Given that the Shakespeare text is spoken in a contemporary, prosaic Dutch, an eye on the screen is essential as that's also where the subtitles are.  In one of the most thrilling scenes, Hans Kesting  as Mark Antony delivered his eulogy to Caesar very close to me, and once or twice locked eyes with me (the spectator as crowd member) - but I also had to keep looking away from him to the broadcast version, so as to check what he was actually saying (the spectator as receiver of the mediated).  You can buy food and drink on stage, and eat it during the show.  You can check out the make-up area, where the performers are prepared to go on camera.  There's an info desk about the company's work, from where the set changes are announced, complete with musak.

The Roman Tragedies - the onstage make-up area.

It could all be incredibly gimmicky, I suppose - and it is certainly fun - but it seems to me that this is much more than an experiment with audience participation.  And that the participation is not actually participatory at all.  I saw the production when it first came to the Barbican in 2009, and then I wrote that "there's an element of real democracy about the whole thing. It raises endless questions about theatre and politics - not least whether politics might be turning into nothing but performance."   Reading that blog today, it feels like a memory of a more innocent time, as well as recognising the production as prophetic.  In its current manifestation, the production opens with the Trump inauguration being broadcast on TV, while Volumnia and Virgilia discuss the absent Martius, their private conversation also being broadcast.  There seems to be no boundary between the public and the private.

The Roman Tragedies - spectators and TVs

On one level, this reflects our current "politics as show-biz" - the desire to feel intimate with public figures, to be aware of their private lives, to have them live out those lives as a public display (Antony and Cleopatra is particularly strong in this way).  On another level, it suggests the privatisation of public space - the way in which reckless magnates like Trump, Farage and (the most immediate example) George Osborne have come to treat politics as just another part of their self-aggrandising, self-enriching projects.  And this is crucial to the way the performance works - or, at least, it felt so in the charged atmosphere of 2017, far more so than it had in 2009.  Because the apparent agency this production gives to the audience is not agency at all: we remain as passive recipients of the play.  If, as I said in 2009, the production is "democratic" (and at heart I believe theatre to be a fundamentally democratic form), then it is through the exposure of what is so profoundly undemocratic in the current moment.  We have ceased to be participants, and become mere consumers.

Van Hove cuts all the scenes where Shakespeare has the common people speak.  The actors address the audience as "Friends, Romans, countrymen" - partly live but more tellingly through the medium of broadcast.  We feel as if we could be part of the story, as if our role contains the potential for action - but in fact we spectate.  The performance provides us with basic needs - we can work out when to take a loo break and the food is pretty good.  But we retain our role as spectators even as we are offered the illusion of participation.  For the last section of the performance, we are ordered back to our original seats, facing the conventional proscenium stage in a conventional hierarchical relationship - and of course, we unquestioningly obey.  Even the final ovation, leaping to our feet as one, is somehow disturbing in this most uneasy of performances.

In June 2016, the people of Britain responded to a marketing campaign based on lies, misinformation and the manipulation of prejudice, conveyed through broadcast and social media.  This led to the shocking referendum result, which has since been exploited as an expression of "the will of the people" to chilling effect - the Brexit process is being rushed through without consultation or democratic process.  Trump's antics are only an Americanised manifestation of the same basic thing.  Last week I was grateful to the Dutch for an election that stemmed the tide of populism, and for a piece of theatre that clarified just what is going on.

The beneficence of Google

So - Google has offered £130m to the Chancellor as a token of the tax it owes.  This cosy deal has, rightly, been met with a great deal of scepticism.  An expert at the University of Essex, Prof. Prem Sikka, has estimated that the amount owed is in fact closer to £1.6bn.  But, if you are a huge corporation, it seems that you are taxed on the basis of what you decide to pay, rather than at a rate set by the state.

The response has generally been to say that the deal is absurd, and the amount preposterous.  £130m, people say, will make next to no difference to the deficit, and is a tiny drop in the ocean of government spending.  To pay tax at that level does not in any way reflect the presence that Google has in British society - where it makes 10% of its global revenues.  And yet - £130m is actually rather more than the size of the cut administered by the Chancellor to the Arts Council in 2010.  This was the horrific 30% moment, when the Arts Council's budget was slashed.

The effects of that cut have been immense.  For one thing, the Arts Council has cut administration back so far that it can barely administer grants any more.  The ability to take a genuine interest in the organisations receiving those grants, and to explore the work of those who have not yet received them, has dwindled.  But worse, the arts organisations themselves have been severely limited, and our cultural life has suffered.  I find the programming of the large organisations (except, oddly, the Royal Opera) to be much more conservative and bland than it was five years ago, and the possibility of developing new work or collaborating with communities outside "the mainstream" to be vanishing.  The emphasis in Arts Council application forms is more and more on financial viability and resilience, management and accounting processes - less and less on creativity, imagination, or even experience of making art.

In so far as this government has an arts policy, it is to encourage philanthropy - training arts organisations to solicit money from wealthy individuals.  Kind of like begging - but dressed up by consultants who tell you how to do it well, with champagne and canapés.  This is the American model - and in the States, where there is a well-developed tradition of charitable giving, many people regard such donations as being the equivalent of taxation.  Their donations afford them a tax break (the crucial element Osborne has missed out here), and they talk about their philanthropy as a form of tax that is better, because they are able to decide for themselves where it goes.

And that is the problem.  Everything which this government is doing is calculated to put even more power into the hands of the wealthy.  Why on earth should rich people decide what constitutes artistic quality, and have an exclusive power over the cultural life of a nation?  Isn't it obvious that the effect of this will be to concentrate what money is given into the high-profile large organisations with their development departments, and to push them to pander to the tastes of their funders, which tend to be more for "great art" presented in a traditional, often rather patriotic way, and less for anything that might dare to challenge.   If there were proper taxes - both on wealthier individuals, but more importantly on major corporations - then there would be adequate public funds to spend on things which contribute to the public good - things like health care, education and (yes) culture.  By which I mean an open, inclusive, dynamic and controversial culture. The sort of thing they had in the state-funded, forward-looking societies of Periclean Athens and Shakespearean London.  Or even modern Germany.

It doesn't even need very much.  A derisory offer once a year from Google would put us back where we were under Labour - which now seems like a bit of a golden age.