Brexit stage left: how theatre became the best way to understand today’s Britain
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Version 0 of 1. The Brexit referendum asked voters to make a simple choice. But, as we are still discovering, many other national fractures came together last June. Dislike of migration, impatience with the political class and resentment of London all figured heavily in the mix. Most of us are still trying to absorb the lessons and to find adequate ways to address them. That undoubtedly still goes for most politicians. It was easy to say Brexit meant Brexit. But, nine months on, the political class is still groping towards a fuller and wiser understanding of what the June 2016 vote means. The House of Lords began to get its act together this week when it debated the article 50 bill. But the Commons still seems traumatised whenever the decision to leave Europe comes up. There have been occasional good speeches in parliament. Kenneth Clarke made a notable one last month. Michael Heseltine made another on Tuesday in the Lords. A dozen or so other parliamentarians are always worth listening to on the subject. But, for me at least, the words that have risen to the occasion about the great issues of the day, and have then stuck in the mind, have been uttered not in Westminster but in the theatre. On the face of it, this seems unlikely. The arts, especially in London, are easily labelled as one of those metropolitan elites against which the Brexit vote was unerringly aimed. Sometimes, let’s face it, they deserve to be. In the Guardian in February, the National Theatre’s artistic director Rufus Norris made clear that he, at least, got this. “It was very clear that part of the rancour, the protest, was about the dominance of metropolitan London-based voices telling us how we ought to do things,” he said. Norris’s new project of writing and directing a play about Brexit which the National will take on tour around the country through to the end of June, a year after the leave vote, reflects his desire to reach out to a changing Britain. The title of the play, put together by Carol Ann Duffy from dozens of interviews from every corner of the UK, is both fragile and resonant: My Country; a work in progress. Its language is resonant too. Most of the voices in the play are those of our fellow citizens, from Derry to Durham and Dundee to Devon. But it is Duffy’s wise and considerate voice that rises above the throng. Duffy shapes the play as an emergency gathering of representatives of the regions and nations of Britain, convened by Britannia. “I am your memory,” says Britannia. “I have breathed you in, like air, and breathed you out as prayer, or speech, or song.” Now, though, Britannia is worried about what we have become, as well she might be, and at the end of the play she turns to the audience and says, with real anxiety but without admonishment: “Are you listening? Do I hear you listening?” It is appropriate, both for the nation and for the National Theatre, that the play ends with another question. Are we listening? The words hang in the air as the lights come up. There is not much sign that the answer to Duffy’s question is yes. Not, that is, if we judge by Westminster’s article 50 debates, the trolling of the Twittersphere, the triumphalist bullying of the Daily Mail, or by the implacable moods in Northern Ireland and among Scottish separatists. There is nothing new in the idea that theatre should engage with politics, of course. There was a marked upsurge in mainstream political drama long before Brexit, not least in the work of David Hare and in the shape of James Graham’s brilliant evocation of the late 1970s House of Commons, This House. Yet, given the tumultuous politics of 2017, it is also no surprise that My Country is one of two high-profile new plays opening this month that deal head on with our times. Limehouse by Steve Waters, at the Donmar Warehouse, does this too; and in a wholly different way from the Norris/Duffy show or from a Hare politics play. Waters’ work is an ostensibly traditional domestic drama, with five people debating centre-left politics in a London kitchen. The year, though, is 1981, and the five are David and Debbie Owen, Shirley Williams, Bill Rodgers and Roy Jenkins. The play’s subject is therefore whether to leave the Labour party and set up the Social Democratic Party, which – spoiler alert – they do. Yet although Limehouse is set in 1981 and the characters it portrays really existed and did more or less what they are depicted as doing, it is obvious almost from the beginning that this play is really about 2017. The discussions about Michael Foot’s Labour party are addressed to an audience that lives with Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour. The central question in the play, whether to stick with Labour or build something new, is a question for today too. In the play’s closing scene, those connections are made explicit. Like Duffy, Waters also leaves a question hanging in the air at the end. This time it is: “What if?” The question neatly bridges the two eras. What if there hadn’t been a Falklands war and the SDP-Liberal alliance had stormed the 1983 election? What if Corbynism holds on to an ever-declining party? There are only two practical choices on Brexit. Stick with Theresa May’s hard Brexit, or soften it? And there are only two choices for Labour. Stick with Corbyn’s version or make something better? The theatre is a place of illusions, but it can also be a place of illumination. |