British theatre needs to re-examine its politics - Spectator Coffee House, June 30, 2020

British theatre needs to re-examine its politics

Patrick West

Dame Helen Mirren has called for a 'huge investment' in the arts, warning that the UK's theatres are only weeks from collapse. The theatre, she said on the Today programme, is central to the 'identity of our nation' and 'embedded in what it means to be British.'

With live performances banned since lockdown, most people will share her concern about the future of Britain's theatres. But the implication that theatre is intrinsic to the national character doesn't ring true today.

The only genres of live acting that have widespread popular appeal in Britain are musicals and pantomime. Otherwise, theatre is a decidedly middle-class affair these days, and a left-wing one to boot (with rare exceptions such as the playwright Tom Stoppard). Often this left-wing dominance of the acting fraternity has an unpleasant side, as shown by Laurence Fox’s ordeals and the recent airing of Maxine Peake’s politics.

Theatre in this country is therefore a minority interest, which is why Mirren's plea is unlikely to garner much sympathy, especially among conservatives. If British theatre really wants saving it should re-examine its politics.

For example, there are many people who would like to see a Shakespeare play set in the relevant era with male parts played by men – or at least in Elizabethan or Jacobean times, with female parts played by young men. But these plays are the exception today, with directors often giving male roles to women instead. It's annoying, distracting and incoherent, not least when the gender pronouns in the play aren't altered in accordance with the sex of the actor. This kind of meddling often leads to theatre’s cardinal sin: it breaks the suspension of disbelief.

Take the RSC's acclaimed 2016 production of Hamlet, which also aired a couple of weeks ago on BBC4. Set in sub-Saharan Africa, the whole play was transferred to a different setting with its assigned gender roles remaining intact. All of the main characters were black, and the story remained coherent (with Paapa Essiedu rightly praised for his superb performance as Hamlet). It remained a story about an angry youth mourning the death of his father and seeking revenge: a story for people irrespective of their gender, race, culture or nationality.

With one exception. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were played by white actors. The suspension of disbelief was shattered temporarily, as you realised the director was trying to make a point about racism, by imagining a world in which the white man is subservient to his black master, a world in which the white man is not taken seriously. All of a sudden you were no longer immersed in the story, and merely watching actors in a play in a theatre.

Earlier this year, Dominic Cavendish of the Daily Telegraph wrote that Shakespeare was in danger of being 'cancelled' by a 'woke' generation of artists and theatregoers who are intent on a diverse, gender-flipping casting of a playwright who was the 'product of a patriarchal, Anglo-centric, proto-colonial, age', and 'that a traditionally cast production is now a rarity, ever more unthinkable'. I'm inclined to agree. If I want to enjoy Shakespeare these days, I will read him or watch old films and RSC television productions from the 1970s on YouTube.

Shakespeare plays are only the most obvious casualty of director tampering. Two years ago, in a West End production of Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan, the Duchess of Berwick was played by the white actress Jennifer Saunders, while her biological brother Lord Lorton was played by Joseph Marcell, who is black. While the play received rave reviews, it still had an inherent incoherence at its heart.

Of course, diverting from the original text of a play can work, such as when Glenda Jackson first played King Lear at the Old Vic in 2016. But this wasn't manifest politicking: Jackson, a rather masculine actress anyway, is held in high repute. The situation is very different now, with divergence from original texts and blatant left-wing politics being the norm in British theatre.

So yes, let's save our theatres. But in return theatres should put on plays for everyone, that aren’t just vehicles for woke agitprop.

The summer we all went mad - Spiked, June 26, 2020

The summer we all went mad

The Black Lives Matter hysteria is this generation’s Diana moment.

Patrick West


The summer of 2020 will probably be remembered as the season in which everyone went mad. The root cause for this is the lockdown implemented to stem the coronavirus, which has generated feelings of frustration, powerlessness, loneliness and restlessness, feelings that in turn have been transformed into bad-tempered attention-seeking and ostentatious displays of moral purity. The current convulsions of anti-racist boasting have been the most egregious consequence of the virus pandemic.

From corporations issuing historical apologies for their part in the slave trade to the defacement of statues, from violent weekly Black Lives Matter demonstrations to police and footballers ‘taking the knee’ to demonstrate their solidarity with the anti-racist cause, sanctimonious anti-racism has become this summer’s mania.

Inevitably, as with Remembrance Day poppies growing larger and being displayed earlier each year, the eagerness to display one’s caring or ‘woke’ credentials has escalated and become ever-more vociferous and competitive. Some anti-racist campaigners have graduated from taking the knee to giving Black Power salutes. Others have declared their new icon to be the awful Louis Farrakhan. While tea manufacturers are implored to declare #solidaritea, Sky News and the BBC are locked in a contest as to who can can out-anti-racist the other. Meanwhile, the foaming and shrieking on Twitter – the intemperate denunciations – become louder and more sulphurous every day.

The London mayor, Sadiq Khan, has established the Orwellian sounding Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm to review which statutes in the capital should remain. While some police officers decide to take the knee in order to quell volatile crowds, Hertfordshire Police now insist that its officers do so. Every football game not only begins with the taking of the knee, but every player bears on his shirt the legend ‘Black Lives Matter’. We’ve got to the bizarre stage now that a veteran, black anti-racism campaigner – Trevor Phillips – is denounced by white, middle-class wetpants liberals as an ‘Uncle Tom’ for having the temerity to suggest that Britain is the best country in Europe to be black.

A sure barometer of something becoming a hegemony, which ‘woke’ ideology has undoubtedly become, is the manner in which dissenters or non-conforming voices are treated. So witness the fury and outrage on Monday night when some Burnley supporters hired a plane to fly over Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium, with a banner pronouncing ‘White Lives Matter’. Naturally, within hours the police said they were getting involved. Of course they were. To counter-protest in this febrile atmosphere of white, liberal-left grandstanding and fawning self-hatred that ‘White Lives Matter’ is an appalling and offensive blasphemy. Of course white lives don’t matter. Everything is the fault of white people and their privilege.

The vehemence of the outrage, and, more to the point, the ostentatious apologies by faux-guilty white people, is telling. Ben Mee, the Burnley captain, said he was ‘ashamed’ and ’embarrassed’ by the incident. Like Greene King, Lloyds of London, Barclays Bank and the Bank of England apologising for the sins of their ancestors, the Burnley captain issued a mea culpa for something he didn’t actually do.

Apologising for something you haven’t done yourself takes no emotional investment, but it does serve the purpose of drawing attention to yourself and making you appear noble and virtuous. And this is the essence of so much loud anti-racism at the moment – certainly among white liberals: it’s good old-fashioned virtue-signalling, coupled with fear and conformism. What footballer would dare refuse to take the knee? What corporate head would appear on television to pronounce that he had nothing whatsoever to do with slavery and was not for nowt going to say sorry for anything?

What we are seeing at the moment is akin to what we experience each November (but more sinister), when people compete over who can have the biggest poppy the earliest, and anyone who appears on television without one is subject to suspicion and inquisition. It resembles, too, the reaction to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997, when a menacing air of emotional correctness pervaded the land.

Black Lives Matter 2020 is this generation’s Diana moment. This summer we have been implored to say the correct thing, to display the correct emotion, to be conspicuously compassionate. Anyone dissenting or staying silent is morally wanting, or worse: a racist. Such monstrous stupidity.


Sky Cinema’s war on the past

Much to the chagrin and irritation of many of its users, but keeping with the spirit of this summer, the Sky Cinema channel has this month started to put trigger warnings next to potentially offensive films. Movies such as Gone with the Wind and Dumbo now carry the caution that they contain ‘outdated attitudes, language and cultural depiction which may cause offence’. A Sky spokesman says: ‘Sky is committed to supporting anti-racism and improving diversity and inclusion.’

Like statue iconoclasm, Sky’s move represents today’s current hostile and superior view of the past. They did bad things then because they were racist and unenlightened. There is the implicit belief that we in 2020 have reached a plateau of enlightenment from which we can judge all previous times.

Yet morals always change and always will. History is one era in which we can genuinely talk of moral relativism. The next generation is bound to decry our one because tomorrow’s moralities will be different. Who knows what they will be. To judge by the growing popularity of veganism, my bet is that the people of 2020 will be damned for eating animals. Censorious ‘woke’ cancel culture might also be condemned for the intolerant ideology it is. And just as we deplore the brutalists of the 1960s who destroyed so much Victorian architecture, the vandalisation of statues might also come to be deplored by the more liberal people of tomorrow.

‘As the perfect afterthought Father’s Day gift, scented candles come in an arguably excessive range of aromas. Thanks to Chris Martin, lead singer of Coldplay, there is now one more.

‘His candle is called This Smells Like My Jizz. It is the companion to his two Burp brands launched last year: This Smells Like My Bellend and This Smells Like My Anus. The new model is described as “A fitting follow-up to that candle, this blend is made with human placenta, canine diarrhoea, absinthe, hemlock, essence of petunia, rhubarb, Monster Munch, two pints of cider (ice in the cider) and boiled cabbages for a scent that’s sexy, surprising and wildly addictive”.

‘Martin, 43, unveiled the candle, priced £75, on Tonight With Fucking Jimmy Carr on Tuesday.’

Nature is a bastard - Spiked, May 1, 2020

Nature is a bastard

This pandemic reminds us that nature is not benign, pure and innocent.

Patrick West

In Western culture, ‘nature’ and that which is ‘natural’ is usually evoked as something benign, pure, innocent and uncontaminated. ‘Nature’ relates to the way things should be – the natural order of things. This association is manifest most clearly in television adverts, where ‘natural’ is used to convey the message that a product is harmless and harmonious. It has sprung forth unmolested from Mother Earth. It’s an implicit opposite to ‘manmade’, that which is potentially perilous because its inherent purity has been violated by homo sapiens.

At a deep level, this myth of natural goodness has its origins in Christianity and the notion that mankind is a fallen creature, who once inhabited the untainted Garden of Eden before his innate immorality got the better of him. It’s a myth that has been repeated and reinforced over the centuries, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th century, who lauded man in the childlike ‘state of nature’. It gained traction soon after in the Romantic reaction to the Industrial Revolution, as epitomised by William Blake’s lament about those ‘dark satanic mills’. In more recent decades, the supposedly benevolent qualities of the ‘natural’ and ‘organic’ have been espoused by the environmentalist movement, in response to the perceived deleterious effect man has had on the planet, whether it be pollution, industrialised farming, nuclear disaster or climate change.

All the same, it has always been a myth. And a staggeringly ludicrous, even risible myth at that. The reality of nature is this: disease, pain, parasitism, predation, cancer, infant mortality, brain tumours, faeces, wisdom teeth, eczema, infection, plagues, tempests, earthquakes, madness, ageing, decrepitude, death – and deadly viruses. All these things are natural.

Nature in a benign light is something beautiful to behold, if we consider the lilies in the field, or raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. But nature’s malign aspect is a thing of awe and terror: cold, cunning, savage and utterly indifferent. Foul and visceral, ferocious and scheming – ‘all swoll’n and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye’, as Shakespeare put it.

At the moment, many people are beginning to talk of the coronavirus from an imagined future point of view – namely, what we will have remembered from this dreadful affair in, say, six months time. It is hoped that we will have remembered the sense of community, how our neighbours came to our aid, how we kept in touch with relatives via Zoom, how for weeks we diligently kept ourselves indoors and metres apart for the greater good.

I do hope we do remember all this. I do indeed hope all survivors will be grateful for being alive and live every day like a cancer survivor does: in joy and gratitude. But I also hope we take away a more sober, rational lesson. I hope that we will remember the death, fear, paranoia and utter boredom inflicted upon the entire world in the spring of 2020 at the hands not of nasty mankind – who usually gets the blame for these things – but by nature, by a natural virus.

Nature is not our friend. Nature is a bastard: red in tooth and claw. Nature is mankind’s eternal enemy. Our lot is a perpetual war against it. We may be of nature, but unique to all species on this planet, we are not slaves to its lethal diktats. We transcend our origins. This is why we have always had medicines and doctors, and in more recent centuries, hospitals to treat the poorly, and scientists to invent cures and vaccines to nature’s deadly defects. Without all of this, life would be very nasty, brutish and short indeed.


Who are we really clapping for?

There is something awfully familiar about Clapping for the NHS, that evening event in which we go outside and give thanks to the NHS workers who have risked their lives to save the lives of others. It’s strangely reminiscent of the reaction to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997.

Sure, the tone is different. It was mournful, maudlin and hysterical back then. The tone today is one of relief and even joy. But in both cases there is a sense of people wanting to be part of something bigger than themselves, to be part of the crowd. In both cases you sense people are emoting because of a feeling of loneliness in their own lives: in 2020, this is literally the case for so many. And both then and now there is an uneasy suspicion that people are enjoying it a bit too much – taking herd-like pleasure in something that should be a sombre and serious affair.

How much of the clapping is for the benefit of NHS staff, and how much of it is for the benefit of those doing the clapping? I’m in awe of NHS staff who have risked their lives to save coronavirus victims, but I don’t think this kind of communal applause is really needed. A rainbow poster in your front window would do, or even an appropriate tweet. But where’s the fun in that? Silent, solitary gestures are boring.

Underneath, little has changed in British society since 1997. Many of us still live soulless, lonely lives. We are probably more atomised now. Communities are still fragmented. Nothing has yet to replace the rites and beliefs afforded to us by traditional religion. It’s in this chronic vacuum that ersatz, transient religions emerge. Back then it was competitive mourning. Today it’s NHS worship.


Selfies still make you miserable

The harder you try to improve your selfies, the worse you will feel about yourself. This is the conclusion of the study, ‘Uploading Your Best Self: Selfie Editing and Body Dissatisfaction’, published in the journal, Body Image. It monitored 130 women aged 18 to 30 who took a selfie and were given 10 minutes to edit it. The more the selfie-taker edited, the more she felt miserable. The study concluded that vulnerable women and girls should refrain from putting on social media edited ‘perfect’ selfies and instead post ‘more naturalistic images’.

The temptation to take a selfie in order to garner self-affirming likes on social media is a strong one. Indeed, the desire to be ‘liked’ on social media is a universal one. It’s just that it is stronger in some of us than others. Most of us forever fail to learn that the desire to be ‘liked’ never leads to long-term contentment, irrespective of how many ‘likes’ we get.

The only solution is to stop putting up pictures of yourself altogether. Better still, stop seeking to be ‘liked’ at all.