Dark Times
British Theatre after Brexit
Aleks Sierz
In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
是的, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.
Bertolt Brecht
The UK Referendum vote to leave the European Union—Brexit—took place
在 23 六月 2016, and the result was a triumph of the irrational over rea-
儿子. 当然, I am conscious that it is unfair for somebody like me—an
ardent European—to characterize those who voted to Leave as unreasoning and
deluded. 毕竟, I’m a white middle-class man in full employment and living in
Lambeth (the London borough which recorded the highest proportion of people
in the country voting to Remain in the EU). 然而, I did see many moments
during the campaign that reminded me forcefully of an incident that the late
Peter F. Drucker, Austrian-born American management consultant and educator,
mentions in his 1939 书, The End of Economic Man. At one point during the
rise of Hitler he witnesses a “wildly cheering rally” at which a speaker proclaims,
“We don’t want higher bread prices; we don’t want lower bread prices; we don’t
want bread prices to stay the same—we want National Socialist bread prices!”
During the Referendum campaign the same tone could be detected in the often-
repeated slogan “We want our country back.” Meaning what exactly? 和, 后
the result, the new prime minister Theresa May’s gnomic statement that “Brexit
means Brexit” is another example of the depressing, but now all-pervasive post-
factual politics. Needless to say, the campaign also provided numerous examples
of vox pops, which were not so much irrational as plain racist. Anyone who glances
at Dominic Sandbrook’s 2010 social history book, State of Emergency: The Way
We Were—Britain 1970–74, which covers the entry of the UK into what was then
the Common Market, will recognize the distinctive voice of traditional Little
Englander resentment, a snarl against immigrants and big corporations alike.
© 2017 Performing Arts Journal, Inc.
PAJ 115 (2017), PP. 3–11.
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土井:10.1162/PAJJ _a_00346
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为我, it felt like the 2016 campaign was conducted during a time when reason
had taken an early summer holiday, and the EU, and the UK’s membership as
part of it, became a kind of universal scapegoat. The main reason for this was
the fact that membership of the EU stipulates the free movement of people
(code for migrants). Hence the scapegoating: Oh dear, I’ve lost my job—blame
EU migrants. I can’t get social housing—blame EU migrants. My wages have
gone down—blame EU migrants. I can’t get a doctor’s appointment—blame
EU migrants. Look, prices have gone up—blame EU migrants. Little Tom can’t
get into primary school—blame EU migrants. His older sister Charlotte can’t
get into the best secondary school—blame EU migrants. What about child
关心?—blame EU migrants. My mother spent a long waiting time at A&E in the
local hospital—blame EU migrants. The price of beer has gone up—blame EU
migrants. My internet speed is too slow—blame EU migrants. My wife no longer
loves me—blame EU migrants. My children hate me—blame EU migrants. 我的
cat has died—blame EU migrants. In this atmosphere of folly, the result of the
Referendum, although dismaying, was not such a great surprise. But what does
Brexit mean for British theatre?
The first spasms of response felt like a bereavement. In the British theatre com-
社区, there was a sense of loss. A poll by the Creative Industries Federation in
May found that ninety-seven percent of its members wanted to Remain in the EU.
More than 250 artists—from Benedict Cumberbatch to Anish Kapoor—signed
a letter arguing that Britain’s cultural industries faced disaster if the UK left.
同样地, Samuel West, the actor and director who leads the National Campaign
for the Arts, found that some ninety-six percent of creatives wanted to Remain.
“Many people are mourning,” he said while participating in The Cultural Response,
a BBC Radio 4 Front Row special on 26 七月 2016, hosted by John Wilson. 在
the other hand, another participant, Rufus Norris, the artistic director of the
National Theatre, called the Brexit vote a “wake-up call,” and warned that the
arts in general have become “out of touch” with some parts of the country. 他的
solution is to start a listening project, aimed at finding out more about how “Brit-
ish values” are perceived in different parts of the country. “If we are going to be
a national organization,” he said, “we have to speak to and for the nation. 我们的
principal responsibility initially is to listen.” This condescending response raises
more questions than it answers: if those areas of the country which voted most
strongly to Leave—North-East, South-West and Midlands—are the most socially
and economically deprived, then simply listening to their fears and prejudices
can surely do little to encourage either good or provocative drama. 除非, 那
是, Norris wants to find and develop a “Brexit play,” whose heroes are nostalgic
patriots articulating expressions of resentment, 种族主义, and anti-foreigner preju-
骰子. And further, show those particular prejudiced characters as the heroes, 相当
4 PAJ 115
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than the victims, of the drama. This “Brexit play” might be interesting, 并且会
certainly confront most audiences, who are overwhelmingly liberal in sentiment,
with views that they don’t want to hear, but somehow I can’t see it happening.
一般来说, the idea of Brexit—which won’t actually take place for, at the very
至少, another two years—has led to an understandable fog of gloom in the theatre
社区. This has been deepened by statements from a handful of so-called
cultural figureheads: Munira Mirza, former culture deputy to London mayor
and foremost Leave campaigner Boris Johnson, has argued that theatre should
adopt a more global perspective. In the Evening Standard, she wrote: “Nick Allott,
managing director of Cameron Mackintosh Ltd says that for commercial theatre
至少, Europe is decreasing in importance, while the market is growing rapidly
in China and the Middle East. We are ready for a truly global future.” She also
repeated the assertion that “The Brexit vote brought home that some elements
of the cultural sector are profoundly out of touch with much of the country.”
This is a recognizably populist sentiment, but so far Mirza has declined to tell
us what a culture that is “in touch” with the country would look like.
It is certainly true that the Referendum issue has polarized opinion. In The Stage,
the newspaper of the theatre industry, an article by arts consultant James Doeser
argued that Brexit was the result of the “angry voice of the dispossessed, elderly,
white working class” who were protesting against the “liberal metropolitan elite.”
英国脱欧, he said, “was a grand expression of a long-standing yet previously muted
philistinism.” Leavers are not only politically wrong, but culturally ignorant
也. The article’s headline read “Brexit is just the start of the war on culture.”
Such early reactions of appalled despair have been greeted in turn by protests
against the Remainers. Carole Burton from Solihull complained to the same
newspaper’s “Letters” page that the idea that “all the Leave voters are cultural
philistines” is plain wrong, and she objected to the “torrent of abuse that has
been pouring from the losing side.” In another issue, Mitch Murray from the
Isle of Man called The Stage critic Mark Shenton “arrogant” for suggesting that
only “some” British citizens voted for Brexit when “Britain voted by a majority
of more than one million to leave the EU.” That’s democracy, he said, get over
它! Yet the general feeling when scanning reports in The Stage is that the main
problem is uncertainty. 清楚地, if you are planning events and funding several
years in advance this vagueness makes life extremely hard. In the middle of the
Edinburgh Festival, 例如, some leading Fringe performers, 生产者,
and venue managers warned that Brexit will have a profound effect not only on
international artists participating in the festival (due to expected visa restrictions
on foreign citizens), but also on international students who wish to study the
arts in the UK. Therefore many artists are lobbying the Conservative government
SIERZ / Dark Times 5
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to ensure that the eventual terms of Leaving will not make life too difficult for
the international exchange of ideas and people.
What is certain, at the moment, is that the Referendum campaign has accentu-
ated a series of divisions within the UK. The litany is now familiar: middle-class
versus working class; young versus old; educated versus ignorant; 受雇的
versus unemployed; cosmopolitan versus Little Englander; multicultural versus
racist; and London versus the regions. 虽然, with a couple of exceptions, 它
is too early for British theatre to tackle the new issue of Brexit, it has for decades
already addressed the subject of social division. 实际上, plays about the so-called
underclass are a staple of British stages. The examples, since the start of the new
millennium, are legion: Leo Butler’s council-estate drama Redundant (Royal
法庭, 2001), to name but one, is a typical example of what is recognizably dirty
现实主义: poor working-class people in desperate straits. Expect coarse language,
vulgar sentiments, and brutality. Set in Sheffield, this is the story of a year in
the life of Lucy, a seventeen-year-old white teen who dreams of having a family,
unfazed by the fact that she already has one child in care. Written with excruci-
ating psychological realism, the play is raw and raucous. In the 1970s tradition
of state-of-the-nation plays, Lucy’s gran attacks the link between thoughtlessness
and teenage pregnancy—“Never learn, d’yer?” And her granddaughter’s response
to the fact that her child is a girl—“Another fuckin’ cunt in the family”—sums
up the disappointment of all the women in the story. While representations of
wild folk on stage habitually fascinate the tame folk in the audience, it is worth
stressing that, far from being out of touch, the play is also sympathetic to the
underclass. Poverty-line Britain is not so much a Hell on Earth as a place that
urgently needs attention. And when its inhabitants don’t get it, they vote against
those they think have let them down. The problem is not that British theatre
ignores the concerns of the poor; the problem is that the poor are excluded from
much of British culture. They are not theatre’s main audience, and when they are
represented on the television, it is as objects of fun and derision.
A similar mixture of disadvantage and violence is a familiar aspect of contem-
porary British playwriting. In Dennis Kelly’s Orphans, 例如, Danny and
Helen, a young married working-class couple who have one child and are expect-
ing another, are enjoying a quiet dinner when Liam, Helen’s brother, arrives
unexpectedly. The stage direction describes his appearance: “He has blood all
down his front.” Starting from this vivid image, Kelly makes Liam give a series of
explanations for what has happened to him until finally the horrendous truth
comes out. The title refers to Helen and Liam, whose parents died when they were
小的, and the intense energy of the play comes from the three characters decid-
ing what to do about the narratives that Liam spins. Each moment of decision is
also a moment when an ethical question is asked: What is the right thing to do?
6 PAJ 115
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Such implicit questions are also common to other underclass dramas of the 2000s.
They occur in Roy Williams’s Fallout (Royal Court, 2003), about a teenage black
gang who have killed a young black kid, and in Simon Stephens’s Motortown (Royal
法庭, 2006), about a working-class army veteran, returned from one of Blair’s
wars, who casually kills a black woman. The main criticism of such powerful
imaginings of underclass life is that they are instances of cultural tourism: 出色地-
heeled middle-class audiences gawping at poor people doing bad things in dirty
settings. 另一方面, they also give a strong voice to the dispossessed
and the deprived. Either way, the large number of plays about the underclass and
about Britain’s forgotten communities, both urban and rural, make Rufus Norris’s
idea of listening to people outside of the metropolitan elite patronizing at best
and completely futile at worst. British playwrights have not only been listening,
they have been writing dramas about such people for decades.
But just as successive governments and the EU have failed to enthuse the Brit-
ish people about the European project, so British theatre has, despite its ever-
expanding canon, practically ignored the subject of Europe. While the War on
Terror has dominated the way playwrights view the state of the world, Britain’s
uneasy relationship with the Continent has rarely been examined. Only two
plays have taken the Chunnel to Euroland: Tim Luscombe’s The Schuman Plan
(Hampstead, 2006) and Richard Bean’s In the Club (Hampstead, 2007)—the first
as tragedy, the second as farce. Luscombe took a grand historical view, which told
the story of Bill, a Suffolk boy who grows up in a fishing family in the 1930s and
then becomes a Eurocrat in the postwar era. The quintessential Englishman, 他
starts off idealistic and ends up disillusioned: “Now all I see is details. Fiscal,
merchantile, boring details.” “Don’t worry,” advises his colleague. “It’s a very
English response to being in Europe.” By contrast with this serious account of EU
政治, Bean created a political sex farce by looking at the misfortunes of one
hapless Euro MP, Philip Wardrobe, who is venal, shifty, and selfish. “I’ve only
ever been any good at two things. Fucking up and apologizing [原文如此],” he admits,
with a wry nod to the British penchant for saying “sorry.”
A handful of other plays have mentioned some EU institutions, usually as
examples of political failure. In Steve Waters’s World Music (Sheffield, 2003),
loosely based on the fallout from the Rwandan genocide, the central character
is Geoff Fallon, a socialist member of the European Parliament, who as a young
man taught in Africa and made friends with Kiyabe, a local politician helping
to rebuild his country after its colonial past. Deftly jumping between the pres-
ent and scenes set in 1980, Waters convincingly shows the machinations of the
European parliament, the painful private life of Fallon (who ignores his son
while picking up Florence, a black woman working illegally in a Brussels cafe),
SIERZ / Dark Times 7
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and the contrast between an idealistic view of Africa and its reality. By the end
of the story, grim reality trumps starry-eyed idealism.
An excellent example of the effect of the EU on a specific English community
can be found in Richard Bean’s Harvest (Royal Court, 2005), a century-long
comic epic about the Harrisons, a pig-farming family in Yorkshire. Set on Kil-
ham Wold Farm, some eighty-two acres near Driffield, Bean’s comedy follows
the fortunes of William Harrison from the age of nineteen in 1914 到 109 在
2005. Over these ninety years, as well as family quarrels, the external pressures
on the Harrisons include edicts from the central government and the European
社区. Eccentric, comic, and celebratory of Yorkshire Englishness, 之一
the play’s messages is that Britain’s countryside is neglected and oppressed by
foreign powers, whether in Whitehall or in Brussels. And this failure to protect
the countryside compromises national identity. If the traditional English breakfast
is bacon and eggs, Bean shows how pig farmers have been betrayed by market
forces and government indifference. Ours is a land of lost content and anger. 作为
Laura says in the play, “I’ve never had a penny in grants from Europe and yet
him up the road with forty thousand fucking acres gets two million quid a year
he dunt need.” This is the authentic voice of English resentment.
Bean is an expert at articulating the feelings of Little Englanders. His most outra-
geous and controversial play is all about migration. The comic epic England People
Very Nice (National Theatre, 2009) covers more than 400 years of the history of
various migrations into London’s East End, from yesteryear’s French Huguenots
to today’s Bangladeshis, and including the Irish, the Jews, and the Somalis.
As each group of new arrivals is met with violence but eventually assimilated
by means of Romeo and Juliet-style love affairs, a picture emerges of a mongrel
国家, bonded together by a wicked sense of humor, a love of drink, and a lusty
earthiness. If at times the playwriting suggests that behind Bean’s breezy humor
there lurks an unconscious fury—which is frankly unsettling—the play shows
how definitions of national identity are in constant flux. Although some scenes
made many in the audience uncomfortable because of the play’s evident delight
in insistent cultural stereotyping, its multicultural cast and high profile suggested
a confidence in dealing with an enormously sensitive issue. The production was
a huge box-office success, and its main theme of migration was to prove central
in the Referendum debate. 不出所料, the eastward expansion of the EU in
2004–07 resulted in a spate of East European migrant dramas. Steve Waters’s
Hard Labour (Hampstead/WYP, 2008), 例如, looks at the rise and fall of
a gang master, who—in a parody of the Thatcherite free market—sees little dif-
ference between crime and business. His ruthless exploitation of migrant labor,
undercutting the wages of local workers, has since grown into a pressing social
8 PAJ 115
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问题, often alluded to during the Referendum campaign. 相似地, Tena Stivicic’s
Fragile! (Arcola, 2007) gives a panoramic picture of migrants trying to make a
new life for themselves in London, while one of the most powerful accounts of
sex trafficking is Lucy Kirkwood’s It Felt Empty When the Heart Went in at First
but It Is Alright Now (Clean Break/Arcola, 2009), a strong mix of feisty realism,
satirical comedy, and numbing heartbreak. With its ironic repeated refrain of
“Welcome to England!” the play looks at the experiences of Dijana, a Croatian
woman who is forced to work as a prostitute and ends up in a detention center
where she meets Gloria, a West African. 这里, multicultural England appears as
an international crossroads of female pain.
Other plays have explored the English resentment of foreigners in local contexts.
Joy Wilkinson’s excellent Fair (Finborough, 2005), 例如, is set in Lancashire
and shows what happens when Melanie meets Railton at a fairground and they
end up in bed. 不久, she discovers that he’s a racist and the play accurately
explores the resentments of the white working class, often using the ghost of Rail-
ton’s dead father as a third character. For a while, Melanie campaigns for a mela,
a multicultural celebratory event open to all ages and all races, but Railton wants
an English St. George’s Fair. At one point, Railton mocks Melanie’s middle-class
bohemian identity: “Northerner? Londoner? 英语? 英国人? 欧洲的? 西方-
埃尔纳? Earthling? Some liberal pick ’n’ mix bag.” Here, the white working class
is seen as the problem. 相似地, in Atiha Sen Gupta’s thoughtful What Fatima
Did . . . (Hampstead, 2009), the teenage Fatima throws her friends and family
into confusion when she decides to start wearing the hijab, and the climactic
scene comes when her white ex-boyfriend George arrives at her fancy-dress
eighteenth birthday party draped in the flag of St. 乔治 (although his folks are
爱尔兰语) and then provocatively turns the flag into a hijab. 同样地, 直流电. Moore’s
Alaska (Royal Court, 2007) looks at how a twenty-four-year-old failure, Frank,
who works at a cinema, racially abuses Mamta, his new supervisor. In their final
对抗, Frank provocatively argues that blacks and Asians commit worse
crimes on each other than they ever suffered under British imperialism: “Cos
I’m white, you care more about what I say than what all those billions of black
and brown fuckers actually do.” Like Gupta, Moore introduces complex crosscur-
租金, showing how Frank’s insecurities about his sexual identity are part of his
racist mindset. Plays such as these illustrate the fact that there is no such thing
as racial purity and argue that racism in Britain results from a mixture of social
failure and sexual anxiety.
British new writing is always quick off the mark. Since June 2016, the idea of
Brexit has already sneaked into a couple of recent plays: Stephen Laughton’s aptly-
titled Screens (Theatre 503, 2016) is about a British-Cypriot family of Turkish
SIERZ / Dark Times 9
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Muslim ancestry. In one incident, the mother is abused in the street because she
is mistaken for a Syrian refugee, and this is explicitly mentioned as an effect of
英国脱欧. 同时, several recent migrant stories have tackled a subject that was
to become crucial in the Referendum. Examples include Tess Berry-Hart’s Cargo
(Arcola, 2016) and Anders Lustgarten’s Lampedusa (Soho Theatre, 2015), 也
earlier examples such as Rachel De-lahay’s Routes (Royal Court, 2013) and Carla
Grauls’s Occupied (Theatre 503, 2014). In Occupied, Alex, one of the Romanian
characters, 说, “But you see it is your problem. Because where does Romania
去, where do the hundreds, thousands of Romanians come to get jobs, to get a
better life? England! It’s the pretending I hate. The way the English pretend to
care when they don’t. Why not be like other Europeans and show your hatred
instead of hiding it in your tolerance?” Arguably, the Referendum provided the
opportunity for a mass of British people to express exactly this hatred. Best of
all the migrant stories was Zinnie Harris’s How To Hold Your Breath (Royal Court,
2015), a highly imaginative take on the situation which invented a scenario in
which Europeans were fleeing into north Africa, thus reversing the mindset and
clichés of some standard accounts of the migrant issue.
Using a more traditional form, A View from Islington North (Arts Theatre, 2016),
a series of very short plays curated by director Max Stafford-Clark, looks at Brit-
ish politics today. Named after leftwing leader Jeremy Corbyn’s North London
选区, the evening included Ayn Rand Takes a Stand by David Hare, 和
showed how Rand—Russian-born novelist and proto-neo-con philosopher—
returns from the grave to encourage our Chancellor and Home Secretary (在
时间, Theresa May) to put their trust in the market. With impeccable logic, 她
argues in favor of unrestricted migration—to May’s horror. This highly intelligent,
brightly written, and thought-provoking piece ranges across subjects such as free
speech, economic liberty, and the power of individuals to change their destiny.
Although this is a short playlet, it surely proves that in dark times, maybe the
best way to articulate anxiety is through imagination and humor.
There have also been many recent plays that deal sympathetically with migrant
社区, especially Muslims. 例如, John Hollingworth’s Multitudes
(Tricycle Theatre, 2015) is set in Bradford, and its title alludes to Walt Whitman’s
“I am large. I contain multitudes” from Song of Myself. It intelligently explores
conflict between several social groups. With its highly topical references to young
men and women being radicalized or going off to Syria, and the fraught subject
of the conversion of white women to Islam, this really is a play for today. 在
同时, the problems of some migrant communities have also attracted atten-
的, such as Charlene James’s Cuttin’ It (Young Vic, 2016) about female genital
mutilation in the London Somali community. 此外, lots of small plays,
10 PAJ 115
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such as Andrew Muir’s The Session (Soho, 2015), have looked at the relationship
between migrants and natives: in this case between Bournemouth-born Robbie
and Polish-born Lena. Despite all of these many examples, the failure of suc-
cessive governments to “sell” the idea of being European to the British public at
large is matched by theatre’s failure to convince a mass audience that a European
identity—as well as a British one—might be worth having.
Most of the theatre community was in favor of Remain, and many see dark times
未来, dreading the effects of Brexit: mostly the loss of European funding, 但
also the various personal hassles (more costly trips abroad, uncertainty about the
civil status of EU nationals at present in the UK, and ditto for touring ventures
and co-productions). 如果, in the wider community, migration is a kind of univer-
sal scapegoat, then for theatre people there is a risk that maybe Brexit will soon
fulfill the same function: Oh dear, I’ve lost my job—blame Brexit. I can’t get
social housing—blame Brexit. My wages have gone down—blame Brexit. I can’t
get a doctor’s appointment—blame Brexit. Look, prices have gone up—blame
英国脱欧. Little Tom can’t get into primary school—blame Brexit. His older sister
Charlotte can’t get into the best secondary school—blame Brexit. What about
child care?—blame Brexit. My mother spent a long waiting time at A&E in the
local hospital—blame Brexit. The price of beer has gone up—blame Brexit. 我的
internet speed is too slow—blame Brexit. My wife no longer loves me—blame
英国脱欧. My children hate me—blame Brexit. My cat has died—blame Brexit.
ALEKS SIERZ is Senior Research Fellow at Rose Bruford College, 英国,
and author of In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (Faber, 2001), 这
Theatre of Martin Crimp (Methuen Drama, 2006), Rewriting the Nation:
British Theatre Today (Methuen Drama, 2011) 和, with Lia Ghilardi,
The Time-Traveller’s Guide to British Theatre: The First Four Hundred Years
(Oberon Books, 2015).
SIERZ / Dark Times 11
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