Where Have All The Protest Songs Gone?

“Where have all the protest songs gone?”, Eleanor Margolis laments in the New Statesman this week. Margolis recounts a trip to the End of the Road festival where she saw Robin Ince introduce Grace Petrie, “a guitar-wielding 20-something” who played a set of protest songs; defiant songs both about the agendas and ideals of modern protester movements and about protests themselves, after which an unimpressed Margolis went home and penned a piece in which she asked “where have all the protest songs gone”. Well, as the first commenter on the article pointedly and rightly mentions, the place to look for protest music is not the comedy tent of the End of the Road festival, but the fact that hard edged political music filtered even into this arena, falling into Margolis’ lap without her needing to look for it, indicates that perhaps there isn’t such a dearth of protest music after all. Before Margolis gets to her point she makes a few snide remarks about the performance, and before I get to mine I’m going to briefly address them, not only because they are specifically unfair but also because there is a broader issue.

In Margolis’ eyes, Petrie’s set was a series of “painfully earnest protest songs”. I’ve seen Grace Petrie play live; it’s a stunning, moving, inspiring and thought provoking experience. This is perhaps because she writes songs like ‘Emily Davidson Blues’ and ‘Tonne of Bricks’ which tackle the difficult politics of protest vandalism, violence and sentencing. The demonisation of politically conscious students, our problematic cultural values and the hypocrisy of the legal systemare subjects I’ve written on before, but never with the talent to set to music. These are difficult ideas, and they are important for activists. Margolis, I would tactfully suggest, might not fully relate to the student protest experience articulated in these lyrics in quite the same way I do. Grace Petrie’s music is unashamed in its idealism, determination and ideology. Margolis writes as the kind of achingly self-deprecating lefty journalist who must describe a festival as a “small, boutique-y gathering of beardy Guardian readers” in order to excuse herself from being there. While I find Petrie’s performances gripping and honest, Margolis considered it “so sickeningly worthy that I nearly choked on my falafel burger”. Perhaps because she was trying to eat it ironically.

Margolis’ assertion that “the whole performance seemed to cling for its life to another era” is where we get to the real point, though I think she has missed it. The problem that we have with the question “where have all the protest songs gone” is a problem that pervades attitudes to protest and the culture of protest both within and without the activist community, which is expecting modern activity to fall into the patterns of the past. Grace Petrie herself articulated the hypocrisy at the heart of this in a tweet to me:

@MediocreDave The 2 criticisms I hear: a) we need protest music for TODAY and b) People writing protest songs belong in another era

Fools and Clowns: Bruce, Hicks and Stanhope

Twentieth century Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin wrote that the festive laughter of a carnival is ‘universal in scope, it is directed at all and everyone, including the carnival’s participants’. [1] He went on explicitly to differentiate between this ubiquitous laughter and the laughter of ‘pure’ satire, because ‘the satirist whose laughter is negative places himself above the object of his mockery, he is opposed to it’. [2] The difference between satirical comedy and the egalitarian folk laughter of carnival is that the satirical performer is distinct from the laughter of the audience, controlling it from above with assumed and granted authority. But while in Bakhtin’s idea of carnial the laughter is the laughter of ‘all the people’, he also describes the role of ‘clowns and fools’, individuals who stand out as being ‘the constant, accredited representitives of the carnival spirit’. [3] Stewart Lee has observed what he described as the ‘shaman-clown tradition’, stemming from ancient comic festivals, in certain modern stand up comedians, and it is helpful when looking at contemporary performances in the light of Bakhtin’s theories to think of some comics not as performers per se but as a focus for this ‘carnival spirit’, leading the collective laughter of the audience. The humour of American comedians Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks and Doug Stanhope, through whom there has widely been observed a chain of succession, can be read as one modern incarnation of Bakhtin’s folk humour, placing them in a far older tradition than is perhaps usually thought. This influence is debatable, but it manifests itself both superficially (in terms of the content of their shows, made up of grotesque taboo breaking jokes about religious and authoritarian institutions) and in a deeper sense (the very mechanics of their performance; that which accounts for their success with audiences).

Bakhtin described how in carnivaleqsue traditions ‘verbal etiquette and discipline are relaxed and indecent words and expressions may be used’ [4] and wrote of the significance of what he called ‘marketplace’ or ‘billingsgate’ language; an often vulgar vernacular of ‘curses, oaths [and] popular blazons’. [5] Far from this being a negative, he argues that ‘an ideal and at the same time real type of communication, impossible in real life, is established’. [6] What is achieved is more than unrestrained communication, however. Sue Vice wrote that ‘carnival profanation consists of ‘a whole system of carnivalistic debasings and bringings down to earth’, to the level of the body’. [7] By debasing and linking with the body (and specifically its digestive and reproductive processes) carnival not only undermines its subjects but also strengthens them. That which denies its own reproduction and consumption has no mechanism for sustained life, whereas that which acknowledges what is natural about itself (even if a little unsavoury) is capable of continual regeneration. Bakhtin referred to this as ‘grotesque realism’; it is distasteful but it is real. The vulgarity of the ‘billingsgate’ is, deep down, a celebration; sexually explicit language is also the language of reproduction, scatological language is the language of the living body and by using this language one is allowing for and acknowledging the healthy continuation of life. As Vice wrote, ‘Death and renewal are central to carnival … the two states are inseparable’. [8]

The title of Lenny Bruce’s autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, demonstrates the significance of profanity in his career (as do his many arrests for obscenity). His supporters argue, however, that his shows, though vulgar, had redeeming social importance, and he has been compared directly (both in court and in a petition of support) to Rabelais, one of the central authors from whom Bakhtin derived his theory of the carnivalesque. [9] Indeed, Bakhtin could have been describing Bruce when he published in 1965 that ‘these [billingsgate] elements still prevent public reading of Rabelais, although in other respects no author is better suited for such reading’. [10] While this unacceptable language became a public distraction from the actual substance of his routines the language should not be viewed as irrelevant to this deeper satirical content. Rather, Bruce’s questioning of (and challenges to) the formal values of performance language were no different from his questioning of (and challenges to) the government, organised religion, Hollywood, etc. Satire can promote great public discourse but it is therefore always necessary to ensure that language, the tool of this discourse, is not constrained, restricted or controlled to the point of impotence. In attacking the idea that audiences should not hear certain words Bruce was also protecting a performer’s right to offend and be critical, establishing the ‘real type of communication’ that Bakhtin described. Bruce was described as a ‘moralist’ [11] and many of his jokes revolved around an attempt to hold various institutions to a consistent set of moral standards (take, for example, the line ‘the Ten Commandments doesn’t say “Thou Shallt Not Kill Sometimes…”’). [12] One of Bruce’s routines was built around the phrase ”to’ is a preposition, ‘come’ is a verb’ and was an example of how obscenity could be constructed out of individually innocuous words, as though he were trying to find the secret of what made them offensive. In place of any rational values, however, he found only hypocrisy and created performances which undermined this hypocritical behaviour. He created imagined scenes in which he could caricaturise untenable opinion and expose its shortcomings, or as Lou Gottlieb, a witness in his first obscenity trial put it ‘… as Mr. Bruce presents his performances he creates a world in which normal dimensions … are transmuted into a grotesque panorama of contemporary society’. [13] In a ‘bit’ called Christ and Moses, for example, Bruce describes those Biblical figures returning to Earth and their impression of the modern day Church, with irreligious and foul mouthed priests failing to uphold the tenets of Christianity. Burlesques of this nature, with figures of authority being recast as comic foil, have much in common with carnival.

In 1991 Eric Bogosian wrote a new introduction to How to Talk Dirty and Influence People in which he says ‘as the pendulum slowly shifts we are back in such conservative times as those that spawned [Bruce] in the first place, and so now’s the time to read him’. [14] This was also the time, though, for a successor. Bill Hicks was performing stand up comedy in a similar vein, and has been compared to Bruce in a variety of critical and popular material ever since, including Early Day Motion 678 in the British Parliament on the anniversary of his death which described him as ‘one of the few people who may be mentioned as being worth[y] of inclusion with Lenny Bruce in any list of unflinching and painfully honest political philosophers.’ In the context of carnival, this ‘unflinching’ quality is what allowed him to defy established social conventions as Bruce did.

As with Bruce, Hicks’s work was reminiscent of the carnival practices described by Bakhtin, but while Bruce’s language allows us to consider billingsgate, Hicks advanced the performative element of this to become a more physical, more graphic, less verbal spectacle, more reminiscent of carnival burlesques and parodies. These were often vulgar, yet were based firmly in moral satire. He frequently performed routines in which various celebrities or politicians would ‘suck Satan’s cock‘ as a symbol for their lack of ethical caliber. In one recorded show he describes television presenter Dick Clark unzipping a rubber mask to reveal himself to be a ‘cloven hooved, horned wolverine‘ who then has anal sex with game show host and singer John Davidson. Hicks creates the image of ‘a black, blood gorged tic which crawls out of the scaly penis of the wolverine and into the bowels of John Davidson’, impregnating him (at this point on the recording Hicks bids farewell to audience members who are walking out). ‘Six months, six days and six hours later his bile breaks and he shits the brood’, Hicks continues before attempting to represent this action loudly and at length. With its mock religious mythology, satirical sense of ritual and grotesque bodily images every element of this routine is in keeping with medieval carnival traditions. In a similar scene he expresses his contempt for contemporary musicians by depicting Debbie Gibson, one of the ‘new rock stars who drink diet cola and shop in your malls’ being raped by Jimi Hendrix. The audience respond enthusiastically as this figurative act debases one popular figure and reinstates another through the use of sexual metaphor.

Vice wrote that ‘Bakhtin is keen to point out that carnivalesque parody and travesty are quite different from ‘the negative and formal parody of modern times’, which only denies without renewing. This is a consistent thread in his argument: in modern versions of carnival laughter, billingsgate profanations, and so on, only the downward half of the subverting movement has survived’. [15] While there is undeniably a sense of regeneration in Bill Hicks’s performances they were a constant negotiation between denial as an opportunity for renewal and denial as a negative, almost nihilistic suppression of life. A reviewer wrote that ‘the key to Hicks’s longevity is his idealism‘, and throughout his work there is an implication that we are only a few correct collective decisions away from a better world as he recognises (as Bakhtin did) the power that common people have when acting together. He says that life is ‘just a ride, and a we can change it any time we want; it’s only a choice‘. In spite of these encouraging words at the ends of his shows about how the world could be made better (which were, with a carnivalesque sense of balance, always tempered by Hicks pretending to be assassinated) it can be said that his actual appeal was not that people were convinced by this message but that they enjoyed temporarily accepting it. For the duration of his performances he liberated his audience, emotionally and intellectually, and allowed them to feel empowered, even though after his shows people would return to their lives and society would continue to operate as normal. This is comparable to the medieval carnivals Bakhtin wrote about; while they occurred the ordinary restrictions on behaviour were relaxed and the people had the power. In daily life people were subjects but during carnival they had the power collectively to crown and decrown a carnival king, they could burlesque their religious leaders, they could break taboos and talk freely. Even though it was a temporary and licensed experience carnival was attractive, just as Hick’s shows were, because it provided a window into an alternative, and presumably preferable, world. Bruce apparently believed that by exposing the hypocrisy and pettiness of the Church and the state he could affect development within them. He fought his comic battles in court and brought court transcripts into his comedy shows as though believing that vindicating his ideas could change things. Hicks, an idealist from a subsequent generation, did not so much seek to redress the harshness of society’s problems as to create a space where people could be given cathartic relief from them, being allowed to believe that a positive rebirth was possible.

The Independent on Sunday wrote that ‘there’s a kind of Olympic torch of extreme American comedy, which passed from Lenny Bruce … to the late Bill Hicks. Doug Stanhope is its latest, and equally brilliant, bearer’. Like Hicks and Bruce before him, Stanhope’s humour is grotesque; he revels in sex and scatology, he is profane and blasphemous but despite this confrontation of social values many audiences respond enthusiastically. Yet while he talks, as his predecessors did, about the problems that society creates for people, he has taken the subversive stage persona that he inherited a step further and begun to subvert that persona itself. While Bruce was called a ‘secular moralist’ and Hicks an ‘idealist’, Stanhope sets himself apart from his audiences not by being superior to them but by presenting himself as a mess, who, though perhaps inspirational, few would aspire to emulate. He complains, constantly, but about vague and sometimes unidentifiable problems, talking about ‘the media’ and ‘society’ in petulant, naively uniformed terms. While former satirists chose specific flaws in specific targets and attempted to convince the audience of a new critical viewpoint, Stanhope rages against mercurial forces of oppression which he scarcely defines, much less offers a genuine critique on. Far more than Bruce and Hicks he is a focus point for a carnival feeling, while they were (by comparison) lecturers. On his DVD Deadbeat Hero he advises his audiences not to take him too seriously, admitting ‘I’m probably wrong about half the shit I say and … you can find me to be a hypocrit’, undermining his own views in a way that the former comics didn’t. His shows, if not about the message of his words, then, are about the feeling of playful liberation he temporarily gives his audience. Of ‘clowns and fools’ Bakhtin wrote that they were ‘representatives of the carnival spirit in every day life out of carnival season’ and that they ‘remained fools and clowns always and wherever they made their appearance’, standing on ‘the borderline between life and art’. [16]  This seems, in some way, to be Stanhope’s appeal, too. ‘What makes Stanhope essential viewing is that none of this is an act’ writes one reviewer, another declaring that ‘he lives a mad, mad life and what he remembers he reports back to us’. While this type of review obviously indicates that audiences are experiencing a vicarious thrill they are also apparently willing to regard Stanhope as a living embodiment of the carnivalesque disregard for formality.

These satirists are problematic, though, because while their humour might be considered ‘folk’ in some regards (it is empowering of the people, it is democratic, it provides subversive satisfaction and appeals to a non- ruling collective consciousness) it is not all inclusive. Stanhope named a show No Refunds, playing on the likelyhood of offending his audience and failing to meet their expectations to the point that they leave and demand their money back; which demonstrates the difference between this satire, attacking dominant systems of authority on ideological or philosophical grounds, and genuine folk laughter as Bakhtin described it, which is apolitical and does not criticise these systems so much as allow for their temporary relaxation. Even as Stanhope attacks he does not specifically exclude, however. He opens one show with the advice that ‘eventually I’m going to hit a subject that you’re going to be queer about, well … don’t, just wait for the next joke … don’t get all upset’.

In these terms it can appear that Stanhope has introduced a stronger carnival spirit into American satirical stand up comedy, but this claim must be qualified by looking at the nature of his material. Despite not assuming the satirist’s moral high ground that Bakhtin spoke of Stanhope is an exponent of comedy which ‘only denies without renewing’. He discusses coarse subjects but they do not operate in the same way as carnivalesque billingsgate. While Bruce’s attitude to sex treated it as the basis for a healthy relationship, a thing that because it is so universally natural should not be taboo, Stanhope’s general approach is less balanced. He does not talk in terms of reproduction, for example, and in fact, like Hicks before him, consistently argues that there are too many people in the world and that the human race should stop reproducing, boasting in one show ‘I have a vasectomy and an abortion on my record’. As well as joking about abortion he also comments on sex as a manipulative tool, sexually transmitted diseases and child pornography; clearly placing at the heart of this humour not the positive renewal we get in carnival but a focus on damaging, unhealthy experience. Similarly, while the consumption of the carnivalesque, even when referred to indirectly by scatological imagery, was a mechanism for sustained human life, Stanhope talks in similar terms about alcohol and narcotic drugs. Again like Hicks before him (and, to a limited degree, Bruce) he is keen to point out the unreported positive effects of drugs on the mind but also highlights their negative effect on the body. Stanhope’s entire persona is built around the idea of self indulgence to the point of self destruction. This is the contradiction of his work; while he allows his audience to experience a sense of the carnivalesque, complete with its empowerment and its unity, he himself is a pessimist (‘this is the most boring generation in the history of people’) and refuses to allow for the renewal which is so central to Bakhtin’s carnivalesque theories. Stanhope’s work is difficultly complex, though. This could be alternatively read as a simple extention of grotesque realism, acknowledging that the worst limits of human excess are, whilst horrifying, not unspeakable. He addresses the negative, the dangerous and the deadly leaving the audience to negotiate for themselves the renewal.

Though there are flaws in referring to it as such, it seems that Stanhope has progressed ‘folk humour’ past the limits of the carnival to a new stage. It is still low, communal and vulgar but unlike carnival it is illicit and unlicensed, it is not all inclusive but requires a willing and sometimes troubling complicity from his audience and it no longer burlesques established figures of authority such as the Church or the state. Instead, in recognising (rightly or wrongly) that in modern society people’s situations are ultimately dictated by their own choices, Stanhope’s folk humour makes the ‘folk’ themselves its target, attacking the apathy and hypocrisy which allow people to endure disappointing lifestyles and allowing audiences, temporarily, to laugh about them and feel relieved. Here, arguably, lies the renewal and rebirth that Bakhtin wrote about as the antithesis of the negativity and denial.

*  *  *

[1] Mikhail Bakhtin Rabelais and His World (United States: Indiana University Press, 1984) p. 11.

[2] Ibid. p. 12.

[3] Ibid. p. 8.

[4] Ibid. p. 16.

[5] Ibid. p. 5.

[6] Ibid. p. 16.

[7] Sue Vice Introducing Bakhtin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008) p. 152.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Lenny Bruce How to Talk Dirty and Influence People (United States: Fireside, 1992) p. 118, 173.

[10] Mikhail Bakhtin Rabelais and His World (United States: Indiana University Press, 1984) p. 145.

[11] Frank Kofsky Lenny Bruce: The Comedian as Social Critic and Secular Moralist, (United States: Monad Press, 1974)

[12] Lenny Bruce How to Talk Dirty and Influence People (United States: Fireside, 1992) p. 71.

[13] Ibid. p. 116.

[14] Ibid. p. vii.

[15] Sue Vice Introducing Bakhtin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008) p. 154.

[16] Mikhail Bakhtin Rabelais and His World (United States: Indiana University Press, 1984) p. 8.

Bread and Circuses

With a widely reported [though deeply unlikely] estimated global audience of over two billion, almost a third of the population of the planet was expected to watch the marriage of Prince William to Catherine Middleton on 29th April 2011. As a piece of popular spectacle, few events can ever rival this broad and diverse audience, and in some respects, with its rehearsed structure, basis in tradition, powerful visual images, communal music and inclusivity, the royal wedding can be read as a phenomenal piece of popular theatre. Allain and Harvie discuss a definition of popular theatre that takes into account hugely successful commercial ventures which exploit popular theatrical forms and attract a wide audience, offering Cirque du Soleil or the Abba musical Mamma Mia as ready examples:

These examples point to the need to make a distinction (even if this formula is not rigid and the gap is sometimes bridged) between popular commercial theatre and, at the opposite end of the spectrum, popular theatre that has an overt political agenda.^[1]

In discussing a working definition of popular theatre Allain and Harvie are right to suggest dichotomised thinking, as the term ‘popular’ can readily be applied to both large scale national (and international) events and small scale local ones. It encompasses the openly propagandistic and the consciously apolitical, groups the commercial with the anti-capitalist and incorporates the technically proficient, the rehearsed and the engrossing alongside the crude, the improvised and the alienating. Demonstrably, it is not a single dichotomy which separates different popular performances but a multitude of spectra. The two opposing modes of popular theatre that Allain and Harvie suggest are specifically flawed, as their distinction presupposes that popular ‘commercial’ theatre (which we can take to mean theatre that is concerned with entertainment and a broad appeal and does not seek to undermine or alter the status-quo) is unlikely to have a political agenda, and also because there is no obvious place for an event such as the modern British royal wedding, which does not neatly fall into either of the two extremes or onto the continuum between them. The event is not commercial though it is an open display of wealth and privilege. Nor does it claim any political agenda, though events such as these, as will be argued here, can easily be appropriated for political utility. When the state (or any aspect of the establishment) conducts popular performance events which are stylistically indebted to popular theatre traditions and invite the public to engage as participants and spectators, problematic questions arise with regards to reconciling the event’s ‘popular’ status with its anti-subversive, non-transgressive nature.

The royal wedding can be seen in its contemporary context as one of many defining moments of an era in which the staging of popular performance events dominates political discourse in this country. The ideological and economic actions taken by the government have met with stiff opposition, an opposition which has frequently manifested itself in popular performance. Groups such as UK Uncut have sought to temporarily redefine public spaces (specifically commercial ones) into spaces of performance, often choosing to theme actions around certain issues or ideas. Through the introduction of props and performance, a targeted shop or bank might be ‘turned’ into a library, a school, a creche, etc in an attempt to draw a link through the performance event between their financial practises and funding cuts to those services. Returning popular performance to the marketplace, campaigners dressed as surgeons, superheroes and Santa Claus have occupied commercial spaces while yet others have staged poetry readings, stand up comedy gigs or concerts. Similarly, activists operating under the banner NHS Direct Action have staged the agit-prop skit Death of the NHS, in which a vampiric Andrew Lansley causes the deaths of screaming and bloodied patients while draining doctors and nurses, outside various government buildings. One interesting staple of popular performance that has been witnessed on many protests is the clown, with many people choosing (apparently independently) to dress up in conventional (or subverted) clown make up and costume, both to criticise the establishment and to affectionately satirise other protesters.

In a more extreme example, those using ‘black bloc’ tactics have codified a clearly defined costume of all black clothes, their faces covered, while props such as flares, coloured smoke, paint-bombs and spray cans are used to create a public spectacle in which they demonstrate, through the symbolic destruction of icons of capitalism (such as bank branches), their capacity to alter the world they operate within. Mass events, most notably the 500,000 strong TUC march through central London on March 26th 2011, have featured less conscious performances by individuals but still exemplify many traditional aspects of popular performance, including brightly coloured props and costume, subversive humour, songs, widely known chants (a ubiquitous feature of performative activism) and, most obviously and significantly, a deliberately broad appeal. In some regards these represent a midpoint between the unlicensed demonstrations of smaller groups and the large scale events organised by the state.

State events have a great capacity to draw people together for communal expression. In a quasi-carnivalesque way people are authorised to act outside of the normal bounds of acceptable behaviour with the rules temporarily relaxed. There is another dimension to the positive role of these popular events, and one that is of significant importance to understanding Prince William’s wedding, coming, as it did, at a time of national difficulty. Arch and Marschner, in their history of British royal weddings, touch on the social significance they can have, specifically the uplifting effect on a nation’s mood. Princess Anne’s marriage in 1973 is recorded as a major national event:

Colour television pictures, an explosion of souvenirs and the relief – articulated by newspapers and magazines – that such a colourful event could still take place in a country where social disorder and economic decline seemed poised to plumb new depths, seem, in retrospect, the salient features of the occasion. ^[2]

This sentiment was directly echoed by David Cameron who declared of the engagement ‘it’s great to have a piece of unadulterated good news that everyone can celebrate … I’m sure that’s how the whole country feels, and I’m sure it’ll be something when the country will come together’. Arch and Marschner remember Princess Anne’s wedding as a welcome event of buoyant elation:

In Britain – where the government had just declared a state of emergency, considering the current situation in the coal and electricity industries a threat to the essentials of the life of the community – the splendour of the occasion worked its familiar magic, and the newspapers reported that both the fuel crisis and the state of emergency were forgotten. ^[3]

While there are many who regard these popular events as merciful reprieve from difficult times, more sober critics present the exact same phenomena as an indictment. Ian Jack, writing in Newsweek, similarly remarks of Prince Charles’ marriage to Lady Diana that

The bells rang out, the guns saluted, and Diana rode to her nuptials in a glass carriage, but the celebration came as a relief and a distraction to a country beleaguered by social division and unrest [IRA hunger strikes, race riots in Brixton and Toxteth, and, like now, 2.5 million unemployed with the number rising].

In Satire X, written in the first or second century AD, the Roman polemicist Juvenal suggested that the public, who once had democratic power over their leaders, had ‘pulled in their horns, there’s only two things that concern them: Bread and Games [also frequently translated as circuses].’ ^[4] That is to say, the people had become complacent about their political agency and were disengaged to the point that their only concerns were their immediate needs, ‘bread’, and diverting entertainment, the ‘games’ or ‘circuses’. The phrase has been developed in modern usage to refer to a deliberate attempt by the state to distract the public by providing these pieces of grand popular theatre, and in this vein has been appropriated by the activist performance group Bread and Puppet and the anti-Olympic games campaign group Bread Not Circuses (the political exploitation of various Olympic events is a persistent observation, most notably about the 1936 games in Berlin).

If there is a political usefulness in these events, it lies in their capacity to fully transform a communal mood. Allain and Harvie observe this in the age of modern broadcasting by considering one of the most important popular spectacles of recent decades:

Lady Diana’s funeral is just another example of how a local event becomes global spectacle when it is constructed by the vast resources of the world’s media. … The fact that, even though the live events were shown so extensively on television, thousands of people still felt the need to visit the palace in person or sign condolence books says much about the value placed on liveness and actual participation, however vicarious, in such events. ^[5]

The same was surely also true of Prince William’s wedding. Many people attended the event in London while many more expressed their own involvement by hosting parties, watching the television broadcast communally and dressing in specific costume for the occasion. It is not unreasonable to claim that for the weekend surrounding the wedding it was the dominant focus of the public’s attention.
The writer Ben Goldacre was quick to condemn the government for exploiting the distracting influence of the event, declaring that the Department of Health had won the ‘prize for burying bad news’ when they made a potentially unpopular announcement regarding increased cuts to NHS funding. This pronouncement is a simplification of the situation, though, and the full extent of his accusations (and the observations of Juvenal) can be be better understood when viewed in the context of the conflicted nature of popular theatre.

On the 28th April, the day before the wedding, Chris Knight, Anthropology professor and amateur exponent of political street theatre, was arrested, along with two others, for his intention to stage a mock public execution of Prince Andrew in effigy using a prop guillotine. The same afternoon, Charlie Veitch of performance activism group The Love Police was also arrested, for his stated intention to publicly voice his anti-royalist sentiment (though his specific plans were not revealed). All were arrested on ‘suspicion of conspiracy to cause public nuisance and breach of the peace.’ On the day of the wedding, a number of arrests were carried out in central London, including one by plain-clothed officers of a street performer while he was singing ‘we all live in a fascist regime’, adding an almost enjoyable irony to the performance. Veitch, Knight et al were detained in police custody for almost twenty four hours (the legal limit) and then released without charge. They had effectively been kept off of the street for the duration of the royal wedding, rendering their planned performances impossible.

Though the events, with their intended symbolic opposition, could not take place, they did contribute to a greater symbolic impression of the situation: just as the government and monarchy were engaging in a piece of popular theatre on a huge scale, enjoyed by millions across the world and uniting its audience in a sense of celebration, the Metropolitan Police were carrying out a coordinated operation to remove dissenting voices from the event. Popular theatre cannot be reduced to one single definable function, but the events of April 28th-29th 2011 demonstrate two extremes of the way it can operate. Official events, organised or sanctioned by authority, can legitimately bring people together, as was noted above, and enable them to communally express celebration, grief, remembrance, thanksgiving etc but, unlike the unlicensed, illegitimate performance of protest and political street theatre, they are unable to express dissatisfaction, radicalism and rage. In this age of dejection and dissidence, with a public torn between a desire to forget their societal troubles and an impulse to challenge them head on, the role of popular performance in public space is in flux. After the royal wedding, Assistant Commissioner Lyne Owens expressed the honour and privilege of being involved in a ‘fantastic day of pageantry and celebration’, and underscored the importance of events on the horizon from their perspective:

…today’s success should convince people that the Met is well able to handle next year’s Diamond Jubilee and the Olympic Games.

The disparity between theatre with a broad appeal and theatre that is consciously in the interests of the population will not be resolved, but analysis of the performance practises exhibited over the coming months and the social context they exist in will see it sharply defined. The future is uncertain, but with regards to social attitudes to government and the role of those who seek to find creative methods to voice dissent, Juvenal’s words already seem eerily prophetic:

Time was when their plebiscite elected Generals, Heads of State, commanders of legions: but now they’ve pulled in their horns, there’s only two things that concern them: Bread and Circuses.

‘I hear that many are to be purged.’

‘That’s right, they’re turning the heat on, and no mistake.’

*  *  *

[1] Paul Allain and Jen Harvie The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance (Oxford: Routledge, 2006) p. 190.

[2] Nigel Arch and Joanna Marschner The Royal Wedding Dresses: The Splendour of Royal Marriage Across Five Centuries (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1990) p. 127.

[3] Ibid. p. 127.

[4] Juvenal The Sixteen Satires (Middlesex: Penguin Classics, 1974) p.  207.

[5] Paul Allain and Jen Harvie The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance (Oxford: Routledge, 2006) p. 102, 103.