Editorial: Electoral Theatre

Theatre is an affair of the State. I would say that, being at ease with princes and having been founded in the regime of democracy on the agora, theatre is now indecisive, or hurting – not because of the reign of television, as people pretend, but due to the essential lack of politics in which the electoral process is resolved.¹

This edition of Contemporary Theatre Review is timed to coincide with the UK General Election of May 2015. It deals in part with theatre about electoral politics, but also seeks to take seriously the analogical relationship proposed by Badiou (of which more shortly) by treating electoral politics as a kind of theatre. As Stephen Coleman observes in his framing essay, ‘Elections as Storytelling Contests’ (pp. 166–76), there are essentially three groups of performers involved in a contemporary democratic election – the politicians seeking our votes, the media commentators who seek to ‘referee’ the politicians and editorialise their narratives for popular consumption, and finally the electors themselves. Customarily positioned simply as ‘passive’ spectators to the drama of politics, voters are called upon at election times to become participants – to act, albeit on a tightly circumscribed platform – in order that the existing political dispensation can continue to affirm its underlying legitimacy.

It might thus be simplest to position this edition in terms of a performance studies paradigm – one which extends theatrical metaphors in order to analyse other dimensions of life (in this case, elections) ‘as’ performance. All too often, however, performance studies thinking betrays the promise of its own interdisciplinarity, by simply providing license for theatre-trained scholars to wander roughshod into adjacent disciplinary territory, without consulting the existing inhabitants. This edition attempts something different, insofar as it extends directly from a collaborative research process initiated by a social scientist – the aforementioned Stephen Coleman, who is Professor of Political Communication at the University of Leeds. A former psephologist, Coleman’s disaffection with opinion polling is rooted in the awareness that polls provide only statistical data in response to pre-set questions. They do not tell us why people feel as they do about those questions. Nor, just as importantly, do they interrogate the terms of the questions themselves – questions which are usually designed to furnish the political classes with raw data, ‘intelligence’ on which to base their strategies, more than they are to render the electorate intelligible.

The Arts and Humanities Research Council-supported project ‘The Road to Voting’ (2007–11) was thus conceived by Coleman and Vanalyne Green (a performance and video artist, and Professor of Fine Art at Leeds) as a means of exploring the why and how of political participation. Motivated not least by the steadily decreasing patterns of voter turn-out apparent across the Western world, Coleman conducted a large number of qualitative research interviews with potential voters (and, indeed, conscientious non-voters) who were chosen to represent a range of demographic groups in the greater Leeds area. He asked about their memories of going to vote, their feelings about the process, the reasons why that process might to be failing to engage people, and what alternative forms of participation they could envisage. Rather than simply analysing his interview findings in the form of conventional academic literature, however, Coleman also made the transcripts and recordings available to the project’s participating artists, in order to stimulate creative responses. After all, if the real subject here was affect – people’s feelings of anger, awkwardness, hope, shame, and so forth, in relation to the electoral process – then it might just be that theatre, filmmaking, and installation art offered more appropriately performative means by which to explore the outcomes of this research.

Although Coleman published a monograph presenting his own analysis of the interview findings from ‘The Road to Voting’ – the neatly titled How Voters Feel – in 2013, the creative outcomes of the project have not been discussed critically until now. In her essay for this edition of Contemporary Theatre Review, ‘Political Sensibilities, Affect, and the Performative Space of Voting’ (pp. 177–89), Brenda Hollweg (a research associate on the project) provides a theoretically informed overview of ‘The Road to Voting’ and its associated film, theatre, and installation outcomes. Subsequently, my own contribution, ‘Staging the Democratic Deficit’ (pp. 190–204), attempts a more in-depth analysis of the project’s most publicly visible outcome, the verbatim play Counted – which was produced almost within spitting distance of Parliament, around the time of the 2010 General Election.

The other contents of this edition do not arise directly from ‘The Road to Voting’, but they extrapolate in various ways on its concerns – often drawing from How Voters Feel as a key point of reference. In ‘Hailing the Citizen’ (pp. 205–15), leading media studies scholar John Corner considers some of the ways in which governments and political groups deploy dramaturgical strategies of address (in film, on television, and online) in order to engage potential voters – by casting them as pivotal players in variously imagined narratives of social progress. Subsequently, James Frieze’s essay ‘Beyond the Zero-Sum Game: Participation and the Optics of Opting’ (pp. 216–29) critiques some of these same strategies of address by turning to the explicitly theatrical example of Ontroerend Goed’s 2013 play Fight Night. The Belgian company satirises the manipulation of voting publics by introducing elements of audience participation into a nonetheless carefully scripted scenario. In this performance, whichever way you vote – or indeed, even if you refuse to vote – the dramaturgical system continues regardless.

The uneasy collision (collusion?) between theatricality and broadcast media is also central to two of the pieces presented in this edition’s ‘Documents’ section. The text of Tim Crouch’s biting, still-relevant short play John, Antonio, and Nancy is published here for the first time, courtesy of the author. Writing in immediate response to the 2010 General Election, Crouch uses child performers to recontextualise verbatim quotes from the televised, three-way leadership debates that took place for the first time that year. His play is followed by an interview with actor Vincent Franklin, star of Russell T. Davies’s recent Channel 4 television drama, Cucumber. Franklin boasts the unusual distinction of having performed as both a Labour chief whip (in This House, James Graham’s 2012 historical drama for the National Theatre of Great Britain) and a chief Tory spin doctor (in The Thick of It, Armando Iannucci’s caustic political satire for BBC television). Based on these experiences, Franklin offers a bleakly humourous analysis of politicians’ performances during the hung parliaments of both the 2010s and 1970s.

The perspectives offered by these documents, as well as by Corner’s and Frieze’s essays, are perhaps less than optimistic about the state of contemporary politics. Our final two pieces, however, present cautiously positive views of their authors’ performative participation in the act of voting. Helen Nicholson’s ‘Affective Geographies of the Ballot Box’ (pp. 230–41) attempts yet another interdisciplinary strategy, drawing on geographic and ethnographic theory to reflect on the embodied performance of walking to a polling station in a rural constituency outside of London to vote in the 2014 European elections. Her quiet thinking through of the various site-specific intensities implicit in this ritual of electoral participation (social, historical, and phenomenological) is subsequently thrown into relief by the decidedly raucous melee of voices which Laura Bissell and David Overend call into play in ‘Early Days’ (pp. 242–50) – their lively, Glasgow-centred account (part reportage, part critique) of some of the diverse performances, theatrical and otherwise, that they witnessed in the months leading up to the Scottish independence referendum of September 2014. This piece, like Nicholson’s, reminds us that, for all the posturing of politicians and media commentators, the actors who matter most in an election are indeed the voters. The Scottish example, in particular, demonstrates that popular involvement in political argument retains the potential to trouble and even exceed the supposedly circumscribed parameters of debate set out by those framing the poll. The dissensual multiplicity of perspectives and counter-arguments stirred up during the referendum campaign could not be contained within the neat, binary dynamics preferred by the narrativising media. For this very reason, the issue of whether ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ came out victorious on the day may ultimately prove to be of less significance than the fact that fully 85% of the Scottish electorate turned out to vote one way or the other. No General Election in the UK has attracted such a degree of public engagement since immediately after World War II, and – at the time of writing – it looks likely that the after-shocks of this poll will continue to inform the UK-wide election campaign of 2015 in a range of highly unpredictable ways.

This brings me back to Alain Badiou, and his bravura philosophical performance in Rhapsody for the Theatre (French original, 1990), a quirkily unpredictable text in which he proposes a direct analogy between theatrical and political processes. Both theatre and politics, Badiou maintains, are defined by the ‘eternal’ enactment of debate, conflict, and struggle. These public contestations exist with the permission or indulgence of State power, but sometimes walk a fine line in relation to it. Both theatre and politics, moreover, though relying on the pre-existence of certain established texts or scenarios for their enactment, are essentially live – existing only in and through the ongoing, present moment: ‘theatre and politics continue: they can exist or not, but they cannot come to an end’.²

For Badiou, this analogical connection stands not merely as a convenient parallel, but as a kind of symbiotic relationship. Theatre and politics are both prone, in his eyes, to periods of related ill health, and the parlous state of electoral politics in the West may help to explain why theatre too so often fails to live up to its perceived potential. Both on stage and in parliamentary elections, certain habitual rituals of argument are enacted, but they often amount to little more than empty spectacle: ‘As is the case of today’s politics’, Badiou notes, ‘there is little, very little Theatre, because “theatre” most often protects us from it’.³ Even so, as his rhapsodic title indicates, Badiou is far from despairing, because what ‘philosophy sees in theatre, which always fascinates it and gets it all worked up, [is] a mode of the Idea that is infected, always, by desire. […] Theatre: the putting-into-bodies of the Idea.’⁴

As long as desire exists, then, so the potential of Theatre exists – for rhapsodic celebration and subversion of the status quo. Analogically, we might suppose (though Badiou does not say this), the potential for politics also persistently exists, seeded within the theatrical charade that so often passes for democratic elections in the West. As events in Scotland in 2014 perhaps suggest, so long as the participatory act of voting exists – the putting-into-bodies of the Idea of democracy – then so too does the possibility that populations might once again become infected with the desire for change, for true representation, for true accountability.

If that sounds a little high-flown for your taste, you might prefer another analogy signalled by Badiou. Theatre, he proposes is ‘a localizing machine, a machine for […] orienting us in time, [for] telling us where we are in history’.⁵ The basic script might remain the same each time a play is remounted, but its enactment in the present moment introduces for the spectator what Badiou calls ‘a “cut” in time’ – as the text is re-enunciated in a fresh historical context. This ‘elucidation of the instant serves to orient us […] in the obscure thickness in which we are situated’.⁶ It is a claim that, surely, applies with at least as much force to elections, for those of us still spectating them. Certainly for me, the ritual theatrics of the UK General Election have functioned as an affective marker of time just as profoundly as have those singular events (the death of Diana, the collapse of the World Trade Center) for which we all supposedly remember our whereabouts on hearing of them.

If I cast my mind back to 3 May 1979, for example (the date is forever engraved in memory), I can clearly recall Margaret Thatcher winning a first term of office as Prime Minister on the same, doubly traumatic day that I was forced to participate in my junior school swimming gala. Somehow I experienced both events as a coercive imposition: at 11 years old, after all, I had no say at all in the election result (I just knew from my Labour-voting parents that it was a bad thing). Thirteen years later, as a second-time voter in the General Election of 1992, I was more profoundly appalled by a result which saw Thatcher’s nominated successor as Conservative leader, John Major, returned to office despite all poll predictions to the contrary. My own performance on this occasion involved not the public humiliation of the one-width drowning race, but a private ritual of disidentification with the wider British public, as I sat in my postgraduate bedsit listening to The Jam’s ‘Going Underground’ at maximum volume: ‘I don’t get what this society wants’. Five years after that, while entirely distrusting the saccharine dance-pop of D-Ream’s ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ – the ubiquitous soundtrack to Tony Blair’s landslide Labour victory of 1997 – I nonetheless recall experiencing joyous relief at finally being able to identify with the electorate as a whole, as the Tories were unceremoniously dumped out of office. Election day, 1 May, also happened to be my birthday, and a party at my Glasgow tenement involved friends and colleagues young and old roaring drunken approval at the TV well into the wee hours, as every last Scottish Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) bit the dust one after another.

My point here is not to make a virtue of voting Labour (which proves merely that I learned to imitate my parents), but to emphasise the coalescence of history, affect, and self-performance in my profoundly felt memories of those occasions. However sceptical we might feel over the question of whether electors really change anything through the gestural act of voting itself (since the government, as we know, always gets in), still, perhaps, in the stories we tell around elections, about the how and why of voting (or not), something is capable of shifting. In this respect, again, electoral participation is analogous to theatre – a Theatre which, Badiou reminds us, ‘treats not politics [itself] but the consciousnesses raised in the state of politics’.⁷

Notes

1. Alain Badiou, Rhapsody for the Theatre, trans. by Bruno Bosteels (London: Verso, 2013), p. 15.

2. Badiou, Rhapsody, p. 11.

3. Badiou, Rhapsody, p. 22.

4. Badiou, Rhapsody, p. 73, emphasis in original.

5. Badiou, Rhapsody, p. 78, emphasis in original.

6. Badiou, Rhapsody, p. 79.

7. Badiou, Rhapsody, p. 36.