Anders Lustgarten’s new play explores the origins of the surveillance state in Elizabethan England, he tells
Nick Curtis
WE ARE lucky,” says Anders Lustgarten, “that our current authoritarians are very, ver y s*** at being au t h o r i t a r i a n . ” T h e 4 0 -ye a r- o l d playwright and activist believes Donald Trump would like to impose on America “a sort of corporate authoritarianism” akin to that of Erdogan’s Turkey if he were not “so lazy and incompetent”, and that those outside the wealthy one per cent in the UK were lucky to get the hapless Theresa May as Prime Minister rather than potential rivals who were far more “competent, profoundly malicious, and ruthless”. Neither of these current leaders could hold a candle, he suggests, to the subject of his latest play, Sir Francis Walsingham, who as Elizabeth I’s spymaster effectively invented the surveillance state — and made its people love it.
“The more you dig around in that era, what is interesting is not only the extension of a system of mass surveillance for the first time but also the mythology of the Virgin Queen — Gloriana — which has persisted down the years,” says Lustgarten.
Eliz abeth’s reign “also saw the beginnings of capitalism, the beginning of the enclosure movement [of common land], and of mass political dissent. The late Elizabethan era executed more people for political dissent than any other era in British history, per capita.” He grins: “And it’s just a cool period with spies and ruffs and people stabbing each other. Everyone loves that.”
The Secret Theatre — its title comes from John le Carré’s description of espionage — looks at first sight like a departure for Lustgarten. The highly educated son of liberal American academics of Hungarian descent, he grew up all over the world, has been arrested during political protests in four separate continents, and started writing plays while teaching prisoners in San Quentin.
The plays that thrust him into the limelight were agitprop-y contemporary dramas about the BNP (A Day at the Racists, Finborough), capitalism (If You Don’t Let Us Dream We Won’t Let You Sleep, Royal Court), China (The Sugar- C oated Bullets of the Bourgeoisie, Arcola) and the migrant crisis (Lampedusa, Soho Theatre). So how did he end up writing a historical drama for the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe?
The answer is, he didn’t. “It was a scratch thing I’ve been writing for more of less five years,” he says. “Plays sometimes find their place, and it is ideal for that space. It seems to get disturbingly more relevant as time goes on.” Bec ause i t ’s n o t just about Walsingham, of course. “I started out wanting to write something about the NSA, GCHQ and state surveillance,” he says. “And as we have found out, Facebook and Google and Cambridge Analytica have a corporate dimension to surveillance that is even more disturbing. But the fundamentally interesting and difficult challenge about writing political plays is that drama is inherently about individuals, and power is inherently about systems and ideologies.”
Previous dramas about the likes of the CIA leaker Edward Snowden “have been fairly terrible because they don’t