Newsnight comes to the stage but the barricades remain unstormed
Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere
Does anyone have a clue what’s going on? Revolutions and unrest in the Middle East; European countries staring into the abyss of bankruptcy; anticapitalists running amok; the Trump phenomenon and the collapse, even, of “reality”, as fake news proliferates and the digital generation find their own anti-hierarchical spin on that Sixties catchphrase “Turn on, tune in, drop out”.
Relax, folks. Paul Mason is on hand to guide us through these bewildering times. You know the guy. Former economics editor of Newsnight, then Channel 4 News, now an intellectually inquisitive, politically engaged journo who was once dubbed, to his vehement protestation, “a revolutionary Marxist” by George Osborne.
Mason’s ambitious, amply rewarding 2011 book Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere (prompted by an influential blog post) takes its readers from Cairo’s Tahrir Square to the tear-gas filled streets of Athens, Occupy-beset Wall Street and beyond, to try to “figure out what is going on” (to borrow a Trumpian phrase). Now, his richly researched (subsequently revised) primer has been translated into a pop-up act of theatre that will in turn furnish an experimental BBC programme.
Those lucky enough to bag free tickets to this (already concluded) événement were promised a new kind of theatre in director David Lan’s prefatory remarks. Yet despite a radical-sounding opening reference to Brecht’s analogy between epic drama and a witness describing a car crash, I don’t think any significant barricades have been stormed.
Essentially this was “Newsnight theatre”, with Mason, in jeans and shirt, picking his way among the attendees (sitting meekly on makeshift perches), thinking aloud and re-enacting – with the help of three actors – insightful conversational encounters. There was a lot of projected footage, including a distressing instance of the Arab Spring suddenly darkening: a young Aleppo girl pictured singing just before a huge explosion.
At times, it felt so rushed as to court charges of glibness: one minute, a mini-lecture on the 1871 Paris Commune (the subject of a play Mason will premiere on the fringe next month), the next a potted history of the rising against Mubarak, with the audience enlisted as the unruly mob, chanting (in Arabic) “The people demand the fall of the regime”. But Mason’s mission is to force us to make tenuous connections, lob provocations our way. Even if this only kicks off a debate about the need for some of the dynamism of “current affairs” reportage to intrude on our rather dozy theatrical scene, it will have served a valiant purpose.
‘Mason’s mission is to force us to make tenuous connections, to lob provocations our way’
To be broadcast as part of Performance Live on BBC Two in May