In uneasy times we like to make a song and dance out of politics
The good thing about musicals used to be that you didn’t have to take them seriously. For those of us whose brows hang low, a night out in the company of singing cats or magic nannies or rollerskating diesel engines was pure escapist pleasure. Any tears produced were strictly sentimental.
“We have our arts so we won’t die of truth,” said the novelist Ray Bradbury. I wonder what he would have made of the Donmar Warehouse’s 2017 spring season. As well as staging a new play about the 1981 schism in the Labour Party, the Donmar is putting together a musical about the collapse of Kids Company,
with the snappy title: The Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee Takes Oral Evidence on Whitehall’s Relationship with Kid’s
Company. The lyrics will be taken from the transcript of last year’s Commons select committee into the charity’s mismanaged finances. Bernard Jenkin, the bespectacled Tory MP and committee chairman, is expected to have some of the biggest tunes.
If that doesn’t quench your thirst for a current affairs-based singalong, there’s always Removal Men – a musical about prison officers at a Yarl’s Wood-style immigrant detention centre. Or the forthcoming Sinking
Water, about the Chinese immigrant cockle-pickers who died at Morecambe Bay in 2004. There are also musicals in development about the Jungle camp at Calais, and the benefits of nuclear power versus renewable energy.
Making a drama out of a real-life crisis is not a new idea; the ancient Greeks did it, Shakespeare perfected it. But these days, there’s a much shorter journey from reality to entertainment. The moment Tony Blair stepped off the political stage, he was reincarnated all over the actual stage (and screen). Almost everyone involved in the New Labour project, from Gordon Brown to David Blunkett, suddenly found themselves turned into dramatis personae. Coalition, the Channel 4 drama about how the Tories formed a government with the Lib Dems, didn’t even wait for an ending: it was aired while that government was still in power.
Why the hurry? Partly, this trend reflects a more general news-hungry mood. We live, as they say, in interesting times. War, mass migration and political upheaval produce an abundance of human dramas. And social media has brought us much closer to these stories: they unfold, sometimes in real time, on our phones. We retweet them, comment on them, become part of them. News is no longer the preserve of inky-fingered Fleet Street professionals. Anyone can do it, and you can do almost anything with it.
Social media has also shifted the boundaries of privacy. We feel more entitled to peer in at other people’s lives. Yet the remnant of some ancient decorum remains, like a post-evolutionary stump of tail. Much as I am enjoying the sumptuous new Netflix drama The Crown, my conscience itches. Head of state she may be, but the Queen is also a living person – and a notoriously private one. Is it not a dreadful cheek, first to presume to know the inner workings of her mind, or her marriage, and then to dish it up as entertainment?
However “true” these stories are, they always end up as fiction; that is where the artistry lies. For the people whose lives get rewritten – the Queen, the charity boss or the cocklepicker’s relative – it must be a kind of theft.