Theatre for social change

It’s just getting clearer and clearer to me that the role of theatre in society is to promote social change.

It’s kind of stupid of me to think this, though, because I don’t see a theatre company anywhere that agrees with me.

And it’s very hard to make theatre on your own.

The problem for me is that mostly what the theatre industry seems to be doing is just trying to carry on as normal.

Trying to pretend that the crisis we’re in just isn’t happening.

Which is what all our politicians are doing.

I think it’s irresponsible and wrong; but I can’t waste my time condemning fellow artists.

We must all somehow do what we can to keep going.

The only thing for me to do is to keep creating what I believe needs making, though it often feels right now like a lonely kind of business.

And it’s taken me back to a memory of the first production of “The Gospel According to Jesus Queen Of Heaven” because that’s really when it all began, this activism business.

Also because I’ve spent this morning performing my new version of the play to a group of forty Christian youth group workers from all over Europe;

And it feels particularly timely today because yesterday the laughably titled “Equality And Human Rights Commission” recommended that the UK government change its legal definition of ‘sex’ back to biological sex, and so deprive trans people of our identities and our human rights.

EHCR

This new version of the show doesn’t have the beautiful mirror or the gorgeous lights of the original, that Neil Montgomery’s photos capture so skilfully.

Instead it’s just a group of us sitting in a room together, “meeting as friends, because we want to change the world”.

And this, the play reminds us, “This is how it all began”.

A group of us meeting as equals, meeting as friends, in a place of safety and mutual acceptance, where we can be together and reflect on the nature of solidarity and love.

The kind of solidarity and love that is the most effective and most powerful answer to the torrents of fear and hatred that threaten to engulf us.

It’s amazing to revisit my website, where these Queen Jesus pictures come from, and revisit what I wrote when I set it up:

“Theatre of the world because:

theatre needs to be written for the world and about the world.

The problems that confront us are global: an artistic response based on the dilemmas of a single individual, or a single individual within a single nation, is no longer adequate.

all traditional values are no longer adequate to handle the dilemmas that confront us.

our political ideas and institutions are no longer adequate.

our economic values and institutions are no longer adequate.

our scientific values and institutions are no longer adequate.

our ideas of gender, of what it means to be male or female, are no longer adequate.

our artistic ideas are no longer adequate.

We have to create new values, new institutions, new economic and political structures. Or we will destroy ourselves.

It is the responsibility of the artist to help dream, envision, create these new values and these new structures.

This is the focus of my life and work.”

I was a bit pompous in those days, I can’t help thinking, when I set down the principles that had begun to form in my imagination in 1989, when I visited the richest and the poorest parts of the world within a few months of each other and could feel, feel so intensely in my body, how they were and are all parts of the one world and that we all belong together.

What’s also for sure in this changed situation is that we need to think of new ways of making theatre. New ways of making theatre and new ways of paying for theatre.

We can’t go on relying on a government subsidy that gets ever more tightly controlled and ever more inadequate year after year.

Maybe it does just mean going back to the most basic elements of theatre:

A live encounter between people in a room that while the performance lasts becomes somewhere a bit magical and a bit sacred.

A portable theatre. A show that can be put on anywhere. A theatre that costs very little to put on. A green theatre. A theatre that does not add to the damage to the structure of the world….

But instead empowers its audience to begin the process of healing it.

I spoke this morning of how colonialism and slavery have left deep wounds on our collective culture.

Deep wounds on the body of our mother the earth; and deep wounds in all of our hearts.

Wounds that it’s our job as theatre makers to try to begin to heal.

So that we can all find the power together to create a new and better way of organising ourselves in this tormented world…..

If the idea of the performance I’m describing intrigues you, and you’d maybe like to consider booking it, then get in touch. Let’s see what we can arrange…

If you think what I’m writing about may interest a colleague or a friend, then feel free to share too..

And thank you, as ever for reading…