London losing its theatres is like Paris losing its Michelin-star restaurants, Venice losing its canals or Amsterdam losing its opium dens (aka coffee shops).
For centuries, people from all over the world have been forming a beeline for the West End, pursing their lips in anticipation of yet another theatrical tour de force. Great English actors of the past, such as Burbage, Garrick and Keene, are still venerated as if they were our contemporaries.
English theatre produced history’s greatest playwright, but Shakespeare didn’t just waft in from thin air. Tall trees don’t grow in the desert – they grow in large forests of shorter trees. Artists are the same: they grow to sublime heights only if the cultural soil is gloriously fertile, with lesser talents sprouting luxuriantly to prop up a genius.
Now that soil has been strewn with coarse-grained salt to destroy the crops and make sure nothing will ever grow there again. The tactic was first used by victorious Roman soldiers thus punishing vanquished Carthage.
For Carthage, read London theatres. And for Roman soldiers, read fascism.
In this context I’m using the word broadly, in the sense of boundless powerlust expressed through wanton destruction driven by conscious innovation. Objectionable here isn’t the noun but the adjective.
That art doesn’t stand still is axiomatic. Today’s composers couldn’t possibly write like Bach, today’s novelists like Fielding, today’s painters would look like silly epigones if they adopted Duccio’s style. The ineluctable logic of art demands innovation.
Any great art represents an organic accumulation of innovations over centuries, if not millennia. Yet not all development is organic. Some was imposed by evildoers whose conscious objective was to destroy, not to create.
Modernism, though not ipso facto wicked, can be easily used to such wicked ends, in politics as well as in art. Fascism is as good a term as any to describe this tendency, with art in this instance imitating politics.
The Italian poet and painter Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (d. 1944) illustrates this point perfectly. For the founder of Futurism merged within his person both artistic and political fascism, thereby emphasising their natural affinity.
A prolific essayist as well as a poet, Marinetti wrote the bible of artistic vandalism, the Futurist Manifesto (1909), and co-authored the Fascist Manifesto 10 years later. A true polymath, he left no artistic turn unstoned, including theatre.
His main idea was to replace traditional playhouses with variety theatres, the better to mock theatrical tradition into oblivion. When it came to laying down his ideas, Marinetti didn’t mince words:
“Variety theatre is to destroy everything solemn, sacred, serious in art. It promotes the impending annihilation of immortal works by altering and mocking them, by producing them as if they were nothing special…
“It’s essential that all logic in Variety productions be eliminated, that they be made excessively bizarre, with every contrast amplified so much that everything bizarre dominates…
“Interrupt the singer. Accompany the aria with swearwords and insults… Force the audience in the stalls, gallery and boxes to take part in the action…
“Systematically defile classical art on stage, by, for example, producing Greek, French and Italian tragedies in one evening, abbreviated and comically merged together…”
The disembodied spirit of Marinetti is hovering over the West End, making sure the formerly great theatres there follow his prescriptions to the letter. And they don’t disappoint.
Some of the greatest heights of man’s genius are being brought down to earth and stamped into the manure of woke vandalism. Destroying “everything solemn, sacred, serious in art”? Will do, Tommaso. “Systematically defile classical art”? Not a problem. “Producing great plays as if they were nothing special?” Just say the word. “Altering and mocking immortal works”? Nothing to it.
Thus the grim, fearless warrior Agrippa appears on London’s premier stage as a flighty girl wearing a short dress and high heels. Ophelia, dressed in torn jeans, gyrates on a bed to the sound of the ghetto blaster she is holding to her ear. White men are routinely portrayed by black women (doing it the other way around would cancel the director faster than he could say ‘cultural appropriation’). Claudius slaps Hamlet around, with Nazi-clad guards pointing their Schmeissers at the audience. Buckets of red paint are emptied on Richard II’s head.
As if committed to proving that real art can’t thrive in fascist settings designed to destroy it, fewer and fewer actors are any longer able to enunciate the lines properly or even intelligibly. Or perhaps they just sense how incongruous Elizabethan prose sounds in the mouths of youngsters dressed for a drug-fuelled rave in a seedy Soho club.
There are only so many female Agrippas and black Cleopatras that people can take without running a simple cost-benefit analysis through their heads. The cost is the best part of £100 per ticket (much more for musicals). And the benefit is complicity in the fascist takeover of a great English institution.
More and more people are saying thanks, but no thanks. As a result, many West End theatres, where in the past it was next to impossible to get a ticket, are now playing to empty houses. Some are shutting their doors for ever.
Fascism of any kind pretends its body is healthy, but a close look will always reveal signs of cadaverous decomposition. In the good, if in this case still metaphorical, tradition, the great London theatre is forced to dig its own grave.
Before long it too will start rotting and decomposing, its soul ripped out in line with Marinetti’s diktats.
I have not been to a play in years, but this lament reminds me of the musical number “Choreography” from 1954’s “White Christmas”. The singer asks, “what’s happened to the theater?”, then answers his own question stating that dancers are no longer dancing, “they’re doing choreography.” The implication being that modern man (as of 1954!) was better than his predecessors, finding simple dancing to be quaint and outdated and replacing it with the pretentious choreography. The movie has any number of problems, but pointing out the ridiculous direction of live theater (all entertainment?) is spot on.
As always, well done, sir!
Percipient as always. Though the barbarian asks, “was it pure coincidence that the worst form of fascism that ever was, Nazism, sprouted in the most culturally refined nation at the time? For there isn’t a doubt that 1920’s Berlin could run cultural circles around London 2022.”
A good point, that.
Waffen SS officers in Nazi Germany as part of their training regimen were expected to appreciate classical music. Being trained to be a gentleman a requisite for graduation. Classical music. Appreciation of fine art. Ballroom dancing. Etiquette of formal dining.
Think Goering too and his fondness for his art collection. Many others like him too.
Well, the Soviets had their Bolshoi too! Didn’t they!
“Today’s composers couldn’t possibly write like Bach”
Today the composer of what would be deemed classical music only writes such music as a musical score for the cinema? A man of the stature of a Bach or a Beethoven only is seen every century or so anyhow?
We have James MacMillan now, so our century is taken care of.
Otello at the Royal Opera House is currently playing to full houses. Otello is a black man, Desdemona is a white woman and the costumes are appropriate to the period. It felt a little odd, somehow.