Politics as Theatre

Sometimes a viewpoint solidifies while alternatives fade away. To my mind, one of the solidifying viewpoints is an old one – politics as theatre. To take a topical example, the UK power struggle between Keir Starmer and Andrew Burnham is mostly theatre.

We’ve always known it too. The need to analyse doesn’t go away, but even Burnham’s preference for ‘Andy’ over ‘Andrew’ is obvious theatre. Unfortunately for Starmer he isn’t a very good actor – he only does Awkward Lawyer.

The Starmer/Burnham performance highlights the problem though – what we are presented with is mostly theatre. As theatre it has little room for analysis apart from analysis of the performance, the stories, setting and perhaps the cost. Critics have no secure place from which to criticise – the performance must go on as the old cliché has it – and it does.

Politics as theatre is not even a remarkable political conclusion because much of the public arena is theatre, even in our supposedly technocratic age. From the World Cup to Davos, from the arts to soap opera, from TV news to activist stunts, theatre dominates, critical analysis doesn’t.

Amory had grown up to a thousand books, a thousand lies; he had listened eagerly to people who pretended to know, who knew nothing. The mystical reveries of saints that had once filled him with awe in the still hours of night, now vaguely repelled him. The Byrons and Brookes who had defied life from mountain tops were in the end but flaneurs and poseurs, at best mistaking the shadow of courage for the substance of wisdom. The pageantry of his disillusion took shape in a world-old procession of Prophets, Athenians, Martyrs, Saints, Scientists, Don Juans, Jesuits, Puritans, Fausts, Poets, Pacifists; like costumed alumni at a college reunion they streamed before him as their dreams, personalities, and creeds had in turn thrown colored lights on his soul; each had tried to express the glory of life and the tremendous significance of man; each had boasted of synchronizing what had gone before into his own rickety generalities; each had depended after all on the set stage and the convention of the theatre, which is that man in his hunger for faith will feed his mind with the nearest and most convenient food.

F. Scott Fitzgerald This Side of Paradise (1920)