The Nibelung’s Ring: The Early Philosophy John Micael Greer
The Wisdom of Kandiaronk David Graeber, The Anarchist Library
The next would-be assassin may be a drone pilot. US law enforcement doesn’t look ready.
What if the would-be Trump assassin had instead used a drone rigged with explosives?
This is becoming a weapon of choice in Ukraine and across the Middle East, a remote-controlled flying bomb that would likely have more seriously wounded the Republican candidate. Security experts warn that inexpensive drones can be easily transformed into dangerous weapons by extremist groups in the West.
For the US Secret Service and other executive protection agencies, keeping prominent figures safe from traditional threats — guns, knives, bombs — is challenging enough. Drones offer a new and dangerous threat that law enforcement isn’t ready for.
Playwright David Edgar: ‘It’s a very rich time for political theatre’
Fundamentally, The New Real is a Western,” says David Edgar of his latest play for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Just a minute. A Western? The New Real, produced in association with Headlong theatre, is an epic, cut-and-thrust political thriller about election strategists, pinging back and forth between the US and eastern Europe during the early 21st century. Dirty tricks, yes; bar brawls, yes — but horses, Stetsons and saloon doors? Not so much.
“Well,” says Edgar, with a smile, “it’s about two people being called into the village and ending up in a High Noonshootout against each other.”
In fact, it is one of two new Edgar plays featuring a high-stakes showdown between allies: a metaphorical “shootout” that keys into a much broader issue. In The New Real — subtitled “an origin story” — two American political strategists grapple with the complex legacy of the collapse of the communist bloc and a world rapidly realigning around new political coalitions.
The second new play, Here in America, peers into the 1952 falling-out between playwright Arthur Miller and director Elia Kazan, when the latter named names to Senator Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist House Un-American Activities Committee.
Coursing through both works are battles between principle and expediency, the interplay between power and control of the narrative, and the struggle to maintain democracy in the face of authoritarian populism. Edgar first drafted them before the pandemic. He points out that the intervening couple of years have only increased their topicality.
“I do feel we are in the most paranoid, polarised period of American politics there has been since the early Fifties,” he says. “I think Trump has, both in style and substance, a great deal of what we think of as McCarthyism. So I think that beast is back.”
Now 76, Edgar is one of Britain’s leading political playwrights: a tireless chronicler of the shifting sands of power and ideology. He started writing plays as a child in Birmingham, performing them in a garden shed converted into a tiny theatre by his father, and first had a drama professionally staged in 1970 (Two Kinds of Angel), followed by more than 60 works over the next five decades. A long association with the RSC started with his 1976 work, Destiny, about the National Front, and included a hit adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby. He founded the pioneering MA in playwriting studies at Birmingham university and has written an invaluable book, How Plays Work.
Yet he has lost none of his appetite for the fray. Courteous, erudite and wry, he arrives for our interview buzzing with recommendations for books and documentaries that shed light on our current political turbulence.
Edgar has written a trilogy of plays (The Shape of the Table, Pentecost and The Prisoner’s Dilemma) set in eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union, drawn from his own visits to the area during the 1980s and 1990s. He noticed even then that the views being voiced did not align strictly with what the western world saw as left- and right-wing politics.
“You would have conversations with people who liked the arts, believed in free speech and civil liberties, were liberal on sexual and gender issues. But sooner or later, over the fifth Slivovitz, they’d say, ‘The only thing we can’t understand is why you’re so hostile to that wonderful woman, Margaret Thatcher.’ They believed in economic and social liberalism at the same time. And of course, our politics has traditionally not worked like that.”
Those changing priorities have spread, he adds, picking up on voter discontent, catching traditional western parties on the hop and producing a wave of destabilising events. The New Real traces that process across the first 20 years of the 21st century. It’s the subject too of a new book, The Little Black Book of the Populist Right, co-authored by Edgar with Jon Bloomfield.
So what price political theatre? Can it make any difference in such a fractured world? In 2018 Edgar wrote and acted in Trying It On, in which he was robustly challenged by his younger, firebrand self (via a tape recorder) about what he had achieved. Nonetheless, he thinks that political drama is currently in rude health.
“Since the beginning of the last decade, since the 2008 crash, the Arab Spring, Occupy, the #MeToo movement and Black Lives Matter, politics has returned to the centre of life,” he says. “Theatre has returned to what it was in the Seventies: a place where you go to see ideas expressed in a politically charged way.”
Political theatre has always morphed to suit the times, he suggests. He identifies a switch in the late 1970s from big history plays to “snapshot plays” focusing on a particular issue as symptomatic of a greater societal shift. Examples might be David Hare’s Pravda (about Rupert Murdoch’s influence), Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money (about the City) and Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem (about Englishness): “Plays that have a size beyond their subject,” he calls them.
Frequently a champion of other writers, Edgar admires current political dramatists such as Peter Morgan and James Graham, and the way contemporary theatre incorporates politics into its practice, aiming for diversity in casting and the sustainable use of resources. While a play might not change the world, it can, he argues, articulate problems or illustrate how systems work.
“I think the most influential piece of political theatre of the 20th century was Joan Littlewood’s Oh, What a Lovely War!, which handed on a particular, and in my view accurate, view of the first world war,” he says. “The Tricycle Theatre’s ‘tribunal plays’ [verbatim accounts of public inquiries in Britain] added up to a portrait of how the British establishment tried to cover things up.”
Occasionally, political drama can make a real difference. “We’re talking in a year that saw probably the most directly impactful piece of television drama ever: Mr Bates vs The Post Office,” says Edgar, referring to the ITV drama about the Post Office scandal, in which hundreds of sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted for theft or fraud.
The series not only produced a widespread public outcry, it prompted the government to introduce legislation. It was evidence that politically engaged drama can sometimes galvanise change. That, together with the quantity of new plays hitting our stages, is cause for celebration for Edgar. “I think it’s a very rich time for political theatre.”
‘Here in America’, September 14-October 19, orangetreetheatre.co.uk; ‘The New Real’, October 3-November 2, rsc.org.uk
How can women navigate later life?
There is power to be gained in living on one’s own terms
At a cocktail party recently, waiting for a speech to start, I had a brief conversation with a woman that seemed to follow a thread I’d been thinking about for months. As we sat together in the shade, I asked how her summer had been, and she mentioned celebrating a milestone birthday — she had turned 60 this year.
I’ve been thinking lately about how women navigate the different stages of their lives, and asked the woman how she felt about it. She confessed that she’d often downplayed her birthdays in the past because she had mixed feelings about getting older. But she had chosen to approach it differently this year because she was looking forward to this new decade. Her forties had been challenging, her fifties had been great, and she was hoping life would just keep getting better. She leaned towards me with a smile and said, “If a 59-year-old woman is running for the US presidency, who knows what I myself might do in the coming years.” I smiled broadly and wished her an incredible start to her new decade.
Since then, I’ve kept thinking about how
women consider the middle and later years of their lives. I realise that much depends on one’s specific circumstances, but I wish there were more public conversations about how women can continue to thrive, create, expand and shift the world even as their own worlds change.
I was in Venice this summer, where Giorgione’s painting “The Old Woman” (c1506) hangs at the Gallerie dell’Accademia. It is a portrait of a woman wearing a pink tunic with a white shawl over one shoulder. Her age is anyone’s guess, given the historical period. But whether she was 40, 50 or 60, the point is that she was considered old.
She looks at the viewer as if blaming us for her pitiful appearance. Strands of thinning, messy hair fall from a loose-fitting white cap. Her mouth is slightly ajar and through missing teeth it’s as though she’s on the verge of saying something to us. In her right hand she holds a piece of paper that reads “col tempo”, which means “with time”, and points towards her chest. We will all be as she is in due time. Old.
The painting feels emblematic of a long-standing and problematic view of older womanhood. An aged woman seemingly undone, struggling to offer the world anything comprehensible. We may no longer paint women like this, but so much about our culture suggests we still believe women lose their truly generative energy beyond a certain age. Yet don’t we all know many women who have had career shifts and achieved laudable things in their fifties, sixties and beyond. I could name several. Of course, much depends on the specific circumstances of one’s life, including things not in our control. But I still believe that whenever anyone embraces their life and believes in their own value and worth, there are ways to continue to grow and blossom and to encourage purpose and expansion in the lives of others.
I love the self-portrait that Alice Neel made in 1980, when she was 80 years old. The artist sits on a blue and white striped armchair completely naked except for the glasses on her face, a paintbrush in her right hand and what looks like a wiping cloth in her left hand. She’s sitting on the edge of the chair, her head held high as she stares straight at the viewer. What could be a posture of vulnerability seems instead to be one of confidence and self-awareness. Her breasts sag against her stomach and we see the swollen flesh at her ankles. Her hair is completely white. But she is not only accepting of this stage of her physical life, she seems to be proudly claiming it. The paintbrush is symbolic of her creative life, the vitality and fertility she still possesses as an artist, someone who still labours and births new creations.
It is a defiant and unapologetic painting and provokes us to think about how we regard women in this season of their lives. I like to think the work is an invitation to other women to consider how we see and understand ourselves, regardless of what society might say. What parts of our identity should we cling to and how do we learn to narrate our own lives as we grow?
The 2017-18 painting “A Solitary Pursuit” by Nigerian-American artist Toyin Ojih Odutola has a powerful and commanding air. An older black woman with a white Afro and dark-rimmed glasses sits in the driver’s seat of a pink convertible. She wears a white button-up shirt, one elbow resting on the window rim. The roof of the car is pulled back and we can see that she’s in the middle of a vast landscape. She gazes towards us but not at us: we are not the centre of her attention, though she is the centre of ours.
I love this image because it suggests such self-possession. Sitting in the driving seat with a seemingly clear estimation of herself, she’s moving her life in the direction she wants, and the open expanse of land suggests there are still possibilities for her. This past week I attended the DVF Awards, a ceremony established by Diane von Furstenberg and the Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation, to celebrate women who are using their lives to promote justice, equality and care for others. It was inspiring, powerful and beautiful to be in a room with generations of women, from their twenties to their seventies, supporting and encouraging one another. As I looked at them, I thought about what power a woman gains from living life on her own terms, regardless of when the world thinks her time might be up.