Some thoughts on some riots

Back in London for a few days for a family birthday. Like most of us,
I’ve been so shocked and so desperately sad to see the news of riots in
the home city that I love – to the point that it was hard to engage with
the Festival.

Call me Pollyannaish (and I know some will, quite possibly including members of my cast!) but I simply won’t believe
people take to rioting, lawlessness and inflicting pain and damage on
their fellows unless they are frightened, undervalued and
un-listened-to. We all, often, make bad or selfish choices out of
laziness or cowardice or casual greed, but no-one makes an evil choice
lightly. I was horrified to hear on the news today of the pensioner who
was killed defending his block of flats from arsonists. But it does beg
the question, what made the arsonists be arsonists – or killers? What
other choices did they have? Were they reasonable choices? We always do
have a choice, yes – but those of us (myself included) who are fortunate
enough to have meaningful work, (just…) enough to live on, enough
interest, respect, love and money to make life generally bearable,
rarely encounter choices as stark as those who felt – for whatever
reason, understandable or not – that hurting others was the only way to
be heard or noticed. I’ve said this a lot in the past few weeks in interviews about the
production of Medea I’m directing at the Festival – when people ask, why this play, now,
I answer, because if you take a person, in all their richness and
complexity and possibility and eagerness, and you stop them being able
to have a meaningful existence, you turn that person into a bomb. This
is the 2500 year old story of Medea, and this has been happening as a
social trend for a while in the UK. It is terrifying and awful to see
that bomb start to explode here, now.

This isn’t a case of party politics – much as I loathe him, this was
going on long before Cameron’s government – in 2007 I directed a show in
Edinburgh called Pramface, written by and starring Lizzie Hopley, about
the (then) new phenomenon of “chav” jokes, and particularly about the
way women’s magazines were promoting a form of social racism, where it
was fine for middle class women to laugh at and judge characteristics of
working class women. The plot was (in a very brief reduction) this: a
fiercely bright, very unsocialised and uneducated girl, whose cultural
world came from celebrity magazines and reality TV shows, tries to
understand why she and her kind are being vilified – everyone assumes
she is stupid and ignore-able, until she wreaks her bloody revenge on a
womens’ magazine editor.

It was a show I was really proud of, and did really well. It seemed to
chime with audiences, it toured for some time, then like all things it
came to an end. It was only when the riots started this week that I
realised I had chosen to do Medea, at the same festival, several years
later, out of exactly the same distress. I have traveled a lot in the
interim – there’s substantial things in my input into Medea which come
from a more global perspective – but it’s a deep-breath-and-a-coffee
moment, to realise nothing much has changed on the home front.

Dear Londoners (and Mancunians, and Brummies, and goodness knows where
else it has started) please keep safe, keep strong, keep proud. There
are other ways. And we do have a society and a culture worth preserving.
We all need to listen more. And talk more sincerely. Please let this be
a warning heeded, not a provocation to further damage.

Ok – this is heavy weather for a blog about the Festival. (And I’d talk
about the heavy weather we’ve been having, it’s just that we’re all sick
to death of hearing about it, let alone being soaked to the skin by
it…) So here are two shows I’ve seen in the past few days that are
Reasons To Be Cheerful:

Mat Riccardo – Three Balls and a New Suit at Voodoo Rooms at
9.30 pm (1 hr). I first saw Mat do his simply astounding cigar-box
trick at the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club a year or so ago. The man
is probably the best juggler you will ever see. On that bill, a year
ago, he wasn’t talking. In this show, he is, and – luckily – it turns
out he can. A funny, wry, classy show where the feats are superhuman but
the performer is brave enough to be entirely human. The tricks were
astonishing in the moment, the talk made me think for days after.

And Andrew O’Neill’s standup show at the Bosco Tent, Assembly
Gardens, at 10.30 pm (1hr) is a gorgeously silly, bonkers, high-octane
hug of a show which is the perfect antidote to all the vileness the news
and the weather can collectively throw at us. As a young straight
transvestite comic he must be sick to death of allusions to Eddie
Izzard, but they do have a similar, generous, mad-but-accurate,
big-kid-in-a-sweetshop quality. So he talks like Izzard, looks like the
love child of Sue Perkins and Jerry Sadowitz (anyone else intrigued
about how that one happened…?), and plays a mean guitar. Joy.