Bigfoot, Nessie and apolitical plays

As sh*t-stirring goes, a hitherto unheard-of publisher instigating a playwriting prize to “counteract overtly political theatre” is akin to mucking out a stable with a pneumatic drill.

Okay, it’s reactionary, attention-seeking nonsense. But it did spark debate among Papatango staff about whether art is inherently political – or, perhaps more sensibly, what “political” actually means when applied to art. With the 2026 Papatango Prize now open for submissions of new plays, we thought it might be useful to share our stance.

First and foremost: calls for art to be politically neutral are themselves anything but. They’re usually accompanied (this one was) by hand-wringing about “woke” content, as if such complaints aren’t themselves inherently ideological. It seems neutrality is equated with centrist or centre-right positionality, bias somehow only a fault of left-leaning views.

Thus a play like Hobson’s Choice (by Harold Brighouse), a conservative re-interpretation of King Lear (by whatshisname) which strips out the state corruption theme and instead celebrates hard-working business owners, would presumably be deemed nice and neutral. This elides its satire of patriarchy and championing of women’s economic acumen, which for 1915 was pretty radical but now seems tame – reflecting that as progressives shift the social dial, what was once controversial becomes mainstream. But today’s reactionaries conveniently overlook this process, proclaiming only work which now aligns with their ideological framework is neutral. Of course, it never was – probably no play can be – but if something fits their agenda it is presented as a default, moderate position.

It gets even more insidious. When someone condemns “woke” plays as biased – more accurately, not sharing their bias – it’s not a transparent argument. It’s a slippery, opaque attack line which invites people to jump in without revealing what they’re actually endorsing.

The word “woke” is what semioticians – surely the sexiest of any “ician” (sorry Specsavers) – term a floating signifier. It’s designed to mean something different to each individual, satisfying what we want to think. See also any phrase beloved of Reform Party hacks like “common sense” or “British values.”

Yes, there’s a vague consensus “woke” means progressive, inclusive values which recognise systemic oppression – but all those ideas are, themselves, open to interpretation. Thus, when a braying, corn-fed type decries “woke theatre,” it’s with the hope people will hang whatever they personally dislike onto this statement. Person A might think of “agitprop”, person B “inclusive casting”, person C “representation of whatever marginalised group doesn’t include them” and so on. Then they rally to oppose “wokeness”, without realising it might attackt hings they actually like. It’s a cynical, misleading term designed to obscure its real targets.

This brings us back to calls for art to be apolitical. Even if we swallow the idea that “woke plays” are a problem, and that the superior alternative is somehow genuinely neutral, free of bias, what would this look like?

(To give the anti-woke brigade a sporting chance, I’m only using examples of plays by straight, white, mostly dead men.)

A Tom Stoppard play? But The Invention of Love is both a treatise on classical literature and a heartbreaking consideration of queerness. Isn’t that woke?

A traditional Shakespeare then, no gender-swapping, exploration of political structures, or representation of subalterns like, say, a Black man in imperial Venice. Erm…

Evidently calls for art to be apolitical are just silly, because interpretation is fluid, impossible to control.

Any text can be interpreted as political – not just can be, will be. It depends on an individual’s particular views, experiences, pre-occupations. Cultural theorist Frederic Jamieson posits that each person’s unique “horizon of expectations” means we interpret identical texts differently.

So where one person sees a jolly farce free of real-world concerns, another reads One Man, Two Guvnors as a satirical take on a class-based hierarchy seeking to exploit workers but only driving them to subversion, with a sideline in unsustainable over-consumption. Hey, I don’t say it’s the cheeriest take – but it’s palpable…

Before you accuse me of being a dangerous post-structuralist, the point that text is defined not by authorial intent but readers’ subjective responses was fashionable at least as far back as Chaucer (you can’t write him off as woke), whose characters repeatedly and scornfully reinterpret “auctorite” – authority, synonymous with authorship.

We’ve known for centuries that trying to pre-define texts as political, “woke” or neutral, or anything else, is misguided. Different interpretations – of many ideological hues – are always available, whether or not individual readers recognise them. Granted, some are more obvious or convincing than others – but that’s a matter of degree, not ontology.

What does this mean for Papatango and our new Prize? Just that we aren’t going to worry about ideology. We’ll do as always: prioritise dialogue, characterisation and theatricality, and trust entirely to these. We look forward to many varied interpretations of whatever we produce. That’s the true nature of art.