If Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government and its heirs had had
their way, there would be no such thing as society, community, and
quite possibly the two pieces of theatre that are this year's winners
of The Arches Platform 18 award for new directors and theatre makers.
As it is, both Gary Gardiner's tellingly named Thatcher's Children and
Kieran Hurley's response to the Criminal Justice Bill, which
effectively criminalised rave culture, BEATS, combine historical
significance and a renewed political pertinence for a younger
generation who've discovered protest for themselves with renewed
activist vigour.
While Gardiner's piece sets up a mock Houses of Parliament in which a
series of authoritarian speakers explore the legacy of Thatcher's
ideas, Hurley puts a live DJ onstage to explore one of the most absurd
laws in history, which made gatherings of people listening to music
with repetitive beats effectively illegal.
“I wanted to make something about young people gathering en mass,”
Hurley explains, “and I was attracted to the free party scene that
existed during the late 80s and early 90s. There was an apparent
apoliticalness that existed in that culture in terms of a clearly
defined politics, and yet, someone somewhere in power was so threatened
by it that they passed this law. So I wanted to explore what is that
strange, seemingly unharnessed potential of young people en mass, but
also what it is about the world of power is so afraid of when young
people claim space of their own. What is it that they find so
threatening? We've become used to villainising young people through the
riots and so forth, but that time is such rich terrain, and it's so
relevant to what's happening now.”
Gardiner concurs, albeit by seizing a very different means of
production.
“I'm really interested in the idea that's come into play over the last
few years about living in an enterprising society,” he says. “ The
language of innovation is very prevalent at the moment. It's a really
interesting shift in culture, and I wanted to trace those ideas, and
found myself on the trail of Thatcher and her implementation of ideas
of neo-liberalism, free markets and competition. There's something as
well about Thatcher and absolutism and her image as an iron lady, and
this idea about being the lowest of the low is somehow to be weak in
her eyes. Now she's got dementia, she's become weak and feeble, and is
now everything she despised.”
While this sounds like similar terrain to Meryl Streep's big-screen
portrayal of Thatcher in The Iron Lady, Gardiner's take on things
sounds infinitely less schmaltzy. Hurley too hasn't attempted a
site-specific re-enactment of the era he's looking at, but is
attempting what he describes as a story-telling piece, albeit one using
the technical aspects of a club night.
Significantly, perhaps, Gardiner was born in 1979, the year Thatcher
was swept into office. Equally pertinent, Hurley's birth-date goes back
to 1984, a year significant not just for its Orwellian heritage, but
for what looked like a brutal prophecy of a very English civil war.
Still flushed with her second term landslide a year before in the wake
of the Falklands War, Thatcher and co took no prisoners, be they they
striking miners, a still leftist Labour Party or else what right wing
conspiracy theorists dubbed the 'enemy within'. These are things that
the society Thatcher claimed didn't exist are still recovering from.
“She changed things forever,” Gardiner observes. “We can't be anything
other than Thatcher's children. Once you've accepted the economy as an
essential part of policy-making, I can't see a way of moving out of
that.”
Both Platform 18 works arrive onstage at a time that looks closer to
the early days of Thatcher's reign than ever before. With the global
economic downturn creating more unemployment by the day, a by-product
of this has been more direct political engagement. Crucially, this has
not been via political parties, but through a grassroots underbelly
that is coming increasingly to the fore.
One ongoing example of this has been the response to the Scottish
Government's amendments to Public Entertainment Licenses, which became
law on April 1st. This new legislation now requires all free events to
operate with a license where none was required before. While aimed
primarily at unlicensed raves and firework displays, the wording
potentially affects all DIY events, and has
already seen Highlands and Islands Council attempt to charge a
community group a three-figure sum to hold an Easter egg hunt and
bonnet-making competition.
As with the Criminal Justice Bill of old, it has been the grassroots
rather than the big institutions that have led the fight. Hurley points
out other parallels.
“From that systematic attempt to persecute a particular subculture,
many people were radicalised,” he says, “and that in turn informed the
shape and culture of political protest right up to where we are now.
DIY art activism is a really important thing, and the space between
what is a party and what is a protest becomes really blurred.”
Sounds like a riot.
Thatcher's Children / Beats, The Arches, Glasgow, April 17-21; Traverse
Theatre, Edinburgh, April 25-28.
www.thearches.co.uk
www.traverse.co.uk
The Herald, April 17th 2012
ends
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