Demos, Riots, and Theatre

When my students first arrive at university, they are often in the middle of a process of transition. Most of them have come to Theatre through enjoying the intensity of performance. What usually takes longer to come is a sense of the complexity of reception, how their performance will affect an audience. Tracing those effects and affects through the audience and beyond begins a process of cultural analysis, as does a questioning of the sources and functions of that performance intensity. Both of these sides - the intensity of performance and the complexity of reception - are key to understanding the whole theatre situation. An exclusive interest in performance generates - stereotypically - the worst kind of amateur theatre, where the performers are basically just showing off. An exclusive attention to reception leads to insipid audience-pandering, the desperation to be liked, throwing random pleasures at the terrifying mob.

I thought about these two aspects of theatre this week as some of Britain’s largest cities have exploded in disorder. On Saturday, 6 August, the police in Tottenham, North London, shot and killed Mark Duggan, a young black man, in his car. The police released information that he had opened fire first, a claim since demonstrated to be false (though the right-wing press happily repeated these claims). Also, the police did not officially inform his family. The death, the misinformation, and the disregard of the family’s feelings inflamed lingering resentments in the community and a small group gathered at the police station to protest his and his family’s treatment. Still getting no response from the police, and being barred access to the station by a police line. There have been reports that a 16-year-old girl stepped forward to try to speak to the police and was attacked with batons and shields. Some in the crowd retaliated and tried to break through. This soon grew into wider attacks between the police and the protestors. The violence spread; two police cars and a double-decker bus were set alight. Bottles and bricks thrown at the police; the police charged at and arrested demonstrators, it would seem, randomly. Shops were broken into and others set alight. Looting started in the late evening and continued into the early morning. Boots, JD Sports, O2, Currys, Argos, Orange, PC World and Comet were targetted; Aldi was set alight, Carpet Right completely destroyed by fire.

The following night, similar disturbances broke out across London: Enfield, Walthamstow, Islington and Oxford Circus saw trouble. On Monday Bromley, Camden, Clapham, Croydon, Hackney, Lewisham, Peckham, and Woolwich joined in. David Cameron returned from his holiday and ordered that the streets be flooded with police officers, which dampened down protests in London, only to see them flare up in Birmingham, West Bromwich, Manchester, Salford, and Wolverhampton. In the Birmingham demonstration a car hit and killed three Asian youths who were trying to defend their community. The next night, a mixture of heavy rain and perhaps a feeling that the momentum was lost or a point had been made, the troubles died down.

What’s this got to do with theatre? The theatre is no stranger to riots. At times, theatrical performance has itself been a kind of public disorder, spilling beyond social boundaries, overturning hierarchies, challenging definitions of place and identity. Even the very tame Sultan’s Elephant in May 2006 had some homologies with a riot, massed intensities of people, sudden new uses of familiar places and objects, streets closed and impassable. Riots have erupted within theatres, from the Old Price Riots in 1809 through the Playboy Riots in 1907, to 1989’s Velvet Revolution in the former Czechoslovakia, an uprising organised through the theatres. Today, we did a three-hour cycle ride through the parks of South London; on Rye Lane in Peckham, we were stopped; the road was closed as building work was being carried out on some of the riot-damaged buildings; there were unusual sounds, unusual routes (we were told to wheel our bikes through the Netto supermarket), the area slightly re-experienced, re-imagined. Two hours later, we were on the South Bank. The courtyard at the front of the National Theatre was filled with hundreds of performers from the National Youth Theatre; the audience stood around the square, on the terraces, on Waterloo Bridge. The streets were re-purposed, the area re-intensified, re-imagined.

But what strikes me, in fact, is the lack of theatre in these riots. Demonstrations are obviously theatrical: the costumes, the banners, the chants and songs, the spectacle of the whole thing. But when, as sometimes happens, demonstrations blur into a riot, the riots sometimes retain some of that spectacular quality: the improvised barricades, the shows of strength, the massed bodies, the taunting, chanting and jeering, defending an arbitrary line. In saying this, by the way, I don’t mean to diminish the violence, the fear, the underlying causes, to trivialise the riot, simply to point out that maintenance of a spectacular quality is, in some ways, part of the riot. The Tottenham rioters, at the very beginning of the disturbances, are supposed to have shouted ‘Whose streets? Our streets!’ at the police, a slogan that has been heard at demonstrations and disorders for a few years, but it points to the way that some see disorder as a symbolic transfer of territory. In becoming symbolic territory, the streets become theatricalised, they become a stage. But the theatre quickly drained from these disturbances.

In Brixton in 1981, the first riots I can remember, the images were spectacular. The damage, the violence, on all sides, was horrendous too, but the riots were legible, they were articulate. There was a clear challenge to the nature of the street, from the police’s bullying rule of ‘sus’ laws and stop-and-search to that bullied community brutally asserting their ability to occupy the street their way. There was looting, sure, but there was a frontline, there was a stand, barricades. It draw lines in the symbolic territory.

I saw little of that in Peckham or Clapham. This was an inarticulate riot, because it had no theatre. There were skirmishes, kids with scarves round their face smashing shops and then burning the evidence, running from the police. The element of theatricality remaining was only that initial impulse: the intensity of performance. Occupying the stage, flexing your muscles, robbing with impunity, plasma screens being carried through smashed windows in the full view of the police. But there was none of that other side, the sense of an audience. It was a shapeless protest. Of course, this doesn’t make it inarticulate in broader sociological terms: when you smash up shops in your own neighbourhood, there’s a kind of nihilism there that suggests all kinds of deprivation and anomie. It’s obvious to most people in London, I should think, that police-community relations have never been good, the disruption always just under the surface. With unemployment rising and the cuts already beginning to be felt, it doesn’t take much of a spark to set the blaze. But it seemed that the political articulacy of the riots was exploited by others who saw a means of personal gain. As such the theatrics faded, and with it a sense of any community staging itself, reinventing itself through performance.

Instead the theatre has been confined, unusually, to those opposing the disorder, particularly in the communities. There have been reports of people joining hands in chains to protect buildings. There was a remarkable moment when a young woman harangued Mayor of London Boris Johnson at an attempted meet-and-greet event in Clapham. Her hairdressing salon had been invaded, vandalised; what, she demanded, was he going to do? The ruffled Mayor simply, and for him damagingly, turned his back on her and walked off. And then there’s #riotcleanup. Launched and organised through Twitter, thousnads of people across the country occupied the streets, in a kind of saintly revisioning of a riot, brooms in hand to help put right the damage. The photograph by Andrew Bayles (@Lawcol888 on Twitter) of the brooms hoisted into the air like the Standards of some Roman Legion was viewed and reprinted across the world, an image of positivity against the atheatrical nihilism of the riots.