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    Culture wars: Trump’s takeover of arts is straight from the dictator playbook

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    In 1937, leaders of Germany’s Third Reich hosted two simultaneous art exhibitions in Munich. One, titled the Great German Art Exhibition, featured art viewed by the regime as appropriate and aspirational for the ideal Aryan society – orderly and triumphant, with mostly blond people in heroic poses amid pastoral German landscapes. The other showcased what Adolf Hitler and his followers deemed “degenerate art” (“Entartete Kunst”). The works, chaotically displayed and saddled with commentary disparaging “the sick brains of those who wielded the brush or pencil”, were abstract, profane, modernist and produced by the proclaimed enemies of the Reich – Jewish people, communists or those suspected of being either.The Degenerate Art exhibition, which later toured the country, opened a day after Hitler declared “merciless war” on cultural disintegration. The label applied to virtually all German modernist art, as well as anything deemed “an insult to German feeling”. The term and the dueling art exhibitions were part and parcel of Hitler’s propaganda efforts to consolidate power and bolster the regime via cultural production. The Nazis used culture as a crucial lever of control, to demean scapegoated groups, glorify the party and “make the genius of the race visible to that race”, argued the French scholar Eric Michaud in The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany. Political control and suppression of dissent were one thing; art, said Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, was “no mere peacetime amusement, but a sharp spiritual weapon for war”.Earlier this month, Donald Trump took the unprecedented step of naming himself as chair of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC, one of the nation’s premier cultural centers, after purging the board of Biden appointees and installing a slate of unqualified donors and loyalists. “NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA”, the US president wrote on Truth Social. (The center hosted a nominal amount of acts with drag elements.) Days later, Trump was formally voted in by the board – “unanimously”, he noted on Truth Social in a Putin-esque flourish. “There’s no more woke in this country,” he told reporters.The move drew outcry from performers, artists and more, but still went through. The Kennedy Center’s trustees are presidential appointees, so technically it is vulnerable to such flexes of control, as are other federally supported institutions such as the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institution and DC’s consortium of national museums. Some of Trump’s cultural decrees trend ridiculous, such as an executive order calling for a “national garden of American heroes”, or the continued presence of Kid Rock. Others are more insidious – after long threatening to defund the National Endowment for the Arts during his first term, Trump has imposed restrictions on its terms, barring federal grants for projects concerning Maga’s favorite targets – diversity and “gender ideology”.View image in fullscreenWhile the takeover of the Kennedy Center may seem less dire and court less furor than, say, his dismantling of the civil service, Trump’s efforts to exert control over art typify the strategy of a dictator. Comparisons of the Trump presidency to Nazi Germany may be overdone and easily dismissed – even with Republican efforts to ban books in schools deemed “inappropriate”, among many other parallels, Maga and the Third Reich are not the same – but the new administration’s cultural decrees are very much a part of the authoritarian playbook to suppress dissent, scapegoat select groups and seize power.Pick your oppressive regime throughout time and you will find efforts to control the arts. Some of the most renowned artefacts from ancient Rome, from Virgil’s Aeneid to Trajan’s Column, were commissioned by emperors to vivify their divine right to power, celebrate military conquests and cement preferred narratives. The Stalinist regime in the 1930s Soviet Union abolished all independent artistic institutions, required cultural production to exist in absolute allegiance to the party, and systemically executed all of the country’s Ukrainian folk poets. Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution identified “old culture” as one of the four threats to be eradicated as part of his reshaping of Chinese society, which killed more than a million people. After Augusto Pinochet took over Chile in 1973, the regime arrested, tortured and exiled muralists. In her 2012 book Brazilian Art Under Dictatorship, the art historian Claudia Calirman recalls how the museum director Niomar Moniz Sodré Bittencourt hid artworks and advised artists on how to leave the country after officials from the country’s military regime entered her museum and demanded the removal of “dangerous” images – a claim not far removed from the Trump administration’s fearmongering around “gender ideology” and “threats” to children.These tactics continue in the present, carried out in some cases by Trump’s expressed allies. The same Brazilian dictatorship that overtook and blocked art exhibitions between 1968 and 1975 is today championed by the Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro, who worked during his time as president to rewrite the regime’s reputation. On his first day in office in 2019, Bolsonaro dissolved Brazil’s ministry of culture. He also halved funding for the Rouanet Law, a measure that publicly supports artists, and appointed rightwing cultural figures with little relevant experience to prominent cultural positions. In Poland, the rightwing Law and Justice party has tried to rewrite history at the second world war museum in Gdańsk and dismissed its director, Paweł Machcewicz; in recent years, Italy’s rightwing minister of culture, Alberto Bonisoli, threatened to not renew the contracts of non-Italian museum directors. Much ado was made in the western press when Cuba jailed the performance artist Danilo Maldonado for criticizing the Castro regime in 2017, or when China’s ruling party placed the renowned artist Ai Weiwei under house arrest.View image in fullscreenBut perhaps no one models what Trump aspires to be, and hopes to do, more than Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who since his election in 2010 has rewritten the constitution, changed electoral law to favor his Fidesz party, positioned allies as heads of most media outlets and overhauled the justice system. And as part of his consolidation of power into full dictatorship, he has taken control of the country’s cultural institutions, managing their output and enshrining censorship. Starting when Fidesz first gained municipal power in 2006, the party has purged the boards of local theaters and installed Fidesz loyalists. In 2010, Orbán took over public institutions via appointment of governing bodies that could grant or withhold funds according to the organization’s willingness to heed demands. In 2013, he dismissed the artistic director of the National Theatre in Budapest, Róbert Alföldi, on account of his resistance to political interference and his sexuality, viewed as offensive by the homophobic regime.By 2019, Orbán could feasibly declare an era “of spiritual order, a kind of prevailing mood, perhaps even taste … determined by cultural trends, collective beliefs and social customs. This is the task we are now faced with: we must embed the political system in a cultural era.” His government subsequently banned funding for gender studies at universities and passed a “culture law” tying funding of theaters to their ability to “actively protect the interests of the nation’s survival, wellbeing and growth”, a censorship measure that significantly chilled the country’s art scene.Such a measure is not dissimilar, in intent and execution, from Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center, nor his new mandates on the National Endowment for the Arts, which has already been subject to decades’ worth of US culture wars. Those wars are heating up – if history and very recent precedent are anything to go by, then Trump and his party’s efforts to chip away at US cultural autonomy, at individual and institutional creative expression, will be one of his most corrosive and anti-democratic legacies. More

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      ‘I feel I’ve upset a few people over the years’: actor Brian Cox on overrated co-stars, charmless politicians and the joy of smoking weed

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      As I leave the office, my editor wishes me luck. “Hope he’s not too grumpy!” she says. A moment later, the deputy editor asks where I’m off to. To see Brian Cox, the actor, I say. “Oh!” she says, with a rather-you-than-me look. “Hope he’s not too grumpy!”Cox has played grumpy for going on 60 years. All sorts of grumpiness – idiot grumpy (independent candidate Bob Servant in the TV comedy of the same name), world-weary grumpy (school principal Dr Nelson Guggenheim in Wes Anderson’s film Rushmore), psychopathic grumpy (the first movie incarnation of Hannibal Lecter in Manhunter), egomaniacal grumpy (Robert McKee in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation) and, of course, brutal grumpy as media mogul Logan Roy in the TV series Succession. In recent years, he has often appeared on chatshows being grumpy about the state of the world. In 2022, he published his hugely entertaining memoirs, in which he was grumpy about method acting, useless directors, vain thesps, useless politicians, the church, capitalism, cancel culture, you name it. He was also fabulously indiscreet – Steven Seagal, whom he worked with on The Glimmer Man, is “as ludicrous in real life as he appears on screen”, Johnny Depp is “so overblown, so overrated”, Tarantino’s work is “meretricious”, Edward Norton is “a nice lad, but a bit of a pain in the arse because he fancies himself as a writer-director”, while Michael Caton-Jones, who directed him in Rob Roy, is a “complete arsehole”.‘I feel I’ve upset a few people over the years,” Cox says with an angelic smile. “The problem is, I can be quite a loudmouth. Sometimes I have been fairly volatile, and I think, ‘Why the fuck did you say that?’” He’s looking back over his epic career. “There’s a lot of stuff I’ve done which I look at and think, ‘That was crap.’” But today’s not the time for negativity. “No, I’m not going to go down that road.”Blimey, I say, we’re going to have to out you as a diplomat? He laughs – a lovely youthful chuckle. “Yes! You can out me as a diplomat!” he says enthusiastically. The thing is, he adds, certain people are overrated. We’re talking about his memoirs, and the unflinching references to the likes of Depp and Seagal. “But then they probably think they’re overrated as well. So I’m not saying anything they don’t think anyway.”View image in fullscreenWe meet at a hotel in London’s West End, close to the Haymarket theatre where he’s rehearsing The Score, about the ageing Bach, directed by Trevor Nunn. Cox stars in the play opposite his wife, Nicole Ansari-Cox, who is playing his stage wife. Cox looks so dapper in 50 shades of brown – brogues, socks, checked trousers and jacket, all offset with a purple tie. As a young man, he looked older than his years – a squat, Sherman tank of a man made for middle age. Now, at 78, with snow-white hair and a goatee, he looks surprisingly youthful.I ask him why he so often gets cast as grumps. He holds his hands up, nonplussed. Is it because he is one? “No, I’m not like that at all. It’s the antithesis of who I am, actually.” He stops to think about it. “No, that’s not entirely true. Of course, I get grumpy. Particularly about politics, I get very grumpy. A lot of that makes me angry. The failure of the Labour party in particular.” Pause. “But I don’t want to get into that.” Another pause. “Listen, I could go on for ages.” And another.One, two, three. And he’s off. “I don’t know why the Labour party is called the Labour party. It’s not labour orientated. I just think … ”He exhales with loud disappointment. “Keir Hardie, the guy who started it all, was an extraordinary man. And it was a very inclusive thing he was after – social justice. And this lot coming in now, they’re not exercising social justice. It’s true that the last lot left us in deep shit, so there’s a lot of stuff they’ve got to do, but they’ve got to be a bit canny about it in order not to alienate the folk. And Starmer is not exactly the most charming of individuals. He’s not Mr Charm. He’s not got the thing Tony Blair had, which served him brilliantly till hubris got the better of him. Starmer is minus one on that score.” Nor does he rate Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, on the charm front. “She’s had a charm bypass. There’s no question.” He laughs again. But he’s worried – for Scotland, for Britain, for Europe, for the world.Cox has been campaigning with the group Independent Age against the scrapping of the winter fuel payments for pensioners who aren’t on certain benefits, urging older people to check whether they are eligible for pension credit. “I just think it’s not on. It’s unjust. And means testing?” He hisses the word with contempt. “Means testing is something they did in the 30s. And I find that … I don’t know.” He stops, lost for words. “I can’t get with it at all.”View image in fullscreenHe loves his politics. For many years, he was a Labour loyalist. “I was a big Labour man. I was the voice of Labour for the 1997 campaign.” Eventually, he fell out with Blair over Iraq. As for Corbyn, he says, he was not cut out to be a leader. “Jeremy Corbyn is a great guy, don’t get me wrong, but he’s a professional backbencher. He’s a naysayer. And you can’t just be a naysayer, you’ve got to come up with something else in its place. That’s what progress is about.”And just to show he’s no naysayer, he’ll name the person most suited to the job. “I was all for Andy Burnham.” Unfortunately, he says, Burnham is mayor of Greater Manchester rather than a Labour MP. “But what he’s done in Manchester is phenomenal. And he’s keen on the idea that I’m keen on, which is a federal Britain. I believe the way we will survive and come out of the fucking shite that we’ve been in, and keep regurgitating again and again, is by being a federal society where each country has its own say. You can’t separate these islands off, but we’ve got to come together on a federal basis. Not as subjects.”Cox had a fascinating childhood, and is still exploring how it shaped him. He was born in Dundee, to observant Catholic parents. He was the youngest of five siblings – his oldest sister was 17 years his senior. His father, Charles, known as Chic, ran a grocer’s in a deprived part of Dundee; his mother was a spinner in the jute mills. Chic was a kind, sociable man who sold stuff on tick to the needy. “We lived in a tenement, and my dad had the grocer’s shop for 25 years, so he was lower middle class. Not working class.” The flat had two bedrooms – the three girls slept in one room in a single bed, his parents slept in the other, while Cox and his older brother bedded down in the living room.There were three landmarks within a street of where they lived – the church, the library and the cinema. He went to the church because he had to, the library because he wanted to, and the cinema because he was smitten. “My first love was cinema. There were 21 cinemas in my hometown, and I visited every single one of them.” From the age of six, he went by himself. First, he fell for Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin’s slapstick, then, by the age of nine, he was watching serious films about corruption and thwarted ambition such as On the Waterfront. There was no question, he says, that he would become an actor. “I knew this was my trade.”View image in fullscreenWere there any actors he knew, in the family or among friends? “No, but there were performers.” He looks at the biscuit next to his coffee. “D’you want it? I’m diabetic so I can’t eat it. Every Hogmanay the flat was packed with 70 people and I’d be summoned at 1am to perform.” How old was he? “I was three.” Was he the only one summoned? “No, everybody was. My second eldest sister, May, had a great voice. I’d do Al Jolson impersonations. It was weird for a wee boy to sing “Climb up on my knee. Sonny Boy, though you’re only three”! I always remember the effect on the room. There’s something about the room when it’s focused on something. The dynamic changes. Human beings get into a harmony with one another. It’s a wonderful feeling, and I thought, I want to be a part of that.”When he was eight, his father died and his life was uprooted. They discovered that Chic had given so much away on tick, he had left the family in debt. His mother never recovered from his death and their new poverty, and she had severe mental health problems from then on. Cox was farmed out to his three sisters. He left school at 15 and went to work at Dundee Repertory, and at the age of 17 went to England to study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.“The 60s were amazing. It was the time of social mobility, when you were welcomed. When I came to drama school, people made it obvious they were happy that I was there. I felt so liberated. London to me has always represented freedom. I loved the sense that I was allowed to be who I was and celebrated for coming from my class.” Does he think he would have a chance of making it nowadays, coming from his background? “No, I wouldn’t. The conditions are so different now.”He really hoped to be an American movie actor, but of course that was impossible. So he settled for being a British theatre actor. And this is where his identity started to fragment. He wanted to be the best he possibly could be in theatre, and that meant excelling in Shakespeare, and Shakespeare was unambiguously English. So Cox started to think of himself as British at best, possibly even a little bit English, and he became more and more divorced from his Scottishness. He moved away from his homeland physically and mentally.Ever since he fell out with Blairism, he has been reconnecting with his Scottishness – or more accurately his Celticness. He recently had a DNA test and discovered he is 88% Irish and 12% Scottish. And it makes sense to him now.View image in fullscreenCox campaigned for Scottish independence and became active in the Scottish National party. Did he ever consider going into politics? “Yes. Alex [Salmond] wanted me to stand as an SNP candidate. I just don’t believe in the word national. It’s got too many connotations. It should be called the Scottish Independence party. SIP.” Cox became close to Salmond, the SNP’s former leader who died in October. Salmond was a controversial figure, who was cleared of 12 charges of sexual assault in 2020, with one charge of sexual assault with intent to rape found not proven. “Alex wasn’t a saint by any stretch of the imagination, but his political thinking was quite brilliant. Probably the most brilliant we’ve had. He was a visionary. I saw a lot of Alex. He was great fun, a bon viveur.”Did he ever warn him about his behaviour? “I never got to that stage. I wish I had. Someone had asked me about his questionable relationship to women. I won’t go into the details. And I think that was problematic.” Was Salmond aware it was problematic? “He wasn’t a fool so he had to be aware of what was going on, but he got let off. He was never salacious in my company. I just liked his brilliance; his sense of the world.”One reason Cox wasn’t tempted by politics is that he has always loved his profession. Acting has been a calling; a vocation. Cox gave up on his Catholicism long ago because it made no sense to him. “If you want a real church, go to the theatre; that tells the truth. Or the cinema. Go and see the performing arts.” He talks about the great directors with awe, paying a special tribute to two who have passed on – Michael Elliott who directed him in a stage production of Moby Dick in 1984, and Lindsay Anderson, who cast him in In Celebration, his second film, in 1975, set in the Derbyshire mining town of Langwith, and also starring the great Alan Bates. “Michael Elliott and Lindsay Anderson were the two people who gave me standards – both were of Scottish extraction, it has to be said. It’s a sort of purity of vision. I loved working with both of them. I’ve still got Lindsay’s notes.”Cox, famously, can’t stand method acting. He believes it’s pointless, selfish, an enemy of the imagination and destroys the atmosphere for others on set. He has described the technique used by his Succession co-star Jeremy Strong, who plays one of his three children, as “fucking annoying”. But, today, the newly circumspect Cox would like to accentuate the positive. “He was wonderful to act with. I had no argument with Jeremy’s acting.” But? “He would be an even better actor if he just got rid of that so there would be much more inclusiveness in what he did.”Isn’t it a pain when you can’t have real conversations with a cast member because they are permanently in character? “Well, it’s not good for the ensemble. It creates hostility. That’s the problem.” Did he talk to Strong about it? “No, not in the way I would like to have talked to him, but it’s a very emotive subject for people who follow the Strasberg line.”View image in fullscreenCox is talking about Lee Strasberg, regarded as the father of method acting in America. Last year, Cox suggested that if Strong had been more relaxed about his technique it would have been helpful for the Succession cast: “Go back to your trailer and have a hit of marijuana, you know?” Does he hit the marijuana? “Oh yes,” he says. What does it do for him? “It relaxes me.” He says it was only in middle age that he discovered the joy of a spliff. He was introduced to it by the uncle of a former girlfriend. He does a Cockney wide boy impersonation of him. “He was staying with me, and I’d come home and say it’s difficult for me to switch off, and he said, ‘Have you ever tried the weed?’ I’d always been very against that because when I was young I thought drugs just obfuscated the career path. And probably it would have at that time. So he said, ‘Why don’t you try some weed?’ So I did, and I just thought, ‘Oh GOD! It’s just the best way to get rid of the day.’”Succession has made Cox more famous than he ever had been. A mixed blessing, he says. Beforehand, he would get stopped by people who recognised him, but didn’t know why. Now there’s no doubt. Strangers not only ask for selfies, they also beg him to tell them to fuck off Logan Roy style, which often he’s happy to do, with feeling.Looking back at earlier profiles, it’s an astonishing career progression. In the 1980s, when he won the Laurence Olivier award for best actor in a new play for Rat in the Skull, and Critics Circle award for Titus Andronicus and The Taming of the Shrew, we were told he was a latecomer to success. In his 70s, he has won a Golden Globe and been Emmy nominated three years on the trot for playing Succession’s dyspeptic media mogul, who some have compared to Rupert Murdoch. “There’s a lot of, ‘Oh Brian Cox, isn’t he doing well now?’” he says. “But I’ve done well my whole career. I’ve had a great career.”Succession has, however, given him opportunities that he might not otherwise have had. He has just finished directing his first movie. Glenrothan is a family saga about a whisky distillery, which he calls his love letter to Scotland. What he has learned most from the experience, he says, is that directing is the wrong word for the job. “I realised I’m not a director, but a curator.” What’s the difference? “Film is a communicative art, where you’re curating brilliant costume designs with brilliant set designs with a brilliant DP. It’s not you. You’re just gathering that together and organising it, rather than saying we must go there and do this and do that. Not me, me, me. I mean the film may be shite, but at least it’s shite on my terms.”He has worked alongside his wife, Nicole Ansari-Cox, before; he directed her in 2020 in Sinners, a play about a woman stoned for adultery. “I love directing her. Or even curating her! She’s great – so good, so open.” Before marrying Ansari-Cox, he had two children with the actor Caroline Burt, to whom he was married for 19 years. His oldest is the actor Alan Cox, now in his mid-50s, who played the young John Mortimer in the TV drama A Voyage Round My Father.Cox has straddled the classes over the years, and known both poverty and considerable wealth. Burt came from an upper middle class family, and they sent their children to prestigious public schools. He has often said he was lacking as a father first time round – impatient, absent. But now he’s not so sure. “I think that’s just to do with the fact that I got married so young first time. I was 21 and had my first kid at 24. It was all alien to me.”View image in fullscreenHe has experienced being both a young father and an old one. His two sons with Nicole, Orson and Torin (aged 22 and 20, respectively), have grown up in New York, where the family live. He becomes gooey when talking about them. “I still look at their baby pictures. I miss them from when they were small. They’re now grown adults. They’re ridiculously tall, which is embarrassing because I’m only 5ft 8in and Nicole’s 5ft 2in.” How tall are they? “6ft 4in and 6ft 3in. It’s something about America. I used to think, ‘If I go to America, I’ll grow tall. Well, I’ll be taller.’ And of course I never lived in America when I was young, so I never got tall!”As a US citizen, how does he feel about the return of Donald Trump as president? “The penny doesn’t seem to drop about him. I can’t understand it. That’s why it’s so shocking. A man known to be sexist, racist, a suspected rapist … ” He turns puce, and struggles to get the words out. “And he’s got a big Catholic vote behind him … and I kept thinking, ‘How does that tie in with Catholic consciousness?’” No wonder, he says, that he gave up on religion. “It’s all bollocks. BOLLOCKS,” he roars. I’ve never met anybody who says bollocks with such ferocity. Then he rows back. “I don’t want to be disrespectful of people who believe, so bollocks is a bit harsh.”The older he gets, the more he wants to know why we’re on Earth – what our purpose is, if there is any. And the re-election of Trump makes him even more baffled. “We don’t understand who the fuck we are. We really don’t. We have no fucking clue who we are. How did we get to a stage where 80 million Americans will elect this fucking, you know, to become president.” He says “fucking” every bit as ferociously as he does “bollocks”.Does the US election make him lose faith in people?” “No, it doesn’t make me lose faith in people. It just makes me realise people are stupid. We’re in for a pretty rough old four years coming up.” Does he think he’ll stay in the US with Trump in power? “I don’t know. I’ve got to because my sons are there. But I’ll try to spend as much time here as I can.”We change the subject to something more positive. He tells me how he got together with Nicole. He’d previously met her one evening in 1990, when he was playing Lear in Hamburg. They talked, they danced, and then eight years elapsed before they saw each other again. By now he was single, recently out of a long-term relationship, and working on Broadway. “I got this message from the stage doorman, Jerry, and he said, ‘This broad came here last night. Really good-looking broad, she left this note, and I had one of those weird thoughts, ‘If I open this note, it’s going to change my life.’ I literally had this premonition. I’ve never experienced anything like this in my life.” And it did. He had just heard there was a no-show, so he rang Nicole and offered her the ticket. “We got together over that weekend – 1998, 26 years ago.”View image in fullscreenHe has previously said the secret to a happy relationship is separate bedrooms. Did he mean it? “That helps.” Why? “Because it means we’re independent. We’re not dependent on each other. I mean it’s very hard at the moment because we’re having to share a room, as I’ve got such a small flat in London. It’s weird. The place is such a fucking mess.” Normally, back home in America, they have a totally different set-up. “We visit each other.” Does he stay overnight if he visits? “Yeayeayea. The secret of a happy marriage is to allow the person to be the person and not make them into what you want to make them.”I ask if he thinks about death. “Yes, all the time. I have a fantasy every night about how I’m going to die. I don’t think about it in a depressing way. I just think of all the possible scenarios.” What’s his favourite? “Going without fuss, wrapped up in bed with a cup of tea, maybe with the telly on.” I think you may have a long wait ahead of you, I say. “Maybe. Maybe.” I hope so.It’s time to leave. We head off together. He talks about where I grew up in Manchester, the years he spent there working in the theatre, and the people and places he loves that I may know. Grumpy? No way. Sure, he’s passionate about a better world and pointing out all that’s bad in the present one. Yes, he’s a loudmouth with a penchant for roaring “Bollocks” at the world’s shysters and hypocrites. But, whisper it, Brian Cox may just be one of life’s great enthusiasts. The Score is at Theatre Royal Haymarket in London from 20 February to 26 April 2025, trh.co.uk More

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      in US Politics

      ‘People feel terrible. They want to laugh’: can comedy make light of Trump 2.0?

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      “When Trump first won, there was almost a novelty to having a character such as him in a position of such vast responsibility – that was a new thing for comedy to address,” said Andy Zaltzman, chair of Radio 4’s The News Quiz and the satirist behind The Bugle podcast and multiple political comedies.The first Trump presidency spawned debate about whether it’s possible to satirise a man whose extreme appearance and rhetoric mean he presents as a walking caricature. The New York Times even ran a piece titled “How President Trump ruined political comedy”.Now comedians in the UK and US are trying to work out how to deal with a second, possibly darker, Trump presidency.“Trump is so ridiculous that he makes comic extrapolation harder,” said Chicago-born, London-based standup Sara Barron, who found much of the comedy targeting Trump “did not provide catharsis”.Zaltzman has just embarked on a tour and, post-election, is writing new jokes exploring the global implications. Trump’s absurdity means there are obvious punchlines, “but it can be harder to get to the heart of the issue”, Zaltzman said.“Comedy is so ubiquitous – anything that happens, there’ll be a thousand memes and TikToks. The challenge is finding an original angle. That’s always been difficult with Trump.”View image in fullscreenPreviously, Zaltzman’s solution was presenting Trump’s brain (a cauliflower) on stage, using chopped-up Trump speeches to make it “speak” about Australian cricketers: “I figured no one else would be taking that angle.”In the run-up to election day, Barron found a personal angle. Coincidentally, her career thrived under Trump’s last tenure, so she made a sketch satirising the instinct of many to think: “This terrible thing is happening, but here’s why it’s OK for me!”Fellow US-born, UK-based standup Janine Harouni isn’t happy that Trump is back but said: “It’s a gift for comedy because people are feeling terrible and they want to laugh.” During Trump’s first term, Harouni produced Stand Up With Janine Harouni (Please Remain Seated), in which she explored the political distance between her left-leaning self and her Trump-supporting father.“I wrote that show because I love my dad and cannot reconcile his political beliefs with how I feel about him personally. My father is also an Arab, son of immigrants, so I was really struggling with that,” Harouni said.She approached this via comedy because it felt so thorny. “Comedy is a release of worry and fear. If you can find a way to laugh at something that upset you, it doesn’t have control any more,” Harouni said. “I wanted it to feel healing and hopeful.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenBarron witnessed that power while performing on election results day – a reminder that comedians can “give people some kind of respite”, she said. “It was an electric gig. Everyone was so happy to be with like-minded people.”Catharsis is a driving force of political comedy, said Zaltzman: “It gives people a chance to laugh at serious news, which is valuable.” It can also challenge authority. “It absolutely has to hold power to account,” said Lewis MacLeod, the voice of Trump on Dead Ringers. “It becomes its own protest, but it’s done with laughs.”MacLeod perfected his Trump impression for the latest series by studying recent interviews. “Listening to him on Joe Rogan was a gift for any mimic. It was uninterrupted; he wasn’t arguing,” he said. “He’s a little bit older, more reflective. There’s this messianic tone.”MacLeod has also started caricaturing Elon Musk, who is likely to play a role in Trump’s administration. “There’s something of a mad, maniacal robot about him,” MacLeod said. There’s the danger of creating satirical impressions that are too likable: “That’s the rub of satire and mimicry.”With Trump’s increased support this time, Zaltzman questions the power of comedy to change minds but said: “The best comedy has elements of creativity and optimism, offering alternative ideas, hopefully that will emerge.”Harouni said, from her experience with her Trump-voting family, there’s reason to feel hopeful: “Not everyone who voted for Trump holds his worst beliefs.” She hopes the political comedy of the next four years considers that. “I like comedy that unites people from different systems of belief,” she said. “I hope people strive for that rather than continue to feed into the divisive narrative that’s driving Americans further apart.” More

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      Sweat review – chilling vision of a divided, alienated America

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      Although principally set in 2000, Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer-winning 2015 play anticipated Donald Trump’s presidency with its portrayal of a divided, frustrated and disfranchised community in the deindustrialising city of Reading, Pennsylvania. With Trump campaigning for a second term, the Royal Exchange’s revival is timely. Jade Lewis’s production ultimately presents a chilling vision of how job insecurity can destroy one’s sense of self and lead to the poisonous othering stoked by Trump.The stage design by Good Teeth studio has huge slabs suspended from the rafters, powerfully suggesting an industrial landscape hoisted away overnight. This in effect is what happens to the play’s steelworkers who, amid a dispute with management over pay cuts, are locked out of their plant, with their machines and jobs destined for Mexico as a result of the contentious North American Free Trade Agreement whose renegotiation was a Trump campaign pledge.This conflict is heightened by a familial dimension akin to Human Resources, the 1999 film by the late Laurent Cantet in which a management trainee is embroiled in job cuts that affect his father on the shop floor. Nottage’s play centres on African American Cynthia (Carla Henry) who works at the factory with her son Chris (Abdul Sessay) and has finally crossed the floor to become a supervisor only to encounter resentment, some of it racially fuelled, from her friends. Suspicious of her new colleagues (“I wonder if they gave me this job on purpose. Pin a target on me”), Cynthia is also alienated by her former neighbours at the machines.View image in fullscreenSimilarly targeted is Colombian American Oscar (Marcello Cruz) who works at the local bar and crosses the picket line to pick up factory shifts. He is labelled a traitor by workers whose union has long been a closed shop to him and the story, framed by the aftermath of a violent climax, has a lucid sense that blustering calls for solidarity usually conceal exceptions. Nottage gave the play an epigraph from Langston Hughes’ Let America Be America Again, in which the poet declares the country “never was America to me”.With its sparse, barely stocked bar-room design, Lewis’s production perfectly conveys the play’s desolation – embodied by Cynthia’s ex, the drug-addicted Brucie (Chris Jack), one of the bar’s regulars – but missing is the atmospheric, authentic sense of place that marked Lynette Linton’s blistering 2018 staging at the Donmar Warehouse. It’s not just in the occasionally wavering accents or oddly pristine costumes but in the bonds between the characters, which need to be more fully established for the play’s second half to detonate. While the cast convey the bodily toll of work, a visceral sense of physicality is missing in their confrontations. Further use of the revolve stage, which heightens some scenes, might have prevented the energy seeping from other exchanges.If it never finds the right rhythm, there are powerful performances, especially from Henry as the weary yet steadfast Cynthia, Pooky Quesnel as her rancorous friend Tracey and Cruz as the observant Oscar who captures the lived-in tone of Hughes’ poem, which evades Maga fantasy nostalgia in its call to simply “make America again”.
      At the Royal Exchange, Manchester, until 25 May More

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      Our Little Amal has travelled thousands of miles – but there is still far to go

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      We were theatre people gathered from the UK, the US, Palestine, South Africa, Syria, Taiwan, Eritrea, Italy and France. Our idea was for Amal, a 12ft puppet of a Syrian child, to travel along one of the routes across Turkey and Europe that refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and many other countries follow as they flee war, violence and persecution. We imagined Amal as one of tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors and her journey as, simply, a search for her mother.In 70 towns and cities along her 5,000-mile route – Gaziantep to Manchester – we invited artists and arts organisations to welcome her. “A refugee child will arrive. She’ll be tired, hungry, frightened. How will you welcome her? With a dance? With a meal typical of your region? With an orchestral concert?”And we invited figures of “power” to welcome her – in a Turkish mountain village the mayor, in Rome the pope, in London the speaker of the House of Commons …Between July and November 2021, Amal travelled along the south Turkish coast, crossed to the island of Chios in Greece, walked through Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, France, sailed from Dunkirk to Dover all the while leading perhaps the biggest community art project ever staged, a rolling festival of art and hope. In Arabic Amal means “hope”.Through the genius of her creators, Handspring Puppet Company, the skill of her puppeteers and social media, she quickly became a global symbol of human rights. She met something like a million people on the street, tens of millions more online. Her education pack was downloaded from walkwithamal.org all over the world. In the welcoming crowds, we’d hear kids explain to their parents: “She was born in Aleppo, we learned about her in school …”Almost as soon as she set out, she received invitations to places – Stockholm, Adelaide, Seoul – not within the logic of her route but, once her first journey was complete, she was free. She could go anywhere. In 2022 at the invitation of the mayor of Lviv she visited Ukraine as well as shelters set up across the border in Poland to receive refugees from the war zone. She toured the UK, visiting Stonehenge and appearing alongside Elbow at Glastonbury. She led a group of mayors from many major cities through the streets of Amsterdam to the Anne Frank House.In New York she was welcomed by the Metropolitan Opera on her arrival at JFK airport and by artists and audiences at 50 sites across all five boroughs. Thousands of children holding bird puppets streamed behind her across Brooklyn Bridge. We saw all this, and visits early this year to Toronto and Trondheim, as preparation for her second very long journey.On 7 September she arrived in Boston harbour in a clipper. Later that day she was serenaded by students in Harvard Yard and at night was played to sleep among other homeless people by Yo Yo Ma. On 10 September members of the Nipmuc nation canoed across Lake Ashfield to sing to her in welcome. The mayor of Hartford, Connecticut was the first of many mayors to declare the day of her visit “Little Amal Day”. In Washington a brass band played as she strode down Pennsylvania Avenue to be welcomed to the Capitol by congressmen and women, then she paraded down Black Lives Matter Plaza.She went north to the “rustbelt” – Detroit, Dearborn, Flint. She gazed at the rush of cars thrusting down into the tunnel under the Detroit River that emerges in Canada, the first of three river borders on her 12-week, 60-city US/Mexico journey. In Memphis, Tennessee, she stood outside room 306 of the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated. In Birmingham, Alabama, she marched from the 16th Street Baptist Church hand in hand with a veteran of the 1960s civil rights “foot soldiers”, the crowd singing “Ain’t nobody gonna turn me around, turn me around …” On a glittering New Orleans night, accompanied by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, she made her way through the revellers on Bourbon Street.From El Paso, Texas she crossed briefly into Mexico. Beneath the massive blood-red X-shaped tower that expresses Ciudad Juárez as a crossing point and a meeting place, she was cheered by young people in Mexican national dress and a Mariachi band. Later, standing on the south bank of the Rio Grande (the second river border of her journey), she came across a group of families with young children from Venezuela who, having waded through the chest-high water, were on US soil but blocked from going further by the barbed-wire crested 20-foot wall …Back in the US, she was welcomed by some of the hundreds, maybe thousands, young and old, who run organisations in villages and towns along the border to support migrants and refugees who have made it across. Tiffany runs a shelter where new arrivals can make a phone call, eat, shower and rest while a bus is summoned to ferry them to Tucson where they’ll hand themselves over to the authorities and apply to stay. Father Mike offers his church hall to new arrivals to pause and take stock of the new world they’re in. Outside on the street a youngster from Honduras is interviewed by a local journalist.“What does Amal mean to you?”“She gives me hope …”One late October day, west of Nogales, Arizona, the elderly chairman of the Tohono O’odham Nation guided Amal to the fence between his hereditary territory and Mexico. Overnight, perhaps 2,000 people had crossed and were gathered in a hard mud clearing under the blazing sun awaiting the arrival of police to “process” them. “We will never allow a wall to be built on this land which we cherish,” said the Chairman gazing up at Amal. “If they try, we will fight them, won’t we, my girl.”In the Inglewood neighbourhood of Los Angeles, she had a starring role in a vibrant Vegas-style dance of welcome choreographed by Debbie Allen, performed by hundreds of students. On the jam-packed Jerry Moss Plaza of the downtown Music Center bands played, soap bubbles glimmered in the night air as a jubilant crowd serenaded Amal.From San Diego, she crossed into Mexico through the turnstile on foot and was greeted by the governor of the state of Baja California and the mayor of Tijuana, both making speeches about how deeply they as mothers felt their responsibilities for the wellbeing of migrant children. On Tijuana Playa the metal border wall juts into the sea. As Amal strolled along the beach accompanied by well-wishers and a mariachi band, I thought: “But the wall doesn’t jut out that far, why don’t people swim round it?” The currents are too strong.Will the strong flow of migrants ever cease? No one sets out on these perilous journeys unless there’s no other way to escape war, organised crime, extreme poverty. In Mexico, as in Turkey, it seemed to us that, at the official level but also on the streets, there’s an understanding that “the problem” is not refugees and asylum seekers. The people are innocent. The problem is the situation. Deal with the political, social and economic crises or people will keep coming.In the Centro Comunitario San Bernabé in Monterrey she played soccer with teams of boisterous kids. In the Tonalá neighbourhood of Guadalajara something like 40,000 people crowded the streets. “Amal, Amal, Amal!” In Zapopan perhaps 20,000 yelled as she entered the Basilica of Our Lady, was sung to by priests and then escorted back out into the blazing sunshine by yet another mariachi band.In Mexico City she was formally welcomed by the presidents of the Senate and of the Congress. In Los Pinos Park the minister of culture brandished her cowboy hat and sang to her. “You are warriors,” she told us, “warriors for peace.” On the central square, the Zócalo, she was welcomed by the mayor and by a dance choreographed for her by Raúl Tamez. Tens of thousands marched behind her through the working-class district Iztapalapa brandishing signs “We love Amal, Ser Migrante es un acto de Valor”.Outside the church at Xochimilco, near the vast canal system built by the Aztecs on which Amal went for a twilight cruise, Unicef and UNHCR officials asked if she would keep heading south into Guatemala, San Salvador and Honduras: “This work you do is very important to us. You draw attention to the level of the crisis, to the needs of the children. No doubt about it, she should keep going.”At Mexico’s southernmost tip, Ciudad Hidalgo, the river border with Guatemala is a gently sloping bank strengthened by sandbags leading down to a row of wooden rafts. Armed police stand about but seem unengaged by the constant, apparently casual, flow of people punting to and fro in both directions. The Guatemalan quetzal is stronger than the Mexican peso so Guatemalans hop aboard the rafts and float across to do their shopping. But Amal has no need to shop. She climbs aboard a raft, lays her head on her hands, stretches out and floats gently along, at rest at last.As she travelled, Amal raised just shy of $1,000,000 (£800,000) which will be distributed to organisations that support refugees by our charity partner Choose Love. There are two further, briefer, Amal journeys planned for 2024.
      David Lan was artistic director of the Young Vic from 2000 to 2018. With Tracey Seaward he is producer of The Walk.
      This article was amended on 12 December. Philadelphia Avenue has been corrected to Pennsylvania Avenue; and the spelling of choreographer Raúl Tamez’s name has been corrected. More

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      in US Politics

      Top Broadway star likens Ron DeSantis to Klan grand wizard

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      Prominent Broadway actor Denée Benton likened Florida’s rightwing governor Ron DeSantis to a Ku Klux Klan grand wizard at Sunday night’s Tony awards ceremony, drawing applause and roars of approval from the audience.Benton, known for her stage roles in Hamilton as well as Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812, took aim at the Republican presidential hopeful and his policies attacking minority groups as she announced an award for theatrical excellence for a Florida high school teacher from the town of Plantation.She said: “While I am certain that the current grand wizard, I’m sorry, excuse me, governor of my home state will be changing the name of this following town immediately, we were honored to present this award to the truly incredible and life-changing Jason Zembuch-Young, enhancing the lives of students at South Plantation high school in Plantation, Florida.”There were gasps from some in the crowd, followed by laughter and lengthy applause.DeSantis has curtailed Black voters’ rights, restricted conversations of race and sexuality in Florida’s classrooms and workplaces, and rolled back protections for the LBGTQ+ community and other minority groups as he attempts to prove his extremist credentials to Republican voters in pursuit of his party’s presidential nomination.Benton’s comments also came the day after a group of DeSantis supporters was spotted waving Nazi flags and banners supporting the governor at the entrance to Disney World in Orlando.DeSantis is feuding with the theme park giant over his ’don’t say gay’ law banning discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools, and he has not responded to calls from Democrats or civil rights groups to condemn either Saturday’s demonstration or previous gatherings of Nazi sympathizers in central Florida.He is also being sued for his “unauthorized alien transportation program” in which groups of South American asylum seekers have been moved around the country in planes chartered by the state of Florida and dumped in states and cities run by Democrats without prior notice.Critics have highlighted the parallels between the DeSantis program, which he sees as a protest to President Joe Biden’s immigration policies, and the reverse freedom rides from the civil rights era of six decades ago.Similar to the false promises of accommodation, jobs, clothing and food allegedly made to lure the DeSantis groups of migrants, white supremacist groups in the 1960s – including the Klan – bussed Black families out of southern states to the north with assurances that a better life awaited them.Benton’s comments on Sunday were broadcast live to the nation on a CBS telecast of the Tony awards from Manhattan. The 31-year-old actor was educated at Carnegie Mellon University, which partnered with the Tonys to honor Zembuch-Young for his work creating a diverse and inclusive theater at his school and in summer camps, including shows staged entirely in American sign language (ASL).“I didn’t start out with a mission of: let’s be as inclusive as we possibly can. I’ve always championed the underdog because I kind of relate to that,” Zembuch-Young told the Associated Press last month.“If there’s somebody that’s standing in front of you and they want to work, well, let’s put them to work and let’s figure out a way to have them be as successful as they possibly can.”DeSantis’s media office did not respond to Benton’s comments. But Never Back Down, a political action committee supporting the governor’s run for the White House, criticized her in a tweet.“Liberal ‘elites’ can’t stand how effective Ron DeSantis is at defeating their attempts to sexualize and indoctrinate your children,” it wrote, repeating previous messaging from DeSantis acolytes that opposition to his anti-trans policies equates to “grooming”. More

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      in US Politics

      Harry Belafonte, singer, actor and tireless activist, dies aged 96

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      Harry Belafonte, the singer, actor and civil rights activist who broke down racial barriers, has died aged 96.As well as performing global hits such as Day-O (The Banana Boat Song), winning a Tony award for acting and appearing in numerous feature films, Belafonte spent his life fighting for a variety of causes. He bankrolled numerous 1960s initiatives to bring civil rights to Black Americans; campaigned against poverty, apartheid and Aids in Africa; and supported leftwing political figures such as Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.The cause of death was congestive heart failure, his spokesman told the New York Times. Figures including the rapper Ice Cube and Mia Farrow paid tribute to Belafonte. The US news anchor Christiane Amanpour tweeted that he “inspired generations around the whole world in the struggle for non-violent resistance justice and change. We need his example now more than ever.”Bernice King, daughter of Dr Martin Luther King, shared a picture of Belafonte at her father’s funeral and said that he “showed up for my family in very compassionate ways. In fact, he paid for the babysitter for me and my siblings.” The Beninese-French musician Angélique Kidjo called Belafonte “the brightest star in every sense of that word. Your passion, love, knowledge and respect for Africa was unlimited.”Belafonte was born in 1927 in working-class Harlem, New York, and spent eight years of his childhood in his impoverished parents’ native Jamaica. He returned to New York for high school but struggled with dyslexia and dropped out in his early teens. He took odd jobs working in markets and the city’s garment district, and then signed up to the US navy aged 17 in March 1944, working as a munitions loader at a base in New Jersey.After the war ended, he worked as a janitor’s assistant, but aspired to become an actor after watching plays at New York’s American Negro Theatre (along with fellow aspiring actor Sidney Poitier). He took acting classes – where his classmates included Marlon Brando and Walter Matthau – paid for by singing folk, pop and jazz numbers at New York club gigs, where he was backed by groups whose members included Miles Davis and Charlie Parker.He released his debut album in 1954, a collection of traditional folk songs. His second album, Belafonte, was the first No 1 in the new US Billboard album chart in March 1956, but its success was outdone by his third album the following year, Calypso, featuring songs from his Jamaican heritage. It brought the feelgood calypso style to many Americans for the first time, and became the first album to sell more than a million copies in the US.The lead track was Day-O (The Banana Boat Song), a signature song for Belafonte – it spent 18 weeks in the UK singles chart, including three weeks at No 2. His version of Mary’s Boy Child was a UK chart-topper later that year, while Island in the Sun reached No 3. He released 30 studio albums, plus collaborative albums with Nana Mouskouri, Lena Horne and Miriam Makeba. The latter release won him one of his two Grammy awards; he was later awarded a lifetime achievement Grammy and the Academy’s president’s merit award.Bob Dylan’s first recording – playing harmonica – was on Belafonte’s 1962 album, Midnight Special. The previous year, Belafonte had been hired by Frank Sinatra to perform at John F Kennedy’s presidential inauguration.Belafonte maintained an acting career alongside music, winning a Tony award in 1954 for his appearance in the musical revue show, John Murray Anderson’s Almanac, and appearing in several films, most notably as one of the leads in Island in the Sun, along with James Mason, Joan Fontaine and Joan Collins, with whom he had an affair. He was twice paired with Dorothy Dandridge, in Carmen Jones and Bright Road, but he turned down a third film, an adaptation of Porgy and Bess, which he found “racially demeaning”.He later said the decision “helped fuel the rebel spirit” that was brewing in him, a spirit he parlayed into a lifetime of activism, using his newfound wealth to fund various initiatives. He was mentored by Martin Luther King Jr and Paul Robeson, and bailed King out of a Birmingham, Alabama, jail in 1963 as well as co-organising the march on Washington that culminated in King’s “I have a dream” speech. He also funded the Freedom Riders and SNCC, activists fighting unlawful segregation in the American south, and worked on voter registration drives.He later focused on a series of African initiatives. He organised the all-star charity record We Are the World, raising more than $63m for famine relief, and his 1988 album, Paradise in Gazankulu, protested against apartheid in South Africa. He was appointed a Unicef goodwill ambassador in 1987, and later campaigned to eradicate Aids from Africa.After recovering from prostate cancer in 1996, he advocated for awareness of the disease. He was a fierce proponent of leftwing politics, criticising hawkish US foreign policy, campaigning against nuclear armament, and meeting with both Castro and Chavez. At the meeting with Chavez, in 2006, he described US president George W Bush as “the greatest terrorist in the world”. He also characterised Bush’s Black secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice as being like slaves who worked in their master’s house rather than in the fields, criticisms that Powell and Rice rejected.He was a frequent critic of Democrats, particularly Barack Obama, over issues including Guantanamo Bay detentions and the fight against rightwing extremism. He criticised Jay-Z and Beyoncé in 2012 for having “turned their back on social responsibility … Give me Bruce Springsteen, and now you’re talking. I really think he is Black.” Jay-Z responded: “You’re this civil rights activist and you just bigged up the white guy against me in the white media … that was just the wrong way to go about it.”He continued to take occasional acting roles. In 2018, he appeared in the Spike Lee movie BlacKkKlansman. In 2014, 12 Years a Slave director Steve McQueen announced he was working with Belafonte on a film about Paul Robeson, though it wasn’t developed.Belafonte was married three times, first to Marguerite Byrd, from 1948 to 1957, with whom he had two daughters, activist Adrienne and actor Shari. He had two further children with his second wife, Julie Robinson: actor Gina and music producer David. He and Robinson divorced after 47 years, and in 2008 he married Pamela Frank, who survives him. More

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      in US Politics

      Baldwin v Buckley: how the ‘debate play’ made a riveting resurgence

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      James Graham’s play Best of Enemies recently brought to life the gladiatorial televised clashes between Gore Vidal and William F Buckley Jr in the lead-up to the 1968 US presidential election. Tucked inside that drama was a fleeting mention of the historic debate between the white, conservative Buckley and the Black American civil rights activist James Baldwin. It felt, potentially, like it could make a play in its own right.A new production stages just that momentous confrontation in verbatim form. Debate: Baldwin v Buckley re-enacts in full the Cambridge University Union head-to-head from February 1965, when it was recorded and broadcast by the BBC.First re-created on screen during the lockdown of 2020, it has since been staged off-Broadway and now makes its UK premiere at Stone Nest in London’s West End. Adapted and directed by Christopher McElroen, it features Teagle F Bougere as Baldwin and Eric T Miller as Buckley.Baldwin and Buckley have half an hour a piece to make their case for or against the motion of the debate: “The American Dream is at the Expense of the American Negro.” We follow their logic without interruption in the debating chamber, Baldwin arguing for civil rights and for America to acknowledge the sins of its past, while Buckley makes the case for white conservative values.McElroen says the decision to stage the debate this way came after the murder of George Floyd, in the midst of the Black Lives Matter protests. “It addressed the racial conflict that the country was navigating yet again.”Political theatre has a long and fine British tradition, from Shakespeare’s history plays to David Hare’s work and Graham’s own oeuvre – which includes This House and The Vote. But the “debate play” is something apart; drawing on the ancient Athenian art of rhetoric and persuasion, it speaks to us directly of issues in our world. It is, by comparison, a rarity these days but we see it in such highly compelling instances as Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, whose courtroom debate was arguably its strongest feature. There is also David Mamet’s recently revived and volcanic two-hander, Oleanna, which is not formally constructed as a debate but presents two oppositional viewpoints on political correctness in university campuses with immense force, and allows us to view its subject from both sides.An even more current example is the New Diorama’s musical, After the Act, which features parliamentary debate around Section 28 (which legislated against teaching homosexuality in British schools) and manages to bring satirical comedy to the debate form.In the case of McElroen’s production, nothing extraneous is added to the words exchanged between Baldwin and Buckley. Unlike Best of Enemies, which couches the infamous debates within greater fictive material, this is a pure reconstruction of the original. “To frame the debate within a bigger story would be like killing a fly with a sledgehammer,” says McElroen. “The material is James Baldwin and William F Buckley Jr – two amazing intellectuals on opposite sides of the political spectrum. The conflict is inherent in that, you don’t need to do anything to it.”The setting is modern, apart from an old TV that replays some of the original footage, and there is no use of theatrical lighting or sound. Yet it is utterly captivating. The fierce eloquence and intellectual rigour of Baldwin and Buckley’s arguments have not lost any of their power. There is an argument to suggest that the most powerful part of Best of Enemies is Vidal and Buckley’s debates themselves, which offer a ferocious sense of spectacle – and that the fiction is secondary.The fact that Buckley airs such critical, even offensive, views on the civil rights movement and effectively mobilises a defence of white supremacy, brings its own questions. Would this debate ever be sanctioned now at a university union, in our era of de-platforming – and should it be?Yes, says McElroen, because the divided politics are still there. After every show there is a live discussion with the audience, and in some venues the after-show conversations are proof of how some have moved on from this debate around race while others remained entrenched. The first venue in which Baldwin v Buckley played live was the Women’s National Republican Club in New York. “They identified strongly with Buckley’s arguments,” says McElroen, “and they identified the Black Lives Matter movement to be a radical group not dissimilar from the way Buckley viewed the civil rights movement.”The other issue it raises is whether we have lost the art of civilised debate – and more specifically, if the demand for “total” agreement is eroding the space and permission for true debate and disagreement. If this debate were taking place today, McElroen thinks, Buckley would have stopped Baldwin by his third or fourth word and the discussion would have descended into chaos.If a more recent political debate were given similar verbatim treatment in dramatic form – such as the televised Trump and Biden presidential face-offs – it might be highly entertaining to watch for the heated interruptions and put-downs. But contemporary political debates rarely allow the opponent the time and breadth to make their argument, uninterrupted, in the way that Baldwin and Buckley did.There is a strain, in debate drama, that it is striving to be more than just theatre, and that it is ultimately trying to galvanise the audience towards a change of heart or mind outside the auditorium through its act of persuasion.McElroen is staging his play across the US – from Tennessee to southern California – in the lead-up to the next presidential elections, travelling out of the “liberal bubble” and into Republican heartlands. “To the extent that a piece of theatre can affect change, we hope to use this to spark dialogue. What we try and do at the end of the performance is to focus on civility, and on what actually unites us as opposed to the things that divide us,” he says.“The odd thing about the debate between Baldwin and Buckley is that they find consensus in their arguments about the value of America and the American way of life. We need to do better collectively to hear what the other side is saying. If we do that, we’ll be surprised at how much consensus exists.”
      At Stone Nest, London, until 8 April. More

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      in US Politics

      Can theatre predict 2024’s US election? Politics Weekly America

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      Playwright Mike Bartlett prophesies a Donald Trump v Kamala Harris showdown against a backdrop of rolling violence

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      Mike Bartlett’s new stage work, The 47th, explores a Donald Trump v Kamala Harris contest in 2024, set against a backdrop of rolling violence. Jonathan Freedland asks why artists and writers are drawn to American politics again and again, and what theatre can reveal about the protagonists that news coverage can’t Listen to this week’s episode of Politics Weekly UK with John Harris Send your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts

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