The Spectre at the Feast

I spent a lot of time this year working with the hideously talented Bob Moran on his triumphant show Art-pocalypse. I pitched it to pinched neighbours as Watergate meets Fawlty Towers. But it’s more contentious than that, suggesting, as it does, the value of personal agency, creative freedom, and love.

My parents, who drop blue pills like I drop red ones, each take issue with my perspective on recent events in their own way. Nonetheless they were there on opening night, with an army of self-declared vaxxed to death friends. My father liked my dress, and my mother thought I’d lost weight and should consider getting my face done. So much for controversy.

This was a real bells and whistles extravaganza. Bob’s moving, frank, and funny account of the last few years was embellished with live drawing, cartoons (and great visuals, hat tip Keith), and live music (hat tip, composer Paul Handley and his band). Bob deserved his standing ovations. But he won’t be getting one at the Newcastle Opera House, where we were supposed to take Art-pocalypse in January. The premise for our contract being cancelled is an objectionable historical tweet no one will show us.

I’ve now heard various reasons from theatres to not host the show, including “We really pushed vaccine passports, will he change his mind about those?” or, “We can’t be political.” And of course, always lurking in the background, is the phantom menstrual cycle of an interval ice cream seller in Wigan, and whether this could manifest into something tangible, like a complaint. “But there’s no ice cream in the show” I assured a cautious programmer this week. “Well, it’s easy for me to say that’s appropriate as a cis gendered white woman,” she randomly replied, “But there’s a mask in the poster.”

The spectral ice cream seller’s role is to carry everyone’s cowardice, while suggesting an element of genuine economic activity in theatres so heavily subsidised it now makes no difference if they’re open or closed.

What I find more curious is the complicity of artists and performers. The public can be forgiven for clinging to their notions of free speech, when between pushing vaccines and veganism, the likes of Ricky Gervais are wheeled out to make “outrageous” quips about Epstein island, and prove how even the Hollywood elite can handle gentle ribbing about their paedophilia; while the up and coming are forever available to promote their BBC endorsed bilge in a cancel-culture denying “think piece” for the Guardian.

But performers themselves are aware of the disequilibrium of the risk/reward ratio in the current climate. It takes months and months and money to put together a show like this. It’s palpably absurd that if some forlorn moron takes a break from applying filters to selfies for long enough to complain about a cartoon, their opinion should have consequences. Once this principle is accepted it means anyone anywhere can play the forlorn moron and unplug their nemesis de jour, inverting the natural hierarchy to promote the devious or the dumb above the sincere and the gifted.

Creatives should be up in arms about cancellations like these, but instead they cross their fingers and cross out their ideas, hoping to avoid a similar fate by diluting whatever talent they think they have to a dosage they pray won’t be fatal. Playing to the bodach has profound consequences: people forget why they wanted to create. Those that have anything to say are distracted by the fact those that don’t have more currency than they do. Already confused, the insecurities that led them to the stage are now compounded by the fact they’re apparently replaceable in a way a barman having an off day is not. Desperate to remain relevant and unsure what that means, they ensconce themselves in cliques of the similarly admin addled. They try to make content within ever tighter parameters of the ‘acceptable today’ hoping not to be ‘gone tomorrow’. They become frightened of the honest and the bold, especially when they admire them. They are grateful when the accomplished are cancelled because they think that means they were right to chain themselves to ideas they don’t hold and values they don’t cherish.  

But it’s a mad gamble to take; staking everything on the bet that all your peers are for sale. They aren’t. Some people (not many, I agree) create from an inner impulse towards the true, the good and the beautiful. They’re on a journey to transcend their own limitations, not kowtow to someone else’s. The weak are trapped in an illusion. The narcissist and the neurotic will be sepulchred in their safe spaces; the future belongs to the brave and the interesting.

In short, a new date will be announced soon.