What we ought to say (Hope, Royal Court Theatre, 21/12/14)

CW: sexual violence and self-harm, both only in paragraph 3.

After coming out of Hope, I nipped through the Royal Court bar to the toilet. The company afterparty for God Bless the Child, critiqued for your delectation here, was in full swing. As I wove past Hayley-off-Coronation-Street ­and Watson’s-wife-off-Sherlock and all the kids, at least one of whom was in a non-ironic bowtie, it struck me. Hope by Jack Thorne was the best play that I’ve seen at this venue in terms of solving The Royal Court Problem: how do we make theatre that can meaningfully be described as ‘political’, even (for Vicky Featherstone, this year) ‘revolutionary’, to a largely affluent middle-class audience who have pre-established left-liberal values anyway? I’ve spoken before about the ultimately safe feeling of ‘edginess’ that pervades the Court as a venue – and David Greig’s expressed it more eloquently in his manifesto-essay ‘Rough Theatre’. While it’s hardly a game-changing play in the grand scheme of things, the atmosphere in the auditorium at Hope seemed to be one of tentatively finding a way out of this mess. My abiding memory of God Bless the Child was being sat under the harshly clinical fluorescent lights of its fake-classroom, being made to feel angry by a precision-engineered theatrical angrifying tool that wasn’t really that carefully constructed. Hope, in contrast, seemed to say, ‘You’re here because your idea of pre-Christmas fun is to watch “a funny and scathing fable attacking the squeeze on local government”. That means you’re probably already angry – guess what, so are we. Let’s have some fun with this anger, and see where we go from here.’ At God Bless the Child, there were lots of individual sardonic laughs at isolated, puncturing moments. The audience at Hope was one of the warmest and most organic I’ve been in recently: we laughed together, we tittered privately, one of the pair of elderly ladies gave a half-scandalised ‘ooh’ early on (more on that later).

Solving The Royal Court Problem is not reducible, as Featherstone’s predecessor famously proposed to make it, to analysing ‘what it means to be middle class’. In the opening scene, Mark (Paul Higgins), Deputy Leader of a Labour-led council, rehearses a public speech in which he insists that ‘we are a working-class town’, one that has struggled with economic crisis before; no location is specified, but it’s clear we’re far from Westminster. The comparisons to be made with Jim Cartwright’s Road, the play that occupied this space coming on to thirty years ago, are surprisingly enlightening. I had the chance to see Cartwright’s play for the second time a few months ago: the effectiveness with which it shows the most intimate somatic consequences of apparently cool, distant and large-scale political decisions – most notably in the central scenes of Joey’s hunger-strike – continues to startle. (‘Consequences’ isn’t quite the right word: such violence seems to be presented as the fundamental inalienable logic according to which Thatcherite policy always already works.)

In Hope, no sooner has Mark announced his working-class credentials, he stumbles over the line ‘we live in an age of cuts’. His colleague and lover Julie (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) facetiously chips in with the suggestion that he replace ‘cuts’ with ‘cunts’, and then that ‘vaginal mutilation might not go down so well with the woman’s vote’. This is what made my neighbour in the stalls so shocked, and it established a connection of violence with money (and especially of money as physical object) that would echo throughout the text. But only echo, and only in the text: one of the strengths of Thorne’s writing is that the connection emerges reflexively, uncannily, without ever acquiring the force of a running metaphor. After spending the night with him, Julie notices that Mark has a spooky dent in his back ‘about the size of a five-pence piece’. He later admits that he first became aware of social responsibility when he made a joke about an impoverished schoolmate getting his hair cut at the charity shop ‘Round Pounds’ – only for the kid to tear his hair out. Another councillor, Sarwan (Rudi Dharmalingam) insists on describing a rash ‘only a day away from seepage’ to a colleague, and admits that the nationwide imbalance in local government cuts ‘make[s] you want to tear someone’s throat out’. Yet this violence is never staged. When a local resident is killed as a result of reduced public street lighting, it is recounted as just another problem for the flailing council to deal with. If Road exposes the wounds of the political body for all to see, Hope doesn’t want to, or can’t: it’s as if, decades after the collapse of the industrial North and four years into LibCon austerity, we’ve become used to no longer registering this pain as pain.

It’s there, too, in Hope’s unique status as an ultra-recent history play: it rattles through the months of 2014, with references to Miliband and Pickles and Farage; characters discuss the Scottish referendum, but crucially only after it has actually taken place; its final scene is specifically set on the day of the play’s performance.  The effect of watching events that are not-quite-contemporary, divorced from the contemporaneity with which we as audience members experienced them last year, is akin to watching a wound become a scar, to no longer being in immediate pain but still having to face its consequences. Rather than simply expressing trauma, as Road does, at our ignorance of ‘how that time could turn into this time’, Hope attempts to look askance, at how political conditions ebb into each other – and shows that this kind of looking brings its own discomforts.

Let’s put it another way. Joey’s scenes in Road are an astonishing staging of shame, if shame is understood as the condition of being seen in a state of degradation: he breaks the fourth wall to tell the audience to look at him, as he in turn looks out at their shameful political complacency. Hope, on the other hand, offers a theatre and a politics of embarrassment. Nicholas Ridout (again) has written well on the difference between the two. Embarrassment always seems like the softer, less genuine emotion, as if embarrassment itself is embarrassed at not being shameful enough. This is because embarrassment is the social management of the private experience of shame, a management that cannot stop itself from being publicly revealed: to be embarrassed is to become ‘suddenly aware of being made to appear, of the fact that you have your being through your appearance’ – and crucially, it is a spectacle of escaping that awareness, of working to get on with your life without drawing attention to yourself any more. To blush, for example, is both to acknowledge shame and to attempt to keep it in my face and no further, to allow me to maintain my focus on what I was already doing. Like recovery from corpsing, embarrassment ‘falls short of catastrophe’. If shame roots us to the spot in which we feel exposed, risking and recovering from embarrassment keep us going: indeed, Ridout proposes it as a background condition of all theatrical performance.

The characters in Hope are in a permanent state of embarrassment, crashing from one catastrophe to another but knowing that they have to keep on. The word and its cognates recur throughout the play, from council leader Hilary’s (Stella Gonet’s) fear of being embarrassed during an appearance at a threatened daycare centre, to the councillors’ collective hope that their funds will be increased out of the government’s embarrassment at their climactic decision to stand down and not set a budget. The word ‘shame’ appears only once, but pointedly, and during the play’s wordiest and most explicitly political scene. George (Tom Georgeson), Julie’s father and a self-confessed ‘old-time wire-walker’ who led a Labour council during the late seventies, offers Mark support as he considers whether to organise a mass stand-down. His speech quickly becomes a lament for the collapse of the Labour movement and organised protest: ‘Idealism is dead. Solidarity is dead. It’s been destroyed by pragmatism and hatred and shame.’ It’s a shame that has left George paralysed, admitting that ‘we’ve wasted our time’ and later telling Mark’s son, Jake (Knight) that ‘you’ll never have it as good as I did’.

But the rest of the play identifies our conversion of shame into embarrassment as the site on which solidarity can be, tentatively, renewed. George leaves Mark by asking him ‘to be a great man. And I’ve not the slightest idea what that involves.’ We already know that this is a concern that dogs Mark: Jake reveals that he has a habit of asking his lovers and ex-lovers whether he’s ‘a good man’. Ultimately, with the council disbanded but officials from Whitehall nevertheless descending to ‘make this town functional again’, he claims, ‘I have always tried to do the right thing’, only for Hilary to accuse him of ‘confus[ing] the right thing with what seems right and what seems right is never the right thing’. Performing good actions, and the social management of good things so that they appear good, may dilute some absolute private condition of being good – but they are also the only conditions in which such goodness is revealed. If the fits and starts of embarrassment are the space in which we manage our feelings of absolute shame, they are also the only space, in a fallen world, in which we can sustain glimpses of shame’s absolute opposite: the condition of being looked at and judged worthy, in a state of grace (roll titles…)

This constant need to simply get on with performing, in various senses of that word, in order to achieve grace and avoid shame, was nicely reflected by the decision to have the councillors execute various keep-fit stretches and balancing acts on the edge of the stage as they recited overlapping monologues. It was a rare instance of a Choreographed Interstitial Movement Sequence^TM that really works for me (and it’s just one benefit of the swiftness with which John Tiffany directed this production, cutting superfluous scenes and characters, pressing on without scene-changes or blackouts). The councillors looked ridiculous and restless, as if they were executing a caricature of their need to remain ‘flexible’ to people’s needs. But they were also somehow graceful. Their bodies aspired to a kind of elegant movement which did not need conscious control, which could simply be while they recited their lines, like the marionettes famously described by Heinrich von Kleist – just as their work for the council should aspire to the organic condition of a community caring for itself. George dismisses a Labour party whose ‘believers don’t know how to believe any more’, but this condition of never quite knowing how to express one’s belief publicly is ‘where we must learn to wriggle’, to move the body around semi-consciously until we can make it work for us. The latter phrase is Simon Critchley’s summary of the space that Stanley Cavell’s philosophy offers us, a space which denies ‘both the epistemological guarantee for our beliefs and the possibility of a sceptical escape from these beliefs’. Substitute ‘beliefs’ for ‘hopes’ and you get a decent summary of the space that Hope’s characters are in – and, by wriggling within it, those hopes are briefly allowed to appear guaranteed.

A similar kind of grace-chasing convulsion seemed to underpin the effects of the set. As Thorne’s script demanded, it was a brilliant recreation of ‘a 1920s-era council office. The sort of place that has beautiful lead-lined glass windows and ugly 1970s furniture.’ But the central presence of a piano, and of a proscenium stage that slid back and then forward again to start and end the production, also made it smack of a music hall, suggesting that the councillors were ‘on show’, in a corny, humiliating manner. If this sense eroded the general illusion of realism, of a council building in a graceful relationship with its community, it emphasised my sense of being entertained in a theatre, of being in an audience in a graceful relationship with a company of actors. As I’ve kept saying, this play was good fun. Some bedraggled Christmas decorations gave some loveable festive cheer; at one point, a character walked on playing a ukulele for no obvious reason. I don’t normally drink at the theatre, but I bought myself a G&T to take me through the second half…

And, here, it’s worth noting the grace of some of the casting decisions (which, again, distances this production from God Bless the Child). Much of the first half of the play revolves around the threatened closure of a day-care centre, run by Mark’s ex-wife Gina (Christine Entwistle) and used by Laura, played by Jo Eastwood, an actor with Down’s syndrome. The scenes in which the pair recounted their fight against the closure felt like they were closing a gap between mere representation and some form of genuine political action, most directly from Eastwood’s presence but also through devices like having both actors put on the Dalmatian costumes they wore for one of the protests as they described it. Elsewhere, the script made it clear that the black Duncan-Brewster was playing a character of her own race (discussing possible replacements on the council with Julie, Sarwan notes that ‘brown has to be replaced by brown’). But it’s hard to believe that her father, who was a non-metropolitan politician in the seventies and is played without comment by the white Georgeson, is anything other than white. Maybe I’m naive and need to see more, but this is the first instance I’ve seen of an admirably absolute colour-blindness: a play that wants to engage with issues of race, but does not feel the need to make the racial make-up of either its cast or its characters mutually coherent, and simply expects its audience to run with it, to let all people simply be without worrying about representation. No production of Hope could, by itself, undo the racial tension or the closure of day-care centres that really occur in the kind of town that it represents – but this production is doing something, even if it is inadequate, fitful, embarrassing. In fact, this ‘something’ is the equal and opposite reaction against what Ridout describes as the work of embarrassment, which tweezers open the gap ‘between acting and being, between ambition and capacity, between image (self-for-the-world) and self-presence’, and which denies Kleistian grace. And this counter-work might be just as central to theatrical performance as embarrassment itself.

And this, finally and at last, is how this play solves The Royal Court Problem. I’ve been enjoying Andrew Haydon’s recent return to his blog, and I think his comments on The Fever at the Almeida ring true for Hope as well: ‘the piece refuses to agitate for change, or to suggest that there’s any likely solution to our greed or self-interest’, but this refusal ‘might just provoke small, gradual, tiny, not-self-interest-threatening attempts at change in those who see it’. Such tiny attempts, I contend, are the wriggles of our not-quite-graceful embarrassment. There’s nothing to suggest that the particular audience I was in for Hope are out there, now, making those attempts. George’s cri de coeur against contemporary politics notably got a clap from a single audience member, which died down very rapidly. It’s in stark contrast with the NT Live screening of David Hare’s Skylight that I saw back in July, where the entire audience, both in the cinema and at Wyndham’s Theatre, broke into applause at Carey Mulligan’s heroic speech on behalf of the teachers and social workers who ‘unblock the drains’ of our society – no doubt we were all buoyed up by the public sector strike and the flushing of Michael Gove down the cabinet toilet that had occurred the previous week.

Yet I still think that Hope can work to sustain that kind of engagement in a way that other plays cannot. Road famously ends with a call to ‘come again’, an action which would fix everyone involved back in their postures of shame: the characters on Road will go back to their failures to escape; the actors and audience will come back to the Royal Court, to exchange money for the same semi-palliative dose of watching and being watched. Hope ends (thanks to a to-my-mind judicious cut to Thorne’s text) with the councillors staring out at the audience, back at work after their budget’s devastation at the hands of Whitehall, and asking in turn ‘Can I help you?’, suggesting that change will be made somewhere beyond the theatre, where the people represented by these actors ask those questions and where we can openly answer. I’m reminded of the way that Forced Entertainment discussed their work at the conclusion of A Decade of Forced Entertainment from 1994: there work is ‘optimistic […] even when it’s bleak’ because ‘it opens a space which people fill’, ‘so the optimism is more an absence than anything else’. It is a way of going on. I don’t know why or how I believe in the grace of that audience at Hope last December, but I do – and the wriggles of this review might help me to guarantee it.

Witnessing the Badger (God Bless The Child, Royal Court Theatre, 20/12/14)

CW: links to two pages which refer to child abuse, in 6th and 15th paragraph.

God Bless the Child by Molly Davies was, pretty remarkably, my first time in the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court – and I still need to go back to get a proper sense of how it normally works as a venue. The space had been transformed into a scarily-accurate replica of a primary school classroom – a classroom complete with eight eight-year-old children (of whom more, much more, in a minute), running around and playing together as a pre-show. But it was the wall displays which impressed me: indistinguishable as a whole from those in a real classroom, and filled with work clearly produced by the younger actors themselves, there were just enough awkward details to suggest things were ever-so-slightly askew. One of the discussion boards near me explained the difference between fiction, ‘where we use our imagination’, and non-fiction books. The board nearest me was about Sali Rayner (Amanda Abbington), the author ‘we’ve been learning about this term’. It was full of fun facts which delicately marked out the difference between her and the children in the classroom: she goes on holiday in the Scilly Isles; her favourite ice cream is not just vanilla but Madagascar vanilla. ‘We’ in 4N had been reading Rayner’s Badger Do Best books, read a newspaper article about her, and, crucially, been following her new learning scheme. Evidence of this learning scheme was dotted around the rest of the displays. Once the play started, it became apparent that this scheme dominated every aspect of Ms Newsome’s (Ony Uhiara’s) teaching, with its ‘thinking toadstools and listening lilypads’; its scripted ‘conflict resolution’ centring around a stuffed badger toy; its child-led but teacher-centred approach that ended up banishing the lovely TA Mrs Bradley (Julie Hesmondhalgh).

In pride of place next to the blackboard was a display with cardboard cut-outs of all the books’ characters under the title ‘Badger Do Best^TM’. The ^TM sign was visible nowhere else, never mentioned in the play: I’m reminded of the uncanny place that the same sign holds in the script for ‘The Threat of International Terrorism’ episode in Martin Crimp’s Attempts on her Life, there but not quite spoken onstage. In fact, the whole slightly-off tone is pure Crimp: at its best, this production called to mind the scripts that became Crimp’s Fewer Emergencies and their immediate antecedent, Caryl Churchill’s Far Away, in which ‘trouble and chaos and underclass and unrest and broken things’, ‘wars and no jobs’ (all Davies’s words) are already played out in the way that we raise and teach our kids.

And yet, for Molly Davies, the trouble comes not so much out of the mouths of babes as out of the mouths of set designers. One of the facts listed about Sali is that she likes writing in her ‘Summer House’ – and, in her acknowledgements to the script, Davies thanks ‘Michael and Peter Cox for building me a place to write in’. She also thanks her director Vicky Featherstone ‘for wanting to put on such a play, and for never being tempted to use puppets’. I assume the implied ending is ‘…instead of real children to play 4N.’ And herein hangs the problem. Both during and after the performance, I found myself wondering whether this production would’ve been better/more interesting/more committed if it had used puppets, or had pulled a Blue Remembered Hills or… Casting real eight-year-olds was the easiest option, and the most troubling.

The performance I saw barely strayed from the published text, which makes no mention of the kids’ involvement in the writing process. All but four of the kids have at least some previous experience in film, television or theatre. They probably needed it. A large chunk of time is given over to the not-quite-allegorical revolution that they stage against Badger Do Best and the teachers who do his bidding; they carry whole scenes, and perform a lot of those Choreographed Interstitial Movement Sequences With The Lights Half-Down^{(TM much?)}. The staging demanded a lot of them and – unlike the Court’s Playtime earlier this year, or its Carpet Time storytelling event in conjunction with this production – didn’t give much of sense that it was organised around their ideas and free-form creativity. They didn’t seem to be having much fun: a scene of them dancing around to Don’t Stop Me Now with Hesmondhalgh in the latter half of the play came like a breath of fresh air.

And their performances were… OK. I saw the production at its penultimate performance, and it’s clear that some of them had worked out how to get laughs and succumbed to stagey delivery. They weren’t helped by the script, which was crammed with the kind of endearing grammatical mistakes (‘keeped’, ‘teached’) which – correct me if I’m wrong? – most nine-year-olds have grown out of. I think my problem with coming to a clearer judgement than this about the kids is symptomatic of a lack of clarity, on both Davies’s and Featherstone’s part, about what function the children were fulfilling as theatrical signs. As I watched the young actors jump through hoops just as the characters they represented were made to by the Badger Do Best system, I felt like I had two options. I could marvel at how polished and well-drilled they were, and thus my response was meant to be ‘Hahaha! See! That’s what the Department of Education’s doing to our children, and you like it! Oh, the irony!’ Or I could find myself waiting for the moments when they inevitably slipped up and think ‘Hahaha! See! The kids just can’t cope with this regimentation, and you enjoy it more when they break out!’ For the makers of the play, rehearsing the kids thoroughly was a win-win situation. It smacks of one of Sali’s first lines in the play, upon discovering how far the thinking toadstools are from the listening lilypads: ‘I love that there is a certain amount of flexibility in my system…’

Good political playwrights, to my mind, attend closely to the conditions and human resources behind their plays’ production not in the interest of writerly control, but of creating a social space in which any such control can be risked, suspended, generously shared with the other participants: they model an alternative, perhaps even a utopian, life-world. My Best Play of 2013 placed its onstage choir in a situation halfway between the actors (with whom they were performing, whose script they were following) and the audience (alongside whom they were responding): their evident embarrassment at failing to ‘perform’ successfully, according to the script’s demands, both mirrored and generated the audience’s own failure, to sit back and pass disinterested aesthetic judgement. In my Best ‘New’ Play Staged in a Theatre of 2014, a young actor was employed to portray an (adult-operated) avatar in a pornographic virtual world: the script, always teetering on the edge of making the child say something inappropriate, made the whole tradition of naturalistic theatre seem complicit in the very exploitation of bodies that this play seemed to be condemning. The world acknowledged as ‘the place we have to learn to be’, called for at the end of that play, might be one that demands a changed relationship with theatre as well as with social media.

There was the occasional moment in God Bless the Child when the threatened innocence of the child characters managed to overlap, vertiginously, with a threat to the actors portraying them: in a moment of frustration, Ms Newsome scrawled FUCK OFF on her whiteboard and had to erase it frantically as the children rushed in. But both The Events and The Nether managed, where God Bless the Child didn’t, never to erase the spontaneous, non-diegetic condition of the young or unprepared performer: their failure to generate a perfect illusion, and to produce a coherent paraphrasable message, were not just momentary blips, but sustained conditions of the work. In doing so, these plays highlight a problem I have with Nicholas Ridout’s Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems, a study I’ve been engaging with for my PhD. Ridout makes only passing reference to child performers but, like the other problems of his title – the actor who experiences stage fright or who corpses, momentary eye contact with an actor, the unanticipated movements of an otherwise trained animal – they expose theatre’s ‘wild remainder that escapes semiotic recuperation’. In Ridout’s Marxist analysis, this remainder is the trace of labour relations not subsumed into the sacrificial exchange economy. At the moment when things go wrong, when ‘grace achieved without visible labour’ gives way to ‘the gracelessness that fails’, we get the chance ‘to feel what we feel about work’. For Ridout, these moments of failure are what even mainstream theatre is all about: it is precisely these ‘side-affects’, the recognition that theatre is a ‘machine that sets out to undo itself’, that give the main affects their value.

But Ridout’s thesis has a curiously reactionary streak. For the most part, the vital breakdowns are momentary and immediately repaired, the conventional bourgeois theatre always working to restore itself. Even the avant-garde work of companies like Forced Entertainment and Teatro Giulio Cesare, in which he interprets the failure as more sustained and the pleasure as lying in ‘watching the wheels’ of the theatre-machine ‘spin’ to no avail, the bourgeois theatre and its associated exploitations remain as this pleasure’s necessary other. Although Ridout is right to deny a conception of theatre as ‘the place we go to experience some ahistorical freedom from work’, he also denies theatre’s status as a space in which an entirely alternative, particular, non-capitalist model for freedom can start to be tentatively worked out, here and now, within these historical conditions if in no other – a sensation like the one that I remember getting from The Events. God Bless the Child, on the other hand, serves as a kind of allegorical illustration or doubling-up, of Ridout’s main idea. The play makes me happiest when the kids make mistakes in their performance, because it marks the fulfilment of those moments in the narrative in which they rebel – and this fulfilment works to delineate a political message, the celebration of ‘revolution’ and ‘acts of resistance’, which Featherstone has built the 2014-15 season at the Court around, and which she hopes will ‘demand’ us as an audience ‘to consider a better future’. And yet the emergence of this message is only possible because most of the time the kids are fulfilling the model expected of them as conventional theatrical performers. The exception ultimately proves the rule.

Ridout’s theatre-machine that succeeds in its failing seems to be bound up in the ‘rather tricky dramaturgy of guilt and redemption’ that Jacques Rancière critiques in “The Emancipated Spectator”: ‘theatre is charged with making spectators passive, in opposition to its very essence, which allegedly consists in the self-activity of the community’. If God Bless the Child is taken as a play which straightforwardly advocates resistance to all dogmatic authority figures, it sets itself the paradoxical task of training both its audience and its cast to rebel. Rancière argues that most established models of political theatre remain caught up in this tricky task. Brecht figured his audiences as transitioning from a condition of passivity to one of engaged detachment, Artaud to one of total embodied involvement. Neither engage with the capacity for theatrical audiences to be always already engaged or embodied, to not require training or be easily trained.

Running at 105 minutes without an interval, God Bless the Child felt baggy and overlong, not least because Davies seemed keen to cock her hat to various kinds of political theatre, while recognising that none really resolved the dilemma that she was posing. The first half was propelled by scenes between Ms Newsome and her headteacher Ms Evitt (Nikki Amuka Bird), in which the former tried to point out the failures of the Badger Do Best system while the latter stressed the necessity of keeping it going in order to secure the school’s finances. This nineteenth-century ‘war between two right claims’ approach to political drama doesn’t normally do it for me, but these were by far the clearest scenes in the play: context was filled in, wider relevance was shown, and the children weren’t present to complicate things. But this naturalism was consistently interrupted by scenes featuring the children alone (set, apparently, in an unsupervised classroom – breaking the illusion in and of itself!) in which they ritualistically told each other scary stories and unthreaded the badger soft toy, as if in a kind of tongue-in-cheek at-one-remove homage to a primal Artaudian theatre of sacrifice.

Halfway through the piece, Ms Newsome goes on leave to recuperate from the children’s revolution, never to return, and Sali Rayner herself comes in to pick up the pieces: the divide’s so perfect I was left to wonder why doubling wasn’t used. Abbington’s performance as Rayner, fine on its own terms and often hugely funny, tilted the whole production away from naturalistic debate and towards self-conscious satire. It culminated in a Brechtian final scene: members of the audience were invited into the classroom and we were, for the first time, explicitly addressed as parents who had come to hear the children’s work – only for us to hear, from the mouth of children ‘look[ing] directly at the audience’, that ‘Sali has the government’s voice and the government has your voice. It only does what you let it.’ But if this was a call to unite in the face of our masters, it was a deeply compromised one: earlier in the assembly, Sali’s suggestion that this event would herald ‘a unification of school, community and Badger Do Best’ left me suspicious of any totalising promise for a new society.

It was only with the play’s penultimate appeal to the puppet, in its penultimate scene, that a way out of this tangle of exhausted dramaturgies became visible. Louie, 4N’s main troublemaker, had finished her final personal session with Sali; faced with the threat of spending her ‘school life stuck in a PRU colouring triangles’, she had apparently submitted; as she left the stage, alone, she turned and asked the puppet ‘what would you do differently next time?’, in the words of Sali’s own scripted ‘conflict resolution’ strategy, and listened for its response. Louis’s rebellion had started when she announced that Badger wasn’t real halfway through a resolution session: now, she accepted that the unreal Badger nevertheless had some kind of real value; that structured processes of public self-reflection – if shorn of their fetishised, authoritarian contexts – could still generate productive results. In doing so, Davies’s play finally gestured towards a different set of theatrical practices that it otherwise overlooked: to the questioning re-imaginative process of ‘spect-actorship’ developed by Augustus Boal and still visible in the recent work of Cardboard Citizens, or to the generous ‘sing if you feel like singing’ spirit on which The Events ended. I just wish that, instead of lacerating itself on its own irony, Davies’s play had allowed its actors and audience to participate in such processes themselves.

I wrote most of the above in early January, as the Christmas season was drawing to a close, in my mind if not that of the adverts’. One of the curious features of God Bless the Child was its not-quite-failure to frame its debates in terms of a crisis of public faith. As little as forty years ago, Badger Do Best simply didn’t need to exist: his totalising system of ideas, routines and techniques is a kind of substitute for the prayers, liturgies and moral principles provided by Christianity, and which continues in faith schools to this day. If the ‘Trojan horse’ scandal in Birmingham last spring allowed commentators (rightly) to note our government’s deeply uneven and prejudiced approach to determining which faiths make good educators, one of the lacunae in the coverage (at least as I read it) was any acknowledgement that the Department of Education was using this affair to mask its commitment to fundamentalisms of its own. God Bless the Child wasn’t set in a free school, but its story of a government quietly endorsing a commercial author-advisor to roll out a quietly trademarked educational system, gestured towards the principle according to which such schools work. The aim is not to do away with fundamental beliefs in the name of freedom, but to replace them with a fundamentalism that can be concealed: the kind that erects the temples of our neoliberal cities, while others seek to destroy them.

And this drive for replacement won’t go away. As Gillian Rose taught us, we inhabit a broken middle between law and freedom; we can’t get rid of either, but we need a better way of reconciling them than modern society’s invention of laws disguised as freedom. God Bless the Child did, fleetingly, attempt to think through this. If calling the main character Louie (and allowing her to style herself King) allowed a conspicuous nod to one founding revolution of modernity, Davies also introduced a subtler nod to an earlier one: 4N were studying the Tudors, and Louie piped up that Henry VIII broke away from the Catholic Church ‘cos he needed to be the important one, not the Pope. He changed all their believes so he could do what he wants’. Did Louie’s revolution, and this play, exhaust themselves because they failed to commit to a Protestant-ism characterised by ongoing protest, one that did not resolve into the authoritarianism of a new law or king, one that was carried along by what Rose calls ‘unrevealed religion’, the belief that is inspired and satisfied by no creed or liturgy but which I nevertheless can’t get rid of? In the final scene, as the children cycled through their revelations of just who speaks with whose voice, with each ventriloquist of Badger Do Best being replaced by another, I was reminded of John Calvin’s worry that ‘every one of us is, even from his mother’s womb, a master craftsman of idols’. No voice can remain disembodied; no belief can remain unexposed. How do we live with our inability to get rid of idols?

And how do I talk about any of this without framing it as simple nostalgia for a Christian nation, or a faith-based education system? When I reflect on the (often deeply shameful) inadequacies of my old Catholic school, I’m still grateful that I went to a faith school. But is it not time to imagine a different kind of “faith school”, one which is just that – which places at its heart the principle that forms of irrational faith cannot be eradicated, that, like Badger Do Best, they hover between fiction and non-fiction; and that a school is the place where our faiths are undermined and wrecked, re-assessed and strengthened by each other. Such a school might be pluralist, but would not be secular. It would set in place an architecture of rules and guidelines and puppet-idols that always already say “You are doing this, even though you know it will not do. Reform me, wreck me and destroy me if you have to, and not in the name of showing how flexible the system is but out of an insistence that the system is wrong, that only an abandonment of systems allows me to claim commitment to someone who abandoned power”. And yet it remains the rules that say this…

My research has recently been informed by Catherine Pickstock’s “Liturgy, Art and Politics”, a wide-ranging and persuasive argument for the ‘political significance’ of liturgy as a site of resistance – ‘a far more plausible site of resistance than art’, even – against the baroque reifications and unwarranted authorities that characterise modernity. It does so by allowing the most immanent details of lived, private experience to gesture towards a transcendental shared ideal. Crucially, it allows for a vision beyond society as it currently exists, but allows that transformative vision to emerge from within the heart of society, rather than from ‘the margins and the semi-excluded’ which characterise most contemporary discourses of “critique”.  As much as I admire her argument, and despite her claims for liturgy’s capacity to host its own excess and its refusal to be merely functional, Pickstock occasionally seems to fall into a vision of liturgy as a version of Sali Rayner’s supremely flexible system, one that already anticipates every need we can imagine (particularly given her focus on largely Catholic models). She notes that ‘the universal’ in Christianity is ‘only accessible through the various, specific, time-bound traditional customary paths’ – but, in order to work out what those paths are in all their variety, specificity and time-boundedness, we need to be open to error, to lurching from now-inadequate paths to only-slightly-less-inadequate ones, to heading off into the margins who aren’t satisfied by the pre-existing pattern. For Pickstock’s model of liturgy to come about, do we need to articulate and incorporate the ‘negative liturgies’ that bring such liturgy into being? I take the term from Andrew Edgar’s intriguing essay on sport and liturgy, who in turn takes the idea of negative from the wrong path of Adorno’s negative dialectics. Theatre might be another example of a negative liturgy, and so might our schools and universities – and only when we find ways to reimagine them on those terms can are children be called blessed.