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Austerity Takes the Stage in London

Austerity Takes the Stage in London
Tue, 2/19/2013 - by Anders Lustgarten

Playwright and activist Anders Lustgarten's new play, "If You Don't Let Us Dream, We Won't Let You Sleep," opening February 20 at the Royal Court Theatre in London, explodes the ethos of austerity as it looks at the shock treatment issued by the financial world -- and asks, what happens when the City’s agenda is taken to its ultimate conclusion? "I wrote it," says Lustgarten, "because at its heart this system of finance that now dominates us is quite simple, under its impossibly convoluted technicalities, and I want to help people understand it. I wrote it because now’s the time for the return of proper political theatre."

The following is Lustgarten's introduction to his work.

So this is where I think we are, at the start of the second decade of the twenty-first century, on this fascinating and infuriating small wet island that firmly believes it’s approximately 3000 miles further west than it actually is:

Austerity was never about fixing the economy: Or we wouldn’t be in triple dip recession. Not even Gideon Oliver Osborne, heir to the baronetcy of Ballentaylor and Ballylemon and thus the ideal embodiment of Tory attacks on "entitlement culture", is that inept. Austerity is about fundamentally reshaping not just government but our basic understanding of what it means to be a member of society, in order to serve the needs of financial markets.

Kill the zombie:

The austerity boys get away with it because hardly anyone understands financial capitalism, but mainly due to a killer zombie. The "market knows best" paradigm, born in the Seventies amidst the uncollected rubbish of the three day week, died in spectacular fashion in the 2008 banking collapse, which proved financial institutions to be as trustworthy and productive as one of their NINJA loans. But like in the George A. Romero films, the zombie won’t die! In fact the zombipoalyptic idea of the infallible private sector is chomping away on ever more of the real economy and people’s lives.

Keynes is dead:

In large part because the zombie’s traditional foe has expired too. The Keynesian idea of the state as the moral and economic alternative to the private sector, which animated the Left for most of the twentieth century (not the Blairite "left", obviously, which was animated by non-executive directorships and black cod miso) looks far gone when the private sector now runs the state and soaks it for bailouts and subsidies. All political parties cringe before the market. The result is, in an era that touts "choice" as its cardinal virtue, politically we have none.

Post-party politics:

And yet in a way that’s great—we’re starting to leave the old corrupted dichotomy of Labour and Tory behind, and look for new forms of political engagement. The political lesson of the twentieth century is that concentrated power, whether fascist, corporate or vanguard of the proletariat, produces catastrophes. So the question for the twenty-first century is what shape our new political forms will take. The most immediately exciting stuff is grassroots action, of which Occupy was one type and the riots another.

Radical optimism:

What turns people off conventional politics is a sense that it won’t make a difference, and direct action gives you that feeling of making a difference back. It also gives you a sense of optimism and excitement, and optimism is about the most radical quality you can possess right now. But on its own, can grassroots action control financial flows? Can it reconfigure institutions and structures to serve people instead of speculative capital? Unlikely. So our paradoxical relationship to institutions of power, who only listen to us when we make it clear we reject them, is what we need to think about next.

So that’s the intellectual chain of thought that made me write this play. But it’s only one part of why I wrote it.

I wrote it because a few years ago I was teaching in prison, and my friend Esther Baker put on a version of "Accidental Death of an Anarchist" which I rewrote to be about the Stephen Lawrence case. Prisoners are a loud group of people and not easily inclined to silence, but (apart from the bits where we had to physically remove large men from the stage as they argued with the characters about various plot twists) they were spellbound. That was my first real experience of the theatre, and of the joy of storytelling in particular.

I wrote it because I love the feeling in a room of an audience and a cast feeling and creating something collectively. It’s a microcosm of a good society.

I wrote it because at its heart this system of finance that now dominates us is quite simple, under its impossibly convoluted technicalities, and I want to help people understand it. What they do with that knowledge is up to them.

I wrote it because now’s the time for the return of proper political theater. Not old-style agitprop, but ‘anti-prop’ that takes on the overwhelming reality of 2013: the propaganda of markets that they’re indispensable.

What if we put up taxes and the bankers threatened to leave? Well, (a) they wouldn’t, because there’s nowhere else with such lax regulatory and tax regimes, where their kids can be poshly educated and they speak English and have Michelin-starred restaurants and nobody bothers you. The people who love London the most are the twenty-year old Italian kid escaping Mama and the fifty year old hedge fund manager escaping tax, both for the same reason: nobody’s watching them. But (b), we’d be much better off, because we wouldn’t be paying trillions in bailouts, because our whole society wouldn’t be under the sway of a tiny interest group, and because we are capable, talented people who’d find more productive ways to make a living. You want to leave? Enjoy Russia. Say hi to Gerard Depardieu and tell him I burnt every DVD of Cyrano I could lay my hands on.

I wrote it to make you feel, and therefore to think. Hope it worked.

"If You Don’t Let Us Dream, We Won’t Let You Sleep," by Anders Lustgarten, was published by Methuen Drama and is available at Bloomsbury. For more information about the performance, visit The Royal Court Theatre.

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