“Can I ask if you actually understood what was going on half the time?” said Gary Lineker to Michael Johnson in the BBC Studio. He wasn’t the only one of the commentary team worried about the strength of signal. Trevor Nelson helpfully suggested that if anyone was “having problems translating this vision of British history” then the sight of Mr Bean hitting a flatulent piano key (described by the New York Times as “witty”; they might as well have called The Queen’s dentistry “appropriately poor”) was surely a happy transcultural note; while Sue Barker more than once giggled with embarrassment as if she’d just spied Tim Henman curling one out on centre court with a quick furtive fist-pump. Legs astride atop some kind of kiln borrowed from a steampunk Spinal Tap show, Kenneth Branagh cried “be not afeard; the isle is full of noises”, perhaps directing Caliban’s speech from The Tempest at some billion or so bedraggled viewers gazing at the shores of this mad little island turned global stage.
For sure this was a live event of national anxiety. Part of this appeared to be our ingrained sense of pratfallery, our “crap Britain” syndrome. If anyone could get this wrong we could, with our masochistic variant of pride. And yet the Olympics, thus far, has been choreographed rather adeptly, almost as if there were certain expectations that come with all this capital. And rightly so. As tax-payers we didn’t philanthropically peel-off thirteen billion quid to crowdfund an Escher-like repainting of our bus lanes, so BMWs might glide through the city immaculately-lubed while the rest of us expire in tubes like overheated sperm, out of quixotic generosity. The largesse of ArcelorMittal wasn’t going hamstring Anish Kapoor’s rendering of tendonitis in steel. All those global corporations pooling their own futures weren’t going to let any real money accidentally trickle down into local communities, while the surveillance architecture wasn’t going to turn a blind eye. The glib salesmen we seem to persist in calling politicians weren’t going to screw up those deals for The City, to which the remodelled Stratford, with its minutely-engineered mallspace and private sense of public, was never not going to be a neat geographical addendum.
Similarly, twenty seven million pounds can buy a degree of theatrical coordination that would have even something like The Lion King purring, and would spur the War Horses of this world so far toward global domination it would have to be renamed Planet of the War Horses and include a scene in which humans heavy in the saddle are rendered down to glue and catfood for the stablepets of our equine Overlords. It can buy gigantic billowing babies; hydrogen-filled Bowie masks; crazy cauldrons of fire; it could just about pay Gary Lineker enough to keep himself limber for his dayjob hawking fat and sodium discs to children. And yes, of course, for every perfectly executed split-kick of a Starlight there’s a Spiderman: Please Turn Off The Lights, and yet no large production has thus far had the elected leader of a country white-knuckled at the prospect of James Bond doing something unscripted to the Queen in an expensive fast-moving vehicle.
Neither, as it turned out, were we a nation stumped by the “left-field” antics of the theatre on display. Amongst the commentariat the right frothed while the left bubbled: as a deaf choir sung the national anthem, Suffragettes mixed with Jarrow marchers, Voldemort hovered over a massed flotilla of NHS beds while Dizzee articulated a shared eccentricity by calling everyone bonkers. It was claimed as a variant of nationalism we could be comfortable with, emptied for once of the dark continents of guilt and abuse which make the word Britain utterable, shorn for once of that clucking bunting and “austerity nostalgia”. After postmodern queasiness and those trays of anchovies dusted with cocaine that accompanied Blair’s “Cool Britannia”, finally, a positive feast (and one prepared by so many makers from the subsidised sector, lest we forget). So that Josie Long would tweet “I can haz national pride?”, and Caitlin Moran could tearfully pronounce it her “Marxist utopia”, while in branding it “leftie multicultural crap” a Tory MP would fall off the edge of Twitter to spin in the darkness of eternity.
And yet it’s easy to see why the epithet “subversive” so freely banded around, could be seen as somewhat hyperbolic. The sheer totality of the spectacle, this procession of presences, brooked no argument and little reality. The camera’s zoomed in on a detailed replica of the sash Emmeline Pankhurst attempted to throw around the neck of the King’s speeding horse; while outside in the unreported dark a hundred and eighty critical mass protestors were silently shipped off on “arrest buses”. As towering chimneys burst from the astro-turfed middle earth toward the sky, making present the majesty and hardship of Britain’s industrial past; snaking from the gates of the stadium the industrial tubes of Bazalgette’s pioneering sewers, now called the Olympic Greenway: a branding exercise in tarmac in a land emptied of public works, manufacturing and jobs. For all its slyness and cockiness, for all that tiny bead of sweat that gathered in the Cameron gusset, the gentle smoke wafted up the arse of Boris Johnson that compelled him to burble something about “the triumph over the capitalism” – was this not just a big pyrotechnic cherry on top of a sundae made of sport, sport, more sport and a harrowing protean exercise in authoritarian capitalism? So used to “feelgood feelbad”, the term Mark Fisher gave to a comfy ritual of dissent, was this just not an equally ineffectual “feelgood feelgood”?
I’ll admit to feeling alienated on Friday night. Watching the thing unfold on television I wanted to enjoy it, and feel that it was good. Rushing through the Hackney night on the train, and seeing the dark buildings disclose a vast beautiful fluorescence of fireworks I wanted to be awed, like Artaud seeing everything else as dim echoes of that joining changing light. And I wanted to feel that the cheers of the train carriage were meaningful, and the joke I shared with the grinning guy next to me about twenty seven million quid going up in smoke to be a genuinely convivial moment. But I just felt slightly empty, that we could joke with strangers and cheer forever and dissolve in cathartic floods on Twitter, and then what?
So I watched back on iplayer. Seeing the letters NHS emblazoned across the earth like a vastly noble painted cock on a roof, yes, that did begin to move me. As if we were seeing a testament from a vantage point in space, about what it was that this momentary scored collective could stand for, what it could reduce itself to in the name of sameness that was so big so clear. I began to feel moved by the unity of time and space. It didn’t seem as though history was being dangerously elided but pushed through the valve of an imagination that sought to populate it with progressive symbols. If at first I railed against the weakness of our egos (“this is exactly how Leni Reifenstahl got her job” I snapped at a friend) then watching it back it looked more and more like some attempt to render a collective unconscious – the scheme of which to bring this to light being not simply self congratulatory, but self-recognising. Maybe here was the centre not, for once, being deferred. Was this some kind of suggestive experience perhaps, of being governed by our own consent? Were here the masses making history not the heroes? Yes there were flags, soldiers, and indie bands, but there was also this speculative consciousness, of which spectators felt a genuine part.
And perhaps there’s something in that extra definitive article than Johnson welded onto “the triumph over the capitalism”. He didn’t have to awkwardly point out that it was not, in fact, a portrayal of “capitalism” and the good things that exist despite of its demands; but rather that the show contained its own notion, “the capitalism”, possibly fantastical, yet apparently necessary to formally confine. Unless, maybe, he felt that Boyle’s articulation, so much more profound and memorable than any haystack on a chatshow, was on his terrain. That it might sit uncomfortably with the dressage for what one commentator, in a reversal of Naomi Klein’s “disaster capitalism” has dubbed “celebration capitalism”. Perhaps this was an affectively structuring event far beyond the powers of politicians to frame where we come from and what we stand for.
This kind of debate strikes to the heart of the idea of theatre as political or the hope that it can be a part of meaningful social change. What are the modes of spectatorship at big events, and how are nationalist projects able to be transformed in plays about the nation? What is the nature of the spectacle that does our anti-capitalism for us? Is the participatory form immediately more progressive than something observed, or is there an alchemy of praxis in the act of spectatorship? My thinking is not particularly clever about this, but I was moved to write this column, to go with the hundreds of others, and the glow still warming parts of Twitter. As the French theorist Althusser wrote after seeing a play in which chimneys soared and workers silently clustered, and wondering just what occurs within and without of a play, he noted the “play pursuing in me its incomplete meaning, searching in me, despite myself, now that all the actors and sets have been cleared away, for the advent of its silent discourse.” Which is a nice way of saying: that we’re discussing it at all may be justification enough.