Five thoughts on Just Stop Oil's protest at Les Mis, playwright Karim Khan, and three shows to see.
Protestors stopped the West End show on Wednesday night: it was an inspired idea. Plus: the playwright behind Brown Boys Swim, three shows to see, and more.
Hello, and welcome back to The Crush Bar, a weekly newsletter about theatre written by me, Fergus Morgan. This is the first issue since August, as I took a bit of a break after Edinburgh Fringe and all the craziness that involved.
This is also the first issue since this newsletter was totally unexpectedly and very gratifyingly recommended by The Observer as one of the 33 best Substacks to read. Welcome to everyone who subscribed off the back of that. Thanks for your support.
I have now reverted to the non-Fringe format for this newsletter, so below you will find a quick piece on Just Stop Oil’s protest at the West End production of Les Miserables on Wednesday - I know it is not the kind of thing I usually write about, but I felt compelled to, as I found some of the reaction to it particularly ridiculous - plus an interview with Brown Boys Swim playwright Karim Khan, and three recommendations for shows currently running.
Before that, though, I have another recommendation for you. If you like reading this newsletter, then I know you will enjoy reading Natasha Tripney’s new Substack newsletter Café Europa, which is all about European theatre. Natasha is a good friend and colleague of mine in the pages of The Stage. I really recommend subscribing to her stuff.
One last thing: you can support this newsletter in three different ways. Firstly, you can share it with anyone that might be interested. Secondly, you can use it for promo purposes: click here for info on that. And thirdly, you can become a paid supporter for the cost of a cup-and-a-half of coffee a month using the button below.
That’s all for now. On with the newsletter. See you at the bottom.
On Wednesday night, some protesters jumped on the stage during a performance of Les Miserables in the West End.
No, it was not an act of mercy to spare spectators having to sit through the second half : it was a Just Stop Oil protest. They locked themselves to the set and raised banners to a chorus of boos from some of the audience. The performance stopped, the theatre was evacuated, and the remainder of the show was cancelled. Five people have been arrested and everyone has a lot of thoughts about it. Here are five from me:
What an inspired protest. Les Mis is, at heart, a story about some people standing up for what they believe in. It is about the June Rebellion of 1832 – not, of course, the French Revolution, as Just Stop Oil incorrectly said on Twitter – and frames it as a grand act of civil disobedience in the face of suffering, and in the hope of creating a better future. From where I am sitting, that is exactly what Just Stop Oil are doing, too. I cannot think of a better show to stage a protest in. The symbolism is perfect. It has worked, too: once again, Just Stop Oil is front and centre of the news cycle.
And they did it with such style, too. It is worth watching the video of the protestors clambering on stage, chaining themselves to the set, and unfurling their banners. They time it perfectly, just as the chorus breaks into a rousing rendition of Do You Hear The People Sing? They manage to still their nerves – can you imagine how terrifying doing something like that would be? – and execute their plan perfectly. And they even made sure it was being filmed for all of us, too. Five stars from me.
Criticising a protest at Les Mis makes you look silly. That is what I find particularly great about this. It is such a clever idea for a protest because it elevates the protestors almost beyond reproof, and makes anyone criticising them look like a fool:
In fact, the protest not only skewers its critics as hypocrites, it also makes a fascinating point about how historical uprisings are commodified and sanitised by the entertainment industry. Heck, it goes beyond protest: this is performance art. Also, the only argument against the protest I am a bit sympathetic to – that there will be some poor folk who have saved for a long time to see the show – is easily dismissed because everyone got their money back. The worst that will happen is some of them will have to sit through the first half again. Well, actually, when you put it like that…
Sadly, there are a lot of silly people out there. I despair at the anger that has been directed at the protestors. Of course, the abuse they received from some audience members was awful – some of those spectators should not be allowed back into a theatre – but it is the vitriol they have received from some sections of the performing arts industry - an industry that generally prides itself on its progressiveness - that disappoints me most. Surely that anger would be better directed elsewhere?
I find the suggestion that anyone was in any danger ridiculous, too. Come off it. They are Just Stop Oil protestors. They were the ones in danger from some of the more aggressive members of the audience. And, although it might have been a shock for the cast, it was surely obvious what was happening within seconds? And stage management acted quickly and competently: hats off to them, of course.
Theatre is not out-of-bounds: it is the perfect place for a protest. Theatre should be live. It should be an exciting place, where exciting things happen. It should be a place of inspiration and ideas, debate and disagreement. And, yes, it should be a place for protest, too. This is rarely the case in reality, though. I worry that most theatre – particularly in the West End – has been commodified and commercialised into something impressive and artful but repetitive and fundamentally untheatrical, akin to a theme park ride. I love theatre but I am under no illusions that it is central to The Discourse anymore. It is, frankly, peripheral. Wouldn’t it be great if it wasn’t, though? Wouldn’t it be great if, instead of being seen simply as diversionary entertainment, theatre was seen as a vital space to actively work through the challenges society faces? Wouldn’t it be great if theatre found its way onto the front page more often? Wouldn’t it be great, in other words, if amazing stuff like this happened all the time?
A quick addendum, added just before I press send: it is well worth reading theatre producer and Just Stop Oil campaigner Chloe Naldrett’s open letter on all of this. She has a foot in both camps, and covers a lot of the stuff I have rambled about above far more articulately than me.
Last week, pupils from The Oxford Academy went on a school trip to see Brown Boys Swim at the North Wall Arts Centre.
It was a particularly special moment for writer Karim Khan: he was a pupil at The Oxford Academy in the late 2000s, and can imagine the impact a show like Brown Boys Swim – and its focus on the experience of British-South Asian teenage boys – would have had on him then.
“Allowing an audience to feel represented is a big reason why I write,” Khan says. “Sometimes, as a writer, you can get obsessed about progressing your career and forget why you wanted to write in the first place. Having my school come to watch the show, and seeing people who looked like me in the audience, was a really important moment. This show has reaffirmed to me why I want to write.”
Brown Boys Swim, which was a hit at the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe and is now touring to Coventry, London, Manchester and Birmingham, follows two adolescent Muslims – Mohsen and Kash – as they learn how to swim ahead of the social event of the summer: a pool party. Khan uses this premise to explore how societal prejudices can define British-South Asian boys’ lives. There are a lot of reasons, from family expectations to Islamophobia, why brown boys rarely learn to swim, explains Khan.
“It is not autobiographical, but it has definitely got a lot of my own memories and experiences in it,” he adds. “I really wanted to write a coming-of-age story through the perspective of young, South Asian, Muslim men, and through the prism of an Oxford we haven’t seen before. Oxford is often associated with the university, but that isn’t the Oxford my friends and I grew up with at all.”
Born in 1994, Khan grew up in Oxford, became interested in theatre and film as a teenager, then started writing seriously while studying English at University College London. His ambition was nurtured through the Soho Theatre Writers Lab and the Royal Court Writers’ Group, through his early plays – 2017’s Orange Juice, 2018’s Beyond Shame, and 2019’s Corrosive – and through an MA in Screenwriting at the National Film and Television School, which Khan completed in 2019.
“I have various inspirations,” Khan continues. “In terms of theatre, I love Tennessee Williams. I love how lyrical his writing is, and how he captures dysfunctional people’s relationships. I’m inspired by films as well. The French film La Haine continues to be a really big inspiration for me, and I love the work of the Indian director Satyajit Ray, who made The Apu Trilogy. All that really speaks to me.”
Khan is now based in London, and living off his writing for both stage and screen. He has more plays in the pipeline, including one with Tara Theatre, and is in the writers’ rooms for two television series, having already had an episode of Channel 5’s All Creatures Great And Small broadcast in 2022. He is also one of the inaugural recipients of a Pillars Artist Fellowship, a Netflix and Amazon-sponsored development scheme for Muslim writers, supported by US-based charity Pillars and actor Riz Ahmed.
“We did three retreats in New York, Los Angeles and London,” Khan explains. “Riz was there in London and LA. It was amazing. The best thing about it was being in a group of Muslim writers, who all understood the same dynamics and wanted to ask the same sort of questions. It felt like a really rare experience because there are so few of us. The whole point of it was to embolden us to reclaim the narrative of Muslim representation, to start telling different stories. That is what I want to do.”
Brown Boys Swim is touring until November 4. For more information, click here.
Three shows to see next week.
Body Show - Soho Theatre, until October 14
Frankie Thompson and Liv Ello’s Body Show was one of my favourite productions at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. I know, it wasn’t included in my list, but that is because I saw it over the last weekend, after I had published that. Anyway, it is a disorienting, disturbing and darkly funny show about the absurdity of beauty standards and gender stereotypes in the face of the apocalypse. It’s sold out: but get a ticket if you can.
Battery Park - touring, until October 29
This nostalgia-soaked new musical - or play-with-songs is a more accurate description - is loosely based on writer, composer and director Andy McGregor’s own life. It follows a fictional Britpop band from Greenock on an exhilarating rollercoaster ride through the music industry of the mid-1990s. I saw it at Beacon Arts Centre last month and loved it. You can read my four-star review in The Stage here, and find tickets - it is visiting Ayr, Edinburgh, Inverness and elsewhere - via the button below.
Shooting Hedda Gabler - Rose Theatre, Kingston, until October 21
Playwright Nina Segal is a big favourite of this newsletter: long-term subscribers will remember this big interview with her from March 2021. Her new play Shooting Hedda Gabler is a head-spinning, metatheatrical thriller about an American actor playing Hedda Gabler in a film adaptation of the Ibsen play. You can read more about it in this interview I did for The Stage with its star Antonia Thomas, who is returning to the stage for the first time in nine years - and you can get tickets via the button below.
Thanks for reading
That is it for this week. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all, really - just reply to this newsletter or email me at fergusmorgan@hotmail.co.uk. Or you can find me on Twitter, where I am @FergusMorgan.
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See you next Friday.
Fergus
Really great feature on the protest, Fergus.
It's more politically perspicacious to understand that outside the privileged luxury-belief bubble of which the theatre industry and a section of its audience is unfortunately a part, Net Zero isn't popular. The cost-of-living crisis takes precedence in most people's minds.
My brother's ex-girlfriend glued herself to the M25 for Extinction Rebellion, so I'm not unfamiliar with these issues.
I care about the planet but I don't think lecturing, hectoring, impeding business and spoiling people's fun is the way forward for an arts sector which is already perceived as elitist.
Theatre has to find another way.