Actors may be ‘liars’ but they are also perfectly placed to open discussions on Gaza

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Actors cannot win.

They are either liars, as Plato had it: pedlars of distortions and falsehoods, who should be first worshipped for their godliness, but then immediately banished from the ideal state. Or they are too earnest, daring to fracture the careful fictions spun for our delight and consideration by speaking out of place.

We turn to them for advice, insights into what it is to be human, for their anecdotes, as role models. But we expect them to leave themselves out of their work. We expect them to take on risks, to present the big ideas, to pose questions, to stimulate and to challenge. But we also require that they
keep their mouths shut, to park their own beliefs and values at the stage door. To behave as good employees, and not to rock the boat.

Mabel Li (left), Harry Greenwood (right) and Megan Wilding (middle) wearing keffiyeh in the STC’s production of The Seagull.Credit: Instagram

We treat directors and writers with a bit more lenience. We allow them to court controversy, albeit within the carefully managed boundaries of the theatre. But actors are just there to play their assigned roles without bumping into the furniture, take a bow and leave the room.

Last Saturday, three actors went off script, wearing keffiyeh scarves at the curtain call for the opening night the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of The Seagull. While they have not offered a statement to explain the gesture, it has been taken, at the very least, as a gesture of solidarity with the suffering of Palestinian citizens in Gaza.

“At the very least”, because for some it has been interpreted as “a partisan political action”, that risks, in the words of a letter to the STC Board signed by more than 1000 patrons, alienating theatre goers “who don’t consider it appropriate for cultural events to be politicised”. (We could well extend such consideration to the illumination of the buildings in which cultural events take place).

Some angry patrons have dismissed the STC three’s action as virtue signalling, and a stunt, terminating subscriptions. An STC board member resigned, citing “immense” community pressure to distance herself from the company which, she explained, had failed to speak up against the actors. The implication is that the company itself has taken sides, and denying allyship to both herself, and the community of which she is a part.

The STC management has released an anodyne, HR-speak apology “for any distress caused” by the action, reassuring us that actors are “free to express their opinions and views on their own platforms”. As might be expected, and as is their right, they are distancing themselves from the
action. It is a fine line that they must tread.

Theatre thrives on risk. Theatre prides itself on being a place in which big ideas can be presented, tested, debated. In its more extreme forms, it seeks to test the limits of what might be considered appropriate. Theatre, we are told, challenges, dares, confronts.

Even theatre’s less extreme forms trade on the frisson of its immediacy: the magic of the presence of living, breathing people daring to go to emotional and physical extremes to entertain us. For St Augustine this was the devil’s own work: an audience’s delight in the willingness of an actor to suffer for our enjoyment, he wrote, was a “miserable madness”.

But theatre is not just plays, casts, scripts. Theatres are places where we assemble, with all our differences, to witness something, together. The theatre offers more than just an art object, but the kind of shared experience that the advocates of virtual platforms can only dream of.

Theatre companies want to be relevant. They want to make claims about capturing the spirit of the times, taking the national pulse. These are political claims. How can they not be? Perhaps they need to be careful about what they wish for.

The STC three have succeeded, emphatically, in taking that pulse, in showing us how very deeply divided we are. It is striking in precisely how deep this particular political fault-line cuts. While there may well have been differences of opinion among theatre audiences on, say, marriage equality, or the Voice to Parliament, these issues do not seem to have provoked divisions to this degree.

The trick is how we all respond. We need to think carefully – and perhaps slowly – about what it means to shout down the kinds of exchanges that happen in places like theatres: public, risky exchanges that make us feel genuinely uncomfortable, angry and, yes, perhaps, on occasion, unsafe.

This is not to say that in such places anything goes: any right that we might claim to say something necessarily entails accepting responsibility for the consequences. And that must be the point here: the STC three have risked their reputations, their livelihood, their wellbeing. That does not mean that they are right, but we ought to honour their gesture as a genuine, humane act that goes to the very essence of theatre, if not of our values as a society.

A fortnight ago my 16-year-old daughter asked me about the horrific situation in Israel and Gaza. She has Jewish friends, and friends who are Muslims. She wanted to know whose side she should be on. I guess that’s where we have come to. We live in a world of hot takes: you are either with me or against me. If you disagree with me, you are a fool, a virtue-signaller.

And if you are wrong, you are not just a little bit wrong. You are completely, absolutely, categorically, utterly, catastrophically wrong. You are exiled, banished.

I get how high the stakes are, and, from the safety of my own ivory tower how brutal the reality is. I even get those who say that this is no time for talking, for thinking, for polite debate. That this is the season for war, and hate. Both sides have taken this position. But surely it’s not the only option. Let’s talk about it.

Ian Maxwell is an Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Sydney.

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