I was no longer thinking about theatre or culture or the calibre of performances after seeing the production of The Handmaid’s Tale presented by the English National Opera at the Coliseum and The 47th at the Old Vic and To Kill a Mockingbird at the Gielgud and sitting through the Olivier Awards at Royal Albert Hall once I had settled in amidst the shockingly maskless sold-out crowd, many of whom had been swanning past me not only in their presumptive privilege but also their presumptive health. Those four divergent experiences - that last one looking at an artistic endeavor as a construct for both community and competitiveness - engendered something more discomfiting than trying to fit a critical eye into the gaze of kindness. It was not quite fear I felt at the dystopian future and past much closer to our present than we care to contemplate which the opera and plays and that competitive communal ceremony conjured on- and offstage for me. It was not quite disgust either at such a dystopian proximity. Indeed, once I began to consider it all, it was the not-quite aspect itself that disquieted. Not-quite was the conundrum that began to riddle me. The Brits have historically carried on when the dangerous world demands they do it but I have begun to wish they were not quite so masklessly, heedlessly doing so. It is announced at the beginning of plays and operas and ballets - as they did at the Royal Albert Hall for the Oliviers - that it would be preferred that we put on masks but not quite a quarter of the audience ever does so, and that is a generous estimate based on a quick kind gaze on my part. My more critical eye asserts itself, however, when it has to squint over the mask I strap on each time the announcement is made and the estimation goes down more correctly to around a fifth to a sixth of the faces around me being also masked. So, yes, they carry on, but not quite.
(Above, Boris Johnson photographed by Micha Theiner/The Atlantic)
A not-quite disquietude is how the Brits themselves seem to feel about Prime Minister Boris Johnson. I sense they don’t really approve of him, this tousled dodgy toff who doesn’t even need to dodge the law to keep his Prime Minister job since he’s been found guilty of a crime when he flouted the first lockdown rules that his own government issued and ordered the citizens of the country to obey. He has been fined for it as well. He offered a “full apology” that was not quite a full one since he also suggested that it “did not occur” to him that he was breaking the law. Most people just shrugged. They seem to be more bemused by him than angered by his faux befuddlement at the very notion that a person of his rank and class could be considered a scofflaw. But that is exactly what he did: he scoffed at the law. Any other Prime Minister in history would have resigned immediately. He hasn’t. He won’t. He has proven now his utter lack of honor which gives agency to citizens to be more openly ethically dodgy themselves. Here, unlike America, it’s not the coverup that is greater than the crime, but the transparency of privilege. Also, who would replace him? He might want others to be bemused by his performative befuddlement but he has cunningly surrounded himself in his cabinet with those even more mediocre than he - and genuinely befuddled - so there is nobody one can imagine replacing him. Therefor this jowly Janus-faced PM - more the Queen’s duplicitous jester than her dependable Prime Minister - goes jocularly on in his Prime Ministership.
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