The Political Arena
Despite deep seclusion in our ivory tower, it has not escaped the notice of The Omnivore’s theatre department – and its crack-team of Eastern European labourers – that there is an election afoot. Nor has it escaped the notice of a horrified media – and even the nation’s benighted theatre critics - that politics is often more theatrical than purely factual.
Gordon Brown’s recent gaffe appeared to confirm this (slightly hysterical) tendency, as journalists and bloggers stroked their beards and clucked their tongues over the “disconnect” between person and persona. Presumably if he had publicly laid into a slightly racist pensioner – perhaps calling her a ‘citric idiot‘ – then that at least would have satisfied our almost sociopathic desire for constant, unflinching truth.
But to simply assert that the political arena is theatrical and rhetorical is to imply that the media is not equally so. Take the Brown gaffe, which was not only blown out of proportion, but was actually instigated by the media. They left their microphones on, told Mrs. Duffy what the Prime Minister had said, and, in an astonishing postmodern coup de théâtre, played the tape back to Gordon whilst filming his reaction. It was eerily reminiscent of the stage-managed scenes in Shakespeare, where pseudo-directors trap their victims: Iago in Othello, Toby Belch tricking Malvolio in Twelfth Night, and of course Hamlet’s use of The Mousetrap to ‘catch the conscience of the King’.
We often refer to ‘the political arena’ but in truth the world of politics is merely the play-within-a-play, and as in Shakespeare, the sub-plot magnifies and parodies the main action, at once enforcing the vraisemblance and undermining its claim to realism. To its horror, what the media sees in politics is a grotesque Caliban which it has itself created. To put it another way, dat some meta type shit.
In other related meta type shit, the Guardian’s Leo Benedictus has produced a piece of metacriticism worthy of The Omnivore itself, with a review of the reviews of the reviews of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, which you can read here. For our own digested criticism of The Real Thing, you know where to go.
