Emma Rice reduced Shakespeare's plays to lectures—she had to go

Controversy gripped London’s theatre world last week after the board at Shakespeare’s Globe resolved to part ways with Emma Rice. The board had appointed Rice Artistic Director just six months earlier, and her supporters charged that privileged old white guys had conspired against a female progressive visionary. As Tanika Gupta, Rice’s dramaturge at the Globe, put it on Newsnight, this was a case of "old versus new.”

The rationale offered by the board—that Rice’s preference for fancy lighting and amplifiers clashed with the Globe’s mission to replicate original performance conditions—only compounded the outrage. Soon the Globe found itself on the wrong side of 2016, an age when everything new and progressive is assumed to be good while the old is automatically suspect. Yet as one of Rice’s most persistent critics, I saw the board’s decision as vindication, not for outdated ideas, but for timeless ones.

Saying “No” to Rice couldn’t have been easy. But it made the Globe an exception to one of the deepest cultural trends of our time: the hostile takeover of art and artistic institutions by those who seek to enlist them in service of identity politics and activism.

I fell in love with the Globe shortly after moving to London from New York in 2014. The thatched, open-air roof and the plastered walls, the unfussy stage with room for groundlings underneath, the Bankside atmosphere and proximity to the site of the theatre co-founded by Shakespeare himself four centuries earlier—all this meant that the Globe was a place where you could commune with the Bard himself and, by extension, the whole spirit of the western canon.

The Globe was a temple, and I didn’t mind that many of my fellow worshippers were foreign tourists and students. Then came Emma Rice. Even before she unveiled her first production, Rice had made it clear in interviews that she disdained Shakespeare (“I have tried to sit down with Shakespeare but it doesn’t work. I get very sleepy and then suddenly I want to listen to The Archers.”)

Her debut production, of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, gave audiences a good glimpse of the new regime’s misplaced priorities and intellectual folly. Rice and Gupta rewrote the play—badly. “Away, you Ethiope!” became “Get away from me, you ugly bitch!” The setting and costumes and overall concept were a garish mishmash: part South Asian, part 1970s underworld, part Hoxton 2016, with a dash of cabaret and transvestite aesthetics. A pop song-and-dance routine punctuated every scene. David Bowie met Beyoncé met Bollywood.

As if to anticipate objections, Rice had one of the Rude Mechanicals at one point exclaim: “Why this obsession with text!” Worse than these desperate attempts at “relevance”—as if Shakespeare needed Rice to rescue him from irrelevance—was the artistic director’s heavy-handed identity politics. To wit, Rice saw it as her calling to correct the Bard’s ideological errors.

Start with her dictum that all productions should achieve 50-50 sex parity among actors onstage. The rule was plainly unjustifiable on aesthetic grounds, since it would stretch Shakespearean narrative and meaning to the breaking point. Only an ideologue would impose such a demand, and Rice was never shy about her ideological commitment. Indeed, she blamed the Bard for the allegedly heterosexist mold of all Western theatre. In her Midsummer, the fairy juice that alters characters’ desires became a date-rape drug, and Demetrius spurned “Helenus” (Helena reimagined as a gay man) because he was closeted.

Shakespeare’s big themes—on the mystery of desire, on the relationship between love and perception—were thus reduced to a lecture about rape culture and intersectionality. Rice’s defenders now accuse critics like me of resisting innovation. But not all innovation is good, especially when it’s underpinned by cynical mistrust in the western canon, and in the capacity of audiences to appreciate Shakespeare’s timeless, universal themes.

Alas, the wider art world is full of people who subjugate aesthetics to narrow political ends. I worry about all this, because I’m convinced there is a link between the western canon and great art generally, on the one hand, and liberal civilisation and the liberal way of life, on the other.

As an immigrant to the west from Iran, one of the world’s least free societies, my appreciation for democracy and ordered liberty grew thanks to my encounter with great art and literature, including the best of Modernism. Such art helped me discover pieces of my soul that I didn’t know existed. And it alerted me to those aspects of the human condition that are permanent—evil, fallenness, freedom, responsibility and redemption.

To discover these things in oneself is also to see them in others, across differences of race, sex, sexuality and so on. Yet art driven by identity politics denies the possibility of this kind of universalism: Everything about us, the identitarians say, is the product of social power dynamics and “privilege.” Therefore identitarian art can’t speak to the inner life, to things of the soul; it only cares about group identity and group grievance. As Emma Rice's tenure at the Globe shows, the result is both ugly and corrosive to liberal culture.