Author Archives: jonathanmeth

Who is right? The Tories have just trounced Labour at the polls. Amid the political point scoring, finger pointing, character assassination and messianic zealotry, I wonder if it might come down to this. Labour’s message is “we are right” Conservative’s message is “you are right” This might seem fatuous and simplistic, but bear with me.Continue reading “Who is Right?”

On #puppetgate In Homo Sacer (1998), the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben explores the nature of sovereign power and production of bare life, describing homo sacer as someone whose ‘entire existence is reduced to a bare life stripped of every right by virtue of the fact that anyone can kill him without committing homicide’ (Agamben 1998:Continue reading “Ducks in a Row”

Trans Europa Xpress The days of Empire are long gone… Because the UK won WW2 (with the Soviets and the Americans and the forces fighting from across The Empire) and then had to pay for it with the last great bout of austerity, we actually managed to avoid re-negotiating our position as world leading nation.Continue reading “Trans Europa Xpress”

Starting points Going back to them is always interesting but hazardous. The first reflection is that when Arts Council England (ACE) began in 1946, it was a starting point, and as such open to criticism that the wrong start was made. Perhaps more problematic is the notion that one might start again. Given that theContinue reading “Starting Points”

When a Cornish councillor resigns well into the second year after stating that all disabled children should be put down to save money, we can sleep well in our beds and rest assured that such an outlandish proposition would not be given House room. No, we have the splendour of the New Children and FamiliesContinue reading “Put it down.”

I have been trying to work out why I found Bowie’s Where Are We Now? so affecting. At first I thought it was because in the video he comes across as a man of 66 looking back on his times 30 plus years ago without trying, as so many rocks stars do, to recapture thatContinue reading “Where Are We Now? – Bradford”

Brussels – its not a capital city I have had a sense of, like Paris or Amsterdam or Berlin. French / Flemish – neither flesh nor fowl, rather in bureaucratic lockdown – the “beamter”, the “fonctonnaire”  writ large, as a culture… this is how it has mostly seemed to me – but not yesterday. IContinue reading “The Sheep and The Whale”

When does the social critique offered by theatre collude with the governing ideology by actually reinforcing it? Israel, where the theatre-going public is proportionately the highest per capita in the world –  willingly stages work which critiques the IDF and the government’s policy and practice regarding the Palestinians. In 2007, I sat next to theContinue reading “Theatre is a conservative medium”