Have you seen Hamilton yet? The hip hop musical about one of the USA’s Founding Fathers arrived in London just before Christmas on a crest of hype from Broadway – heaving under the weight of praise and daring you not to like it.

Its credentials as the right show to see became clear when the audience greeted the appearance of Donald Trump’s Vice President, Mike Pence, at one performance with a chorus of boos, followed by an impromtu monolgue from the stage. They were later burnished by Michele Obama, who declared it the greatest piece of art she had ever seen, which is certainly saying something – either about it or her.

It could well be that in its singing and dancing, Hamilton breaks new creative ground in musical theatre. However its liberal sensibilities – “Immigrants/We get the job done!” sings its rainbow cast – will be pretty much what you would expect. As was was highlighted by the Sunday Times’s Christopher Hart in one of the more balanced reviews[1.  From The Sunday Times, Christmas Eve 2017, Hart wrote: “It’s overburdened with self-congratulatory left-liberal attitudes and a strong pro-immigration message, didactically hammered home at every opportunity. Born amid a rather cosy relationship with the real seat of power, and blessed with the official seal of approval from the start, Hamilton cannot bear the immense, ponderous weight of solemn significance with which it has been freighted in the US.”].

The truth is, most performing arts audiences now know what they are going to get in terms of political messaging, especially when it comes to theatre. That is, to an extent, why many of them go. Their prejudices will be confirmed, their membership of the right-thinking club will be re-validated, and their intelligence flattered.

What they won’t be is provoked, challenged, made to look at things a different way or simply shocked. And that would be absolutely fine, if it weren’t for the fact that the arts regularly claim to do all of these things. Because far from being at the cutting edge, far from voicing genuine dissent or protest, the arts have in fact become a kind of visual display unit for the ruling liberal establishment and its orthodoxies.

Around this time Nicholas Hytner, then director of the National Theatre, declared that what he would really like to see was “a good, mischievous right-wing play”. On the face of it this was encouraging. One of our great institutions was effectively admitting what a rarity such a thing would be. The choice of words, however, betrayed the underlying belief that a right-leaning drama would be a naughty indulgence, somehow infantile (“mischievous”) and an enjoyable diversion from the obviously serious, adult and intellectually valid mainstream. The accorded status would be little more than panto.

Such a play eventually came along, in the shape of Richard Bean’s raucous 2009 comedy – England People Very Nice – but in its look at immigration through the ages in London’s Bethnal Green, it ended up parroting the establishment line that, basically, ‘twas ever thus, and that there was effectively nothing to see here.

Certainly the last thing it established was any sort of trend. ‘”There’s no play exposing the corruption and abuse in a country like Venezuela – why not?” – asked the former Culture minister Ed Vaizey (in 2016). Of the arts generally he said “You have to subscribe to the group-think to get on, and that is not healthy.”

With a few courageous exceptions which prove the rule, this group-think or, as this site would undoubtedly prefer, herd-like thinking has, if anything, intensified. You will search in vain for a film, play, novel or piece of visual art in Britain which seriously challenges the doctrine of multiculturalism, or which criticises the climate change orthodoxy, or dares to take on Islamism.

You will find no Michel Houllebecq, whose head-on, politically bracing treatment of the state of life and relationships in contemporary France makes him the only modern novelist worth reading. In Britain it seems, there is no drama to be had in, for example, telling the story of a low-income white family whose lives have been transformed by mass immigration and who go out and vote Brexit. And if such a story were ever told, we could be sure of the treatment… under no circumstances would their point of view be validated.

As with so many areas of national life, the experience of Brexit indeed clarified quite where the arts stand. And it was not just about funding, and the perceived loss of EU subsidy. Nor was it about the snobbish silliness of Emma Thompson and her dismissal of Britain as a dreary, damp backwater. No, Britain’s very ability to be creative was at stake.

During the referendum campaign, 250 arts luminaries including Benedict Cumberbatch, Danny Boyle and Paloma Faith signed a letter to The Times which amounted to a kind of creative Project Fear. “From the Bard to Bowie, British creativity inspires and influences the rest of the world,” it claimed. Yes, who could possibly disagree. But then it went on, in a strange non sequitur:

“We believe that being part of the EU bolsters Britain’s leading role on the world stage…Britain is not just stronger in Europe, it is more imaginative and creative…”

Seriously? More imaginative than the Bard and Bowie? Rather insulting, actually – but then, the EU and our membership of it has long been one of the arts’ blind-spots. But they are also remarkably uncritical when it comes to other, broader political and social trends. Far from providing the much-vaunted cutting edge, they generally lag behind the public on the big issues of the day.

Satire, for example, is at one of its lowest ebbs in Britain. To be healthy satire requires a lack of inhibition, some fearlessness and a sense of outrage. How can you rip into something you basically agree with, or do not want to see attacked? The wider reaches of political correctness, for example, could alone power a whole TV series. Instead, we get The Thick of It which, while excellent, was about the various absurdities of the political process. The issues remain largely left alone. The army of fearless comedians which infests BBC panel shows stick strictly to the tried, trusted and predictably left-wing hate objects.

The culture of habitual offence-taking and the wider issue of free speech come into play here. Many people in the arts quite genuinely believe that their lines of attack should always be aimed fairly and squarely at certain quarters and that others should be left alone. But there are surely others who, for example, have internalised the lessons learned by Salmon Rushdie. When there is a chance that not only will offence be taken, but that it will be acted on, the more faint-hearted will retreat.

As I said earlier, exceptions to the general rule do come along from time to time. The BBC was hugely praised for Three Girls, its drama about the Rochdale grooming gangs scandal, although one could also say less charitably that it was a case of better late than never. Noel Gallagher and Morrissey both dissented from the general line on Brexit, as did Michael Caine. And, just occasionally, the theatre can surprise you.

I remember seeing a production at Warwick University some years back by the brilliant dance and theatre group DV8. Choreographed by Lloyd Newson and called Can We Talk About This? (video extract below), it used words, movement and mime in combination with news footage to explore the effects on free speech of radical Islam (the title quote was the last thing said by Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh to his assassin). It was rigorous and critical, and I remember the effect it had on the largely student audience. As they left, many of them looked confused and uncomfortable. Snowflakes before we had coined the term, they had obviously expected something else. They had perhaps been genuinely challenged.

Unfortunately such experiences are vanishingly rare (with the expansion of ‘safe spaces’ and the general closing down of the mind on our campuses, it’s debateable whether such a production (from just 2011) would be mounted now). Does it matter? Should anyone care? I’d say that if the arts want to be more than just a diversion, more than just a lifestyle choice, then yes, it does. By taking on the issues that dominate public debate, issues that figure in so many conversations every day in the real world, it’s possible too that they might even start to attract those elusive audiences which they’ve been seeking for years. And perhaps more importantly, by their very nature and indeed in their own estimation, the arts should be on the cutting edge of the battle to uphold free speech.

If they are to fulfil that role, then they have to step out of the echo chamber. For the BBC, with its public obligations and duties, it should be an absolute imperative to offer diversity of views rather than just obsessing about the diversity of its staff. This would mean commissioning editors and the like who take in the whole world rather than attempting to fit the whole world into its narrow view. I admit, this looks distinctly unlikely. So perhaps the only way forward is for us to establish new avenues, new platforms and new funding streams. Not only could such initiatives encourage talented young creatives from the right, they might even challenge the entrenched, lazy thinking which characterises so many of our arts institutions and the people in them. Over to you, rich patrons and donors: how about it?

Also on media diversity

As the old media dies, new voices are rising

By Douglas Murray

The answer, according to Dr Peter Ammon, the German ambassador to the Court of St James’s (London), is fake news, because there’s no such thing as definitive history, so we can dramatise it as we wish: “History is always full of ambiguities and ups and downs.”

This, I think, is what he meant in a valedictory interview[1. ‘The Second World War image of Britain has fed Euroscepticism‘, The Guardian, 29 January, 2018] in which he told The Guardian that the image of Britain standing alone against German domination in the Second World War has fed Euroscepticism, but does little to solve the country’s contemporary problems.

I have met five German ambassadors to the Court of St James’s. As a child, in the late 1950s, I was presented to “Johnnie” von Herwarth, who had been one of the anti-Nazi circle in the old German foreign ministry. Then, as a young officer-instructor at the Infantry School on Salisbury Plain in the late 1970s, I met Karl-Günther von Hase to talk about fighting on the Eastern Front, where he had won the Knight’s Cross in 1945.

And when I was commanding my regiment, in the early 1990s, and my good Panzer friend from Staff College days was the army attaché at the German embassy in London, I met Rüdiger von Wechmar to talk about his time with Rommel in North Africa, and Hermann von Richthofen to talk about his famous WW1 “Ace”, great-uncle Manfred (“The Red Baron”). The last ambassador I met was Gebhardt von Moltke, for reasons that must be obvious from his name.

They were all acutely aware of Germany’s more recent history, but also, having lived it both directly and indirectly, were entirely at ease with it; or were at least reconciled to what it meant for modern Germany – and also for Britain. I believe if I were to have asked them what is the greater danger, fake drama or fake news, their answer would have been “fake drama”.

Coincidentally, or not, they all had the nobiliary particle – “von”. Perhaps for them the “long view” stretched a little further back, to when Prussia stood with Britain against Napoleon, the man who would have unified the whole of Europe according to his own very centralist principles.

Dr Ammon does not have the nobiliary particle; he is an economist. And he is concerned that, with British cinemas screening Darkest Hour and Dunkirk to packed houses, Britons are being encouraged to look back rather than forward: “[I]f you focus only on how Britain stood alone in the [Second World] war, how it stood against dominating Germany, well, it is a nice story, but does not solve any problem of today.”

Well, of course it doesn’t, but it can explain, warn and encourage – and should – in order to help solve the problems.

Besides, “ambiguities and ups and downs”, is not an entirely satisfactory description of German history in the last century. Indeed, it looks like a case of historical amnesia. Unless there is accurate – honest – history, wrong conclusions are drawn, which are no basis for informing future action.

For example, Dr Ammon equates Dunkirk with Brexit – which he calls “a tragedy” – but because he fails fully to understand the events of 1940, he fails to understand the situation of Britain in Europe both then and now. Dunkirk was initially a tactical withdrawal (if one of huge strategic significance).

After the collapse of the Belgian and French armies on either flank, the British Expeditionary Force was cut off. Churchill’s intention was to evacuate as many British and French troops as possible and put them back into France elsewhere to continue the fight. This in fact he did, though there had to be a second evacuation (from Brittany) when the French government surrendered and it was no longer possible to maintain a foothold on the Continent.

Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk was not fake drama, but in this respect it was incomplete, and its message therefore potentially misleading.

Recommended reading

Test article

By Victoria Schofield

On the other hand, Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour, for all its many faults, showed that Churchill – supported by the greater part of both sides of the House of Commons – was not prepared to let Britain simply withdraw to Fortress Albion, and with control of the high seas and therefore her imperial wealth leave Europe to the Nazis. On the contrary: he intended freeing the Continent of Nazism – because Britain was inseparably European.

The essential truth of Dunkirk and Darkest Hour is that, yes, 1940 and Brexit are comparable, but not in the way Dr Ammon represents it. For while Britain is leaving the EU – the mechanism, the bureaucracy, the high command, the totalitarianism of Brussels – she is not leaving the fight, so to speak. Britain is not leaving Europe; for she cannot. The ambassador promotes fake drama by misleadingly portraying it thus.

There could be no greater proof of Britain’s intention to stay in Europe than her desire to continue working with the EU on its security initiatives – and above all her commitment to Nato.

He is here guilty of fake history by omission. It may be that he genuinely does not understand, that his background in mathematics and his training as an economist predisposes him to drawing lines under things and proceeding only from there, so that “news” is all that matters.

The problem is, you can’t just draw a line under history and proceed as if from Zero. In history, the sum underlined will be different for every participant, and so, therefore, will be the outcome of what you do next.

The irony is that Dr Ammon studied economics at the Free University of Berlin, where in 1963 President John F Kennedy gave an address after his earlier “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech. In that address he told the assembled staff and students that the university:

“…must be interested in turning out citizens of the world, men who comprehend the difficult, sensitive tasks that lie before us as free men and women, and men who are willing to commit their energies to the advancement of a free society…”

Quite evidently, in a lifetime’s diplomatic service, including ambassador in Washington, Dr Ammon has committed his energies. But in his valedictory remarks at the end of that service, in the case of Britain, he has not shown that he fully comprehends “the difficult, sensitive tasks that lie before us as free men and women”. For what he has done in ascribing the Brexit vote to “a sense of national identity built around Britain standing alone in the Second World War” is to try to rationalise his own – and perhaps Germany’s – failure to understand that films such as Dunkirk and Darkest Hour do not so much promote a false or unhelpful view of national identity but reveal the long historical continuity in Britain’s commitment to a free Europe.

This failure is demonstrated particularly in Dr Ammon’s parting shot. As ambassador in 2015, he was involved in talks between EU leaders and the former prime minister, David Cameron, on the possibility of reforms that could have led to terms for Britain staying in the EU.

Dr Ammon’s greatest task as German ambassador to the Court of St James’s was to keep Britain in the EU. He failed in that task. It was not his failing alone, of course, but he was the one best placed to draw the correct conclusions from history. His valedictory interview was no more than an apologia for that failure, or else he remains purblind to what is and isn’t fake in drama.

BRUTUS
Peace! Count the clock.

CASSIUS
The clock hath stricken three.

(Man in pit at Globe theatre) “Marry, Master Cordwainer, but this play be poor history. Let us away.”

(Second man) “But, good Master Clokkemaker, it be fine drama. Let us tarry.”

***

Shakespeare’s history plays were never historically accurate, and his audiences probably didn’t expect them to be. Few at the Globe could have thought the Romans had mechanical clocks, and even if they did, did it matter?

The Bard was even more cavalier with historical detail in his tragedies. In Titus Andronicus, also set in Ancient Rome, he refers to “Popish tricks” – anachronistic, yes, but conveying an idea that an Elizabethan audience would understand at once. In King Lear, set in pre-historical Britain, he refers to “Bedlam”, though this was a colloquial rendering of the Bethlem Hospital for the insane. In Shakespeare’s contemporary London, it was useful shorthand and therefore reasonable dramatic license. (Perhaps when staged in modern dress, these anachronisms are no longer?)

The “problem” is by no means confined to stage and screen. Let us not begin to look at historical novels, however, if only because, living in that particular glass house, as I do, it is best not to throw stones. Besides, TV and cinema, with their mass audiences, immediacy, and visual capacity to impress, make the “problem” potentially much greater, as UnHerd’s editor, @Montie, suggests:

“The entertainment industry has led opposition to Donald Trump and his “fake news” – but is “fake drama” at least as big a problem? The star of The Apprentice did, after all, emerge from the celebrity/entertainment world as much as from business. That might, just possibly, be more than a coincidence.”

What is truth?

For various reasons, whether sloppy research, honest unawareness or need for excitement and pace, almost no historical drama will be entirely accurate. To the extent that viewers think otherwise is due to their ignorance of history. But ignorance of history isn’t a crime; filmmakers have a duty of care when it comes to portraying history, especially when that history distorts public sentiment towards other nations and historical figures.

A recent example of such distortion is Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, a film that the historian Andrew Roberts said “for all the clichéd characterization, almost total lack of dialogue, complete lack of historical context (not even a cameo role for Winston Churchill)…  somehow works well.” 

As I wrote when Dunkirk was released, the French complained that it didn’t show Frenchmen defending the perimeter; the Indians complained that it didn’t show their two companies of muleteers on the beaches, and the Americans that “the fact that there are only a couple of women and no lead actors of color may rub some the wrong way.”

Worse, it suggested that the Royal Navy abandoned French troops on the beaches in order to evacuate British troops, when in truth there was no discrimination whatsoever, and in doing so injected fake nationalist tension into what was a model of inter-Allied cooperation. As Roberts wrote, “Only much later, when the Nazi-installed Vichy government in France needed to create an Anglophobic myth of betrayal at Dunkirk, did such lies emerge. It is a shame that Nolan is now propagating them – especially since this might be the only contact that millions of people will ever have with the Dunkirk story for years, perhaps even a generation. At a time when schools simply do not teach the histories of anything so patriotism-inducing as Dunkirk, it was incumbent on Nolan to get this right.”

This is the material point. Indeed, at this exigent moment of exiting the European Union, an increase in nationalist tension, fake or otherwise, is the last thing anyone needs. And it would have been easy to avoid, if only by a statement of the facts and figures with the credits at the end.

Uses and abuses

So what about the latest offering in the nationalism stakes, Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour? The film takes many liberties, but on the whole it has been well received in Britain, if only because the Australian Jonathan Teplitzky’s Churchill: The Untold Story of D-Day (2017) was so preposterous. That, and Gary Oldman’s acting in Darkest Hour. As Andrew Roberts says (yes, there are other British Churchill scholars, but none more thorough):

“Oldman, by total contrast, has, through prosthetics, thoughtfulness and superb acting, caught Churchill brilliantly. He acknowledges our preconceptions about Churchill, and mildly co-opts them with charm and acuity.”

Yet there are concerns, and not just with the neat (or even diluted) whisky on the Churchillian breakfast tray. Professor Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins University, Washington DC, a member of UnHerd’s history jury, believes that in presenting Churchill as a Trump-like populist, Darkest Hour elides the lessons that contemporary audiences might learn from his wartime leadership. Writing in The Atlantic, Cohen is dismayed by the gift that Darkest Hour presents to Trump’s supporters:

“Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas, is, in the worst sense of the term, an insightful movie critic. The day after Christmas he left a viewing of Darkest Hour having concluded that yes, Donald Trump is a leader of the Churchillian stamp. He has a limited point. In a twisted way, the profoundly misleading portrayal of Churchill in Darkest Hour is in sync with Huckabee’s spectacularly sycophantic tweet – “Churchill was hated by his own party, opposition party, and press. Feared by King as reckless, and despised for his bluntness. But unlike Neville Chamberlain, he didn’t retreat. We had a Chamberlain for 8 yrs; in @realDonaldTrump we have a Churchill”.”

Cohen, who despairs of the normalisation of Trump by the Republican Party[1. See Professor Cohen’s contribution to last week’s meeting of the History Jury and his answer to the question of which 2017 event will be of greater-than-anticipated long-term significance.], goes on to say that the biggest problem with Darkest Hour is its portrayal of Churchill as essentially “erratic; accused, not entirely unjustly, of systemically bad judgment; at odds with the timid elders of his own party; impulsive; and loud-mouthed… the authentic voice of the people and a forceful bully in the right cause.” And so, “[i]f one squints a bit, one can see the populist conception of leadership here. A Great Man channels the sound instincts of Everyman, and ticks off the great and the good as he defies their timidity and conventional good sense.”

Cohen’s worry is that “the movie allows those who view it, like Huckabee, to succumb to a completely false notion of statesmanship as something scarcely one step removed from being an insufferable blowhard. Reading both wide and deep, expertise, poise, the Roman virtues of gravitas and auctoritas, experience, unremitting effort, organizational skill—all these are the real Churchillian virtues in addition to the eloquence that is so utterly removed from the squeals and barks of the current American president.”

In this, Cohen echoes Canadian Professor Margaret MacMillan, until recently Warden of St Antony’s College, Oxford, who in her much admired The Uses and Abuses of History (2009) warns of the risk of identity which is too narrowly derived from the past “which imprisons us and divides us from others”.

So what of the contention that fake drama/history is more a threat than fake news? Might it be that in the end fake news isn’t pabulum but simply junk food for minds already made up? To closed minds, fake news makes no difference therefore, while to the open-minded it can be easily and quickly rebutted, although of course in the digital age, news, fake or otherwise, is no longer tomorrow’s fish and chip paper. On the other hand, because of a general (and increasing?) ignorance of history, film and drama like Dunkirk, The Crown and Darkest Hour have perhaps a more insidious power to shape perception.

And yet, not every misrepresentation of the past is necessarily malign in its effects. Without Churchill’s undoubtedly romantic evocation of Britain’s island story in 1940, so well portrayed in Darkest Hour, Hitler might never have been defeated. And had Churchill not seen himself in the image of his great ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough, whose biography – panegyric, indeed – he had only lately completed, he might not even have been able to evoke that story so convincingly.

It’s complicated.

***

Over the next few days UnHerd will be publishing other assessments of “fake drama” and its role in shaping cultural attitudes.