Rita, Sue and #Metoo:: The Royal Court Theatre, London, and Liberalism

We live in a time of critical moments. In fact, right now, in the midst of a global pandemic that has seen five million people lose their lives, it can feel as if this single event is the watershed moment from which all else will irrevocably change. The theatre industry around the world lies decimated by the virus, with artists, technicians, and a whole gamut of ancillary staff having lost their jobs and no discernible idea of when things might return to some sense of pre-COVID normality. Coupled with this, another singular event—the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020—had global repercussions, causing statues to be pulled down, and national conversations to be staged in relation to the ongoing legacies of slavery in a world where the lives of black people often do not matter, or at least do not matter as much as those of their white counterparts. So, to speak of crisis or revolution right now is not to negate the events that led up to the #metoo movement and the way in which the movement itself sent shockwaves through the creative industries, but perhaps rather to see it within the prism of a series of revolutions that have taken place within the social and political sphere in the twenty-first century whose ultimate consequences we have yet to see, understand, or experience.

Looking back to a time just prior to the pandemic, it is worth noting that as we approached the onset of 2019, something seemed to have happened that had led to an apparent spiraling of social and political touchpoints. The 2017 inauguration of Donald Trump as US president, the 2016 Brexit referendum result in the United Kingdom, the apparently relentless rise of China's economic power alongside the parallel (and at times occluded) power of Russia to influence change converged to such an extent that much of the critical thought at that time focused its energies on understanding the 'when' and 'how' rather than the 'what' and the 'why.' As a result, there was an almost constant talk of crisis within the arts and humanities academic community as well as out into the broader public discourse. "Theatre of crisis," "Europe in crisis," "Utopia in Crisis," "Rethinking Crisis," "Crisis or Enlightenment?", "Culture in Crisis," "Crises of Democracy," "Crisis of Neoliberal Globalization," and "Systemic Crisis in European Theatre" are just a few of the recent thematic forays into this area from academic conferences emerging largely in the Anglo-American world as researchers attempted to gain an understanding of how we had got to where we were then and how we might move beyond.¹ Indeed, the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic presents yet another crisis to add to the ongoing, relentless crises in which our lived experience may continue to be understood.

Jared Diamond's pre-pandemic and thus presciently entitled Upheaval—How Nations Cope With Crisis and Change (2019)—a brilliant survey of points of crisis across the globe—gestures towards a future where both nations and individuals must decide which "parts of their identities" they wish to retain and what can be discarded.² The notion of identity, and its associated political affiliations, has not hitherto afforded the luxury of a kind of pick-and-mix approach where certain elements may be excluded for the sake of expediency or otherwise. The crises mentioned above have often formed part of or indeed resulted in an engagement with so-called culture wars—the conflict of values and ideas—whose provenance dates back to the nineteenth-century rift between the German Reich and the Roman Catholic church³ but which in the twenty-first century have become more internally focused inside the confines of bordered nations and within the broader context of globalization and neoliberalism.⁴ The polarization of ideas on a range of issues such as abortion, freedom of speech, trans rights, ecoterrorism, and immigration may seem irreconcilable. However, as a direct result of the clash of ideas, new ways of thinking and framing may evolve. The relationship between values—social, political, or cultural—and...