The ideas behind Britain’s Green surge began in a Brazilian jail. In the 1970s, Augusto Boal invented a technique he named Theatre of the Oppressed. It sought to awaken audiences by making them active participants, turning spectators into “spect-actors.”

Theatre of the Oppressed

Boal had drawn the idea from educator Paulo Freire, whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed argued that conventional education was a tool of domination, a “banking” model where teachers deposited facts into passive students.

Jailed by Brazil’s military junta in 1964 and driven into exile, Freire proposed instead that teacher and student examine the world together, aiming at conscientização, or critical consciousness. To exist humanly, Freire wrote, is

to name the world, to change it.

Boal took that idea off the page and put it on a stage.

The technique works by dissolving the boundary between stage and audience. Boal’s best-known form, Forum Theatre, stages a scene of everyday injustice, stops it halfway and invites an audience member to take a character’s place and try differently. The place of theatre, Boal argued, is not to

show the correct path, [but] to offer the means by which all possible paths may be examined.

The shift he and Freire were after was cultural before it was political. Not a transfer of power, but a prior question: had people been so thoroughly treated as spectators that they had forgotten they could take the stage?

Polanski’s theatrics

Half a century later, a British actor trained in that tradition is applying it to Westminster.

Before politics, Zack Polanski worked with a production company staging Forum Theatre shows – a rather different training ground than the PPE-to-think-tank pipeline that produces most British politicians. His campaign slogan, “make hope normal again“, puts a Freirean ring on a more infamous populist catchphrase: politics as an invitation to agency, rather than a return to past glory.

His political style is less about class struggle than participation. But that is a theory of the room, not of the state. It explains why Polanski fits the Greens better than Labour – a party built around discipline and lines for members to follow. But what comes next for the Greens?

A green politics of participation

Before the Greens, Polanski was a Liberal Democrat – a party not known for revolutionary politics. He joined in 2015, drawn chiefly by its support for proportional representation – a cause about widening who gets a say in politics, rather than about any economic programme. He left in 2017 over the party’s foreign-policy compromises.

The detail matters. Polanski was never a left-wing ideologue working his way toward the correct party. He was someone preoccupied with participation, who happened to find that preoccupation served better by the Greens than by the Lib Dems. But whether a theatrical method translates into a governing one is a question his career has not yet had to answer. The harder question is what the tradition is worth when the rehearsal ends.

Green Party membership has grown from the tens of thousands into the hundreds of thousands since Polanski became leader. In February, the party won its first parliamentary by-election ever, overturning a Labour majority in a seat held since the Second World War. The winner was Hannah Spencer, who weeks earlier had been in college, a plumber learning how to plaster.

Before politics, Polanski performed in a Forum Theatre production playing a leader who steered his audience astray, and his spect-actors overthrew him. The tradition was built for exactly that moment: the audience discovering it could act, the protagonist discovering he could be removed.

Polanski is still in rehearsal. What comes after is another question entirely, and one he will have to answer himself: is a theory of stagecraft ready for the test of statecraft?

Featured image via Wikimedia

By Hugo Harvey

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