It's been a summer of spectacle in London, from the celebrations of the queen’s Diamond Jubilee to the ambitiously named World Shakespeare Festival, and now the grandest show of them all, the 2012 Summer Olympics, which will formally begin tonight with an extravagant opening ceremony orchestrated by the film director Danny Boyle.
It’s no accident that all this theater is taking place in a Britain staggered by economic meltdown, a controversial austerity budget and a crisis of political legitimacy following the hacking scandal, which exposed the cozy relationship between News Corporation and the nation’s elite. At times of political or economic crisis, the British have always turned to spectacles as a way of projecting — or creating — power.
Shakespeare often explored how spectacle could hide weakness on the British stage. He learned it from the true master of this art: Queen Elizabeth I. At her accession in 1558, she inherited a kingdom sharply divided between Catholics and Protestants and facing the threat of a Spanish invasion. She took to the streets of London in a lavish coronation procession, where she made a show of being moved by her subjects’ love for her, setting the tone for a “Cult of Elizabeth” in the national imagination. “We princes,” she said, “are set on stages, in the sight and view of all the world.”
Centuries later, Londoners wearied by the Blitz and five years of world war turned to Shakespeare. Cinematic legend has it that Winston Churchill commissioned a rousing film production of “Henry V,” starring Laurence Olivier, to coincide with the planned invasion of France. Churchill even instructed tax officials to consider Olivier’s salary tax-free. The Inland Revenue was not pleased. But what’s money compared to British glory?
When London last staged the Olympics, in 1948, the capital was still scarred by bomb damage, ration cards were required to buy food, and the athletes were housed in the homes of volunteers. But these “Austerity Games” showed the world the city’s resilience at a time when postwar rebuilding had only just begun. In contemporary Britain, austerity may once again be the political reality, but where there’s no bread, there can apparently be circuses.
In December, Prime Minister David Cameron doubled the budget for the Games’s opening and closing ceremonies, to about $107 million, to “showcase the best of Britain to a massive global TV audience.” Reports this week from London speak of tension on the set; if tempers are running high, it’s probably because so much is at stake. Critics are questioning the expense of the games, which will cost a total of about $18 billion, with words like “fiasco,” “disaster” and “complete nightmare.” Last year, rioters, and the Occupy protesters encamped at St. Paul’s Cathedral, staged their own spectacles of anger and dissent. But Mr. Boyle’s big-budget ceremony, titled “Isles of Wonder” in a nod to a speech by Caliban in “The Tempest,” will try to deliver exactly what Elizabethan London did so well: theater that resolves the culture’s tensions by entrancing even its furious Calibans with the wonders of this sceptered isle.
In the midst of the World Shakespeare Festival this summer, archaeologists discovered the remains of the Curtain — Shakespeare’s theater during the building of the Globe, the original “wooden O” of “Henry V” — beneath a construction site in East London. What lies hidden at the foundations of London, it turns out, is theater. The raising of the Curtain offered a timely reminder of another age in which spectacles of power concealed mountains of debt. In the 1590s, both Shakespeare’s company and Queen Elizabeth were in the red, but that made the performance of wealth and power all the more crucial.
What “Henry V” taught British audiences was the power of performance to overcome fear. “Imitate the action of the tiger,” Henry tells his soldiers when urging them once more unto the breach, “disguise fair nature with hard-favoured rage.” That is, show me your war face; act like a hero and you’ll become one; make history by imitating past glories.
Of course, this image of the actor-king is a double-edged sword. Even Elizabeth recognized the portrait of herself in Shakespeare’s portrait of the failed king Richard II, which was staged by her enemies during the Essex Rebellion. “I am Richard II,” she is believed to have said. “Know ye not that?”
Even if the Shakespeare festival confronts Londoners with the unpleasant realization that the most interesting productions of the bard’s plays come dressed in foreign costumes — while their own theater companies have slipped into playing to the tourists who pay the bills — it’s still the empire of culture that colonized those distant lands, mining their traditions to spice up the British imagination.
The British can no longer conquer the world with yeomen’s cries of “God for Harry! England and Saint George!” but the world still tunes in to watch their spectacles with fascination. And more important, so do the British. These spectacles allow them to regain their composure after a season of bad news, but also to compose themselves as the Great Britain we know so well, turning the well-worn face of majesty to the world once more.
Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky is a professor of English at Kenyon College.