The craft-table cringe of Extinction Rebellion

I’m afraid you’ve missed all the fun. Extinction Rebellion has just held a three-day event in Windsor Home Park, slap bang next to Windsor Castle, to ‘upgrade democracy’. In its own words, this was ‘three days of creative, peaceful action to propose democratic renewal as the answer to the climate and nature emergencies’. This doomsday fun-fest climaxed on Sunday in a ‘performance action’. It was supposed to ‘dramatise the death and revival of democracy through theatre, large-scale puppetry and communal song’.

‘Large-scale puppetry’ refers, it seems, to those quite artistically impressive carnival-style figures that have started to appear at demos, rather than the enormous Dougal and Zebedee Magic Roundabout puppets that appeared in The Goodies, or the enormous Muppet, Sweetums.

‘Performance action’ theatre reminds me of my own college days, 34 years ago. We were encouraged to overthrow capitalism through improvisation, a sort of Trotskyist version of Whose Line Is It Anyway?. This was always followed by discussions of the ‘I think what Annabelle did in that piece was really effective’ variety. It would all culminate in a jamboree of papier-mâché and ‘performance’ in Winchester High Street – it’s always somewhere posh, you wouldn’t risk it in Wigan – leaving affluent shoppers smiling indulgently. You’ll be surprised to hear that capitalism remained pretty much intact.

We were always being fired up with talk of the power of performance art. It did have power, but not the kind that was advertised; the power to pass three years, and the power to piss away somebody else’s money.

Some of the XR performance stunts do have a professional touch, which is surely to be welcomed. The ‘Red Rebel Brigade’ – those figures with whitened faces trailing crimson robes who ponce about XR events all spectral and spooky – are quite striking. If we absolutely must have street theatre, let it be curated, well done and spectacular in itself. But a lot of the XR stuff sticks to the traditional tropes of the posh demo – the free-form, the abundance of ginger dreadlocks, the playing of the bongo.

This is the wrong way for XR to go about trying to persuade us of their case. They should try coming up with popular, appealing stuff that makes you smile, dazzles you with its novelty of observation, or causes you to think ‘maybe XR has a point’.

Instead, XR activists always try to affect a long-suffering expression, like Our Lady in Michelangelo’s Pietà, but they generally lack the skill to bring this off and merely look constipated. This is hardly a surprise. These are people who get themselves to sleep at night imagining the rest of us being swept away by tsunamis, shrieking ‘oh if only we’d listened to those middle-class twits’.

The Windsor shindig was calling for ‘citizens’ assemblies’. As Rebecca Lester of XR tells us, ‘I am one of a too-small number of individuals who have been fortunate enough to participate in a citizens’ assembly, and I feel compelled to share my incredible experience’. How to upgrade democracy, Lester and others pondered. But they want to stop democracy, not upgrade it. They never seem to consider that citizens’ assemblies, if truly representative, would include many citizens who disagree with them. Assembly votes might not go quite the way XR hopes.

I wish XR activists would stop being so coy, and say what they so obviously mean – that they are an elite who deserve to be in charge. Indeed, in many ways, they already are.

If I ruled the world, loitering on street corners with the intention of committing a drama workshop would be added to the list of offences punished by swift and severe justice, as pioneered by our zealous ‘lock ’em up’ Labour overlords. Three months for possession of papier-mâché in a built-up area. Six months for puppetry. Nine months for large-scale puppetry. But then, I’m not nutty enough to think I should run the world, unlike these doomsday cultist nutjobs.

In the end, this is all play-acting, a way for young idiots – and old idiots who should know better – to fill their time and give their lives some purpose and meaning. To XR’s credit, it has noticed that the new administration is not that different from the old one. But for XR activists the only acceptable regime is, well, them. A puppet government indeed.

Gareth Roberts is a screenwriter and novelist, best known for his work on Doctor Who.