From Lincoln to Hamilton – the dramatisation of democracy through the ages

It would be difficult to do justice to the mutant-origami-like nature of the endgame in this presidency. Paul Taylor explores the plays and films that have tried to capture the concept of electioneering 

Wednesday 20 January 2021 12:45 GMT
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Clockwise from top left: Lincoln, Hamilton, Her Naked Skin and Shampoo
Clockwise from top left: Lincoln, Hamilton, Her Naked Skin and Shampoo (Rex/Alamy)

One Republican senator resorted to a homely metaphor when he was asked about the traumatic events of Wednesday 6 January. Did he think that the outgoing president did any soul-searching when his supporters stormed the White House in protest at the election of Joe Biden, the Democrat who today will be sworn in as the 46th commander-in-chief?

“My personal view is that [Donald] Trump touched the hot stove on Wednesday and is unlikely to touch it again,” opined Roy Blunt, the GOP senator for Missouri. Reminded that some people in his own party were calling for their leader’s dismissal, Blunt insisted that it should be up to Trump whether he finished the last few days in the White House or resigned over inciting insurrection with his rabble-rousing speech that morning. The president has since become the first in history to be impeached twice.

To do justice to the mutant-origami-like nature of the endgame in this presidency, it would require the services of Dante in full, lurid Inferno. There has long been the need for a “Book of Elections” – an anthology of extracts that show how the concept of electioneering and the role and nature of democracy have been dramatised and analysed through the ages in works of art. The chaotic circumstances of the 2020 presidential election – and its long and horrific aftermath – have powerfully strengthened my conviction that there is a significant gap in the market.  

There are many worthwhile examples. In film, there is Shampoo (1975), starring (and partly scripted by) Warren Beatty as the new 1970s brand of Hairdresser As (Heterosexually) Desirable Stud. The movie’s erotic merry-go-round is utterly at home in Beverly Hills and sometimes is more like a dodgems attraction. The dateline, 4 November 1968, was the eve of Richard Nixon’s election to the White House (he beat Hubert Humphry). This political contest and its outcome snag the attention on the TV screens that festoon the homes where people get bedded, and the corporate fundraisers where dollars are banked. The movie looks back at the onset of this presidency from a post-Watergate perspective, and from within the sobering shadow of Nixon’s eventual resignation on 8 August 1974. Critical opinion on Shampoo is divided. Is it an only partially successful attempt to depict the askew symmetries between a politically rudderless world and its erotic equivalent? Or are we meant to be turned on by George ourselves a little too?  

Then there is Lincoln (2012), directed by Steven Spielberg, eloquently scripted by Angels in America’s Tony Kushner, with Daniel Day-Lewis giving an Oscar-winning performance in the title role. The date of its opening was strategically timed; it offered itself to the public just as Barack Obama was voted in for what would be a difficult second term in the White House. As has often been remarked, the film could be alternatively titled “The Thirteenth Amendment”, such is its fascination with the sweaty business of doing deals in smoke-filled rooms in the effort to steer the amendment (the one that abolished slavery) through the House of Representatives in 1865.

Trump has several times made the characteristically baseless claim that this presidency did more to improve the wellbeing of black people than any since that of Honest Abe. The movie’s painstaking attention to the political graft required to make uplifting changes to the status quo gives the decisive lie to the conceited, delusional fatuity of Trump’s boast.

In the world of stage plays, pride of place could be given to Her Naked Skin (2008). The National Theatre has been producing plays since 1963, but Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s drama was the first work by a woman ever allowed unfettered access to the stage of the Olivier, the NT’s biggest, arena-like auditorium. The piece is set in 1913 during the most militant phase of the Suffragettes’ fight to get the vote for women. Long, gutting sections of the play are set in Holloway Prison. The play is very alert to the class differences in background amongst the women. They are bonded by a unanimity of purpose, though Lenkiewicz is honest about the points of variance even in this regard. And they are, of course, united in all being women and so ipso facto, left short of societal respect.

Her Naked Skin is the only one of the works cited here that does not pivot on an election that throws into relief what the disenfranchised are demanding. And this is calculatedly telling. It emphasises how for most of the men in the period, women’s voting rights were considered subordinate to the issues they assumed should take automatic priority. As he’s portrayed in the play, Herbert Asquith – who was the Liberal prime minister at the time – resents the fact that the Suffragette campaign has started to be compared to the struggle for Irish Home Rule. Asquith thinks there is a big distinction. “The Irish are the Irish” – and the forfeits exacted by their ancestral struggle mean that sometimes they come in handy, furnishing mainland politicians with exculpatory camouflage for their shortcomings. Whereas, with the Suffragettes, “what we are dealing with is a lunatic fringe of lonely frigid women who crave attention”.

In the category of stage musicals, the palm should be awarded to Hamilton. If you cast your mind back far enough, you may remember that in late November 2016, Mike Pence – who was then vice president-elect – paid a Friday night visit to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s smash hit. The 18th-century American Revolution is rendered in musical form, its political significance accentuated by the show's artistic decisions – whether these be in casting (the mainly white, Protestant Founding Fathers are portrayed by an ethnically diverse cast) or in the pluralist, melting pot mode of the musical score (a cascade of pyrotechnic hip-hop, R&B and classic musical). 

As he was making his way out of the auditorium afterwards, Pence was addressed directly from the stage. Brandon Victor Dixon, the actor playing Aaron Burr, America’s third vice-president, read out a statement: “We, sir – we – are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights.”

With the stony loyalty he was to maintain for the next four years, Pence leapt to the defence of the rights of his boss. “The president has a great heart. He’s got heart for the American people.” In subsequent TV interviews, responding to that intervention from the stage, Pence sought to assure the public that president-elect Trump “is going to be a president of all the people”. (“Apologize!” Trump tweeted, deploring the alleged rudeness of the cast and dismissing the show as “overrated”. Like the acting of Meryl Streep…)

The ironies are multiple.  Once in office, the president wasted no time plumbing new depths of divisiveness and invidiousness. Unable to bring himself to criticise the white supremacists who marched at Charlottesville in 2017, he showed uninhibited alacrity in trying to slander the Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020 as a bunch of looting lowlifes.  

To return with relief to the stage play category and to plays that pivot because of the stresses and strains of electoral politics, there is an embarrassment of riches. David Hare’s The Absence of War (1993) analyses the Labour Party’s surprise electoral defeat in 1992. A fictionalised Neil Kinnock (who lost the election to John Major) comes across as an admirably impulsive, headstrong figure, who sometimes dares to be off-message, and one who is in a partly tragic predicament. Some of his spin-doctors are themselves torn over how far he should suppress his true nature – volatile, idealistic – for the cameras in order to qualify as “prime ministerial”. The drama makes you ponder the question of whether a true Socialist is half in love with the idea of defeat and permanent opposition.

Michael Frayn’s 2008 play Democracy applies its brilliant brain to the fragmented, hand-to-mouth coalition politics of West Germany in the early 1970s, then under Willy Brandt, its first left-of-centre chancellor in nigh-on 40 years. With stunningly succinct explanatory power (all the more impressive for being so unassuming), Frayn also mines the symbolic potential of one the great double-acts of modern politics. For a real-life odd couple, it would be hard to beat the intimate relationship between the West German chancellor, Brandt – whose Ostpolitik, or new eastern policy, won him the Nobel Prize – and Gunter Guillaume, the personal assistant who was eventually unmasked as a Stasi spy.

Democracy is a strange beast: the least worst of political systems, yet one inextricably caught up in paradoxes and double binds. A recent edition of the Today programme featured an interview with Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard legal scholar who is a life-long supporter of the Democratic Party at the same time as arguing that Trump’s rhetorical inflaming of the crowd that stormed the Capitol is “constitutionally protected” speech. By a similar token, you’d have to say that one reason democracy is valuable is that it offers a means, as has just been graphically demonstrated, of voting out an unstable buffoon like Trump. All the same, you know what Willy Brandt means when, in Frayn’s version of him, he says of voting: “For a moment one voice rises above the others, and everyone picks up the tune. Until sooner or later another voice is raised...”

So: an array of stimulating pieces that hold the mirror up to the politics of the democratic process. Now ask yourself: can you imagine Donald Trump starting, smiling or laughing ruefully at any of them? Or registering even a flicker of fellow-feeling, recognition or regret?

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