The Extreme Right and the Limits of Liberal Tolerance in David Greig’s The Events and Chris Thorpe’s Confirmation

Abstract

The Extreme Right and the Limits of Liberal Tolerance in David Greig’s The Events and Chris Thorpe’s Confirmation James Hudson (bio) Two plays recently performed in the UK have been conspicuous for engaging critically and analytically with aspects of extremism motivated by far-right politics. David Greig’s The Events (2013) reimagines a mass shooting with strong echoes of the atrocity perpetuated by Anders Breivik on the Norwegian island of Utøya in 2011, and Chris Thorpe’s quasi-verbatim Confirmation (2014) attempts to use the theoretical frame of confirmation bias to explore the ideological beliefs of an English neo-Nazi white supremacist. In something akin to the way that Trevor Griffiths’s The Party (1973) was an “occasional” piece that functioned to take the political temperature in the aftermath of the 1968 événements de mai in Paris, both plays arrive at a high-water mark for right-wing populism in Europe, where for more than a decade extremist right-wing ideas have found their way into the mainstream and the far right has enjoyed a larger share of electoral success, sustained media advocacy, and a maturation of extra-parliamentary activism. This essay performs a comparative analysis of The Events and Confirmation and enquires into how both plays negotiate and interrogate the ideology of the contemporary ethno-nationalist far right. It offers an interpretation of the plays as urgently topical cultural artifacts that distill the most salient elements of a still-inchoate twenty-first-century fascism, each engaging with the specific characteristics of extremist racism and anti-liberalism that act as its primary motors in the present political conjuncture in Europe. The first section of this essay comprises a cultural, political, and economic survey of recent European history that accounts for the ways that anti-immigrant, antimulticulturalist and Islamophobic discourses have become the dominant touchstones of today’s far right. Thereafter, this [End Page 306] essay will examine the way that The Events and Confirmation assimilate and synthesize these ideologies, comparing the strategies by which these extremist-right attitudes are dramaturgically framed and dispensed. It is clear at first glance that both these plays can be seen to be performing interrogations into the way that extremist racist and neo-fascist ideologies are conceived and cultivated in contemporary Europe, both in their own way dealing with the shadow cast by Breivik’s actions. Nonetheless, this essay goes further in suggesting that both works are engaged in bringing to light the ways in which particular qualities of contemporary far-right thought can be shown to be parasitic upon traditional leftist discourse, something that resonates significantly with the Europe-wide success of right-populist parties that have gained recent electoral traction, partly by aping many of the left’s more recognizable tenets against globalization’s more rapacious tendencies. A crucial point of comparison marbled throughout both plays is the counterposing of a quintessentially left-liberal protagonist against an extremist antagonist. Here this essay suggests that in doing so both plays perform an interrogation into the limitations and liabilities of the conventional attributes of liberal tolerance, a tendency encapsulated in its most egregeious form by Facebook CEO’s Sheryl Sandberg’s remark when proposing that Facebook “likes” could be deployed to fight terrorism: “the best antidote to hate is tolerance.”1 In both plays we see a similar process of asking what form such a tolerance would take, of interrogating the precariousness and artificiality of a liberal belief system predicated on the benign acceptance of others’ views when those views are fundamentally intolerable, and of the fundamental incompatibility between a protagonist with a predilection for tolerance attempting also to understand the extremist views of their adversary. Therefore, while this essay elucidates how The Events and Confirmation each engage with and absorb the most distinctive features of contemporary reactionary, racist, and far-right discourse, it also makes the case that the plays can be interpreted in conjunction as offering clear critiques of the way that the contemporary liberal left construes and uses tolerance as a political category, and as questioning whether this is an adequate response to an emergent twenty-first-century fascism. [End Page 307] The Emergence of the Contemporary Racist...