Can’t Kill The Spirit is a play promoted by the Waterloo East theatre, where it will run until 13 July, as “a timely reminder of the need for upstanders in a world of bystanders”.
With a cast of three, minimal furniture and set mostly in a remand centre, it tells the story of a woman called Chloe, played by Lisa Day, who, 40 years earlier, had been involved in the women-led Greenham Common protests against nuclear weapons. She finds those old fires rekindled by today’s climate change direct action, which her son Joe (Sam Ebner-Landy) is also immersed in.
The play itself, written by Lisa’s husband Robert Gordon Clark, a good friend of and contributor to On London, largely explores the implications for her personal life of Chloe’s decision to put her moral and political convictions ahead of the desire of her husband Mark (Roger Beaumont) for a more tranquil domestic existence as the couple move deeper into middle age, and Joe and their other child enter adulthood.
But it also valuably recalls the big impact Greenham had on British life and public opinion at the time, not only as part of the fraught debate about nuclear proliferation and the presence of US missiles on British soil, but also about womanhood and society.
Criticism of the Greenham women and their “peace camp”, set up around a Royal Airforce Base in Berkshire, often included direct or implied rebukes for their failure to conform to an idea of femininity tied tightly to mothering, the home and certain codes of conduct and appearance. Greenham women were independent, insubordinate and muddy. For some, this alone was too much to bear.
The performance of Can’t Kill The Spirit I saw, last Thursday, was followed by a discussion chaired by Anthony Biggs involving Robert, Lisa, director Lucy Aley-Parker and two Greenham veterans: Rebecca Johnson, these days director of Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy, and photographer Janine Wiedel, who put her camera to work at the peace camp during 1983 and 1984.
A strong thread of the exchanges, which involved audience members too, was frustration about how little is known about the Greenham campaigners among people below the age of 35. In my experience, something similar is true of another huge phenomenon of the 1980s, the HIV/AIDS epidemic. For young people I know, though very alive to contemporary sex and gender debates, the TV drama It’s A Sin was a revelation.
Is there something of the same forgetting about protest movements against the racism of the 1970s – responses to actual neo-Nazis attacking and intimidating ethnic minority communities in London and elsewhere and, just three decades after the defeat of Adolf Hitler, even winning significant vote shares in elections in the parts of the capital. At least a recent photographic exhibition at Tate Britain captured something of the fear and fightback of that era
The semi-amnesia about an eventful and pivotal period of post-war British history was identified by Robert during the discussion. The big exception is the miners’ strike, perhaps in part because of coal mining’s emotional symbolic presence in British historical narratives – something that resonates with nostalgists like Jeremy Corbyn and opportunists like Nigel Farage alike – perhaps in part because of Billy Elliot.
Can’t Kill The Spirit and the discussion that followed also prompted reflection on the protest politics of today, which, in different ways and for different causes, have become so prominent in London life of late, ranging from Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion during the depths of the pandemic to the continuing demos about Israel and Gaza since October 2023.
How much deliberate disruption of the city is acceptable in a democracy? When does one group’s freedom to protest become another’s unacceptable source of anxiety? Some of those convinced they have a monopoly on the moral high ground can be troublingly lacking in empathy (“What Hamas did was terrible, but…”).
When does protest become an end in itself, a kind of lifestyle choice? And how good are protest politics at effecting changes they want to see? Raising awareness of an issue is one thing. Getting a critical mass of public opinion on your side and, most importantly, getting results, may take quieter, subtler methods and, of course, the stuff some protest advocates despise – compromise.
If you haven’t already seen Can’t Kill The Spirit, I recommend it – and not just because I’m a friend of Robert Gordon Clark and Lisa Day (co-founders of the Play CG Theatre Company).
It is written and performed with great insight and skill, dramatising the tensions between competing commitments; between tending to precious personal relationships and trying to save the world. It stimulates fruitful reflections on the dynamics of power and progress in free societies, not least in the capital where those dynamics are often at their most vivid and contested.
Finally, on top of that, buying a ticket will help support London ‘s smaller theatres – a cause that can never be anything but good.
Buy tickets for Can’t Kill The Spirit here. Photo from Can’t Kill The Spirit Instagram.
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