Contemporary Theatre Review | 2019
Beyond the Antitheatrical Prejudice: Political Oratory and the Performance of Legitimacy
Abstract
The question of a politician’s skill as a performer is frequently debated in terms both positive and negative. Some politicians, such as Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama have been lauded as naturally gifted orators. Others, Hillary Clinton and JohnMcCain, for instance, are either maligned for their lacklustre acting ability, or, conversely, it is asserted that politicians should not have to be good performers in the first place. Bill Clinton’s longtime nickname ‘slick willie’, for instance, implies among other things a duplicitous ability to weasel himself out of any disadvantageous situation and thus casts Clinton’s virtuosic improvisation skills as a negative. The flipside of this argument is contained in David Foster Wallace’s essay on John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign, wherein the novelist details howMcCain’s obvious discomfort with prepared speeches actually inclined him to trust McCain more. This article is concerned with that suspicion of acting and performance in the political realm, and especially with the closely related argument that an emphasis on performance and theatricality is detrimental to institutional politics. The first section examines relevant scholarship on the interplay between performance and politics, arguing that this scholarship has thus far either insufficiently theorized the performative nature of representative democracy or tended to dismiss a focus on politicians’ performances in the public sphere as an antipolitical distraction from the more purely rational and deliberative business of representative politics. The question of what function is fulfilled by politicians’ performances in representative democracy, whether these are truly mere distraction and ornamentation, or whether the system relies on them to play a more vital role, is thus left open. This article will make the case that the system of representative democracy relies, for its legitimacy, on the ability of politicians to give 1 David Foster Wallace, ‘Up, Simba: Seven Days on the Trail of an Anticandidate’, in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (New York: Little Brown, 2006), 156–234. Contemporary Theatre Review, 2019 Vol. 29, No. 1, 5–22, https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2018.1556210