The City Rises - La città che sale How should we respond to Europe re-arming? This question needs unpicking as a matter of urgency - the ethics, the aesthetics, the politics.

As someone who has dedicated a lifetime to making theatre I recognise the overlap between the two worlds of culture and politics. Both rehearse power, both practice power in their own and interwoven ways. Politicians depend on fictions as much as facts to communicate and accumulate power with and from their audiences, us citizens. And so do theatre practitioners.

But let’s be clear. The spectacle of public humiliation is a political tool. We saw this with Trump’s treatment of Ukrainian President Zelensky and with US Democratic Party Chuck Schumer in the last few days. I choose to focus upon these examples because they have global impact.

The fact that I can so readily provide you with video evidence of these spectacles is not accidental. These snippets of public humiliation, which can be replayed ad infinitum, IS a political device in action. As Trump said just after the apex of his performance of domination over Zelensky, “this is going to make great television”. The host of The Apprentice knew what this would mean.

Performative humiliation directly aims to make opponents and citizens recoil and retreat from public space. For many, viewing this material has grotesque and politically motivated appeal. However an audience reacts, the aim of this spectacle remains the same: to empty the agora - our political gathering space.

We might at first think that public humiliation is the favoured weapon of those who simply want to liquidate democracy. But there is an even more deadly process which follows on. Hannah Arendt called this denationalisation. Once a citizen or their voice is humiliated that person, that group, can quickly become denationalised. That is why and how Trump’s attempt at public humiliation of Chuck Schumer is linked to what Hitler did to German Jews in the 1930’s. In the US last week we also witnessed a separate attempt to make invisible a trans-gender member of the US senate. If public humiliation is employed against foreign presidents and senior politicians representing marginalised communities can we guess what could be happening out at sea in the Mediterranean for example?

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