Performance Live: Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere

This programme contains some strong language.

I'm Kirsty Wark and tonight you're joining me to watch a special

and unusual show at the Young Vic Theatre in London.

It's been created as part of a strand of programmes called

Performance Live,

which, over the next few years, will bring a spectrum of innovative

performances to the small screen

produced by some of today's most exciting artists.

Art holds up a mirror to the world,

and right now, many artists working in different

forms are responding to global political events.

In this case, the Young Vic have teamed up with Paul Mason,

who has written a new play about global revolution

based on his book Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere.

Now, while Paul is familiar to television

audiences as a journalist and commentator,

tonight we'll see him as a performer as he tells his

story of the last five tumultuous years in world history

through the events that he himself witnessed

and the people that he met.

From the outset, expect strong personal opinion and language

as well as film images that some might find upsetting.

Let's go inside.

APPLAUSE

Bertolt Brecht said theatre should be like a man who's seen

a car crash and has to explain what happened to the bystanders.

Now, sometimes he has to act it out, like, "The driver pulled the wheel

"head hit the windscreen, blood everywhere."

But sometimes he's got to be clinically objective,

like, "The Audi was approaching the junction at 30mph."

Well...

I've seen a car crash.

A global car crash.

You're in it.

I've reported it as a TV journalist

but now I want to tell the story in a different way.

I want to tell the story as I saw it.

I want to tell it as if everybody's life depended on it, including mine.

And what I want to ask is how did we get from a mass outbreak

of global protest and hope and optimism

to Donald Trump?

TITTERING

In 2011, all over the world, wave after wave of protest broke out

in place after place and this was a new kind of protest.

For me, it started in London in January 2011,

after the fall of Ben Ali in Tunisia

but before we had any idea what would happen next.

Some protesters had occupied an 18th-century townhouse

and they invited me to come and give them a lecture

about the Paris Commune,

because they'd organised an ad hoc university inside

and they called it the Really Free School.

This is the hard-core of the student protest movement,

veteran eco-warriors,

people who sit down in front of tanks in Gaza

and, as one of them put it to me, the situationist Taliban.

What I want you to understand is the revolution you dream about

has happened once before.

This is Paris in 1871.

But everything outside the blue line is new.

Who do we think lives there?

Hm? The poor.

The poor, the migrants and people like you, a danger to society.

Right, I want to tell the story through the eyes of an activist

called Louise Michel -

schoolteacher, slum-dweller, feminist,

cross-dresser

and violent revolutionary.

She's part of this intense network of underground activity

we now know existed in Paris

under the dictatorship of Emperor Louis-Napoleon.

Right, France goes to war with Germany in 1870

and the Emperor decides to lead the troops into battle personally.

This turns out to be a very bad idea

because he gets captured

and the next day France is a republic.

So now it's led by liberals.

The problem is the German Army is too strong.

Paris is surrounded

and eventually this wonderful new liberal government surrenders.

But...

..the workers of Paris don't want to surrender.

They build barricades,

they take control.

During the Commune...

hundreds of thousands of people tried to live in a new way.

We refused hierarchy.

Refused to replace one kind of power with another.

We lived in the streets.

Everybody was connected to everybody.

From every part of the city, we found each other,

we recognised each other.

We formed a women's union.

We turned the churches into revolutionary clubs.

We said, "Marriage is humanity's greatest crime."

We switched off the voice in our head, the voice of the elite,

telling us, "Behave, behave."

We fought.

There was a mass outbreak of promiscuity

because we chased away all the priests.

Freedom for women.

Freedom for children.

Freedom for prostitutes!

Do you want to know how it ends?

Hm?

It ends badly.

So after about two months,

the French army retook Paris

and then they killed...

..30,000 people in a single week.

Mainly civilians.

They understood instinctively that everything I said

about the Commune was really about the events that were now unfolding.

And I'm thinking, "Shit, that's interesting."

Because I grew up in a working-class town,

a bit like that. It's not exactly my house, but a bit like that.

We didn't refuse hierarchy.

We loved hierarchy.

Everything you achieved was done through organisation.

We wanted to replace one power with another power.

But I'd seen the unions fight and fail

and that whole working-class culture get smashed to pieces.

And after that, for about 20 years, there is no ghost.

There's no spectre of the revolution haunting the elite

with the possibility that it'll all happen again.

This...

This is a revolution.

It's a revolution of the self.

Young people we thought were self-obsessed,

you know, there brains trapped between two white earbuds,

they're fighting back.

And sure, just like the 19th and 18th-century revolutionaries,

the Jacobins,

they are young, they are poor, they are angry.

They live in the modern equivalent of the garret

and they too write appalling poetry.

But these are Jacobins with a laptop

and a smartphone.

And as we spoke,

they seemed a bit distracted.

And I worked out why.

They were tweeting the whole conversation to their friends

everywhere on the planet.

HORNS HONK

January the 25th 2011, protesters, mobilised via the internet,

take control of Tahrir Square.

Now, because who controls Tahrir controls Egypt,

Egypt's dictator Hosni Mubarak,

on the night of the 27th, shuts down the internet

and the mobile phone network.

And so the network takes to the streets.

THEY CHANT

If you are shouting, "Down with Hosni Mubarak," in the slums,

nobody really cares.

They care about food and shelter.

So we chant,

"How expensive is bread?

"How expensive is sugar?

"Why do you have to sell your furniture?"

And people joined in.

I thought it would be a demonstration,

I had no idea it would be a revolution.

Two men came to our slum.

We didn't know them.

They said, "Come, make a demonstration with us,

"with the people in Tahrir Square."

One was Muslim,

but one Christian, like me.

They joined their hands together, one hand.

You know, we went by car, ten or 20 cars,

and when we got there, we realised our goal was possible -

to make a revolution and to get freedom.

At first when we got to the slums, we had to walk in twos.

This was my first protest so I didn't know the reason,

but they said that, under the emergency laws,

more than two people together is a meeting, which is illegal.

Someone started chanting.

All of a sudden, I saw people pouring into the alleyways,

everybody was holding up their phone filming what was going on.

You know, we were about 200 people in this tiny street.

People came onto the balconies to see what was happening.

And that's when it hit me.

Someone who knows nothing about history,

nothing about freedom in Egypt and how it's been suppressed.

You see all these people around you chanting the same thing,

the same thing.

It triggers something in your mind.

I saw people running towards the police,

hurling bricks at them and...

Wow. You know, the normal scenario would be for them to run away.

I said, "Mother...

"I am not myself. I am somebody new that was born today."

My whole life is football.

I support Al Ahly.

You know what that means?

Greatest football club in the world!

That's our banner!

Anyway, some people from the club, they told us,

"These protesters are all traitors, foreigners, queers."

They said, "Go down there and do something about it."

But when we go to Tahrir Square, they cheered us.

You know, we hate the media.

And more than the media, we hate FIFA, and more than FIFA,

we hate the police.

And they were fighting the police before we even got there!

Some of them don't even go to the football!

We became part of them and we chanted,

"Ash-sha'b yurid isqat an-nizam!"

THEY CHANT: 'ASH-SH'B YURID ISQAT AN-NIZAM'

Some people actually thought it had been caused by Facebook.

Mubarak switched off Facebook.

Oh, my God! My God! Get over it.

LAUGHTER

But he still got overthrown.

In fact, it's about an old hierarchy facing a new,

young, networked generation,

and everywhere it's the same thing.

They can't stand the elite that rules them, they can't stand

the economic crisis and they can't stand being poor.

And then...

it happens in Libya.

And who knew, Libya, on the streets people would connect like this?

And then Syria, where it starts with small demonstrations

and graffiti.

And then Bahrain and then...

..Madison, Wisconsin, in the States,

where they take over the government building

and people hold up signs saying,

"From Madison to Cairo."

And then it kicks off massively in Spain.

In Madrid, the moment of truth came.

When, all of a sudden, people started walking

towards the police...

..and just sat down in front of them.

New ideas began to circulate like, why don't we just stay?

Or, look, this is what they did in Egypt.

Or we, too, need to occupy a square.

And we, the journalists in the newsroom, we're going,

"What kind of revolution is this?"

"Is it like Russia? And if it's gonna be like Russia, is it 1905

"when they lose, or is it 1917 when they win?"

June 2011 and in Athens they take over Syntagma Square,

right opposite the parliament.

And they set up a tent camp.

Normally, this would just be the Left, the Communist Party,

with its crash helmets and its banners.

But this time it's different. This time, it's everybody.

Yes, yes, yes!

In Athens, it's not just happening in the tent camps.

All over the city, ordinary people are taking over road tolls.

They are exerting the barriers open

so people can drive through for free.

Or they were going into the magistrates courts.

I went with them, I filmed them, I saw them.

They'd go into the magistrates courts, where people are trying

to sell off homes that have been repossessed,

and they'd just disrupt the proceedings en masse.

What they're doing is to make the whole city ungovernable.

Because this new form of organisation allows you to

go around the official structures, sometimes to ignore them,

and sometimes even to replace them.

At night, in the tent camp, they would hold an assembly,

would go quiet.

And to decide who gets to speak, they would use a method

from the Ancient Agora of Athens, 800 BC,

which is to draw lots.

Because in this kind of democracy, everybody is equal.

We are building a different kind of democracy.

A direct democracy. We don't need parliament, we don't need MPs,

we don't need parties.

Look, look what we've got.

In my whole life, I never saw this.

We are all here.

The networks of the people will decide everything.

And the anarchists, their eyes are lit up.

Because, for three years, they've been in the squats and the slums

of Athens fighting the cops, rioting, doing the anti-fascist work

and they've realised this thing changes the whole dynamic.

It's regime change of the mind.

In people's minds, the regime is already gone.

Not just the prime minister, Papandreou,

but the whole corrupt mainstream party system.

Do you have any idea what is happening to us? To us?

But if you ask 50 people what's going to happen next, you're going

to get 50 different answers.

OK, back to me, please, to me.

All the media, all the newspapers, all the television in Greece

belongs to millionaires.

They're all lined up with the forces, ripped off our country

and we feel total hostility to them.

Hey! Zionist media!

We don't want you here. OK, please, listen to me.

You have to let me make this point. Hey, I said, stop!

You have to let make this point! I am 59 years old.

If Greece dies, Europe dies, America dies, we all die.

Hey! None of us who have been here can ever go back!

Don't you want me to tell your story to the world?

No, it's too late for that.

What you do doesn't matter to us.

We will tell our story for ourselves.

And, in journalism, that is known as a Heart Of Darkness moment.

But I've still got to go on camera.

And in one ear, I've got the anarchists and the nationalists,

and in the other ear, I've got people close

to the German government and they are panicking.

Paul, this is urgent.

Can the Greek government hold?

Because honestly, Paul, if they can't,

then the euro is gone to hell.

So I turned to the camera and I said...

What's going on here is not just a problem for the riot police

and the Greek government,

this is the front line of the world's financial system.

From now on, there's a kind of rolling financial

and economic crisis.

Spain's banks go bust, Portugal is bust,

Ireland is bust several times over.

To save the banks, the European Central Bank orders

massive spending cuts all across the periphery of Europe.

The Greek economy collapses.

In Spain, youth unemployment rises to 25%.

In Greece, it rises to 50%.

Now, all this is being done to save the banks.

Effectively, to save Wall Street.

And so, in September 2011, people occupy Wall Street.

People, by now, completely at home with this new kind of protest.

It was heroic, really.

"Screw you, we're not gonna play your game of demands,

"we haven't got any demands."

Because they had understood that if you can take hold of a place

and occupy it and stay in it for five days, maybe ten,

that could be more important than taking power

or storming the Bastille or even winning an election, because...

..A, it scares the crap out of the elite,

and B, it creates a power inside you that never goes away.

HELICOPTER WHIRRS AND SIREN BLARES

What are you doing up there?

I don't have time for you, man! There's 3,000 people on the bridge

right now. Oh, man, come on, we got a couple of minutes, let's go!

Gimme the screwdriver. Let's go. Here.

And the blue tape. Here. The blue tape, man!

Oh, man, come on, come on, come on!

Look, they're coming. You gotta hurry up, let's go.

All right, all right. We gotta get this fixed.

Where is that guy? So...

Here below, you got Brooklyn Bridge, and over there,

you got those class A tax avoiders, Verizon.

Hey, it's not working, man, it's not working! Shit!

Listen, listen, listen.

I know you don't have much time and I know you don't have any

demands, but my editor's asked me to come here and ask you -

what are your demands?

You wanna know what our demands are? Yes.

Where are you from? British television.

All right, basically, I'll keep it simple.

A bunch of people shared their stories on Tumblr.

People read them and figured, we're all going through the same shit.

We're gonna occupy. What do you do? I mean, what is your job?

I'm a single mom, I'm a grad student and I'm unemployed.

You know, last year I paid more tax than General Electric.

Man, they bailed out the 1%, they fucked the 99%.

But, you know what, we're taking our future into our own hands.

Here we go, here we go!

And...

Boom!

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Yeah! Yes!

Yes!

All right!

BOTH: Mic check!

AUDIENCE: Mic check!

Look around!

You are a part...

You are a part...

..of a global uprising.

..of a global uprising.

We are a cry...

We are a cry...

..from the heart... ..from the heart...

..of the world!

..of the world!

We are unstoppable, another world is possible!

Go!

We are unstoppable, another world is possible!

Again!

We are unstoppable, another world is possible!

Thing is, man, 99% -

this reads as the Bat symbol.

It's culturally legible.

It's a call to arms, a distress call from Gotham City.

But instead of a superhero millionaire psychopath

like Bruce Wayne, Batman coming to our rescue,

we've only got ourselves.

It's the 99% coming to save itself.

There is no Batman, dude!

The superhero's who's gonna save us...

..is us.

SIREN BLARES

Now, that's impressive.

To think it through like that, to say,

"I know what's happening in the history I'm living through."

But do you really think it's unstoppable?

So I'm in a riot in Athens, and, as you do in a riot in Athens,

I'm trying to have coffee with a contact.

And this is a key activist in the Syriza party,

that's the far-left.

They've been nowhere for years, but now, because of this,

they're doing really well in the polls.

Hard as nails, been in politics for years, same generation as me,

read all the books - Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, and she says...

We can't put up with austerity much longer!

People can't live like this.

We need a voice the German government will listen to,

someone above the political system,

someone like Jaques Chirac or Kirchner in Argentina.

A figure from the ruling class who actually understands.

Austerity is going to kill Europe.

Someone to step in, to just call a halt.

And I said to her, "Don't you realise it's going to be you?"

There was a weird moment, she looked at me.

I said, "Don't you realise it's going to be Syriza,

"it's going to be you."

I told my bosses, "Look, the Greek far-left is going

"to win an election. And with all this energy behind them,

"they'll take on Europe, and then, as we call it in macroeconomics,

"the euro will go to shit."

Oh, come on, Paul, it was hardly the entire population of Athens

on the streets, was it? And certainly not the entire

population of Greece. But if people are, as you say,

in such numbers losing faith, where does that lead?

My editor said to me, "Paul, we think you need to get out of Athens

"and go somewhere normal."

BELL RINGS

I'm not seeing any election posters.

It's a nice place.

People are actually moving here from the city.

It's deep Greece, real Greece.

We should have gone to the village with the election posters.

Oh, come on.

Look, come.

THEY SPEAK GREEK

English television.

We're doing a report about the election...

SHE SPEAKS GREEK

You know Greek? A little.

Please, we only have two chairs.

The bank foreclosed on the other one.

LAUGHTER

Why you come here? GPS go wrong?

Good thing about Greece, the sunshine is free.

They haven't sold it to China yet.

What party do you support?

Listen, miss...

for 20 years in this village, no election campaign.

Vote PASOK every time.

PASOK is the mainstream socialist party.

Cows come home from milking.

When sun goes down, people go to elections for milking by PASOK.

But now...

..all shops are closed.

I make just money enough to pay taxes and stay out of jail.

We had enough. What's the problem with PASOK?

Problem not PASOK.

Problem is octopus.

Octopus has eight legs, yes?

You know what octopus does?

Always, it is sucking.

Sucking your blood.

Look.

Octopus is Goldman Sachs.

World's most powerful investment bank.

Deep Greece, yeah?

Press your red button and roll on this.

Sir, have a seat.

Please continue.

Listen.

2001, Goldman Sachs gives Greece secret loan.

2.8 billion.

Loan goes bad.

Now Greece owes five billion.

Wall Street goes bust, Goldman Sachs bailed out.

Greece goes bust, European Central Bank tells Greece -

cut wages, cut pensions, cut hospitals!

Who is boss of European Central Bank?

Mario Draghi.

Who was boss of Goldman Sachs international division 2002 to 2005?

Mario Draghi.

But Draghi wasn't there when the loan was made... Oh, come on!

Look, let me just ask you one thing.

Golden Dawn.

Golden Dawn is the neo-fascist party.

What do you think of Golden Dawn?

You see this wall?

1944, my grandma, she captured Nazi officer,

hang him from this hook, takes knife and...

What would your grandma think of Greece today?

Yeah, listen, have you got any old photos of Grandma?

We could maybe film you looking at them... Photographs!

Grandma!

LAUGHTER Come here!

The Germans came to this village in 1941 to kill us.

Now the Germans tell us our pensions must be cut in half.

Aged 94, I earn more than my grandchildren.

The mountains are howling with Greek blood.

Every Easter for 1,000 years, we roast lamb.

Next year, if we have to, we take a loaf of bread, baste it

in olive oil, oregano, we roast that.

But surrender to Germany?

European Central Bank, IMF?

Never.

Never!

NEVER!

We have to vote for him!

For Syriza!

For the one who says to IMF, Berlin, Brussels, ECB,

Goldman Sachs, "Fuck you!"

The one who says...

HE SPEAKS GREEK

THEY BOTH CHANT IN GREEK

BELL TOLLS

BELL TOLLS

BELL TOLLS

Syriza lost the election.

But only just.

I was in their HQ when they heard the news.

We lost.

Thank God.

We were not ready.

And I'm thinking, not ready for what?

Gezi Park in Istanbul.

It's the last green space in the downtown of the city,

so naturally the government wants to turn it into a shopping mall.

People protest. They set up a tent camp.

10,000 people come - and more.

Some people drink beer.

Some women do yoga in leotards.

Some boys put their arms around some girls.

To them it means, "green space, not concrete,"

or, "democracy, not autocratic rule."

Erdogan, the prime minister, calls them "terrorists," "traitors."

The police attack.

People build barricades, brick by brick.

Like we did in the commune.

Stop, stop, stay calm!

Every football team is here! Besiktas! Fenerbahce! Galatasaray!

You are safe! They're not coming!

CS gas is not really gas, it's powder,

so don't put water on your face, it only makes it worse.

Use this, does anybody want? Hey! Do you want? Where are you from?

England. What team? What team? Man United. A-ah!

What team are you from? Besiktas! But we're all here together.

I thought you guys hated each other's guts.

We do! On a normal day we'd knife each other,

but here we are all brothers. I mean, look.

They fire these at our faces. You want to film? Yeah.

Listen. Everybody's here - teachers, lawyers, engineers.

We are all Muslims, but I don't want my country to end up like Iran!

THEY CHANT IN TURKISH

Last week, I was walking down the street, and this religious

asshole with a beard says to me that this is immodest!

This!

This is my own body!

Listen, what are you going to do, though,

if 50% of society hates your guts?

What are we going to do? Yes. Watch...

SOFT SLOW MUSIC PLAYS

All this happened in the commune too.

But to kill 30,000 revolutionaries,

all you need is 10,000 idiots deluded by aristocrats and priests.

Listen, you can take your aristocrats and your priests,

and your idiots and your imams,

but with a digital network...

You can have all the newspapers owned by millionaires,

you can have the TV owned by the state,

but truth will always travel faster than lies.

The reactionaries also have cell phones.

What if their lies overtake your truth?

Well, what happens then is you get two truths, yeah? Two truths.

The true truth, and the reactionary fascist dingbat truth.

Suppose they shut the internet down?

They do. They've just done it in Turkey, they keep trying.

But you can't de-network people's brains.

Look, do you think that generation is going to go back to

a world of hierarchy and propaganda and bullshit?

What I know is there is always another way things can go.

Something much worse - something you thought would never return.

In one country after another, people were offered the future -

and they said, "No, thanks."

So some people with power started to face a choice between democracy

and a Rolex watch, or between the rule of law and keeping hold of your

yacht, and some said, "I'll take the Rolex watch and the yacht, please."

But if you don't want the future which so many people fought for

and some even started to live,

what you are going to get is the past.

GIRL SINGS

GIRL SINGS

SUDDEN EXPLOSION

From now on, all the hierarchical forces in the world strike back.

In Egypt, the army overthrows the elected government,

the Muslim Brotherhood.

Now, millions of people go on the streets to support the army,

some because they are terrified that Egypt's going to become

an Islamic state.

Others because they're just exhausted by the chaos

of the revolution.

But the Muslim Brotherhood -

they understand about networks and tent camps.

And they occupy a square.

On the 14th of August, 2013, the Egyptian army clears the square.

817 people are killed...

..we think.

They weren't counting.

According to Human Rights Watch,

this is the biggest single mass killing of protesters in one day,

in modern history.

In November, 2013, the army brings in a law

to ban all protest.

It's called the Protest Law...

and the students and the bloggers and the secular young people,

who'd started the revolution,

they call a protest against the Protest Law...

and it lasts about five minutes.

And some are put in jail.

Like the blogger -

Alaa Abdel Fattah.

PIANO MUSIC

In prison, I try to make up for my inactivity

and my helplessness - by reading.

I read, amongst other things, about autism.

Autism is a good metaphor for our condition.

A child loses the ability to speak.

A generation loses the ability to chant.

The thing is, with letters from prison,

sometimes you have to work out what they really mean.

While I was writing, a busload of prisoners

came from a jail where things are...bad.

The state produced the Protest Law to use against the Brotherhood.

But we insisted on trying it out first, with our own bodies.

According to Amnesty International, torture

and arbitrary detention are widespread in Egypt.

Methods of torture include electric shocks, rape,

cigarette burns, hanging from a door.

We've been expecting them since the news

of their torture was leaked into the papers.

We tried to prepare but...

..how do you welcome a friend

who has been through the battle with you...

but been through this experience alone?

We adopt autism.

We don't allow ourselves to connect with how they're feeling.

We greet them with a detailed report about the facts.

They reply with similar autism.

With a detailed report about the torture, in a steady,

mechanical delivery with no embarrassment,

no concealment.

People with autism, their problem is...

there are hidden rules they just can't understand.

Now, in Egypt, there are hidden rules,

a hidden constitution.

Perhaps it is a kind of autism that blinds us to this

hidden constitution.

A disability that makes us unable to learn

the hidden rules by instinct.

An autism which makes us take our own words literally

and so believe, for example, that the revolution really continues!

Or that the people really demand the fall of the regime.

The blogger, Alaa Abd El-Fattah,

remains in prison for breaking the Protest Law.

In February 2017, when he insisted on his right

to read books in prison, the authorities

cancelled the right to read books for everybody in the jail.

From about 2014, history seemed to speed up.

As well as war and repression,

I started to notice this attack on truth.

Large numbers of people seem to be convinced that

objective truth itself was becoming...

impossible.

But it was not until December 2014

that I sat down to write about it, on New Year's Eve.

This is what I wrote on Facebook...

"The whole year is stained for me by the global disorder

"attendant on the USA's withdrawal from a world it's pre-messed up.

"Ukraine, an authoritarian regime in Moscow,

"half of Syria and Iraq under Isis control,

"and my Twitter timeline full of dead bodies and refugees.

"I'm not calling for the USA to go in and sort it out,

"I'm just holding the whole thing up as a warning.

"This situation is getting equally serious to the mid-1930s.

"We are sliding towards a world of chaos and dictatorship

"and lawlessness and violence. And the plane journeys

"me and my colleagues are taking to get there just get shorter.

"Meanwhile, there is a rising froth of disbelief.

"Because, with every lie our media in America and Britain tell,

"it just gets worse.

"People like Sisi in Egypt and Putin in Russia

"and Erdogan in Turkey just revel in the confusion.

"And so, nothing is true.

"All media are foreign spies.

"All footage is doctored.

"All images are Photoshopped.

"And all outrages are expected.

"The aim is to make journalists

"and activists give up.

"Because what's the point?

"Nothing's worth the trouble or the risk

"because you're never going to be believed."

And yet, people go on resisting.

In New York City, there are people in the streets protesting

because the police choked a black man to death.

And they're chanting.

"I can't breathe.

"I can't breathe."

What I want you to consider is,

with everything you wrote or said,

did you help cause the car crash?

CHEERING PLAYS

'What will you do to the oligarchy?'

We are going to destroy the basis upon which they have built

for decade after decade a system, a network,

that viciously sucks the energy

and economic power from everybody else in society.

BELL TOLLS

It's midnight.

Greece is officially bankrupt.

Cheers. ALL: Cheers. Cheers, everybody.

Cheers, cheers, cheers, cheers.

I'm in a bar in Athens

and the banks have now been closed for 11 days.

Syriza, the left party, won the election,

but now, they're in Brussels trying to negotiate a compromise.

Meanwhile, the European Central Bank, all they want is surrender.

And with every hour, things get worse.

It's like we are living under a siege.

See how quiet it is?

It's the same all over the city.

If anyone has any cash left, they don't want to spend it.

Everybody needs a drink, but they are thinking,

"Is this the last one I will ever buy?"

Don't worry, I've got money.

Huh? Next round is on me.

It's on me, malakas.

Look. Hey! Raki all around, huh?

Hey!

Handsome.

Come, you want to go to the strip club? Huh?

Didn't you hear,

five euros is all it costs for a blow job now.

SHE LAUGHS

She teaches in a nursery.

LAUGHTER

The mothers are in tears when they drop off their children

because they have no money to pay, so...

Yeah, look. Look, huh?

Look. Look. Huh?

A little boy says to me, "My mother has no more euros,

"so I drew her some."

With this crayons. He cut it out with his little scissors.

Shit. What?

They closed the Nestle factory. No.

We'll be out of baby milk in a week.

It's a rumour. It's not true. How do you know?

Hold on.

Shit. Maybe it is.

Listen, I spoke to this contact today - he's in corporate security -

and he told me the pharmacies are going to close

way before the bakeries. You've got three days left,

and after that, the question is going to be...

We know what the question is.

No, the question is,

when the doctors run out of medicine,

can Syriza go to the pharmacies, open them up, take what they need

and distribute it themselves? Huh?

Same for the hospitals -

run them without wages,

without electricity.

The Athenian commune, it's what we always dreamed of,

to control the streets, to inflict chaos.

The Greek oligarchy.

They are itching to intervene.

There is enough fascists in the riot police to make it happen.

But they understand -

Syriza is controlled chaos.

Without Syriza, uncontrolled chaos.

I said to the Syriza guy - he was a tough, committed activist,

about my age - "Can you do it, though?"

Do what? Stage the Athenian commune.

Say to the European Central Bank, "Fuck you," and default?

Your banks could close forever.

SHE LAUGHS Forever?

Hey, good for us! We just killed capitalism.

Is Syriza up for it, though?

Last time we took on the Greek ruling class,

in the '70s...

..my dad was one of the most severely tortured.

My mum's torture was to watch it happen.

Everybody standing outside parliament,

everybody holding a banner,

everybody in the party

knows somebody like that.

Are YOU up for it, though?

Like you, like everybody, I'm just following Twitter, WhatsApp,

Messenger, waiting to see.

I had that conversation so many times.

Everybody's got something at stake, and it doesn't have to be much -

small house in the village, your kid's music lesson.

But at some point, you have to look over the precipice

and ask yourself,

"Am I prepared to risk it all?"

If there was a government to overthrow, we could do it.

But we control the government.

It's just that the government is not in control of Greece.

Listen, the rumour is from the talks that the

European negotiators are saying to the Greeks,

"Surrender now, or we turn your country into Afghanistan."

Who wants to live in Afghanistan?

When this bullshit is over...

let's go to my island. Huh?

My uncle, he has a lavender farm.

He brews tsipouro, 60%.

On the beach, there are wild horses and a tavern.

You write poetry?

Well, my poetry is probably shit.

But you know what?

On the island, it sounds OK.

PAUL LAUGHS

And that is what happens

if you don't want to replace one power with another power.

And if you can't dissolve power

and replace it with something better,

sooner or later,

somebody comes along who does want power,

and lots of it.

APPLAUSE PLAYS

What are the Republican Party doing to themselves?

I mean, bloody hell, did you see that debate?

What you have to understand is that, for the Republican right -

the Tea Party, the Evangelicals -

this is not about winning in November.

This is about punishing mainstream Republicans in Congress

for failing to stop Obama.

Wow.

I was in Washington last week,

and my contacts were very clear

that this could go right to convention. What you're saying is,

there's no chance they'll pick a moderate Republican?

There are no moderate Republicans. Grow up.

Look at the demographics, all right? BEEP

Secretary Clinton is polling very well amongst white men with degrees.

I mean, normally white, male college graduates are strongly Republican.

BEEP

But as of today, right now, we are 45-45.

And the whole FBI thing with the e-mails -

I mean, that's just fucking bollocks, isn't it?

Put another way,

is Hillary Clinton convinced she's not going to get indicted?

Look, they've said that investigation is closed, all right?

And the working class? Thank you, yes.

Well, it depends who the Republicans pick. All right?

Trump is strong amongst white male, no college,

but that is only 17% of America.

So it's a dead cert?

But this is a tipping point!

The right is losing the culture war.

I mean, Paul, you yourself have written about it -

the new, networked, globally-minded person,

tolerant of unorthodox relationships.

The new kind of person? Yes. Yes.

This is the new majority.

SHE SIGHS Look,

we believe, barring accidents,

that November 2016 is going to be not just a landslide...

BEEP

..for the Democrats... SHE LAUGHS

..but an earthquake.

The weird thing is, we watched it happen.

Like a car crash.

The liberal centre in politics spends five years

attacking the radical, young, networked protesters,

and they say to working-class people from small towns

where there's very little hope,

"There's no alternative to this."

Erdogan in Turkey then sends a million Syrian refugees

to Europe, and Merkel says, "All welcome."

Assad drops chlorine gas on Aleppo.

Obama says, "So what?"

Putin annexes Crimea.

So what?

The European Central Bank smashes Greece.

All the economists in the Western world applaud.

It's like liberal democracy had a death wish.

And the internet, which was a network for expanding truth,

becomes a machine in the hands of hierarchies for obliterating

the possibility of objective truth at all.

POUNDING DANCE MUSIC

That's how we got from 2011 to Donald Trump.

The young generation used networks to protest.

The rich used money, power and inertia to stop them.

And truth became post-truth.

The borders were strengthened everywhere,

including people's minds.

The commune was surrounded.

It had only death on its horizon.

It could only be brave, and it was.

And in dying, it pushed the door wide open to the future

that was its destiny.

People say, "I am brave."

Not really.

People are simply entranced by events.

I told you it would end badly.

What they are trying to do is to convince us that

the last 30 years was all a dream.

Women's rights, gay rights, human rights.

The idea that black lives actually do matter.

All a dream,

and if you still think it's real, you are crazy.

People seem haunted by a fear of freedom.

They want to be told climate science is bullshit,

that we're going to make country X great again,

that all the news is fake,

so it's much better to trust your gut instinct.

What sticks with me...

is the Bat symbol guy.

The 99%.

There is nobody coming to save us.

The superhero that's going to save us

is us.

So what can we do?

Well, for one thing, we can find each other

across real spaces like this.

When they asked me to do this play, I said, "Brilliant.

"That's just what we should do,

"but we have to start with Brecht.

"Because Brecht says, in a time of crisis,

"the theatre has to be like a man who has seen a car crash

"and says to the bystanders,

"'Here is what happened.'"

They said, "Well, how is it going to end?"

I said, "An actor will read out a poem from Tunisia -

"an old poem popular during the Arab Spring.

"It goes...

"'When the people decide to live, destiny must obey

"'Darkness will disappear, and chains will be broken

"'And he who is not embraced by the will to life

"'Will dissolve and vanish into the air.'"

HE RECITES POEM IN ORIGINAL LANGUAGE

APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

Promise me that you'll come and find me.

You surely don't think that we could

set up house together like man and wife?