Staging Pussy Riot

Everybody wants a piece of the Pussy Riot pie. Anarchists and anti-capitalists claim them as their own, feminists laud them, and nostalgists hope they will be the seeds of a punk revival. Prominent figures from Slavoj Žižek to Madonna have spoken out in support, while barely a day goes by when they aren’t referred to in the media. Before long Pussy Riot will have their own adjective: “It was very Pussy Riotesque,” “I’m feeling quite Pussy Riotous today.”

And so an afternoon of Pussy Riotous theatre and debate took place at the Royal Court Theatre last Saturday. The brainchild of writer EV Crowe (whose play Hero opens there later this month and was recommended in the page of Prospect), it featured short plays by Russian and British playwrights, written in response to the band members’ actions and trial. This was followed by a discussion, chaired by London Review of Books journalist Joanna Biggs and comprising Crowe, singer-songwriter Emmy the Great, poet Kate Tempest and journalist Vadim Nikitin. (It was refreshing to see a panel made up of four women and one man.)

Several plays—varying in length and tone but uniformly clever—were interspersed with prayers to the Virgin Mary, echoing Pussy Riot’s infamous song “Mother of God, Drive Putin Out.” These monologues were spoken by women from different points in Russian history, a neat way of linking the pieces while highlighting the hypocrisy of Russia’s successive regimes. For the finale, we were given our own balaclavas and persuaded to dance and genuflect with the actors in imitation of Pussy Riot’s protest in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Public protest has recently taken a turn towards appropriating the identity of the victim (“we are the 99 per cent,” “I am Troy Davis”) and Pussy Riot’s luminous balaclavas are brilliantly suited to this task. Whether in Sloane Square or Red Square, you can be a Pussy Rioter too.

The discussion which followed moved beyond Pussy Riot to ask, “Are feminist artists in Britain just ‘pussy?’” Biggs skilfully included the audience, and attention was devoted to female self-censorship, the difficulty of creating art with a female voice and the absence of middle-aged women in the arts and media. Attempts by Nikitin (the sole male panellist) to consider the wider political implications of Pussy Riot were allowed to drift away.

This was unfortunate. With lyrics like, “The Orthodox religion of a hard penis/Patients are asked to accept conformity” (“Putin Zassal”), Pussy Riot refuse to isolate feminism from other political concerns. The audience were more interested in the hard penis than the patients. It would have been good to consider Pussy Riot on their own terms: to question whether all oppression is derived from patriarchy, to ask if we lack our own radical feminist artists because British women are depoliticised.

The discussion never turned into a debate. No one in attendance seemed to disagree with the conclusions. Although the panel, for all its eloquence, could have been more diverse, it would be difficult to attract a different audience. Tempest raised this very dilemma, suggesting that if she wrote a feminist poem, it would only irritate and isolate the very people she seeks to convince.

Pussy Riot face a similar problem: they have alienated many of their fellow Russians while attempting to engage with them. After they were sentenced in August, a poll found that more than half of their compatriots deemed their punishment “fair.” For these Russians, Pussy Riot are university-educated snobs with nothing better to do than leap about in balaclavas attacking one of the foundations of Russian culture (Russian Orthodoxy, that is, not political oppression).

By raising these troubling questions, whether directly or not, the event demonstrated its worth. We move too readily from one story to the next, and with two members of Pussy Riot now in remote prison camps while a third is under a suspended sentence, it is easy to neglect the debates that their actions sparked. Events that mix discussion with creative expression are an intelligent way of keeping the conversation going. Pussy Riot pie tastes good—we must not let it go stale.