“Behaviour that causes the public or a section of the public to suffer serious annoyance.” That’s what could be criminalised by the new police, crime, sentencing and courts bill, and it leaves Mark Thomas in a delicate position – as a man to whom annoyance is a lifelong calling. He’s cobbled together this show as an emergency response, he says: neither comedy nor theatre, but “an angry workshop” about the value of public protest, seen through the lens of decades’ personal experience.
There may be workshop elements – Thomas solicits his audience’s demo anecdotes, and shouts out campaigning comrades in the crowd. But far from being “angry”, Seriously Annoying is heartfelt and celebratory. The emphasis is more personal than in some of Thomas’s political work, as he looks back on his Clapham childhood and violent dad to explain the professional public nuisance he later became. Locked down with his mum yards from where Sarah Everard was abducted, he cites the events following Everard’s disappearance as a wake-up call to those with a rose-tinted view of how protest is policed.
The point is that protest can’t be anything other than “annoying”; that’s how it works. There are countless colourful examples from Thomas’s campaigning career, from his awkward maiden appearance at a 1980s Babies Against the Bomb march, via the exhilaration of the poll tax “riots”, to a world-record bid to stage multiple demos on the same day. These misadventures are backed up by audio interviews with activists and lawyers, whose faces Thomas holds up on placards, warning of the grave civil-liberties consequences if the police bill passes.
The comedy plays second fiddle to the call-to-arms – which is fine, when the call-to-arms is this necessary. We live in such unremittingly grim times, the police bill risks passing against a backdrop of public fatalism. Props to Thomas for refusing to let that happen, with this stirring show that links political protest to the ancient English tradition of rough music, of “making noise when we feel communal values have been transgressed”. You’ll leave recommitted to the fight, against this appalling authoritarian government, to keep that tradition alive.
Seriously Annoying is at Arcola theatre, London, until 21 August.
