In the summer of 2012, television offered a wall-to-wall presentation of performances like the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee including its procession of boats down the Thames, and the London summer Olympics and Paralympics Opening Ceremony. These asserted again and again the conception of Team GB. In a programme note, the Olympic event director, Danny Boyle, described that performance as ‘A ceremony that celebrates the creativity, eccentricity, daring and openness of the British genius by harnessing the genius, creativity, eccentricity, daring and openness of modern London’. This study will from time to time touch on what might or might not be meant by ‘the British genius’. No doubt, the host city should be foregrounded, but the easy slide from ‘British genius’ to ‘London’ hints, at the very least, at a certain metro-centricity. Within this, his Opening Ceremony represented a Britain united, what, on becoming Prime Minister in 2016, Theresa May referred to as the ‘precious union’, a phrase picked up and repeatedly used by Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt in their campaigns to succeed May in 2019. A two-minute film represented aspects of the United Kingdom, as the stadium depicted a somewhat unlikely, if good-humoured, idyll, ‘remembering’ a frolicsome version of English pastoral life of village-green cricket and dancing around the Maypole. This included a version of Glastonbury Tor, as the stadium performances were accompanied in turn by national songs of the four nations of the United Kingdom. England was represented in the stadium by ‘Jerusalem’; the other performances were relayed from iconic locations, Northern Ireland’s ‘Danny Boy’ from the Giant’s Causeway, Scotland’s ‘Flower of Scotland’ from Edinburgh Castle, and Wales’s ‘Bread of Heaven’ from Rhossili Beach on the Gower Peninsula. The three smaller nations were, therefore, represented as tourist destinations, two of them rural/coastal, so cheerfully objectivising their separate identities for consumer appropriation. ‘Bread of Heaven’ was sung not in William Williams’s original Welsh, but English. It would presumably have been unthinkable—or at least not for performance here—that a demonstration of British genius could be anything but monolingually Anglophone.
After the songs, Kenneth Branagh in the character of Isambard Kingdom Brunel led a party of ‘businessmen and industrialists’ in Victorian garb to intrude into the idyll. From the peak of the stadium’s Tor, Branagh delivered Caliban’s speech to a drunken rabble from Act 3 scene ii of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. This begins, ‘Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises, / Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not’. Then, the Industrial Revolution began, with an untoward impact on Jerusalem’s ‘green and pleasant land’. The introduction of Shakespeare so early in the performance raises issues of representations of ‘Britishness’ which will be briefly addressed later in this introduction and in more detail in Chapter 4. In passing, however, one may note that the reference to one of Shakespeare’s isles carries an unmistakable echo of John of Gaunt’s eulogy from Richard II to ‘this scepter’d isle’, ‘other Eden, demi-paradise’, ‘precious stone set in the silver sea’, ‘blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England’. The performance went on to include a variety of episodes, some played for humour and even a certain kitsch jolliness. These included an array of dancing nurses and hospital beds to celebrate the establishment of the National Health Service. The current ‘James Bond’ as performed by Daniel Craig apparently delivered the current Queen to the stadium via helicopter and parachute. Her ‘flight’ was accompanied by the playing of Eric Coates’s ‘Dam Busters March’, celebrating, perhaps untactfully, British versions of the Second World War. All these episodes and others performed a unitary vision of ‘Britain’ imagined as sharing a common history and traditions, all English language and, not least, underlying Brunel’s Shakespeare quotation, a kingdom united and imagined as a larger version of a version of ‘England’.
This performance of ‘Britishness’ followed an earlier Olympic ceremonial performance during the closing event of the 2008 Beijing Games. There, London set out its stall as the next host city. In doing this, in one of the more remarkable oddities of performative iconography, the Scottish gold-medal cyclist Chris Hoy rode a bicycle on the athletics track, accompanied by a red London bus. He wore a city suit and a bowler hat, rarely, if ever, now seen in the City of London. The sight of the Scottish champion on a bicycle not quite big enough for him alongside a double-decker bus was beyond parody. It certainly marked a version of London, or perhaps Britain-as-London, signified by stereotype and imagery designed for tourists, or at least non-residents. All of these Olympic performances highlight the fact that representations of Great Britain as the United Kingdom often depend on the elision, if not suppression, of differences in the sense of communities or national identities within the state, not to mention of constitutional realities. Yet, if Queen’s Diamond Jubilee street parties in London’s triumphant Olympic year for Team GB are an indication of the British nation’s unity, what is one to make of the fact that, despite the thousands held in England, only thirteen were held in Scotland? Tom Devine offers one possible, and striking, explanation of this difference:
When asked by British Future ‘Are you very proud of the Queen?’, 50 per cent of English respondents said ‘Yes’, compared with 15 per cent in Scotland. A total of 55 per cent of Scots compared with only 17 per cent of English answered that they were ‘not proud’.1
The 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games Opening Ceremony was directed by David Zolkwer, a highly experienced director of public ceremonial, from the 1997 Hong Kong Handover Ceremony to the 2002 Manchester Commonwealth Games Opening and beyond. The Glasgow ceremony performed versions of ‘Scottishness’ rather than of Anglicised Britishness. The celebratory focus again drew on varieties of kitsch, pushed arguably much further and, yet, more self-mockingly than in London, drawing on forms of Scottish Camp discussed in Chapter 9. The sense of joyous self-satire included dancing Tunnock’s Tea Cakes and the late Andy Stewart. This comedian-singer, much-loved and simultaneously much-despised because of his couthy tartanised image, rose on film from the grave. Rather than quoting Shakespeare or using standard English, he sang a welcome in Scots, with which he often began a BBC television programme he hosted, The White Heather Club (1958–1968)—itself excoriated by many and beloved by many:
Come in, come in, it’s nice tae see ye.
How’s yersel? Ye’re lookin grand.
Tak a seat and hae a drammie.
Man, ye’re welcome.
Here’s my hand.
This formed part of a contemporary mash-up with Dumfries-born Calvin Harris’s 2012 song ‘Feel So Close’ with its chorus ‘And there’s no stopping us right now’. It is hard to think of either of these images of a constituent part of the United Kingdom having been incorporated by Danny Boyle into the earlier ‘British’ opening ceremony. That expressed a quite different vision, a unitary nation, rather than, pace the opening choirs, nations combining to constitute the United Kingdom.
Not all these often-self-mocking and even deliberately clichéd Scottish images, of course, might carry much meaning beyond the Scottish border. Nonetheless, their performance in Glasgow was treated with jovial, even postmodern, irony rather than with the London event’s overall solemnity—despite the overwrought appearance of James Bond—while the performance of a progressive modern Scotland highlighted, inter alia, a gay kiss. That such performances matter, not least to politicians in power, may be deduced from the fact the then-Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon, over-ruled a plan that the Red Arrows flypast smoke-trail during the Glasgow ceremony would feature the Scottish Saltire’s blue and white. He insisted on its trailing instead the Union Flag’s red, white and blue.
Such a gesture might seem petty—and arguably was. The same Red Arrows had, after all, emitted Saltire-coloured flares fifteen years before, on the opening of the Scottish Parliament. Then, there was no inkling of the way the post-devolution politics of Scotland would develop. The Scottish Parliament whose opening was being celebrated was, whatever else, an outcome of the policies of the Labour government then in power in the UK. Perhaps, then, blue and white trails seemed ‘safe’ enough. Underlying such Conservative ‘pettiness’ in 2014, however, is surely a fear that, if the UK national air force celebrated the Saltire when a Scottish National Party government was in power in Scotland (and an independence referendum imminent), the performance of Scottishness might now have a deeper meaning. Given the change in the political context, the underlying significance of the colour of the flares was different. Or so, at least, it might seem in the conservative mind of a government minister.
Here, as in the rest of this book, we are engaged with the interaction of performance and performativity, both terms we will return to. One remembers that a performative act is one where a statement is in itself the very act: the speech-act itself effects change. The usual common example given is of the statement ‘I do’ in assenting to marriage. Nothing actually appears to happen when those words are spoken, but the speaking of the words changes everything about the status of the speaker in a wide variety of legal, economic, social and other ways. Even in the present day, when in Britain over 40% of marriages end in divorce, the performative act of the exchange of marriage vows, while not irrevocable (as it is still in some other cultures), has an impact. This is such that, even if it is indeed revoked, the fact it took place will mark permanent changes of status and have implications which remain even after divorce. The first clause of the 1998 Scotland Act is succinct: ‘There shall be a Scottish Parliament’. One might debate the extent to which an Act of Parliament on the point of its enactment is a performative act. By and large, such acts look forward to action which they permit, forbid or define rather than in themselves being performativ...