Olivier winner John Lithgow attacks Trump's second presidency as ‘a disaster' for US arts
The actor John Lithgow has described Donald Trump's second presidency as 'a pure disaster' for the arts in the US. Lithgow, speaking after his best actor victory at the Olivier awards in London on Sunday, singled out Trump's takeover of the Kennedy Center, Washington DC's national institution for the performing arts. 'Our administration has done some shocking, destructive things,' he said, 'but the one that grieves me most is taking over the Kennedy Center.'
The US president is now chair of the prestigious cultural complex (which was founded as a government-funded, bipartisan venue) and has installed new board members and a new interim leader, loyalist Ric Grenell. The board had been in the process of selecting a successor to outgoing leader Deborah Rutter, who in January announced her intention to step down after 11 years.
'Deborah Rutter was fired from her position as president – even though she'd already resigned and had [several] months to go,' said Lithgow. 'She's a very good friend of mine. We co-chaired a commission on the arts [launched by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2018] and spent three years finding out the state of the arts in America [was] in crisis. Well, it's really in crisis now. First there was coronavirus, now there's this.'
Lithgow was named best actor at the Oliviers for his performance as Roald Dahl in Mark Rosenblatt's play Giant, which ran at the Royal Court last year and transfers to the West End later this month. In his acceptance speech, the actor – best known for the TV comedy 3rd Rock from the Sun – said that this moment was 'more complicated than usual' for relations between the US and the UK but that he personally felt the special relationship was 'intact'.
Lithgow described himself as 'a curious kind of hybrid Englishman', reflecting on the films and TV series he has made in the UK and his stage appearances, which have included Twelfth Night with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2007 and The Magistrate at the National Theatre in 2012.
'I grew up with Shakespeare,' he said. 'My father was a producer of Shakespeare festivals in Ohio. He was a regional theatre artistic director. I was in 20 Shakespeare plays by the time I was 20 years old … I came over and went to Lamda [the London drama school] after my college years. When I returned, everyone thought I was English … My sister said to me: 'I'm not going to talk to you until you stop talking in that pretentious English accent!''
While assessing the current climate for the arts in the US as 'a pure disaster – really disheartening', Lithgow said that 'it gives us all something to fight for and I think the arts are animated by that. Right now, everybody is in shock.' Once that shock has passed, he acknowledged that 'bad times create good art'.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Glasgow Times
42 minutes ago
- Glasgow Times
Glasgow festival first as 'world's most famous detective' makes debut
Now, 25 years on, he is bringing them back to the popular outdoor Shakespeare festival, which kicks off later this month in the Botanic Gardens in the West End. 'A Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet sparked a life-long love of Shakespeare,' he explains. Gordon Barr (Image: Bard in the Botanics) 'His plays have such incredible depth that no matter how often you return to them there is always more to discover.' Gordon adds: 'It is a great pleasure to revisit these two plays for the 2025 season, with more than two decades of experience under my belt.' Bard in the Botanics has announced its Magic, Mayhem and Murder season will open on June 27 and run until August 2. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Bard company stalwart Alan Steele plays Bottom with festival regulars James Boal and Claire Macallister as Oberon and Titania. (Image: Bard in the Botanics) Gordon says the production 'draws on Celtic and British folklore to create a magical version of the evergreen comedy.' The second half of the season, which starts on July 18, includes a new production of Gordon's five-hander Romeo and Juliet, which was last staged in 2012. Sam Stopford takes on the role of Romeo with Lola Aluko as Juliet. Romeo and Juliet (Image: Bard in the Botanics) In the Kibble Palace glasshouse, Jennifer Dick will direct a new production of her adaptation of Marlowe's Dr Faustus with Adam Donaldson as Faustus and Sam Stopford as Mephistopheles, and in the second half of the season, she will present Sherlock Holmes: A Scandal in Bohemia. Dr Faustus (Image: Bard in the Botanics) Bard in the Botanics is not just about Shakespeare, points out Gordon. 'Whilst Shakespeare remains at the heart of Bard in the Botanics, as we continue to explore more of the canon of classic drama and literature, it's exciting to bring the work of another Scottish author to our stages – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,' he says. Sherlock Holmes: A Scandal in Bohemia (Image: Bard in the Botanics) 'His Sherlock Holmes stories have delighted generations of readers and I can't wait for our associate director, Jennifer Dick, to bring three of those stories to life in the Kibble Palace in a brand new play featuring the world's foremost consulting detective. 'This season is full of great stories – some of the best and most enduring stories ever told. From the iconic lovers of Romeo and Juliet to Faustus' pact with the devil to the thrilling adventures of Sherlock Holmes, there's really something for everyone.' For more information and tickets, visit the Bard in the Botanics website.
The Herald Scotland
an hour ago
- The Herald Scotland
Wild animals shouldn't be kept as pets. It's like a prison sentence...
And we don't just mean the teensy-weensy pooches that Hollywood starlets plop in their Gucci shoulder bags, before schlepping them on to the red carpet for a photo opportunity. No, apparently some Americans also own pet zebras, which are very difficult to squeeze into a shoulder bag, Gucci or otherwise. They also don't particularly enjoy being pets, which probably explains why a zebra named Ed did a runner in Tennessee. The stripey escape artist seemed to be enjoying his freedom. Unfortunately those pesky humans managed to nab him, and he was airlifted in a giant net back to his owner. Reader Bruce Martin was telling his wife, Sally, about the great escape and the even greater capture. 'That's horrible,' winced Sally. 'Wild animals shouldn't be kept as pets. It's like a prison sentence for the poor things.' 'It's not so bad for a zebra,' reasoned Bruce. 'They're already behind bars.' Mind your language The audacious Diary is daring to venture where few adults (who aren't in possession of a teacher's certificate) have the boldness to tread. That's right, folks. We're tip-toeing through the school gates of Scotland's schools to discover what the young scholars have been up to. An English teacher in one of Glasgow's finer educational establishments tells us that a curious student wanted to know: 'Where do they speak jargon?' Read more: When a Glasgow teacher gives a young scholar dietary advice... Money matters These are fiscally ferocious times. Inflation isn't just through the roof, it's now blasting into the stratosphere and will soon be colliding with one of Elon Musk's rockets. Thankfully reader Brenda Collins knows how to scrimp and save. 'I'm great at budgeting,' she boasts. 'Unless there's a dress I want, or a great new wine bar opened in town, or I'm desperate to buy my 100th pair of high heels…' Work or shirk? Overheard by reader Mark Talbot on a Newton Mearns bus. One teenage girl said to her pal: 'My mum wants me to study really hard and go to uni. But why should I? Being intelligent is so uncool.' Bad habit When a pal of Trish Cummings slipped a packet of cigarettes from her bag, Trish said: 'You told me you'd stopped smoking for good.' 'I did,' nodded the pal. 'Now I smoke for evil.' Fine without spine Politically engaged reader Craig Ellis points out: 'The fact that jellyfish have survived for 650 million years despite not having brains or a spine gives hope to the entire political class in Holyrood.'
New Statesman
an hour ago
- New Statesman
We are all Mrs Dalloway now
Photo byEveryone has cracks; we hear that's how the light gets in. Adeline Virginia Stephen wanted a life flooded with light. Marrying her husband, Leonard Woolf, in 1912, she said she wanted 'everything – love, children, adventure, intimacy, work'. In her masterpiece Mrs Dalloway, published a century ago, she wanted 'all inner feelings to be lit up'. But so much light meant so many cracks. Virginia Woolf is now such a large figure in global literary culture that she has at least 15 full-length biographies. But Mark Hussey's new Mrs Dalloway is a biography of a novel by Woolf, relaying its conception, execution and propagation. Hussey is Professor of English at New York's Pace University, and we believe him when he tells us Woolf is 'my favourite writer': he has published several books on her, and includes a charmingly domestic photo of his personal Dalloway stash, piled 20 editions high, which he started over 50 years ago. By scholarship's best guess, Dalloway's scene – 'life; London; this moment of June' – is 11 June 1923. For the last eight years, with Woolf's reputation higher than ever, a 'Dalloway Day' has been celebrated, with tours of Woolf's London led by the Virginia Woolf Society. The festivities will be particularly exuberant this year, the centenary of Dalloway's publication. Walkers will see Bloomsbury and Westminster in all the 'absorbing, mysterious… infinite richness' Woolf imbued them with, 'as if in the presence of some sacred ceremony to interrupt which would have been impious'. The amusements may sound little more than a short walk around central London. But so, really, might the book's plot. In the story, a politician's fashionable wife, Clarissa Dalloway, gives a fancy party, and a traumatised young veteran of the First World War, Septimus Warren Smith, kills himself after his doctors neglect him. Hussey is correct that, asked what the book is about, one might answer 'not much.' But, of course, for Woolf it was all about what was happening inside her characters. In that way she was of her modernist cohort, trying to find her artistic bearings after the moment 'on or about December 1910', as she put it, when 'human character changed'. To Woolf, to Joyce, to Proust, there had been what Hussey calls 'a fundamental shift in relations' between subject, object, and the nature of reality. What Woolf called Edwardian writing was futile just as describing a house's exterior was futile to convey the soul who slept inside. If art was to answer the 'astonishing disorder' of modernity, it had to directly penetrate conscious experience. It was an ambitious project, but Woolf felt confident. She had brought off two fairly conventional novels, and her more daring third, Jacob's Room, had attained wide praise. She felt she could write freely, and that she at last knew 'how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice'. Or, putting it another way, that she was 'beginning to learn the mechanism of my own brain'. Her voice was her mental mechanism, however flawed that mechanism. Woolf had had to stay in a private nursing home after a severe breakdown that came a year after the marriage from which she wanted everything. A few months later, chance alone her saved her from death, after she took a deliberate overdose of Veronal (a sleeping aid). And two years after that she had suffered another severe breakdown. But with her confidence and reputation waxing, she felt 'madness is terrific… in its lava I find most of the things I write about'. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Readers liked in her what she liked in those she read: what she called 'queer individuality'. So the project was to inspect her self as it shattered and reconstituted. No humans were 'as they used to hold, immaculate, monolithic, consistent wholes'. Instead they were 'splinters & mosaics', and art should show them as such. A plane broken to pieces and put together again became a mosaic, and thereby turned particular, beautiful, and more interestingly refractive. At one point in the novel, Clarissa Dalloway is seen mending her dress. To do full justice to her 'queer individuality', she devised for Mrs Dalloway a 'queer & masterful' design. For it, she had 'almost too many ideas. I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity.' So she devised Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith, who would show 'the world seen by the sane & the insane side by side' and who, as in a long-held idea for a play, would only ever 'almost meet – only a door between – you see how they just miss – and go off at a tangent, and never come anywhere near again'. But they did come near again. The problem we all know, visible in the book and its author's life, is that the separation did not hold. Sanity went into insanity, life went into death. In 1941, Woolf drowned herself in the River Ouse. Clarissa does not commit suicide, but was originally intended to, and it may be telling that one early reader mistakenly believed she had after finishing the book. Septimus, a shell-shocked veteran of the First World War, who fought to defend Shakespeare's England, does kill himself, and gives lie to the vision of art as individualisation. If the war launched Woolf's project, it also undermined it. Compare Woolf's artistic vision of splinters and mosaics, of lively Clarissa mending her dress, with her thoughts when visiting a relative, wounded during the First World War, in his hospital ward. She felt 'the uselessness of it all, breaking these people & mending them again'. It is hard to say what differentiates life-giving art from death-giving war. In one letter, Woolf described the War in artistic terms, as 'the preposterous masculine fiction'. Septimus is a traumatised veteran, but if any character has 'queer individuality' it is he. And he grows 'stranger and stranger', more and more alone, by allowing himself to think too much. The modernists thought leaving 'description' for 'insight' would help them ascertain truth; in fact it destroyed it. They were not writing, as they thought, after Einstein and Freud, but after their closer contemporary, Werner Heisenberg, the quantum physicist who found that electrons refused to be fixed under observation. So did the modern self, inspection only creating uncertainty. Woolf was closer than she knew on writing in her essay 'Modern Novels' that consciousness is an 'incessant shower of innumerable atoms'. The self-attention they hoped would achieve stability in fact wrecks it. The more you look, the less you know. Woolf's own metaphor was a 'tunnelling process', which allowed her to 'tunnel behind the façade of objective appearance' and reveal consciousness. But efforts to light up anything can only ever illuminate a new, deeper darkness. There is nothing at the back to reach. Clarissa feels 'the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone'. The best option might be to turn back while you still can. The generic life Woolf feared, inert and inartistic, 'mute & mitigated, in the suburbs,' may be preferable. Septimus loathes his boorish physician Dr Holmes, and Woolf loathed the psychiatrists she based him on. But it is hard to dismiss his insistence that introspection offers no delivery from itself, and his prescription that what Septimus really needs is to stop thinking about himself and become occupied by external things. To do so would certainly be to neglect his individuality, but the depths of his individuality killed him. Perhaps he should have joined the dull masses. The bores were right. In a preliminary, more frivolous appearance, the character of Clarissa Dalloway exclaimed, 'How much rather one would be a murderer than a bore!' How much? Mrs Dalloway contains the birth and the doom of the modern self. We are all Virginia Woolf's children. She wanted light and was determined that it could be found somewhere at the back of the 'dark region of psychology'. She never found it, but we have continued her search. Her 'queer individuality' is a public deity. That the unexamined life is not worth living is a truth inviolable; indeed we examine relentlessly. It is almost axiomatic that inward tunnelling breaks through to rewarding clarity. But Mrs Dalloway is a warning as much as guide. Perhaps, for once, we need not go deeper. [See also: Who's offended by Virginia Woolf?] Related
