EU staffers! Macbeth could give you valuable career advice

Many European Union staffers were once frustrated actors. Either that, or frustrated journalists who were previously frustrated actors. Or frustrated actors-turned-interpreters who are now SUPER frustrated after years of having to regurgitate other people’s inanity, even if the job does pay eight thousand a month, and what they’d really like to do is grab that microphone and explain the facts of a messy divorce to all 116 members of the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee. In Gaelic. Of course.

This brings me to the Brussels Shakespeare Society.

The BSS is a loose association of frustrated actors who decided to cash in big-time by working at large public institutions. We also perform Shakespeare because it’s cheaper than therapy and we get to wear big, frilly clothes. And this summer, the BSS will hold a Shakespeare Summer Festival from 1-11 June at the Espace Lumen near Place Flagey.

The centrepiece of this Festival will be a production of Macbeth, a grim but joyful tale about a deputy head of unit who gleefully hacks his office-mates to death because they never wash the mugs in the break room.

Also, his wife, Lady Macbeth, thinks that her husband should have been a head of unit years ago. With the extra money, they’d now be living in a big lakeside house in Genval with the local train that runs right to Schuman without a single stop. But nooooo, he’s just a deputy head of unit, and they’re still squeezed into their little 2-bedroom in Etterbeek that doesn’t even have a garage or a garden.

Years ago, Lady Macbeth tried to launch a professional coaching career but that didn’t work because she went down a Netflix rabbit-hole and never climbed out.

Are you an EU staffer? Do you work in Brussels? Are you alive? Are you brain dead, but not clinically dead? How many fingers am I holding up? If you answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions, then you should come to see Macbeth. This play will help you out. It will give you valuable tips on how to not achieve your dreams. 

Also, the actors are fantastic. The guy playing Macbeth is actually Scottish. I mean, wow. Lady Macbeth is great, too. She really puts those professional coaching skills to work. And the witches are fabulous, hot, and crazy, but also deeply emphatic in their highly intelligent approach to the situation. You can really see where they’re coming from.

Hey! Don’t think that our Macbeth is the same as the Cohen brothers’ Macbeth. Oh no. For one, their Macbeth didn’t have a special cameo appearance by famed Belgian actor Benoît Poelvoorde. Ours doesn’t either. But we do have sexy dance numbers. You read that right. And cool steampunk costumes.

Also, the festival features three short original plays written by valiant frustrated actors who are still looking for their Big Break. By Big Break, I mean a Temporary Agent contract at DG ECHO.

The first play, Shortly to Go, is directed by local theatre luminary Tim Myers. The play was penned by Dimitrios Stasinopoulos and Illeas Konteas. Shortly to Go was the winner of the BSS’s 2021 playwriting competition. Pretty cool, eh? An award-winning play about Shakespeare written in Belgium by two Greeks. I haven’t read it yet, but the word is, it’s dynamite.

The second, Will.I.am am I?, is directed by all-around bonhomme Guilhem Chevalier. It was written by ‘Master of Chaos’ Stephen Challens, who is also the director of our Macbeth production. This imaginative work considers whether Shakespeare actually wrote his own masterpieces, or whether he farmed out the writing to the lead singer of the Black Eyed Peas. 

The third, Yellow, is directed by Geoffrey Mamdani, who also wrote the piece. Geoff is a speechwriter at the Commission. I’m amazed he found so many rhymes for Temporary Protection Directive. Supposedly, he gained inspiration for his writing by staring at looping Berlaymont B-roll shots on the Ebs audio-visual channel.

So have a look. You’ll say, ‘Wow, Macbeth showed me what not to do in life. I wonder if Lady Macbeth needs a new client. I wonder if she’d like a new love interest. I wonder if I need a therapist.’ Coming to our Festival might save you the money.

Patrick Stephenson is a frustrated person who sometimes performs in amateur plays. He is also the producer of Macbeth and the treasurer of the Brussels Shakespeare Society.

Did Ursula von der Leyen’s speech have a soul?

A good speech has a soul. Did European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s 2021 State of the Union speech have one?

The surprising answer is yes. Von der Leyen gave a pretty darn good speech, overall. And it had a soul, although you had to wait until the end to discover it. 

Let’s go through the speech and rate it. I’ll use the categories of delivery, structure, and rhetoric, and assign points to each. I’ll even give bonus points if the number of applause lines is larger than the number of intolerable clichés. 

Delivery

On the plus side, Von der Leyen has presence behind a podium. Her words are clipped, articulated, and comprehensible. She flips between English, French and German with a minimum of effort. She has stamina, and can maintain the intensity that a big speech demands. She exudes the seriousness and intelligence that you would expect of a major political figure. When she speaks, your instinct is to listen.

On the down side, Von der Leyen is not the most emotive of speakers. When wanting to make an emphatic point, her go-to move is a two-handed downward karate chop. At her most mechanical, she can look like an angry mother in a Westworld beauty pageant hectoring the judges that her android teenage daughter didn’t stuff anything anywhere during the swimsuit competition.

The audio-visual team tried to complement the speech in real time by adding videos or slides repeating lines that Von der Leyen had just read. The slides felt useful, particularly if I had not caught a number. The videos often were distracting. At one point in the beginning, I found myself watching someone peel potatoes. Why am I watching potato-peeling?

The videos did work, however, when they showed journalists whom Von der Leyen had named as victims of government repression. Then, I knew what I was looking at, and the images reinforced the message.

Score: 7/10.

Structure

Any piece of rhetoric that calls itself a ‘state of the union’ speech is going to face what speechwriters call the Junkyard Challenge. The dilemma is that the speaker has a lot of different programmes – pieces of junk in the junkyard – that you have to mention, complete with terrible acronyms. 

Worse still, these programmes tend to be backed up by keen bureaucratic interests that really want you, the speaker, to say exactly what they have often written about their special projects that they treat with the reverence normally given to baby messiahs. How do you string everything together in a way that listeners can understand?

There’s no way to solve this problem. It can, however, be managed. The key is to find some concept or metaphor that binds everything together. Von der Leyen’s concept came from a quote by Robert Schuman: ‘Europe needs a soul, an ideal, and the political will to serve this ideal.’ The concept of Europe’s soul is a powerful one, and as a unifying concept, it partly succeeds. 

The speech starts with a perfectly acceptable introduction that celebrates the EU’s role in combating the pandemic while perhaps too-conveniently passing over the Commission’s initial hesitation and difficulties in that regard. Notably, she introduces a second unifying theme here: that of drawing ‘inspiration’ from ‘Europe’s young people.’ ‘Our youth put meaning into empathy and solidarity,’ she says. 

I wanted to ask: what youngsters are you talking about, exactly? The ones I see on Spanish beaches or in Belgian parks are putting preening photos of their bulging bits on Instagram.

After a section urging global vaccinations, things start to get a little messy. We jump from celebrating the single market to urging a new ‘European Chips Act’, complete with the stirring invocation, ‘So let’s be bold… with semiconductors.’ (To the fair, the line receive applause.) 

It’s the sort of dense, thicket-y stuff that speechwriters hate to deal with, but usually must. It slows the speech down tremendously. 

From there, we push forward to sections on climate change and Afghanistan, but the links between them are tenuous at best. One problem is the repeated use of ‘Honourable Members’. Usually such a phrase signals to an audience that the speech is coming to an end, and audience members sigh with gratitude that the torture is almost over. But here, the phrase just means the start of a new section. One wonders if the ‘soul’ concept couldn’t have serve to create more elegant transitions.

The dense language took a toll on the audience’s attention span. Around the 27 minute mark, the camera caught a shot of an MEP surfing on his mobile phone.

Von der Leyen, however, ploughed through these sections with admirable determination. 

Score: 6/10.

Rhetoric

In the short-term, a speech has only one judge: the audience and its reaction. The speaker can’t escape from this judgement, even if the speech’s makers often rationalise a poor reception. If the audience claps, laughs, or makes any other positive noises, the speech was probably a good one. If the audience hisses or boos, the speech was likely bad, or perhaps a provocation. If the audience remains quiet, your speech was merely boring – arguably, the harshest verdict.

Yes, in the longer term, critics can recognise a speech like the Gettysburg Address as a masterpiece, even if at the time, the audience’s response was lukewarm at best. But the ‘misunderstood genius’ defence rarely works.

Van der Leyen’s audience was among the more sympathetic, and she can’t receive many points for converting unbelievers. Her theme, overall, was one of self-celebration: hooray for us! And the audience responded as you would think: yes, hooray for us! I counted at least 17 applause lines, not including the sustained applause at the end. 

A few lines rang dreadfully hollow. ‘We stand by the Afghan people,’ she solemnly declared. But I doubt that Afghans, standing some 7,000 kilometres away, felt the Commission’s presence.

But more often, signposts earned their applause: ‘human rights are not for sale at any price’, ‘the regime in Minsk has instrumentalised human beings’, ‘women must live without fear’, and ‘when we defend the media, we defend democracy’. Another line about defending the rule of law felt almost brave, given the right-wing Polish and Hungarian deputies in the room. And when she said that ‘under the French Presidency, President Macron and I will convene a Summit on European defence,’ I thought: oh, gosh golly gee! Did we just make news?!

But from this initially high score, we must subtract the clichés that take good speeches and make them dull. ‘Interoperability’ is the third-worst word in the English language (just after, in first place, ‘process’, and in second place, ‘the comprehensive approach’). Why not use words that mean something, like: ‘Help our militaries to work better together’? Anything that doesn’t sound like you’re talking about a robot orgy.

A few other problematic phrases popped here and there. I winced when, near the start, Von der Leyen said regarding the pandemic, ‘There are hearts we can never mend’. Wait, what? Physically or emotionally? The sentence reminded me of the Simpsons gag line, ‘They may say she died of a burst ventricle, but I know she died of a broken heart.’ 

Also, ‘a pandemic is a marathon, not a sprint.’ Ugh. How many times have transatlantic elites used this phrase to describe intractable problems? Just hearing it once more made me want to die of a broken heart while running up the Avenue de Tervueren in the Brussels 20k. Sorry, I mean of a burst ventricle.

Also, ‘our Union is both beautifully unique and uniquely beautiful.’ That’s a bad pick-up line. I may have heard it in The Wild Geese on a Thursday night, back in the day. Come to think of it, I might have said it.

Finally, a pet peeve. Regarding European defence integration, Von der Leyen said that all we need to do is correct ‘a lack of political will.’ 

I have never quite understood this phrase. It apparently describes things that member states don’t want to do, but the cliché doesn’t bother to tell the listener why. Member states won’t change their calculus of their own self-interest simply if one says, ‘Please stop not wanting to do something.’ A better approach would identify their concerns, and then propose ways that the Commission could address them.

Score: 7/10. 

Applause lines minus clichés: 17 – 5 = 12 bonus points.

Final verdict

The best speeches are about confronting problems and proposing solutions that a community can implement together. So when I saw the Commission’s social media postings about this speech, I was initially fascinated. My early misreading was that Von der Leyen was suggesting that the Union was in danger of losing its soul. What an excellent way, I thought, to frame an urgent call for action. 

Unfortunately, that’s not what she was suggesting. ‘I see a strong soul in everything that we do,’ she said. The gist was, nothing is lacking. But a great speech needs a lacking, a space, that it fills with a call to action. The moment was a missed opportunity to confront the lack of courage and vision that, in my view, is the EU’s greatest challenge. 

The speech did partially redeem itself by giving us an example of a great soul at the end. I mean, of course, Von der Leyen’s guest, the Italian Paralympic athlete Beatrice Vio (pictured with Von der Leyen above). Her soul was big enough to serve as a stand-in for the speech’s. Such human stories are rhetorically more powerful than all the initiatives, acts, and money-shuffling put together. They give blood to bone.

Maybe in a later speech the Commission President might dare to suggest that the European Union has a soul to lose. She might even reveal a bit of her own soul, as well. 

Total score: 7 (delivery) + 6 (structure) + 7 (rhetoric) = 20 out of 30; plus 12 bonus points, for an overall mark of 42. Below punchable Tony Blair, above sober Jean-Claude Juncker.

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