Brexit is the commonly used term for the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union on 31 January 2020, which resulted from a referendum on 23 June 2016. This article details the mostly critical response to this decision in the visual art, novels, theatre, and film.
Background
The British government led by David Cameron held a referendum on the issue in 2016; a majority voted to leave the European Union. On 29 March 2017, Theresa May's administration invoked Article 50 of the Treaty on the European Union in a letter to the President of the European Council, Donald Tusk. The UK was set to leave on 29 March 2019, unless the Brexit Withdrawal agreement was adopted by the House of Commons, in which case the UK would have left in May 2019. With the failure to ratify the withdrawal agreement by the British Parliament, Prime Minister Theresa May negotiated a further extension until 31 October 2019. Later that year the withdrawal was delayed a further 3 months and, struggling to pass his renegotiated deal in the way he wished, Prime Minister Boris Johnson called the 2019 general election on 12 December 2019. The election resulted in the Conservatives receiving a majority of 80 seats; the UK subsequently left the European Union at 23:00 GMT on 31 January 2020.
Artists' sentiments toward Brexit
The response of artists and writers to Brexit has tended to be negative, reflecting a reported overwhelming percentage of people involved in Britain's creative industries voting against leaving the European Union. The visual artist Bob and Roberta Smith, writing in The Guardian newspaper during 2017, typifies this response:
Gilbert and George, Morrissey, Roger Daltrey and Ringo Starr are among the creative figures who support Brexit.
Brexit in the visual arts Responses by visual artists to Brexit include a mural, painted in May 2017, by the secretive graffiti artist Banksy near the ferry port at Dover in southern England. It shows a workman using a chisel to chip off one of the stars on the European Union Flag. In August 2019 the mural was found to have been painted over with white paint and covered in scaffolding.
In his 2017 art exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London, the artist Grayson Perry showed a series of ceramic, tapestry and other works of art dealing with the divisions in Britain during the Brexit campaign and in its aftermath. This included two large ceramic pots, Perry called his Brexit Vases, standing on plinths ten feet apart, on the first of which were scenes involving pro-European British citizens, and on the second scenes involving anti-European British citizens. These were derived from what Perry called his 'Brexit tour of Britain'.
In 2019, The Guardian commissioned Anish Kapoor to create a piece of art in response to the political climate around Brexit. Kapoor's work, entitled A Brexit, A Broxit, We All Fall Down, was an image of Britain with "a gory rip stretching from Glasgow to the south coast".
Jason deCaires Taylor installed an artwork called Pride of Brexit at the base of the White Cliffs of Dover in 2019. It consisted of three lions, a national symbol, "emaciated and exhausted" lying on the sand. Taylor said they were meant to be "a monument to one of the most unpatriotic events Britain has ever seen". They were later reinstalled on the Thames embankment across from the Palace of Westminster.
Artist Clemens Wilhelm was commissioned by Scottish arts organisation Deveron Projects to mark the departure of the UK from the EU. His weeping willow Brexit Tree would be planted on the day the UK left the EU as a "symbol of loss and healing". It was planted on 31 January 2020 in a ceremony that included participation of Richard Demarco and A. L. Kennedy. A film work of the project will be released in January 2021.
Brexit in novels The day after the referendum, gay niche erotica author Chuck Tingle self-published the 4,000-word book Pounded by the Pound: Turned Gay by the Socioeconomic Implications of Britain Leaving the European Union, in which a large coin from the future comes to see the main character Alex to explain him the danger of Brexit, and together they go back to the past to sway voters against voting to leave the European Union, "proving that all you need is love."
Peter Preston's 1998 novel, The 51st State, predicted a UK Prime Minister, following his father's dying wishes, withdrawing the UK from the EU, then joining the United States.Peter Preston, The 51st State (London: Penguin, 1999)
Ali Smith's 2016 novel Autumn has been described by the Financial Times as the first serious Brexit novel.
One of the first novels to engage with a post-Brexit Britain was Rabbitman by Michael Paraskos (published 9 March 2017). Rabbitman is a dark comic fantasy in which the events that lead to the election of a right-wing populist American president, and Britain's vote to leave the European Union, were the result of a series of Faustian pacts with the Devil. As a result, Rabbitman is set partly in a post-Brexit Britain in which society has collapsed and people are dependent on European Union food aid.Michael Paraskos, Rabbitman (London: Friction Fiction, 2017)
Mark Billingham's Love Like Blood (published 1 June 2017) is a crime thriller in which Brexit sees a rise in xenophobic hate crime.Mark Billingham, Love Like Blood, (London: Little Brown Books, 2017) In the novel The Remains of the Way (published 6 June 2017), David Boyle imagines Brexit was a conspiracy led by a forgotten government quango, still working away in Whitehall, originally set up by Thomas Cromwell in the 16th century during the reign of King Henry VIII, and now dedicated to a Protestant Brexit.David Boyle, Remains of the Day (London: Real Press, 2017)
Post-Brexit Britain is also the setting for Amanda Craig's The Lie of the Land (published 13 June 2017), a satirical novel set ten years after the vote to leave the European Union, in which an impoverished middle class couple from Islington in north London are forced to move from the heart of the pro-European Union capital to the heart of the pro-Brexit countryside in Devon.Amanda Craig, The Lie of the Land (London: Little Brown Books, 2017)
Brexit is also the baseline for Douglas Board's comic political thriller Time of Lies (published 23 June 2017). In this novel, the first post-Brexit general election in 2020 is won by a violent right-wing former football hooligan called Bob Grant. Board charts the response to this of the hitherto pro-European Union metropolitan political elite.Douglas Board, Time of Lies (London: Lightning Books, 2017)
Stanley Johnson's Kompromat (published 23 July 2017) is a political thriller that suggests the vote to leave the European Union was a result of Russian influence on the referendum, although Johnson has insisted his book is not intended to point the finger at Russia's secret services, but is "just meant to be fun".
Jonathan Coe's Middle England (published 8 November 2018) is a state-of-the-nation novel which re-introduces some of the author's earlier characters from The Rotters' Club (2001) and The Closed Circle (2004), and moves from the election of the coalition government in 2010, through the riots of 2011, the 2012 Olympics, the 2016 referendum and its aftermath, ending in 2018.Jonathan Coe, Middle England (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2018)
Night of the Party by Tracey Mathias is set in the UK after Brexit. With a far-right party in power, only British-born people are permitted to remain in the country, and the book examines the consequences of populist and isolationist policies on the protagonist and his friends.
Rachel Churcher's Battle Ground series is Young Adult dystopia, set in a totalitarian near-future UK after Brexit and Scottish independence.
Sam Byers' Perfidious Albion is set in East Anglia, and examines power, influence, and nationalism in the UK after Brexit.
Chris Mullin's The Friends of Harry Perkins, the sequel to A Very British Coup, is set in the aftermath of Brexit, said to be neither apocalyptic nor an economic miracle. It follows Fred Thompson's journey to becoming Labour leader and eventually Prime Minister, with one of his chief aims being to reverse Brexit.
Brexit in theatre In theatre, in June 2017 the National Theatre in London presented a play by Carol Ann Duffy, entitled, My Country; a work in progress. An allegorical work, the play uses the device of a convention called by the goddess Britannia who is concerned about the future of the British people. The play differs from some artistic responses in that Duffy and the National Theatre-based the attitudes of the characters on stage in part on the responses to interviews, conducted by the regional offices of the UK Arts Councils, with ordinary people, but excluding responses from London and the south-east of England, where most people voted not to leave the European Union. As a result, according to Dominic Cavendish, writing in the Daily Telegraph newspaper, "the bias is towards the Leave camp".
However the play, that only featured British voices, was an example of how the British theatre artists largely ignored the perspective of migrants, contributing to “the paradox of simultaneous hyper- and in-visibility of immigrants in the UK” in the Brexit debate. Much more interesting were contributions from the UK-based migrant artists “in which migrant artists claim[ed] agency over their representation within public spaces and create a platform for a new social imagination that can facilitate transnational and trans-local encounters, multicultural democratic spaces, sense of commonality, and solidarity."
Rosaura (an adaptation of Life Is a Dream by Pedro Calderón de la Barca) created by actors Paula Rodríguez and Sandra Arpa was performed in London just after the Brexit referendum. It reimagines Calderón's story by focusing on Rosaura, and changes several details in the play (including adding references to Brexit). Moscow (where Rosaura is from) is changed to 'Hispania' and the Polish royal court is changed to the 'Court of Europe'. Instead of Astolfo and Segismundo battling, they compete in a "reality show-style election" where Astolfo is characterised as similar to Boris Johnson.
An Evening with an Immigrant is an autobiographical piece by a British-based Nigerian poet and performer Inua Ellams. It premiered in July 2016 at the Soho Theatre in London. Ellams recalls his life between Nigeria, the UK, and Ireland and comments on the British colonial past and its role in the current migrant crisis. Bubble Revolution by Polish playwright Julia Holewińska, directed by John Currivan and co-created and performed by Kasia Lech at the 2016 Edinburgh Fringe Festival focused on growing-up in communist and post-communist Poland and experiences of speaking English as a foreign language. The three productions used “memories rooted in their native and non-native cultures as a platform for the audience to engage with transnational conditions in today's Europe and the UK, and explore these and spectators’ own experiences through a translocal gaze”.
The Fishamble play 'The Alternative' is an Ireland-based satire of both Brexit and the Irish unification question, and imagines an alternate history in which Home Rule is successfully implemented in Ireland in the 1910s, leading to Ireland remaining part of the United Kingdom to the present day. The play centers around a campaign in which Ireland is voting on whether to declare independence (Vote Leave) or to remain part of the UK (Vote Remain). The play had a limited run in theatres across the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.
Brexit in film and television