The Show Won’t Go On: Les Miserables Cancelled as Green Activists Storm Theatre, Attach Themselves to Set

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Just Stop Oil Press Release
Oliver JJ Lane

A performance of Les Miserables was abandoned on Wednesday evening in London after a group of green extremists stormed the stage, comparing themselves to the protagonists in the play, saying revolutionary behaviour is justified by circumstances.

The Sondheim Theatre in London’s West End district was evacuated on Wednesday night after a group of protesters stormed the stage, unfurled banners, and attached themselves to the set with ‘lock on’ devices the stagehands could not remove. Police say they responded and arrested give people, and the theatre owner said while they respected free expression, theatregoers also have a right “to enjoy the event for which they have paid.”

Reports on the protest by the Daily Telegraph notes members of the audience booed the protesters as they interrupted the performance.

Just Stop Oil, for their part, published a statement to coincide with the action using the content of the musical to justify their own behaviour. The organisation said: “The show starts with Jean Valjean stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s starving child. How long before we are all forced to steal loaves of bread? How long before there are riots on the streets? The show cannot go on.”

Comparing themselves, presumably, to the insurrectionists of the 1832 June Rebellion depicted in Les Miserables, they said the protesters are “just like the revolutionaries featured in the story, they are calling on everyone to take a stand”.

The protest follows a similar direct action against the cultural sector to raise attention for themselves by Just Stop Oil in June when their activists interrupted a performance of Poulenc’s three-act opera Dialogues des Carmélites at the Glyndebourne Festival. Again the group attempted to make tenuous comparisons between themselves and the content of the performance, although perhaps without understanding what was being performed.

Dialogues des Carmélites fictionalises the deaths of Christian martyrs to a radical and violent revolution, themes which perhaps suit the self-professed green revolutionaries’ hardline agenda less well.

The group has also launched high-profile attacks on other cultural icons, including flinging tomato soup and glueing themselves to works of art by Vincent Van Gogh, William Turner, and Johannes Vermeer. Also in Just Stop Oil’s sights have been the daily lives or ordinary commuters, with several protests blocking roads.

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