In the sort of news that shouldn’t garner anything other than a weary sigh, a publishing company is offering a two grand prize for writing a play that isn’t “woke.”

This, according to an article in (where else?) the Telegraph, comes on the heels of recent plays in London’s West End that have focused on the Israel/Palestine conflict, or shown Joan of Arc as non-binary, or told the story of the founding of the National Health Service.

As a side-note, I’d love to know how many Telegraph readers are only still with us thanks to the NHS - a rough guess would be something like 96% - but the other topics are fair game. After all, we never USED to have women playing men in plays, except in every pantomime in Britain for the last two hundred years.

But before that, there was never a tradition in theatre of boys dressing up as girls! Except in every role.

Alright, fine, but still! Shakespeare’s plays never featured foreigners, Jews or black people!

Alright, it’s indefensible nonsense. It’s almost as if the people behind this scheme are painfully thick reactionaries, ignorant of any sense of history. Or they’ve only just encountered the arts for the first time, and have assumed that there weren’t queer people or left wing politics involved with theatre, film, music and literature until sometime around the COVID pandemic.

Even if it weren’t fucking stupid (and it is) it’s not even a winning strategy. Do the Right think they’re going to win the culture war through theatre?! Andrew Tate is on every 14-year-old boy’s phone telling them that women are a form of mollusc, the leader of the free world is a warmongering rapist and paedophile, Reform are more popular than the government and the right wing are still so sensitive about their own incompetence, so spineless about their own professed ideologies, that they worry they can’t “win” without having theatres on-side?! London’s West End is hardly a hotbed of Marxist dogma - they haven’t even cancelled Michael Jackson, for fuck’s sake.

However many of the people who work in theatre might be left wing, gay or autistic (basically all of them, if we’re honest) the productions themselves are rarely far-left rallying cries for the People’s Revolution. Due to endless cuts to theatre funding, most play houses are now only putting on adaptations of old sitcoms, public domain works starring someone you recognise from TV, or sing-along musicals for the middle-aged and basic. To claim that theatre as an industry is somehow spreading dangerous, socialist ideas to a massive audience is frankly delusional.

Luckily, I have some free time right now, and this is the exact kind of stupidity I’m happy to exploit, so I’ll be putting together a pitch deck of various guaranteed-not-woke projects in the hopes that one of these bigoted imbeciles will cough up. Here are a few ideas:

Awokenings.

Based on “Awakenings,” the story of the still-not-understood “sleeping sickness” of the early 1920s, which reduced patients to a form of locked-in syndrome, and Dr. Oliver Sacks, whose treatment of these patients led in some cases to victims briefly regaining their faculties before they tragically slipped back into paralysis.

Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro starred in the movie, a dramatisation based on Sacks’ memoirs, and the new version will be about someone who briefly starts thinking like Nigel Farage before tragically slipping back into the beliefs that gender is a construct and that immigrants are a benefit to society. We can’t get Robin Williams, obviously, so we’ll have to get a Robin Williams impersonator. We’ll ask him to focus on the parts of Williams’ act where he imitated racial minorities or extremely camp homosexuals. Unclear if DeNiro is still up for it, but given some of the shit he’s been in lately we won’t rule him out.

Gunfight At The Woke-ay Corral.

A bunch of whiny beta males and feminists stand around in a cattle pen complaining, until legendary lawman Wyatt Earp comes to town and shoots them all for reasons that we’ll pretend were justified in the paperwork later on.

Just kidding, this is a Western, you can shoot whoever you want and there’s never any fallout, just like it should be! Think of America in 1880 as being a lot like America in about six months’ time.

The plot on this one might be a bit thin, but it has the bonus of generating multiple think pieces about how right wingers want to murder people they disagree with politically, and this is somehow the fault of some-or-all sections of the left. When one side is murderous Nazis and the other side is a bit shrill at times, can we really say who the bad guys are?

Yes, but The Atlantic, the New York Times and most of the British tabloids make a tidy living pretending that we can’t.

If we need more material, we can always take the John Wayne route and pad out a Western with various comedy segments featuring people who, hilariously, are from other cultures.

Finnegan’s Woke.

Sprawling, ellptical and linguistically dense, James Joyce’s famously difficult and dreamlike non-novel will be adapted into a stage version that retains none of that, and is just a series of “thick Irishman” jokes from the seventies. We’ll probably add some material about mothers-in-law, too, just to mix it up a bit. Jim Davidson tentatively pencilled in for this one.

We can have a more recent right wing comedian on for the second half of the show, but that will have to be shorter as they only have the same three jokes; “I identify as [something unlikely]”, “something something pronouns” and something about being “triggered.” Fortunately, by that point the sort of audience who would see the show will have forgotten that they already saw the first half and we can just bring Davidson on to do the same material again, which is a pretty good descriptor of his career as a whole.

Ap-woke-alypse Now.

Might be tough to get financing for a whole movie, but we’ll try.

Ben Willard, a burned out special forces soldier, is sent on a top secret mission in the jungles of Vietnam to hunt down and eliminate Colonel Kurtz, a rogue Green Beret who has built a fortified compound among the natives who worship him and, even worse, started writing poetry.

Martin Sheen played Willard in the original but he’s far too old and left-wing. If you want a Special Forces soldier you need someone like Jason Statham, or maybe a Hemsworth. That third Hemsworth is bound to be available at cost.

The original is famously long, but we can get it down to ninety minutes if we just focus on the scenes with big fiery explosions and “Ride of the Valkyries” playing and lots of foreign looking people going “aaaargh!”, LIKE A PROPER FILM.

Woker.

Joaquin Phoenix is a talentless and personally unlikeable comedian who slowly descends into madness as he fails to build interpersonal relationships or find love, eventually becoming a deranged murderer and a hero to others like him as a lack of infrastructure allows him to fall through the cracks of society.

We don’t need to do anything with this one, actually, it’s literally just changing a letter in the title, although we might need to re-cut it so it’s less of a cautionary tale and more of a feelgood success story.

…No, I just checked, a lot of people on the right already saw it that way. We’re good!

That two grand is practically sitting here in my pockeeeee-ee-ettttttt…

If you’d like to inflict this nonsense on someone else, why not share it? It won’t make up for the time you’ve wasted, but maybe it will lead to me getting the help I need…