The campaign for climate justice has landed me in some strange places over the past few years. I’ve invaded a theatre stage and smeared myself with fake oil while declaiming Shakespearean couplets; sung in a pop-up musical to disrupt the press launch of an art exhibition; and unleashed a giant sea-monster puppet inside the British Museum.
This uninvited guerrilla theatre, the work of our activist theatre group BP or not BP?, aims to challenge oil-company sponsorship of major British arts institutions. It’s part of a fast-growing movement for a fossil-free culture, which is working to kick away one of the struts the oil industry uses to prop up its power: cultural sponsorship.
