At Home He Feels Like A Tourist

Why strongmen feel so good to watch, and why almost nobody else was still willing to play the part

This essay asks a simple question with an uncomfortable answer: why does the strongman feel so good to watch? The answer might not lie in economics or ideology. It could lie in a role the theatre invented and mostly abandoned — and that these men unwittingly picked straight up.

Act I: Not By Accident

Nobody laughs at a rocket launch by accident, and nobody spends that kind of money to be laughed at. Musk’s livestreamed countdowns, Trump’s rallies, Putin’s bare-chested photography — the reflex is to read these as vanity, low taste, a childish hunger for spectacle in men with too much money and too much power and not enough supervision. That reading is comfortable and it is wrong. It mistakes a stage direction for a character flaw, and it forgets that money and power bought the stage in the first place — the countdown clock, the rally lighting rig, the front page, all of it paid for, none of it accidental. Walter Benjamin had a word for this a century ago — the aestheticization of politics — and he meant it as a warning, not a compliment.

What’s actually happening in the countdown is theatre, and theatre of a very specific, very old kind — the kind almost nobody has had the nerve to stage in four hundred years. Contemporary drama that goes near the strongman does it at a remove: a translator, a biographer, a satirist standing between the audience and the man, softening the encounter into something safe to watch. Peter Morgan’s Patriots gives you Berezovsky’s rise and fall through the frame of hindsight and betrayal. Brecht’s Arturo Ui mode gives you gangster-farce, the tyrant shrunk to a figure you’re allowed to despise from a comfortable height. Both are honourable choices. Neither is the choice Shakespeare and Marlowe made.

They put the man himself in the chair and refused to explain him. No fixer, no framing device, no joke to hide behind — Coriolanus and Tamburlaine stand at the dead centre of their own tragedies, sovereign and largely opaque, and the audience is left to sit with that opacity rather than have it interpreted for them. That refusal to mediate is not a period style that drama simply grew out of. It is a nerve that drama, by and large, has since lost.

And the space that nerve vacated did not stay empty. Someone was always going to walk onto an unmediated stage, sovereign and unexplained, and claim it. For four hundred years the theatre mostly declined the role. The men in the countdown did not.

Act II: Survival, Not Nerve

Before asking why playwrights lost their nerve, it’s worth asking whether most of them ever had the option to use it. England had a state censor of the stage continuously from the late sixteenth century until 1968 — first the Master of the Revels, then, after 1737, the Lord Chamberlain by direct act of Parliament, in a system built specifically to stop theatre doing to a government what Fielding’s satires had just done to Walpole’s. Two hundred and thirty-one years of pre-performance licensing, unbroken. “Modern democracy permits this” is true in Britain for under sixty years.

The danger wasn’t theoretical, and Shakespeare’s own company sat inside it. The deposition scene in Richard II was cut from every printed edition until after Elizabeth’s death, and in 1601 the Chamberlain’s Men were paid by Essex’s fellow conspirators to stage the play the night before their rebellion — the company was hauled in front of the Privy Council afterward to explain themselves. Ben Jonson’s Sejanus His Fall got him hauled in front of the same Privy Council in 1603, on suspicion of popery and treason, two years after Richard II had already proven the point. Coriolanus, Sejanus and Tamburlaine are set in Rome and Scythia not purely for artistic reach. Distance was also the legal cover. A dead Roman general could be staged unmediated. A living Tudor monarch never could be.

Nor was Britain unusual. French neoclassical tragedy under Louis XIV stayed in antiquity for the same structural reason, royal patronage enforcing its own distance without needing a named statute. Brecht displaced Hitler into a Chicago gangster in 1941 specifically because staging him directly carried real risk for a stateless exile. Havel wrote absurdist political theatre in Communist Czechoslovakia and went to prison for it, within living memory.

And underneath the censorship, a harder fact: for most of recorded history, in most places, an independent stage capable of hosting dissent barely existed to be censored. Public theatre as a secular institution separate from the temple or the court is itself a rare and late arrival. Sanskrit drama developed under court and religious patronage, bound by the Natyashastra‘s own rules. Noh was sponsored and controlled by the shogunate. Court opera answered to the prince who paid for it. Even Athens, theatre’s supposed birthplace, funded its tragedies through civic and religious festival, embedded in the state rather than independent of it. The commercial public playhouse Shakespeare wrote for — funded by ticket sales, answerable to an audience rather than a patron — is closer to a historical anomaly than a norm. For most cultures across most of history, the question was never “would you dare stage the tyrant.” It was “who owns the stage you’d need.”

So our real subject can only properly starts once the legal and institutional constraints lift — Britain, post-1968 — and playwrights still, overwhelmingly, choose the mediated or satirical version anyway. That’s the part that earns the word “nerve.” Everything before it was survival.

Act III: Big Men

Start with the word itself, because it’s doing more work than a title usually does. “Big man” isn’t a metaphor borrowed for effect. It’s a term of art from anthropology — Marshall Sahlins, writing on political systems in Melanesia in 1963, used it for a specific kind of authority: not inherited, not conferred by office, built entirely through performance. Generosity, oratory, personal magnetism, a following earned in public and re-earned constantly, because nothing backs it once the performance stops.

But even Sahlins’s big man answers to somebody — which means his following can walk. So we need to settle something before Coriolanus and Tamburlaine arrive: does the performance answer to anyone, or does it answer to nothing at all? That turns out to be the axis the whole cast sits on, ancient and modern both.

Modern power still asks for a ticket, however rigged the box office. No contender now, however dominant, skips the moment of consent entirely — a vote, a shareholder base, a junta’s own stage-managed referendum. Myanmar’s military took power by force in 2021 and spent the next five years building toward an election and a parliamentary vote to formalise what it had already taken. Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Guinea — coup after coup across the Sahel this decade, and every single junta reached almost immediately for the same vocabulary: “transitional government,” a promised referendum, a receding election date. And North Korea, the regime with the least conceivable need to bother, still holds elections — turnout and approval both reported near enough to unanimous to be meaningless, which is precisely the point: even a hereditary, force-backed, three-generation dynasty stages the appearance of a vote rather than dispense with the ritual entirely. Nobody currently holding power through pure seizure is content to leave it there. Even the purest cases of naked force now available end in a performance of consent, because apparently no one — not even a dynasty with the guns already in the family — wants to be seen ruling on force alone.

Shakespeare and Marlowe give you both ends of that axis, a full four centuries before it became the only game in town. Coriolanus lives inside a system that already demands the performance — show the wounds, ask the plebeians, do the charm offensive — and the tragedy is that he refuses to pay it. Tamburlaine lives inside no such system at all; nothing in his cosmology requires consent, ever, from anyone. One play stages a man destroyed by his refusal to clear a bar every modern contender still has to clear. The other stages the fantasy of what it would be to never face the bar in the first place.

Coriolanus, then, is the more useful figure for how power is acquired now, and Tamburlaine is the more useful figure for what unaccountable dominion feels like once it’s won. Trump, Musk, Putin all pay the entry price fluently — the vote, the board, the “election” — and then behave, once inside, as though the ticket bought outright licenses everything after. Coriolanus refuses the transaction and falls for it. They complete the transaction and act as if it never happened. That gap — between paying for consent and then discarding what it was supposed to mean — is where the modern strongman actually lives, and neither Roman nor Scythian original quite gets there alone.

Coriolanus is a supreme performer of the one register he’s good at, and catastrophically bad at the other. Martial dominance, the body as argument — Coriolanus can do that all day. The plebeian-facing charm Rome demands of him in exchange for the consulship, he refuses outright, considers it beneath him, and Rome revokes him within a single scene once the performance stops. He isn’t undone by an equal. He’s undone by refusing to keep acting.

Tamburlaine has no such refusal in him, which is what makes his ending the sharper of the two. He performs conquest without pause across two full plays, city after city, until there’s nothing left worth taking, and Marlowe gives him no Senate to court because Tamburlaine has already out-performed the need for consent entirely. He rules by spectacle alone — right up until his body does the one thing his performance can’t out-argue. A fever. Mid-sentence. Sons already circling who were never trained to do anything but watch him perform, and have no act of their own prepared.

Jonson wrote the same period’s other half of this story, and it isn’t about the man at the centre at all — it’s about the men circling him. Sejanus His Fall (1603) stages Tiberius’s favourite: a flatterer and manipulator who rises entirely by performing loyalty, gathers a crowd of hangers-on jostling for proximity to him, overreaches by a single request too far, and is torn apart by a mob the moment the emperor decides he’s no longer useful. Tiberius himself survives the whole play untouched. Coriolanus and Tamburlaine show what happens to the man at the centre of the stage. Sejanus shows what happens to everyone standing next to him — worth remembering by the time this essay’s own Coda gets to its court of yes-men.

One line of scope: Aeschylus staged the same warning two thousand years earlier, from the losing side — Xerxes’ hubris in The Persians — which tells you the strongman’s ending was never actually a mystery, just repeatedly ignored.

Act IV: The Wink

Richard III opens by telling you exactly what he’s about to do, and does it anyway. “I am determined to prove a villain” — not a confession wrung out of him, a plan announced to the room before the plot’s even started, and the audience laughs. That’s the whole mechanism in one gesture. Coriolanus and Tamburlaine keep their interior sealed; Richard flings the door open and invites you in, and the invitation is the trap. You’re not watching him from a safe distance. You’re in the room, complicit, delighted, half-hoping he gets away with the next one.

That’s a different weapon from anything Coriolanus or Tamburlaine carry, and it’s the one that maps most precisely onto how Trump and Musk actually operate. Not opacity, not silent conquest — the wink, the aside, the “can you believe I just said that” delight that recruits the audience rather than merely dominating it. Horror keeps a spectator at arm’s length. A shared joke pulls them into the room. Richard understood that a laughing accomplice is worth more than a terrified subject, four hundred years before anyone had a word for engagement metrics.

Which is where Benjamin’s diagnosis earns the fuller explanation the intro only gestured at. Writing in 1935, watching fascism stage itself at Nuremberg — searchlights turned skyward into a “light cathedral,” the crowd made to feel itself part of something vast and beautiful rather than asked to think about what it was agreeing to — Benjamin named the mechanism: fascism aestheticizes politics. Gives the masses the feeling of expression and participation without touching the property relations underneath. His proposed counter-move was not retreat or refusal. It was the opposite: politicize art— build work that makes its own construction visible, that keeps the viewer analytical rather than absorbed, awake rather than swept along.

Brecht built the actual technique Benjamin was calling for, and gave it a name: the alienation effect. Actors address the audience directly, break the fourth wall, remind you constantly that you’re watching something made rather than something happening — the goal being to keep you thinking rather than feeling-with, critically distant rather than emotionally captured. The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is Brecht’s own strongman play, gangster-farce mapped straight onto Hitler’s rise, built entirely out of this toolkit: the audience is never allowed to forget it’s watching a construction, never allowed to be swept into Ui’s spell the way Nuremberg wanted its crowd swept in.

Richard III uses Brecht’s own toolkit against Brecht’s own purpose. Direct address. The aside. The wink to the audience that says you and I both know what I’m doing here. Textbook alienation-effect technique — and it produces the opposite of Brecht’s intended result. Instead of critical distance, it produces intimacy. Instead of keeping the audience awake and separate, it makes them complicit and delighted. Shakespeare found, apparently by accident, while just trying to build a good villain, that breaking the fourth wall doesn’t reliably distance an audience at all — it can just as easily seduce one. Brecht spent a career building a weapon against exactly the mechanism his own favourite device turns out to enable in the wrong hands.

Act V: Too Much Interior

Give a Shakespearean protagonist too much interior and he can’t act at all. Hamlet is nothing but interior — soliloquy after soliloquy, endlessly telling us what he thinks and feels and suspects and doubts — and it’s precisely that capacity for reflection that leaves him circling Claudius for four acts, unable to do the one thing the plot needs him to do. Coriolanus and Tamburlaine barely pause to examine themselves and act without hesitation, right up until they can’t. Hamlet examines himself constantly and can barely act at all. Put the two failures side by side and you see the paradox: too little interior and the man becomes an unstoppable engine with no plan for stopping; too much interior and the man becomes a mind with no engine.

Hamlet doesn’t even attempt the unmediated confrontation — he engineers a mediated one instead, deliberately, because he can’t yet act directly on what he suspects. He commissions a play, a performance within the performance, to catch the king’s conscience without ever having to face him unmediated. It works, in the sense that it confirms the guilt. It doesn’t work in the sense that mediation was never going to be enough to actually settle anything — Hamlet still has to act eventually, and the play-within-the-play only postpones the moment rather than replacing it.

Which makes Hamlet, oddly, the ancestor of the exact move contemporary theatre keeps making instead of the one Shakespeare himself was willing to make elsewhere. Patriots gives you Berezovsky through hindsight and betrayal rather than putting the tyrant himself unmediated in the room. The Arturo Ui mode gives you satire, distance, a figure shrunk small enough to laugh at safely. Both are the play-within-the-play manoeuvre, four centuries on — approach the thing sideways, through a frame, rather than risk direct confrontation with an ambiguous, unexplained man at the centre of the stage. The difference is that Shakespeare had both moves in his own toolkit and used them for different purposes. Contemporary drama, by and large, has only kept the one.

One recent example almost breaks the pattern, and the way it fails to is the more interesting fact than a clean counter-example would have been. Anne Washburn’s Shipwreck (Almeida, 2019) spends most of its three hours exactly where this section predicts it will — seven American liberals arguing with each other in a snowbound farmhouse, processing Trump rather than confronting him. But for one scene, Washburn does something almost nobody else attempts: she puts Trump himself on stage, direct address, unmediated. Except she can only manage it in Roman emperor costume — gold paint, a Caesar-esque tyrant, bird-hooded priests — the exact displacement this essay’s own cast already wears. A contemporary playwright, working under no censor, no Licensing Act, nothing standing between her and a modern-dress confrontation, reaches instinctively for the same toga Coriolanus and Tamburlaine never got to take off. She almost breaks four centuries of habit and finds she can only sustain it in myth, for one mad scene, before retreating back to the farmhouse.

One line on opera, since it’s the obvious next place this argument might go and the reason it doesn’t: opera externalizes psychology into the aria — the character tells you, at volume, exactly what they feel — which is precisely the wrong instrument for a subject built on concealment and self-performance. Verdi’s tyrants sing their interiority outright. Shakespeare’s either hide it or weaponise it strategically. The strongman needs a form built for subtext, withholding, and the audience’s own uncertainty about what’s real — which is drama, not the aria’s full-volume broadcast.

So: two failures of interior, one failure of nerve, and a reason opera was never going to get you there.

Act VI: The Same Retreat

Mockery is the political theatre’s satirical-distancing structure, performed off the stage rather than on it. Every “can you believe he said that” clip, every late-night monologue, every thread dunking on the latest transgression does the exact work the Arturo Ui mode does — shrinks the man to a figure safe to laugh at from a comfortable height, keeps him at arm’s length, never risks the unmediated encounter. It feels like opposition. Structurally, it’s the same retreat Acts II and III already named, just relocated from the playhouse to the group chat.

And it fails for the reason satire always risked failing, which Brecht himself half-knew: laughter doesn’t reliably distance anyone. Act IV already established that Richard III weaponised the wink rather than being defeated by it — an audience invited to laugh with a performer can end up recruited rather than repelled. Mockery aimed at the strongman runs the identical risk in reverse. Every clip clipped to dunk on him is also a clip of him performing, again, for free, to an audience his own supporters will happily watch too — and the joke lands differently depending which side of the room you’re sitting in.

Populism theory gets the claim-structure right and stops there. Ernesto Laclau, Cas Mudde, Jan-Werner Müller — the strongman’s rhetoric works by constructing “the people” as a unified moral bloc and himself as its sole authentic representative, everyone else an illegitimate elite. True, useful, and built for reading speeches and manifestos. It has nothing to say about why a rocket launch produces a physical thrill a position paper never will. It’s a theory of argument applied to something that isn’t, in its persuasive mechanism, primarily an argument.

Terror management theory explains part of the audience, not the performer. Ernest Becker’s mortality-salience research — reminders of death measurably increase preference for strong, decisive leaders —deserves a sentence for the same reason Tamburlaine matters. The underlying studies which inform the theory may have taken a beating in recent replication attempts but the effect names something which still feels true. Need-for-closure research does similar work from firmer ground — ambiguity is uncomfortable, certainty is relief, and a man who never hedges offers a kind of comfort a caveat-laden opponent structurally can’t match.

Credit all three theories, then make the turn: none of this theory explains why the performance has to be watched rather than merely believed. A claim can be accepted quietly. A comfort can be taken without spectacle. What populism theory, terror management, and need-for-closure research all describe is why the content of the strongman’s appeal lands. None of them touch why the delivery has to be theatrical — unmediated, sovereign, staged — rather than simply persuasive. That’s the gap Acts II through V have been filling in from the other direction: not what he says, but the register he says it in, and the fact that almost nobody else on the stage was still willing to work in that register when he arrived.

Which leaves mockery exactly where it started — a satirical-distancing structure, dressed as resistance, that the strongman has already beaten once, four hundred years ago, in a different theatre, under a different name. Arturo Ui shrinks Hitler to something laughable and the play was written, deliberately, as agitprop against a man safely defeated by the time anyone but exiles could stage it. The mockery aimed at a sitting strongman, mid-performance, is asking a distancing device to do a job it has never once been shown to do while the man is still in the room.

Act VII: The Fever

The Big Men don’t look like happy men. Putin’s stillness reads less like calm than containment. Trump’s grievance runs hot enough that even total victory doesn’t seem to dissolve it. Nothing is ever enough for Musk. Whatever these men have built, it hasn’t bought them the thing power is supposedly for — so what is it for. More? But more what exactly? Tamburlaine has the same problem, staged four centuries early and settled by his body rather than his enemies.

He conquers everything there is to conquer, and Marlowe gives him no equal to lose to. Not a rival army, not a palace coup, not even a slow decline — a fever, arriving mid-campaign, mid-sentence, while there’s still more world he intends to take. The instrument built for total acquisition turns out to have no attachment to, no plan for, the one event acquisition can’t be aimed at. Getting old. Stopping. Tamburlaine’s sons are already circling by the deathbed, and Marlowe’s cruelest joke is that not one of them has been trained to do anything but watch him perform — the performance was the whole inheritance, and it doesn’t transfer.

This is where Nietzsche is worth invoking, carefully, and then failing on his own terms. “Will to power” often gets reached for here reflexively, and it’s the wrong reach if you mean overflowing self-mastery, the strength that creates its own values and answers to nothing — Nietzsche’s actual ideal, whatever the Nazi-adjacent misreadings later made of it. Tamburlaine and his living counterparts don’t clear that bar. Self-overcoming implies an interior doing the overcoming; what the fever and the “unhappy bunny” observation both expose is closer to its opposite — a will that conquered outward without ever building anything that could survive turning inward. Not Nietzschean strength. Nietzschean strength’s hollow understudy, mistaking accumulation for the thing accumulation was supposed to be evidence of.

Christopher Shinn staged exactly this five years before it needed staging. Against saw Ben Whishaw as a Silicon Valley billionaire, explicitly read by critics at the time as Musk-and-Zuckerberg-shaped, convinced God had told him to go where the violence was and fix it personally. The reviews called it overreaching, unfocused, too many ideas chasing too little discipline — and whether that’s a flaw in the play or the single most accurate description anyone’s written of the type is genuinely hard to say.

Which returns the essay to where Act I started, closing the loop rather than adding a new claim. Worship, salvation-fantasy, laughter — three different audience reactions to the same performance, and none of them require the performer to have solved anything for himself. He doesn’t need an interior for the crowd’s thrill to be real. He needs the rocket, the rally, the unmediated stage nobody else was willing to occupy, the grifting. What he does with the part of the role no audience ever sees — the fever, the circling sons, the ordinary business of stopping — was never part of the show, and was never going to be.

Coda: The House Lights

The curtain falls on all of it eventually, and nothing in the performance was built for that scene. The equity tanks. The heirs circle, unequipped — dysfunctional in the specific way of men raised to watch, never to act. The court of yes-men mistakes proximity for permanence, right up until it isn’t. The statues go up while the paint’s still wet and start weathering before anyone’s finished admiring them; the ballrooms and towers become the thing tour guides mention in passing on the way to somewhere else. Ozymandias didn’t need a modern update. He just needed a longer lease.

And there’s a second ending nobody plans for, which is that the audience gets bored before the curtain even falls. Not persuaded, not disillusioned — bored, which is worse, because boredom doesn’t argue with you, it just leaves. Even Marlowe couldn’t sustain Tamburlaine past two parts, and by the end of the second nobody’s pretending the conquering is still the point. Shakespeare needed the rest of the play to work out what to do with Hamlet once he’d built him, and spent most of it stalling. Dominance performed is watchable. Dominance performed past its natural running time is just long, and no strongman in this essay’s cast, living or dead, has ever solved that problem — only postponed it, with a bigger set, a longer speech, a taller tower.

So a last word for the audience, worship, prayer, and laughter all included: you bought a ticket. Nobody’s claiming you were foolish to buy one, or that the performance wasn’t, for a while, exactly as thrilling as it looked. But a ticket isn’t a lease on your attention forever, and the moment the spectacle stops earning it, you’re allowed to leave your seat. The house lights come up eventually. They always do. The only real question the essay leaves open is who’s still in the building to see it happen — and whether anyone’s rehearsed the next part.