Tony winners should stay shtum on politics!

It’s awards week, so it must be political soapbox time. Again. At the Tony Awards on Sunday, America’s joyous celebration of all things theatre, the Best Supporting Actor winner, The Lost Boys star Ali Louis Bourzgui, decided to devote his acceptance speech to “the people of Palestine who deserve a free life, a full life, without occupation” and more of that sort of thing. He also sounded off against “the billionaires…the colonisers…the fascists.” He hoped, out loud, that, “We take a moment to recondition our addiction to desensitisation.”

Some of the audience, in that auditorium and watching on TV, might have reflected on the irony that Bourzgui himself evidently seemed somewhat desensitised to the fact that it is Palestinians themselves, in the form of Hamas, who are occupying the people of Gaza (while, up the road as it were, in Jordan, millions of their fellow Palestinians are colonised by the Hashemite dynasty, who hail from Saudi Arabia). Desensitised, too, to the fact that Israelis have been invaded, raped, mutilated, tortured, kidnapped, murdered en masse and are still under daily attack. Still others might note the fact that some of “the billionaires” he so seems to despise are the very people bankrolling the show currently giving him a decent wage, glory and, you know, a Tony.

Yet another celebrity acceptance speech, yet another detour into geopolitics from someone who clearly learned everything they know about the Middle East from Twitter.

Ali Louis Bourzgui dedicated his Tony Award to immigrants and Palestinians, which would be admirable if the… https://t.co/y0jXjwmNWl

— Creative Community for Peace (@CCFPeace) June 9, 2026

But there’s a wider point. If I want to hear political invective, I will, and I won’t be looking to the American Theatre Wing. I will purposefully seek out somewhere that brings together the finest and most knowledgeable minds on the subjects in hand, and there are plenty of options. With apologies, I probably won’t turn to some bloke playing a flying vampire every night on Broadway. And I don’t want to hear about it in the Tonys. I tune in, strange as it may seem, to dive into the beautiful, enigmatic and shifting world of theatre. Not to be preached to.

I’m clearly not the only one. Various comments under reports of the speech on social media grumbled, “I’m here for the talent, not the politics”, “Keep politics out of entertainment.”, “Preachy and pompous…gtf off the stage” and “Another awards ceremony I won’t be watching anymore.” Of course, there were plenty of others in favour, and not a few who found time to bash Jews — “I love that it’s like the same 5 whiny Zionists on every post about him. Cry harder.” As one commenter accurately yet succinctly put it, “Divisive.” 

Is this really what we want from artists? I’m with screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, who at the 1978 Oscars, followed Vanessa Redgrave’s denouncing of “a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums” by saying, “I would like to suggest to Miss Redgrave that her winning an Academy Award is not a pivotal moment in history, does not require a proclamation and a simple thank you would have sufficed.”

Comedian Ricky Gervais was even less subtle when hosting the 2020 Emmys. “If you do win an award tonight,” he said, in an aggrieved tone, “don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.” 

But whether an artist knows about political issues or not is not really my point. Everyone has their own views on, well, everything. Some might be more or less right, others more or less wrong, some fair, some bigoted. I don’t want to know. Of course, when a famous artist uses their platform to say something I agree with, my heart lifts (especially when they’re hitting back at some piece of, say, anti-Semitism from one of their peers). Point for my team. But still, I have realised that, no. On balance, I don’t want to know.

It took writing my new novel, The Inspired, to help me realise this. It’s the story of a young Russian pianist, Lillya, studying in today’s US as first the Ukraine War and then 7th October occur, intertwined with that of Van Cliburn — the handsome and charismatic Texan virtuoso who became the unlikely hero of Cold War Moscow. As Cliburn helps bring together two nations — but only temporarily — and Lillya sees her Ukrainian best friend and chamber music partner turn against her as her rarified university world becomes poisoned, I understood, starkly, the limits of what artists can do. Lillya and Van ultimately fail. And for tha matter, when did an artist in politics succeed? It’s rare. The last time, data tells us, that artists influenced a US election was all of 18 years ago, Oprah Winfrey’s 2018 advocacy for Barak Obama. And Oprah has always been much more than an artist.

In my book, as horrendous wars rage around my flailing pianist-characters, I was left with the most basic artistic question of all. At our worst, our most violent moments, can artists help bring mankind back from the depths of our own depravity? I mean, can the arts really do anything at all?

I think they can, but in small, very personal ways, and only if the artists — forgive me — keep shtum. Because people need places they can escape to. The human spirit needs the arts to help us step away from politics, lift our mood. More even than that, we need to have our hearts opened to each other in the most basic of ways. When we experience a work of theatre, or a symphony, or a ballet, together, as we sit there and let its story touch us and we wonder at and about it, it is an act of community. We feel — we feel, it’s sensory and emotional, more than intellectual — that we are all members of the same human species, experiencing this thing together.

By letting the work speak, to each of us in a very private and profound way, and at the same time to all of us in that room at once, the parts of our brains that are in permanent states of political fury are bypassed. The feeling happens together.

How can I possibly do that if I know that this guy on stage cares about Palestinians and not about Jews? Or the other way around? Or walks around muttering conspiracy theories about political blacklists implicitly operated by powerful Jews (Javier Bardem)? Or fronts a public anti-Israel letter just days after October 7th but doesn’t even mention the Jewish victims, whose scattered remains were at that point still being found, but who apparently weren’t even significant enough for him to mourn (Steve Coogan, whose films and shows I can never again bring myself to watch)? Judaism and Israel are obviously issues I care about deeply, but the point stands, almost always — how can a performer vanish into a part when he has made himself bigger than the role?

There are surely exceptions. I cannot but love Ian McKellen for his long-time advocacy for gay rights. Or Sacha Baron Cohen for his brilliant and inspirational warning against the divisiveness of social media. But maybe I should be more puritanical.

Because there is a relationship of trust that happens when we go to the theatre, that goes way beyond suspension of disbelief. I gift my time and my attention (often paying quite a bit for the privilege), and I open up my emotions to the characters, to the world being created on the stage, to the art. That is an act of vulnerability, and it is an act of love. What I need from the actors — their part of this beautiful bargain between us — is not to pull me back to whatever I fumed about on CNN that day. Because every time an artist sounds off about Trump, or Keir Starmer, or Israel, or Palestine, or any of that, it somehow betrays that trust, and shatters that bond. No matter how well-meaning, or otherwise.

Last week, in New York, I almost went to see The Lost Boys, the show that Ali Louis Bourzgui is playing in. Now I’m glad I didn’t. And you want to know the irony? Instead, I went to see a play about Roald Dahl’s anti-Semitism, Giant, starring John Lithgow. I have no idea where Mr. Lithgow personally stands on the current Middle East situation. He also won a Tony this week. He also made a speech, in which politics did not feature, and I still have no idea what he thinks. I’m very glad I don’t.