BP or not BP?

On Sunday June 15th, theatrical protest group the Reclaim Shakespeare Company will be invading the BP-sponsored British Museum with a piece of mass interactive theatre.

We want you to join us in this grand finale to our latest series of pop-up protests, targeting the Museum’s heavily BP-branded Vikings Exhibition.

With your help, we are planning to bring a longship into the Great Court of the Museum, in order to give BP a Viking funeral. This is obviously completely impossible, but we’re going to do it anyway 🙂

No experience of ship-building or transportation is required, and there will plenty of roles that don’t require heavy lifting.

All you need to do is email us on info@bp-or-not-bp.org, or “join” this Facebook event. We’ll send you a short message with some simple instructions for your part in the performance. Learn these instructions and then be in the Museum at the appointed time to join the horde. You don’t need to dress as a Viking (although this is obviously encouraged).

Sign up and we’ll see you there!

The Reclaim Shakespeare Company x
______________________________________________

Why protest about BP?

BP has a long-running financial relationship with the British Museum. The oil giant even has a lecture theatre named after it. Now it is sponsoring an exhibition about the Vikings, some of history’s most famous plunderers of wealth and resources (so nothing ironic there then).

BP recently launched several highly polluting tar sands extraction projects in Canada, trampling over the rights of local Indigenous people. US Gulf Coast communities have been left devastated by BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill, and the company is now eyeing up highly risky drilling options in the Arctic. At the same time, BP is lobbying against
environmental laws and blocking clean energy alternatives all over the world. It’s not surprising that the company likes to throw a bit of money at arts and culture to help distract us from its real activities.

It’s shameful that the Museum is letting BP get away with it. By providing a tiny percentage (less than 1%) of the annual income of the British Museum, BP gets a huge amount of positive publicity in return, helping it to present itself as a responsible member of society rather than the oily berserker it really is.

BP is only sponsoring our history to help it get away with destroying our future.

Help remove the taint of destruction from our national treasures – join us as we tell the British Museum to end its sponsorship deal with BP! Just email info@bp-or-not-bp.org to sign up for June 15th.

You can see a film of our recent surprise Viking performance at the British Museum here.

And here’s a film of the public flash-mob performance we held at the BP-sponsored Shakespeare exhibition at the British Museum in 2012.