When Greenpeace protesters poured 1,000l of (organic) blood-red liquid down a vast canvas off the Shell Skiff platform in the North Sea last week, it was billed as an artwork – entitled Butchered, and created in collaboration with Anish Kapoor. It was also the latest in decades of high-profile stunts that activists have used to grab the public imagination and plant a thought that can grow into a global movement.
The likes of Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion (XR), and the Occupy movement don’t just block roads or pitch tents in churchyards, but seed ideas. Gen Z and millennials – marinated in a drip-feed of bad news, climate collapse, economic precarity and political implosion – suddenly connected to history and saw protest not as eccentric behaviour, but as the only real theatre left.
XR taught them the grammar of disruption: the pink boat in Oxford Circus, the die-in, the glued hand. Occupy showed that simply holding space could shift the centre of gravity of debate. Both movements proved something Greenpeace had already turbo-charged with its anti-whaling campaigns in the 1970s: the stunt isn’t just about action but planting an image so potent, it germinates in the public imagination. A dinghy blocking a whaling ship was an allegory, David versus Goliath, conscience versus commerce. A seed planted in millions of minds grew into a global movement.
This is the DNA of the stunt, and it is no accident. It’s the same DNA that runs through the soul of every activist: a strange genus of publicity that fuses creative mischief with deep sacrifice. PT Barnum understood the power of spectacle. Edward Bernays understood the potency of symbolism. The suffragettes absorbed it instinctively: windows smashed, fires lit, hunger strikes staged with theatrical ferocity. The Greenham women cut fences and danced on silos, knowing full well the cameras would find them. Protest, properly understood, has always been half conviction and half choreography.
The medium has changed, but the principle endures. The suffragette had the front page. Greenham had the Six O’Clock News. Greenpeace had the photograph. Today’s activist has TikTok, where a roadside stunt can become global theatre in minutes. A smartphone is a megaphone, camera, editing suite and stage, all in one. A single clip, well-timed, can seed an idea across millions before the state has even called a press officer.
And here’s the paradox that rattles governments: every attempt to crush a movement only fertilises the soil.
Arrests by the hundred in Parliament Square, proscription of groups, criminal records for teenagers talking about an act on Zoom… it looks like law and order, but it smells like panic. If you jail one activist, you can radicalise 10 more. If you ban a movement, you risk immortalising it.
Perversely, it’s the naysayer that gives a stunt its enduring power, and whether it’s politicians demanding clampdowns, columnists frothing with outrage, or talk-show callers huffing about “traffic chaos”, every denunciation is free publicity. Without their critics, many stunts would wither. With them, they bloom.
That was the journey I traced in my new BBC Radio 4 Archive on 4 documentary, Outrage Inc., a history of outrage stunts as theatre.
The evidence is clear: the stunt survives because it plants images that can’t be erased. I went back through the archives and across continents to unearth the mischief-makers: The Yes Men who hijacked the BBC to impersonate corporate spokesmen and announce billions in fake compensation for the victims of Bhopal, the world’s deadliest industrial disaster, wiped value off the company before the hoax was exposed; Germany’s Centre for Political Beauty, an “assault troop” known for its provocative operations in the name of human rights, who built a replica Holocaust memorial outside an AfD politician’s house, a piece of living architecture as a political menace; Led by Donkeys, who projected the words of politicians onto buildings and billboards, forcing them to choke on their own rhetoric.
And – perhaps the greatest of them all – Greenpeace, masters of the David-and-Goliath confrontation which produced images powerful enough to define an entire environmental movement.
What unites all these figures across the decades is the instinct to stage a performance so sharp it cannot be unseen. Look at Mexico City, 1968: the Black Power salute wasn’t just a raised fist; it was a choreographed media event designed to seed a symbol. Fifty years later, it re-emerged as the anti-racism symbol of “taking the knee”. A podium pose evolved into a ritual on football pitches. That’s the afterlife of a well-planted stunt: it mutates, resurfaces, and terrifies authority precisely because it cannot be killed.
Every hunger strike, every glued hand, every night in a police cell carries the knowledge that history, not the government, will be the judge. And history, often, rewards the disrupter and condemns those who tried to extinguish the idea.
That is why governments fear stunts. Not because they block roads, but because their actions – equal parts theatre, art, and publicity genius – embed themselves in the imagination. The stunt is indestructible because the idea it seeds cannot be uprooted.
That is the truth every crackdown proves: you can jail the protestor, but you cannot jail the seed.
Mark Borkowski’s Archive on 4, ‘Outrage Inc’, will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Saturday, 23 August, and is available on BBC Sounds
