Politics & Power Quote by Fiona Shaw

There is a particular kind of boredom only an insider can name: the boredom of watching an art form trip over its own self-importance. Fiona Shaw’s “incredibly tedious” isn’t casual impatience; it’s the weariness of someone who’s spent a lifetime around institutions that congratulate themselves for “respecting tradition” while quietly strangling risk. The verb choice does the real work. “Murders itself” frames conservatism not as prudence but as self-harm, a slow institutional suicide carried out in evening wear.

“Conservative pomposity” is an unusually precise insult. She’s not attacking conservatism as an ideology so much as a posture: the reflex to mistake inherited rules for quality, to confuse reverence with rigor. Pomposity is the tell - it signals performance, not principle. Shaw’s complaint is less “I dislike this thing” than “I resent the way it uses prestige to avoid accountability.” When an institution is pompous, it demands deference upfront, before it has earned attention in the present tense.

As an actress, Shaw is also speaking from the body outward. Tedium on stage isn’t abstract; it’s pacing, airless choices, the safe interpretation that plays like an obligation. The line implies a cultural ecosystem where gatekeepers reward the familiar, then wonder why audiences drift. The sting of her phrasing is strategic: it refuses polite critique and insists that complacency has consequences. If the art dies, it won’t be from external threats. It will be from choosing to stay respectable.