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Political Theatre Comes in from the ColdDateline: 10th October, 2004It's an odd beast, political theatre. Twenty years ago a police inspector in the North East, Arthur McKenzie, was one of those responsible for policing the picket lines during the Miners' Strike. What he saw and experienced shocked him to the core and he wrote a play, Pickets and Pigs, about it. Later this month the Customs House in South Shields will premiere it - twenty years after. He had offered it to a number of theatres, both in the NE and in London, and one major London new writing theatre came close to taking it, but, in the end, all he received was rejections - not because it was a bad or badly written play, but because of its political stance. One NE director made that perfectly clear to him. Somehow, through - probably - sheer force of personality, Margaret Thatcher managed to make socialism, society, even empathy, dirty words, and so theatre with a political stance (or, at least, a left of centre stance) or which was critical of the government almost died. Or at least it went underground. This near-death state was assisted by the drastic cuts in subsidy during the Thatcher era, which had the effect that she desired, of forcing theatres to look for support from private industry, with the inevitable result that plays with a political stance for the most part simply did not get funding. The arrival of the (New) Labour government was greetd with some joy in the theatre community and certainly the industry has seen an increase in subsidy, which has helped it to grow. However New Labour's sub-Thatcherite attitudes began to create some disillusion, and this process has been accelerated by the whole business of the Iraq War. Now political theatre is making a comeback. Much of it is a reaction to the war, of course, but some - such as David Hare's The Permanent Way - tackles other problems. It seems, however, to be going through a process of growing up again, working its way through the agit-prop stage (John McGrath's last work, Hyperlynx, seems to me to be very firmly in the agit-prop mould and The Permanent Way is not too far from it), through satire (Justin Butcher's work springs to mind) and drama documentary (such as The Colour of Justice and the Hutton Enquiry), but it has not yet reached its maturity. The next couple of years should prove interesting! Articles Indices:
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