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Revisiting the Revolutionary Stage
Strategies of Political Theatre: Post-War British Playwrights
Michael Patterson
Cambridge University Press 2003
£45 hardback ISBN 0 521258553
Dateline: 20th September, 2004
British political theatre is slippery term. From the point of view
of most teachers, their students and playgoers, it means one of a dozen
playwrights working in Britain between the late 50s to the late 80s.
These would include: Arnold Wesker; John Arden; Trevor Griffiths; (early)
Howard Barker; Edward Bond; Howard Brenton; John McGrath; David Hare;
David Edgar; Caryl Chuchill; Peter Barnes. Political theatre is understood
in the dramatist David Greig's phrase, as a 'theatre that promotes change'
and is equated with being explicitly socialist in its orientation. The
earlier writers' confidence that theatre could accomplish so much and
its final, heroic and ill fated battled with Thatcherite Conservatism
in the 80s, also define its historical limits. (Howard Brenton remarked
in 1984, that his generation of political dramatists felt by the mid
1980s as if they were becoming "internal exile[s]. Indeed, we were
beginning to be called loonies".)
While there are several problems with such a definition of political
theatre (Joan Littlewood would be one and David Hare's Stuff Happens
another), there is no doubt there is a need for a reflection with hindsight
on what was one of the great periods in British drama. There really
has not been a book that attempted to look at the overall picture since
Catherine Itzin's Stages in the Revolution (1980) - which has
been sadly out of print for years - a first hand participative account
of the heyday of such drama before the sea change of Thatcherism in
1978 and John Bull's New British Political Dramatists (1984).
There has been no attempt to do anything like a comparative survey,
although there have been books on the individual dramatists and one
on an important theoretical aspect of their work - Janelle Reinelt's
After Brecht: British Epic Theatre (1996).
Patterson's book is therefore a needed one and in most ways, it does
exactly what it should. He sets out how he defines political theatre
in Britain and then examines each playwright in terms of their comments
about their aims and their work in general. He then provides closely
detailed readings of one play from each of the main playwrights he chooses
(no surprises here), exploring both what they set out to do theatrically
and how well they did it. His style is cool and extremely lucid and
while this is not a blow-by-blow narrative like Itzin's - so one misses
a sense of being in the thick of things - it is much more analytical
and rigorous. Throughout his account, he implies comparisons and uses
his historical distance to be more evaluative and evenhanded.
For example, his account of John McGrath and 7:84 is a very deft reading
of both what McGrath was trying to do and why many of the traditional
aesthetic tests applied to McGrath's agit-prop work are simply irrelevant
from McGrath's own political perspective. Patterson's reading of the
iconic The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil as a modern
day ceilidh entertainment is exemplary and like the others in the book
he is generous to the playwright's stated intentions.
On the other hand, he raises a number of judicious questions about
the problems of McGrath's political theatrical interventions like the
Cheviot.
- Their intended 'localism' meant they succeeded with very particular
audiences at specific times and places, which led to a continual reinvention
of the political wheel from play to play.
- While they may have helped their audiences find their social identity,
there was no real reason why this should lead to any political development
per se in terms of McGrath's revolutionary social agenda -
perhaps they were just a 'Good Night Out'.
- McGrath accused his fellow dramatists of only reaching middle class
audiences, but as Patterson observes, how far 7:84 audiences were
working class is always debatable. Left-wing social workers, teachers
and students of working class origins are, perhaps, as much middle
class in terms of their culture as any typical subsidized theatre
audience. And if at times of crisis, like the miner's strike, the
audience composition and recognition were very different, then the
political theatre was already happening in the street, long before
the actual play became involved in the process.
This is a good example of Patterson's method as he tries to evaluate
the playwrights' political ambitions and the theatrical strategies they
evolved in their own terms and then discusses them fairly and critically.
What might be considered problematic for Brenton and Hare is how far
any single work, in this case The Churchill Play (1974) and Hare's
Fanshen (1975), is representative of their varied output.
The Churchill Play, although it has all the typical fringe theatre
shocks we associate with Brenton, is not atypical. It is not an epic
play like The Romans in Britain, nor is it like the satirical
Pravda co-written with David Hare (1985), and it is unusual insofar
as it does not debate the need for socialism against the backdrop of
the terrible price of Stalinism, as does Weapons of Happiness
(1976). However, Patterson's reading of it is thought-provoking and
especially good on how it changed during the process of revival between
1976 and 1987. The play became literally modified and lines were rewritten
in response to what Brenton saw as changes in British society and the
political context.
Patterson agrees Fanshen is an unusual example of Hare's work,
because it was developed cooperatively with the Joint Stock Company,
through the cast being democratically involved in research for the script.
However, he argues it is similar to those plays that chart the hypocrisy
and contradictory decadence of the ruling British classes such as Plenty
(1978).
Nevertheless, if both plays are similar insofar as they ask us to think
how society and British society in particular could be different, then
such criteria apply to all of Hare's work after the 70s. Surely, this
would be just as true of the Absence of War (1993) or even Via
Dolorosa (1998)?
In conclusion, this is a very necessary and timely book. Yet it does
suggest we should question our definitions of British political theatre.
The book is the story of playwrights, but what of all the other theatre
workers and such aspects as the development of the Fringe? I note also
that Joan Littlewood and Theatre Workshop are not included, but if she
were to be, then it would suggest British political theatre goes back
to the 1930s. Third, Hare as an example suggests British political theatre
does not simply die out after the 1980s. In fact, the principal difference
between the 1990s playwrights, such as Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill,
is that they are as political as their forebears in terms of criticizing
existing society, but do not believe there are any kind of ready made
political answers.
At £40, this hardback appears intended for University libraries.
However, this is such an important and clearly written account of a
defining moment in British theatrical history, that there is much here
to interest the general (non-academic) reader. I hope Cambridge University
Press bring out a paperback in the next few years and make the book
more widely available.
Steven Barfield
University of Westminster.
Articles Indices:
Articles from 2004
Articles from 2003
Articles from 2002
Articles from 2001
Articles from 2000
Articles from 1999
Articles from 1998
Articles from 1997
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