The power of drama to shake the world was demonstrated in January 2024 by ITV’s screening of the four-part Mr Bates vs The Post Office written by Gwyneth Hughes. The episodes were seen by an average of 9.7 million viewers, stirred up national outrage at the Post Office's mistreatment of its own workforce and had politicians long silent on the institutional abuse suddenly scurrying about claiming they were shocked at what they saw.
The Post Office wasn't the only focus of discontent this year. Strikes were rumbling on as people’s living standards fell. The Social Metrics Commission reported “that the rate of poverty in the UK is now higher than at any point in the 21st century.” It went on to claim that there are “nearly one in four (24%) people in the UK now judged to be in poverty.”
The politicians who should have been doing something about it were not popular. Labour won the July election with just 33.7% of the vote in “the second lowest turnout at a UK general election since the introduction of universal suffrage in 1928.”
The troubled state of the nation was impressively conveyed by Yaël Farber’s atmospheric Almeida production of King Lear. On a stage hemmed in by hanging metal chains, Danny Sapani gave a powerful performance as a Lear increasingly bewildered by the disintegrating world around him.
Alma Mater at the Almeida illustrated how deliberately ineffective even liberals in authority can be in dealing with injustice. The student Nikki (Phoebe Campbell) reports to the college's first female “master”, Jo Mulligan (Justine Mitchell) that a new student Paige (Liv Hill) has been raped by one of the male students after a fresher's party themed, “What Were You Wearing When the Police Raided the Brothel?”
Despite Paige and Nikki making the allegation of rape public, the liberal-minded Jo is too conscious of the trouble it might cause the college to do anything about it.
The failure of those in authority to deal with injustice is sometimes compounded by the use of scapegoats to channel discontent. In recent times, the favoured scapegoat has been migrants whose reality was very movingly conveyed by two shows at the National Theatre.
The stage version of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath conjures up the grim toll on those caught up in the American economic crises of the 1930s when the fictional Joad family are forced to leave their drought-ridden land in Oklahoma to seek the illusion of decent work in California.
The dance / movement performance Kin from the company Gecko also illustrates the difficult journey of migrant families.
Border guards scrutinise the papers of refugees carrying suitcases, sometimes punching travellers and even spitting into a bag of food offered to them by a refugee.
A young woman contorts her body in sorrow at her separation from her family. In a brief moment of hope, reunited with them, they dance together in celebration. But the scene is undercut by the yellow stripe the guards have painted on their backs.
A group rejected at a crossing are encouraged to wear a white tie and smear their faces white to get themselves across the border. One of them can’t bring himself to erase his identity and is forcibly disappeared. In contrast, people in neat blue suits sporting blonde hair are politely welcomed with no problems whatsoever.
The issue of racism was the subject of several shows performed at the Lyric Hammersmith where the artistic director Rachel O'Riordan and her team have curated an imaginative combination of new and classic shows that have a political bite.
Among them was an inspiring production of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun written in 1959 during the rise of the American Civil Rights movement. It became the first play on Broadway by a black writer.
Directed by Tinuke Craig and told from the point of view of the women characters who are sympathetic to the male casualties of an oppressive society, it chronicles one black family’s attempt to buy a home in a white district of Chicago with the insurance payment from a family death.
Lena (Doreene Blackstock) intends some of the money to pay for her daughter Beneatha’s training as a doctor, but her son Walter Lee (Solomon Israel) wants something to start a liquor store. The confident, sometimes mischievous manner of Beneatha, played by Josephine-Fransilja, reflects the newly emerging Second Wave of Feminism that is certain the world can and must be different.
The words of the poet Langston Hughes open the show with the question, “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?”, listing several possibilities before finishing with “Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it just explode?”
August 2024 in English cities gave us one frightening answer to that question. A better answer is in the performance of Lorraine Hansberry’s important play.
Unfortunately, as Philip Fisher’s article on a recent Equity report has indicated, theatres are in financial difficulties. This encourages a preference for safe, fluffy, light entertainment. Many venues are mounting one-person shows with perhaps even a comedy night. The 2023 Edinburgh Fringe advertised 1,199 shows in the comedy section of the paper guide. In 2024, that number rose to 1,334.
However, political events and socially conscious culture workers come knocking on the door. This year, it was Palestine that stirred up the demonstrations and controversy in the theatre. Back in February, Chickenshed, priding itself on its “inclusivity” as “a theatre company for absolutely everyone”, decided it had to make an exception for the planned two-week run of the short gentle play Conversation with My Father written and performed by Gemilla Shamrock, a British woman of Palestinian heritage.
The following month, Manchester’s HOME arts venue suddenly cancelled an April performance of Voices of Resilience, which centred on the diaries of the Palestinian Atef Abu Saif. According to the BBC, “100 artists began removing their work from the gallery in protest at the decision”, and as protests mounted, HOME reinstated the event.
To the irritation of Israeli supporters, some shows found their way on stage. A stunning performance of a collection of new, mostly Palestinian-connected plays by established writers entitled Cutting the Tightrope was mounted in May at the Arcola. My Name Is Rachel Corrie about the young American woman deliberately killed by an Israeli bulldozer appeared at the Old Red Lion in June.
Then came the Edinburgh Fringe in which, among the seven shows with a Palestinian theme, was Nadav Burstein’s powerful Rebels and Patriots, illustrating the fury and grief of traumatised Israeli Defence Soldiers. The sold-out performances of David Hare’s dramatic journalism in Via Dolorosa spoke to an interest that wasn’t being satisfied. Importantly, the White Kite Collective at Summerhall gave us the words of seventeen Palestinians along with a short briefing from a local cultural workers activist in the show entitled Stand With Palestinians: Messages from Gaza.
In September, the White Kite Collective followed up with more themed Palestinian shows in London such as a production at the Arcola focusing on journalists in Gaza. According to a February United Nations report, “since 7 October, over 122 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza”.
The Barbican mounted Voices of Resilience despite demands from UK Lawyers for Israel that it be cancelled, and in the larger space, they showed Amos Gitaï’s stage version of his filmed verbatim documentary trilogy known as House created from conversations about a house in West Jerusalem from its Palestinian owners to its subsequent Israeli occupiers. There was such Israeli outrage at the first part of the trilogy completed in 1980 that the commissioning Israeli television station banned it.
Over at Battersea Arts Centre, Khalid Abdalla’s intense often very moving autobiographical play Nowhere told a story of revolutionary movements, friendships and family. It opened and closed with reference to Palestine but takes us on a journey across continents, colonial history and his fight for democracy.
In December, the Kings Head Theatre brought us A Trojan Woman, a timely, disturbing riff on the classic antiwar play from Euripides by the American writer Sara Farrington.
The story and characters are those of The Trojan Women. The language is modern, direct and engaging. The politics are sharply written from the point of view of the victims with only a sardonic portrayal of the Greeks, their messengers and the Gods.
Culture workers alone will not stop Israel from bombing Palestinians, end the sexual abuse of women or feed the increasing numbers of people going to sleep every night hungry. But they can, like the dramas I’ve mentioned here, alert us to an injustice and agitate for a different, better way of organising the world.