In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Watt 71 David Watt Theatre and Political Intervention: The 70s Project in Britain Reconsidered What David Edgar has described as the "demonization" of the 1960s [for which in Britain read 1965-75] ... characteristic of the new Right on both sides of the Atlantic"1 has started to bite, and not only in conservative circles. A recent history of alternative and experimental theatre in Britain is described by its author, Andrew Davies, as "something of an obituary notice."2 Methuen, a publishing house with some power in shaping the official history of recent British theatre, has not only tacitly confirmed Davies' stance, but apparently legitimated it by dropping from print most of the few published examples of left-wing theatrical experimentation of the 70s to which they gained the rights after their takeover of the Pluto Press drama catalogue. The oppositional theatre of the 70s deserves its status as a target of the New Right: Robert Howison has recently described it as "the most visible and coherent product of 1968," an area of cultural work in which ... the mixture of culture and politics which had seemed so confusing in the latter sixties had genuine creative issue, where cultrual and political practice achieved an uncompromised harmony of interests.' What is surprising is the rejection of some of its central principles from within the Left. An interview between David Edgar and Richard Eyre, in celebration of the latter's appointment to the artistic directorship of the National Theatre, in which both dismiss a substantial body of that left-wing theatre work as "an adolescent folly," may stand as exemplum. Neither claims to have been untouched by this "folly", but nonetheless Edgar concurs with Eyre's judgment that "[w]ith hindsight, one of the follies of the 70s, was the belief that the theatre should be an active vehicle of political change."4 Magazine interviews, even in ajournai like Marxism Today, are not ideal vehicles for considered theoretical thought, and Edgar's published views, at least, are much more sophisticated than those which appear there.5 Nonetheless, the interview is representative of a glib tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The extraordinary industrial militancy of the British Labour movement in the early 70s may have seduced some into a naively grandiose sense of the political possibilities of their craft, but it also led to the generation of some hard-won theoretical principles. 72 the minnesota review Much of the 70s project was characterized by an acceptance of a distinction , voiced by Sandy Craig, for example, between "political plays," staged within the institutional structures of the mainstream theatre, and "political theatre," as manifested in the companies which chose to establish a continuing dialogue with potentially progressive oppressed groups of which the working class was a centrally important one. For Craig, ... political plays seek to appeal to, and influence, the middle class ... The implication of this is that society can be reformed and liberalized, where necessary , by the shock troops of the middle class .. . political plays in bourgeois theatre implicitly recognize that the middle class remains the progressive class within society. * The rejection of this stance produced a concern with the class composition and cultural specificities of the target audiences of political theatre companies , caricatured by Edgar in the aforementioned interview as essentially "patronizing" (34). The decline of such a concern in the 80s should not surprise us—faith in the progressive character of the working class has been difficult to sustain in Thatcherite Britain—but it is probably not unrelated to the reining back of that aberrant cultural pluralism of the British Arts Council which made such a stance fundable during the 70s. Eyre's awareness of the ramifications of such a view is reflected in his unease when faced with the question of the class base of the national Theatre's audience. While admitting the National's undeniably narrow class constituency, he comforts himself with the thought that it is not the function of his new institution to "cure the ills of our society," the class base of the audience being seen as a lamentable social problem created by "the whole history of the development of cultural life" in Britain, and...

pdf

Share