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At the End of The Great Radical Tradition? Recent Plays by Howard Brenton SUSAN BENNETT In 1983, in an interview to coincide with the premiere of his play The Genius, Howard Brenton declared that he was "a member of a smaller and smaller constituency, the great radical tradition. '" Now, after a decade of Conservative government in Britain, that great radical tradition has surely seen even the possibility of oppositional theatre brought into question. A recent history of British alternative theatres called itself" something of an obituary notice too.'" Elsewhere, the conclusion has been that contemporary theatre is "effectively in collusion with today's ideological climate." 3 Certainly with the British electorate repeatedly endorsing Mrs. Thatcher's Conservatism and the Labour Party apparently unable to present a credible challenge to the pOlitics in power, the hopes for social change which fuelled the angry young men of British theatre seem, at best, nostalgic. For those dramatists whose plays emerged in the late 50S and through the 60S - those writing for an oppositional or alternative theatre - the status of playwright in contemporary Britain is surely problematic and occasionally confusing. Recently, Caryl Churchill's Serious Money made a great deal of money for the English Stage Company at the Royal Court and in the West End at Wyndham 's, with entire evenings sold to City firms sending their staff on what The Times described as a Yuppie works outing. Howard Brenton and David Hare's Pravda similarly drew large and enthusiastic audiences to the National Theatre. Has then a political crisis arisen as a result of mainstream success? Has the great radical tradition lost its energy and, indeed, its support as a result of this process of accommodation? The answer to both questions is probably yes, but to interpret these responses as the death-knell for oppositional drama is both oversimplified and pessimistic. Brenton's recent plays, written for a broad range of performance venues and theatre companies, indicate a complex repositioning of what is generally labelled "alternative drama" and illustrate a continuing, if changing, form of opposition. 4'0 SUSAN BENNEIT In its current forms, alternative drama addresses different media, different companies with different aims and methodologies and, perhaps most importantly, different audiences. For Brenton, as a self-styled "member of the red theatre under the theatre's bed,"4 these different forms have become a central strategy of playwriting. This paper, then, looks to contemporary oppositional drama not in terms of an obituary or even in terms of a crisis. Instead Brenton's recent plays are explored as drama which reconstructs the approaches and emphases of the great radical tradition in order to meet contemporary cultural practice. Over the last ten years, Brenton's plays have been staged by the Royal National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the B.B.C., the English Stage Company, Foco Novo, and others. This list, in itself, demonstrates the pervasiveness of alternative dramas but, in order to map the relationship between the mainstream and others, it is useful to review Brenton's emergence as playwright. His career is perhaps typical of the oppositional writer through the sixties and seventies. His first full-length play, Revenge, was performed in 1969 at the Theatre Upstairs, the risk-taking second stage at the Royal Court. In the previous year, he had worked with The Combination in Brighton and with David Hare in Portable Theatre. In 1970, he was the recipient of the Arts Council's John Whiting Award and in 1972- 3 was the resident dramatist at the Royal Court Theatre. By the mid-seventies, Brenton was writing plays for the major British institutions: the Royal Shakespeare Company, the B.B.C., and the National Theatre. Indeed, his play Weapons ofHappiness (1976) was the first new play to be produced at the National on the Lyttleton stage (after Brenton had rejected the Cottesloe as not "big enough or public enough"5). Such a development suggests the history of emergent oppositional drama in the sixties and into the seventies: the first plays with small, new companies followed by commissions first from traditional supporters of emergent drama (the Royal.Court and the B.B.C.) and later from the two most...

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