7:84 in 1985: 14 Years of Radical Popular Theater in Great Britain

Van Erven 103 Eugene van Erven 7:84 in 1985: 14 Years of Radical Popular Theater in Great Britain The British economy is in shambles, unemployment is at an all-time high, angry groups of ethnic minorities are killing bobbies and destroying the already dilapitated suburbs of Brixton and Nottingham. Some months ago, one of the most stubbornly fought miners' strikes in British history was brutally halted by military and riot police. To top things off, Margaret Thatcher continues to insist that the situation in South Africa is dramatically improving. Material enough for political theater, one would say. Why is it, then, that the vigor of political drama that so drastically changed the British theater after World War II seems to be slackening? The rise of political theater in Great Britain after World War II is usually connected with the development of the "fringe," small, financially and technically limited theater companies that intended to bring alternative theater to a new type of audience. Most fringe groups wanted to create their own plays and thus provided a new forum for many young playwrights who were waiting in the wings. Trevor Griffiths, David Edgar, Howard Brenton, Louise Page, Caryl Churchill and a host of other male and female writers made their debut in the "fringe."' The story of John McGrath and the 7:84 Theatre Company relates one of the most successful associations between playwright and political fringe in the history of the British theater. Yet, there are signs that 7:84 is also gradually moving back into the mainstream. Like so many other young political playwrights, John McGrath is of working-class origins and benefited from the new Education Act of 1944 to attend Oxford University, where he studied English literature. McGrath was introduced to the bourgeois theatrical establishment while working as a script reader at George Devine's Royal Court. There he met John Arden and even had some of his own plays produced in the "Upstairs" theater. In the mid-sixties, he became involved in television and helped create the highly successful Z-Cars police series. But when the program abandoned its sympathetic focus on social problems of the proletariat in favor of hero-oriented, action-filled crime adventures, John McGrath left the BBC for the movies. He wrote several successful film scenarios, including Billion Dollar Brain, Bofor's Gun and The Reckoning, before turning his attention to political drama. The theater had become a much freer medium than television or film since the abolition of censorship in 1968. Furthermore, under the influence of the mass mobilization of young people and the cultural and political 104 the minnesota review excitement of the late sixties, direct confrontation with a target audience appeared as a more effective option for political dramatists than the other mass media. John McGrath's plays before 1971 had been rather realistic. With Trees in the Wind, McGrath took the first step toward a more truly popular political theater. The play was first presented at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival by a randomly selected group of actors. This improvised company took the play on tour, funded by money that McGrath had saved from his screenwriting. Thus was the 7:84 Theatre Company born: 7:84 was chosen as the name of the group to draw attention to a statistic published in The Economist in 1966 which asserted that 7% of the population of Great Britain owned 84% of the capital wealth. Although this proportion may have fluctuated marginally over the years, we continue to use it because it points to the basic economic structure of the society we live in, from which all the political, social and cultural structures grow. The company opposes this set-up, and tries to indicate socialist alternatives to the capitalist system that dominates all our lives today.2 But the artistic way in which 7:84 presented its socialist alternatives on stage changed considerably during the first decade of its existence. Trees in the Wind is a realistic play with hardly any of the popular theater features that were to characterize later 7:84 creations. It intends to prove an ideological point rather than analyze a socio-historical situation . The play is, in...