Pravda: A Morality Play for the 1980s

Pravda: A Morality Play for the 1980s ROBERT WILCHER On the threshold of the 1980s, a number of commentators on the theatrical scene in Britain were detecting changes both in the political and cultural climate of the country and in the Predicament of those dramatists who had come to prominence in the aftermath of 1968. John Calder expressed the unease felt by many following the Conservative victory at the General Election in 1979: The decrease in normal civility in business dealings, the downgrading of honesty and respect for others, the slow increase in racial tension, the growing admiration for the army and the police, with its accompanying unrealistic xenophobia, the financial starvation of intellectual and artistic life: all these are symptomatic of a shift from the eclectic and tolerant attitudes of the sixties to the new hardness of the eighties. I Calder was particularly alarmed by the "obvious discomfiture" of dramatists like Howard Brenton, David Hare, Howard Barker, Snoo Wilson, and David Edgar who "know what they want to say, but cannot say it effectively enough," and who, reaching only a small audience, "feel overtaken by events, out of kilter with the times, and probably expect to lose the few platforms they have.'" A year later, surveying the state of contemporary socialist theatre in England, C.W.E. Bigsby related the "shift to the larger stages of the subsidised companies and to television" of Hare, Edgar and Brenton to the swing to the right in national politics and to the recognition that the "interventional power of socialist theatre" over the past decade had been negligible: These playwrights changed direction in order to examine the alienation which they felt increasingly to lie behind problems that surfaced in the fonn of a political reaction or collapse ofmoral sensibility, but which originated at alevel not susceptible ofsimplistic analysis. Pravda: Morality Play for the 80S 43 Bigsby went on to cite such plays as Hare's Licking Hitler (1978) and Dreams ofLeaving (1980), Edgar's Mary Barnes (1978) and The Jail Diary ofAlbie Sachs (1978), and Brenton's Sore Throats (1979) as evidence that a preoccupation with the theme of alienation had "replaced the confident and energetic satire of the early seventies."3 Already, before the seventies were out, David Hare had confronted the fact that "satire depends upon ignorance": its purpose is to raise "consciousness" by exposing the realities of corruption, incompetence, and exploitation concealed behind the respectable fa~ades of commerce and government. But where were the tangible effects ofa decade or more of anti-Establishment satire in the British theatre? Hare continued: ... consciousness has been raised in this country for a good many years now and we seem further from radical political change than at any time in my life. The traditional function of the radical artist - ..Look at those Borgias; look at this bureaucracy." - has been undennined. We have looked. We have seen. We have known. And we have not changed. A pervasive cynicism paralyses public life.4 By the time John Bull was completing his survey of political drama 1968 1983 , Margaret Thatcher had been elected for a second tenn ofoffice, and it had become evident "that the Conservative administration really does mean business, that it is prepared to question, and indeed directly to threaten, a whole series of assumptions about the structure of post-war Britain." There were, however. no obvious successors to Brenton's collaboration with Tony Howard, A Short Sharp Shock! (1980), which savagely caricatured the Thatcher government's rise to power: "The conditions would seem ripe for a revival of agit-prop theatre, but curiously there is very little evidence as yetta suggest that such a revival is under way."S Writing mid-way through the 1980s, David Ian Rabey noted that "some of the social symptoms" predicted in Brenton's The Churchill Play (1974), which "might have seemed alarmist fantasy to the initial audience," were already facts of life in I984 - "rioting, looting, swingeing cuts in public and educational expenditure, provisions for the use ofarmy camps as overspill prisons." But he recognized that the theatrical response might need to be more sophisticated than that looked for by Bull: Many recent dramatists have felt increasingly...