Theatre as Weapon: Worker's Theatre in the Soviet Union, Germany and Britain, 1917-1934 by Richard Stourac and Kathleen McCreery (review)

160 Book Reviews RICHARD STOURAC AND KATHLEEN McCREERY. Theatre as Weapon: Worker's Theatre in the Soviet Union, Germany and Britain, 1917-[934. London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1986. Pp. xvi, 336, illus. $55.00. Agit-prop theatre is problematic both for the political institutions and organizations it purports to represent, and for theatre artists whose political inclinations compel them to subordinate art to ideology. Neither art nor politics, neither amateur nor professional , agit-prop is a bastard form hovering on tl)e periphery of all fouf. Theatre practitioners decry its aesthetic inadequacy and professional revolutionaries scorn its political naivete. Even theatre historians largely ignore or misinterpret it. If our knowledge of worker's theatre was confined to information found in general theatre history texts like Brockett's, it would be minimal indeed, consisting primarily of the Epic theatre developed by Meyerhold. Piscator, and Brecht with perhaps a smattering of Joan Littlewood. Likewise. dramatists who are touted as the principal conduits of worker's themes include members of an intellectual elite most of whom were comfortably situated outside the working class: Hauptmann, Shaw, Gorky, and Brecht. In Theatre As Weapon, Richard Stourac and Kathleen McCreery have done much to correct this partial picture many of us have of the worker's theatre that flourished in Europe between I9I7 and 1934. The authors readily acknowledge the indebtedness of worker's theatres to Brecht, Meyerhold, and other well-known directors and playwrights, but their definition of worker's theatre largely precludes lengthy discussions of the more famous men and women who influenced the fonn and content of modern political theatre. Instead, it allows them to concentrate on the grass roots movement which gave rise to the most vital people's theatre of the 20th century. Rather than defining worker's theatre as drama about workers, Stourac and McCreery limit their discussion to theatre and drama created by the workers themselves and designed primarily for working class audiences. Thus, the worker's theatres included in the study shared the conviction that "the working class and its organizations [were] the main historical force for bringing about a radical social change, t, and true worker's theatres were those that "consciously aligned themselves to this struggle and became part of it." Among the many groups which flourished in this period are: the Soviet Blue Blouse and TRAM; the German Red Rockets, the Riveters, the Red Megaphone, the Red Forge; and the British Worker's Theatre Movement, which included groups in most industrial towns and cities in Britain. It is sometimes difficult to wade through the many individuals and groups discussed in Theatre As Weapon, and to distinguish one theatre from another, but this confusion is mitigated somewhat by the authors' cogent treatment of the ideological, aesthetic, and practical problems experienced by virtually all of the agit-prop theatres in the Soviet Union. Gennany, and Britain. Among the issues discussed are: fonn and content; the relationship of agit-prop theatre to Party objectives; the demand for ideological purity as opposed to the desire for professional standards of production; Book Reviews 161 and the problem of the working-class audience's taste for light entertainment and their concomitant lack of political and aesthetic sophistication. The issues are complex and interrelated, but the problem of form/content and its relationship to audience reception is both the most interesting and the one that consistently plagues political theatres regardless of their particular ideological orientation. Indeed, the problem as it was experienced by worker's theatres recalls the question posed by contemporary feminism: "Can the master's tools dismantle the master's house?" On the one hand, because many leaders of the worker's theatre movement felt that " new wine shouldn't go into old bottles," old fonns, especially realism, were rejected in favor of the more abstract forms associated with futurism, expressionism, and other modernist movements. The fate of Soviet artists who insisted on the "formalist" approach is well known, and the Blue Blouses, who were frequently criticized for their formalist incJinations, did not escape censure. But worker's theatres in other countries also encountered resistance to experimentation with abstract forms. Indeed, perhaps the principal irony of...