Thatcher's Theatre: British Theatre and Drama in the Eighties, and: Essays on Caryl Churchill: Contemporary Representations (review)

Thatcher's Theatre: British Theatre And Drama In The Eighties. By D. Keith Peacock. Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies 88. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999; pp. xii + 229. $59.95.

Essays On Caryl Churchill: Contemporary Representations. Edited by Sheila Rabillard. Winnipeg: Blizzard Publishing, 1998; pp. 224. $24.95.

There can be no question that Margaret Thatcher's three terms as Prime Minister (1979-90) had an enormous effect on the conduct of daily life in Britain, including life in the theatre. Nearly ten years after she stepped down from her post, historians and cultural critics have begun to find the critical distance necessary to assess the impact of Thatcher and Thatcherism. Two recent books contribute to our understanding of the Thatcher government's direct and indirect influences on theatre generally and on one of the leading practitioners of leftist drama during those rightward-moving years, Caryl Churchill.

Focusing primarily on "the subsidized 'institutional' companies (The Royal Shakespeare Company, The National Theatre, the Royal Court), regional theatre and the fringe" (2), Keith Peacock's Thatcher's Theatre: British Theatre and Drama in the Eighties explores the Tory government's influence on that segment of Britain's theatrical establishment as well as the theatre's response to the government's efforts to control the arts. The two principle foci of the book are the transformation of the discourse of leftist theatre and the much-discussed crisis in funding which resulted from Thatcher's laissez faire policies as well as her assault on the welfare state. Throughout the book, the author invariably views individual plays, playwrights, theatre companies, and trends through these twin lenses.

The heyday of the left on the British stage, from Peacock's perspective, was the 1970s, when dramatic discourse drew directly from Marxist doctrine and theatrical discourse owed much to agitprop and Brechtian epic technique. In the 1980s, according to Peacock, the dominant discourses of drama and theatre were forced to cope with new realities. One result was a shift back towards more traditional well-made, realistic plays, which had mostly been rejected by leftist dramatists of earlier decades. Smaller casts and less elaborate productions (necessitated partly by reduced funding) became the norm, and the language of the stage became less confrontational, perhaps even conciliatory. While some theatre workers and groups--examples include Ann Jellicoe and the performance art company Welfare State--continued to experiment with such techniques as promenade and the carnevalesque, Peacock ultimately sees these experiments as political failures for they were more likely to celebrate and unite geographical communities than to critique the rightward shift of the larger society.

These shifts in dramatic and theatrical discourse were clearly not precipitated by a lessened commitment to the ideals of the left--at least not on the part of the playwrights in whom Peacock takes the most interest: Edward Bond, Howard Brenton, David Hare, David Edgar, Caryl Churchill, and John McGrath. In fact, the overwhelming villain in Peacock's narrative of the 1980s theatre scene is money, or rather the lack thereof. In earlier decades, the artistic left had come to accept as a matter of course that a certain degree of public funding would be available to them, even to help produce works openly critical of the very government which provided the funds. Many theatre workers had come to count on Arts Council subsidy as their principle source of revenue. While Peacock admits that pure statistics can be misleading, he provides an impressive array of figures, building a strong case for his reading of the theatrical funding crisis of the Thatcher years. In the end, he sees this crisis as nothing short of the "frightening specter of right-wing censorship through the withdrawal of public funds" (69).

Subsidy for the arts was never equally distributed, and the further one was from the mainstream, the less one had ever counted on...