Theatre for the People: An Interview with John McGrath of the 7:84 Theatre Company

Van Erven 117 THEATRE FOR THE PEOPLE: AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN McGRATH OF THE 7:84 THEATRE COMPANY At present, many popular political theater groups in the West seem to go through some sort of change. Much of the hard-core radicalism has worn off, actors are less willing to perform under makeshift circumstances, writers request more elaborate and expensive productions, and more and more radical troupes accept venues in commercial theatrs. The 7:84 Theatre Company consists of an English and a Scottish branch. Recently, the English 7:84 has come under attack from the British Arts Council, which threatened to cut all subsidies to radical troupes. Both the English and the Scottish 7:84 company depend heavily on government support. On the one hand, then, we see radical popular theater being sucked back into the mainstream, and on the other hand, radical theater is being eliminated. Reason enough to find out from John McGrath himself what he feels about the present crisis in the radical popular theater movement in general and 7:84's predicament in particular. The following interview took place in Glasgow, Scotland, on May 11, 1984. ********** [Eugene van Erven]: Where were you in 1968? [John McGrath]: I was sitting in a small room, writing a play called Random Happenings in the Hebrides. This was while everything was happening in May in Paris. So I crossed the Channel in this huge Chevy. Of course the police didn't suspect me of being a radical while driving around in Paris in this Chevrolet convertible . There, I became involved in this revolutionary arts committee which consisted of a healthy combinaion of anarchists, Trotskists and Maoists . . . [EvE]: Did you know Jean-Jacques Lebel?' [JM]: Yeah! I was with Jean-Jacques all the time. He was my buddy. We used to drive through Paris in my Chevy. We had a great time together. [EvE]: Had you gone to Paris on your own account? [JM]: Well, no. I had gone there as a sort of representative of writers and artists in London who had raised some money for the purpose in order to express our solidarity with the people at the Beaux Arts in Paris. 1 also went to the States in 1968. [EvE]: So you followed the protest movement? [JM]: Well, I didn't actually follow the movement. I was also in the States for some movie work I was doing in New York. All of us there were aware of the involvement of the U.S. military in Vietnam. [EvE]: Were you aware at the time of the work done by groups like The San 118 the minnesota review Francisco Mime Troups, Bread and Puppet and Teatro Campesino? [JM]: With some of the pieces of the Mime Troupe, yes. Because some time before that I had been in touch with Herbert Blau through the San Francisco Actors ' Workshop, and he told me some of the things that were going on. Herbie kept us in touch. But I wasn't too conscious of all these American troupes, although I knew they existed. The Living Theater was much bigger here in the fifties and early sixties. Jimmy Anderson, one of the actors of the Living Theater, was a great friend of ours who used to stay with actor friends of ours. We saw a lot of the Living Theater; not so much of the Mime Troupe. [EvE]: But in retrospect wouldn't you say that the work done by the Mime Troupe, Bread and Puppet and Teatro Campesino is closer in form and spirit to what you were doing than the Living Theater? [JM]: Oh yes, sure! We discovered them, of course, in the early seventies. But thinking that we started in '68, I didn't know that much about them. [EvE]: Do you think that all those troupes around the world that sudenly started doing popular political theater in the late sixties all worked independently of each other? [JM]: Yes, I think so. Although there was a terrific chain reaction around the world. There was an enormous mobility of ideas around the sixties. In Europe, the ideas were moving between the street protests in Germany in 1967, and Italy and...