British Avant-Garde Theatre by Claire Warden (review)

Claire Warden’s book opens with an account of a visit made to the first UK performance of T. S. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes in 1934. We learn that “a distinguished and elite audience climbed the precipitous and unsavoury stairs to see it at the time, amongst whom was W. B. Yeats . . . and Virginia Woolf, brought by Eliot and a party of friends”. Bertolt Brecht also saw the production and declared that it was “the best thing he had seen for a long time and by far the best thing in London” (2). In 1935, the play formed half of a double-bill with W.H. Auden’s The Dance of Death. Warden’s comment on this event is both sharp and indicative of her overall methodology: “The juxtaposition of these two plays must have been a remarkable if somewhat perplexing affair, connecting Eliot’s experimental poetic drama with Auden’s innovative, politically conscious play” (2).

Although the terms do not exactly fit in this instance – particularly in the case of Auden’s play – what she is offering to construct is a model of theatrical innovation between roughly 1914 and 1956 that both separates and connects what I and others have labelled, with reference to the later period, “avant-garde” and “agit-prop”. Warden initially limits herself to talking of the “poetic and the political”, but immediately further particularises the divide: “there are two distinguishable genealogies involved: the university-educated poets and their affiliates composing theatrical poetry, and the working-class companies searching for a form that would further their political ideas” (9). In revisiting this historical period she is arguing for a new way of looking at the connections and distinctions that she finds in a British avant-garde. That she is aware of the possible objections to such a construction is apparent throughout her introduction as she writes of her aim to create a workable, versatile category, and argues that “a pliable understanding of the avant-garde as concerned with leading, challenging and changing . . . allows us to bring together disparate groups and figures and create a real sense of a British avant-garde” (5). The entire book is “a re-imagining of British theatrical history” (8). This intellectual “re-imagining” is paralleled by a series of graphic designs by Beth Fletcher that cleverly evoke both the period and its potential as a site for avant-garde experience.

Warden is acutely aware from the outset that the concept of “British avant-garde theatre” is not one that offers either a homogeneous model, or even discrete and defined – if only in manifesto form – groupings. The matter is further complicated by the fact that it is, in practice, impossible to separate evidence of a specifically British avant-garde from other, contemporaneous and near-contemporaneous, avant-gardes: something that, again, Warden is not only well aware of, but which provides her with a great deal of her source material. The book is wide-ranging in its search for connections and sources, from the USA as well as from mainland Europe.

The author concentrates her attention on “four major companies/movements: the Workers’ Theatre Movement and its affiliate groups, Unity Theatre in its various regional guises, Group Theatre and its playwrights, and Theatre Workshop, particularly in its pre-Stratford East days” (17). Her analysis is divided into chapters that deal variously with the structure of plays/performances, staging, language, character and music and movement. While these areas overlap, this process of division allows a concentration on a finite number of inter-connections, as well as the possibility of stressing the relative importance of elements such as dialogue, physical movement and the use of masks at different points on her spectrum. However Warden is careful not to set up rigid boundaries between text-based theatre and non-text-based performance and she also lays great stress on the way past models of theatre including Greek tragedy and music hall were mined. She makes a persuasive case for her construction, and the...