Strategies of Political Theatre: Post-War British Playwrights (review)

Michael Patterson's book is narrower in scope than its title suggests. His type of postwar British playwright is a white, male, socialist writer of the 1970s. Such dramatists as Coward, Rattigan, and Osborne figure only as the ancien regime against which Patterson's writers reacted. Stoppard and Pinter, major figures whose careers have had political aspects or phases, are similarly irrelevant to his purpose. And Patterson does not so much as hint at a next generation of British playwrights, let alone younger political playwrights, let alone Sarah Kane. What we are left with is the left-wing generation that took the roller-coaster ride that began in 1968 and smashed up against Thatcherism—"The Sad and Grumpy Socialists."

The plan of Patterson's book is simple and clear. Like so many contemporary academics, he begins with a unit entitled "Theory." Having established a basic framework, he uses early works by Arnold Wesker (Roots) and John Arden (Serjeant Musgrave's Dance) to flesh out two basic strategies of political theatre. The remainder of the book is devoted to short essays (thirteen to seventeen pages each) on seven dramatists exemplifying his two styles: Trevor Griffiths, Howard Barker, Howard Brenton, John McGrath, David Hare, Edward Bond, and Caryl Churchill. Each chapter begins with a general characterization of the writer's career, emphasizing theatrical-political matters, and ends with an analysis of a single play in which both style and content are probed for political interest.

Patterson's "theory" framework is curiously old-fashioned. He divides political theatre into two strategies, which are really the dominant styles of the last century: "reflectionist" (otherwise realistic or naturalistic) and "interventionist" (otherwise Brechtian or modernist). His discussion follows Brecht all the way to including a handy chart illustrating differences between the styles (compare BB's version in "The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre"). On the one hand is the theatre of illusion that fails to disrupt the spectator's epistemology. "For the purposes of political theatre," Patterson writes, echoing Lukács, "naturalism is a theatrical style unsuited to questioning the world about us" (16). His discussion of the "interventionist" dramaturgy is little more than a restatement of Brecht's model that leads to a rehearsal of the Brecht-Lukács debate about modernism. But questions abound. Why is Zola never brought into the analysis of naturalism? Why are the changes within Brecht's career never alluded to? Patterson is a well-published scholar of modern German theatre, which may explain the limits of his discourse. But theory enthusiasts, familiar with recent and wide-ranging speculations on theatre and politics, will wonder at the narrow and dated quality of Patterson's introduction.

The general portrayals of particular playwrights vary in their success. Patterson brushes off the career of Howard Brenton in three pages, most of which are devoted to long quotations. No mention here of Brenton's early days in the Portable Theatre, of his other collaborations with theatre groups and writers (Joint Stock, Hare, David Edgar, Tariq Ali), or of his extremely diverse plays written since the 1970s. Far better is the more extended treatment of John McGrath's personal and artistic development and his career with the company 7:84. Perhaps most disappointing is that these essays are essentially cut-and-paste jobs using familiar and accessible sources from journalistic and academic articles. Not one of the playwrights was interviewed for the book; neither were their directors, actors, or critics. Nor do the essays reflect any first-hand knowledge of productions. Patterson's material is essentially what any enterprising graduate student can find in the local university library.

The individual plays that Patterson chooses to analyze are all from the 1970s, and he states clearly that some of his choices are debatable. Using Stripwell (1975) to illustrate Howard Barker's career is "particularly problematic" (83) since the work was, perhaps alone among Barker's plays, written to appeal to commercial managements. The same is true about...