DT+ FUNDAMENTALS

A Concise Introduction to:

Political Theatre
Colin Chambers
Kingston University

INTRODUCTION
In general, political theatre is a term applied to theatre that explicitly
refers to, comments upon, or wishes its audience to intervene in political
issues and events. Political theatre can be directly linked to a particular
campaign or party, or have a wider application, and ranges from
community drama dealing with a particular local issue to consciousness-
raising drama presented in alliance with a specific identity group, such
as those organised around sexuality or race. Definitions of what
constitutes political theatre change through time and cultures, as do the
connotations associated with the term ‘political’, and each nation has its
own traditions and history of political theatre.

The notion of political theatre is traced back in Western theatre to the

ancient Greeks, for whom theatre was an integral part of social
existence and civic life. It took on a new life and meaning in the 20th
century in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution, and was
resurgent in the 1960s and the years following. The new politics of this
latter period also saw a redefinition of what it meant to be political and,
as a consequence, what political theatre meant. Most of the political
theatre of the modern era was found on the radical left and was
collectivist or communitarian in spirit. It was often seen as theatre at the
margins or on the outside of society because its aims were opposed to
those who held power.

Last update: 07/02/2019



HISTORY
In ancient Greece, every major settlement had its theatre, which was
intimately bound up with the practice of the Greek version of democracy.
The theatre lay at the heart of the ‘polis’, a term that meant both the city
and the body of people who made up its citizenry, which excluded women
and slaves. The theatre of classical Athens, regarded as the fountainhead
of Western drama, took place within religious festivals, though they did not
themselves have a ritual function. Through the retelling of mythical stories
to thousands of open-air spectators, Greek drama explored and
confronted pressing social and civic issues of the day. The very existence
and aim of theatre was political, and in later historical eras, particularly from
the 20th century on, practitioners have looked back to this period for
inspiration as they tried to recapture the vital, primal function of theatre and
with it a closer connection between actor and audience, between drama
and society.

It was during the 20th century that political theatre as a label gained
currency. The Russian Revolution of 1917 and its development into the
Soviet Union in 1922, gave rise to the proliferation of units of state-
organised agitational propaganda (known as agitprop), which toured the
country with entertainments in different art forms designed to instruct and
inform. In theatre, the troupes sought to reproduce the energy and
directness that characterised popular entertainment, using forms such as
choral mass declamation or the living newspaper, in which news of the day
was dramatized through performance. This kind of theatre, typified by the
Soviet Blue Blouse Movement, created models for performance that were
taken up in other countries through the network of the international
communist movement and its workers’ theatre groups. Out of this global
phenomenon came some notable contributions to theatrical as well as
political culture.

Erwin Piscator (1893-1966), who had founded the amateur Proletarian

Theatre in Berlin in 1920, staged the Red Revue for the German Communist
Party’s election campaign in 1924 and the following year mounted a
pageant for the party’s Berlin conference. Using the latest technical
innovations, he transferred these ideas to his professional activities in
large-scale productions at the Volksbühne and the Theater am
Nollendorfplatz. This laid the basis for the non-naturalistic, anti-illusionary

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Epic Theatre that came to fruition in the dialectical narrative work of Bertolt
Brecht (1898-1956) and transformed 20th-century theatre practice.

In the US, the amateur New Theatre League premiered the seminal 1930s
political play, Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty (1935), which mixes agitprop
and Realism in its militant story of a taxi drivers strike. The play was used
in many campaigns in the UK by the Unity Theatre, which was also amateur,
and which represented the most consistent and sustained popular
intervention in mid-20th-century British drama by the left. Joan
Littlewood’s (1914-2002) transformative contribution to post-war British
theatre, through Theatre Workshop, her company based in the east end of
London, is a direct descendant of the political theatre she had helped
create in the 1930s. This can be seen, for example, in shows such as Oh,
What a Lovely War! (1963), a documentary-based, cabaret-style view of the
First World War from the soldier’s perspective that is highly critical of the
generals and the ruling class they served.

Amidst the political upsurges of the 1960s in Western industrialised

countries, alternative theatre movements arose that drew on and redefined
this tradition of political theatre. Examples can be found in the work of John
McGrath (1935-2002), Ariane Mnouchkine (1939- ), Dario Fo (1926-2016)
and Franca Rame (1929-2013), and the Living Theatre as well as Augusto
Boal (1931-2009) and many groups in what was known as the ‘developing
world’. Political activity itself increasingly embraced a self-evidently
theatrical dimension, and stretched the definition of political theatre
beyond the traditional one, just as the definition of politics was being
reimagined as no longer just a matter of the working class against ruling
class.

This broadening of the dimensions of political theatre chimed with the

slogan popularised in the 1970s, “the personal is political,” and was most
immediately noticeable through the work of theatre groups organised
around particular identities in addition to class: women, gay, lesbian,
national, ethnic, community. Rich new histories of these identity groups
were uncovered as past theatrical activity was recalibrated. Women’s
groups were now able to look back, for example, to the work of the
Actresses’ Franchise League (AFL), founded in 1908 to further the suffrage
cause.

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Globally, the histories of colonised peoples and the struggle for their
theatre began to be identified and recognised as inextricably linked to
political struggle. Research revealed a history of Asian as well as Black
theatrical activity in the UK from the 19th century on. This helped Black and
Asian groups towards the end of the 20th century to make space for their
independent, autonomous voices to be heard and create a new political
aesthetic from the margins, drawing on but transcending the boundaries
of the dominant culture while revitalising it with both their histories and
their contemporary work.

In the later decades of the 20th century, the new, wider understanding of
what it meant to be political and therefore of what constituted political
theatre, allowed the theatre history of even earlier periods to be regarded
afresh. The playwrights of the Elizabethan, Jacobean and Renaissance
eras, who were subject to severe censorship, were now seen to be political
in ways that hitherto had been overlooked or underplayed. Even the work
of the elusive figure who remained their main representative, William
Shakespeare (1564-1616), while heavily contested, could be seen
politically. His plays were interpreted as both conservative, in the context
of a patriarchal and racially prejudiced social order, and as radical, in the
context of gender fluidity and nuanced confrontations with power.
Macbeth (1606) for instance, was read in the light of the Gunpowder Plot
and King James’s attempts to unite Scotland and England in a new political
entity called Britain. In a catchphrase coined by the Polish critic Jan Kott in
the 1960s, Shakespeare was in fact, “our contemporary.”

Swathes of theatre were recovered in this process; the apparently barren

period between the Restoration and the new drama of Henrik Ibsen (1828-
1906) at the end of the 19th century was seen anew, with disparaged forms
such as melodrama shown to be more significant in expressing and
forming popular consciousness of political matters of empire, gender roles,
and attitudes to power and wealth.

Campaigners for a new theatre such as the playwrights George

Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) and Harley Granville Barker (1877-1946) had
to contend not just with the forces of convention and commerce,
but also, like Shakespeare, with state censorship, which banned plays
by themselves as well as by Ibsen, often ostensibly on moral grounds,
but usually with an unspoken political motive until 1968.

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CRITICAL CONTEXT
In the redefinition of politics and political theatre that took place in the latter
part of the 20th century, the idea of simple oppositions was overturned.
Terms such Epic Theatre, associated with Brecht, had been used as the
counterweight to major but supposedly non-political trends, such as the
Theatre of the Absurd, and in the process the likes of Arthur Adamov
(1908-1970) and Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), who were dubbed
Absurdists, were jettisoned from the political arena altogether. A new and
wide-ranging aesthetic of performance was constructed in place of this
simple, binary opposition of ‘political’ versus ‘non-political’. This process
introduced an array of innovative ideas in the theatre, reconceptualising
notions of ‘liveness’, ‘presence’ and ‘spectatorship’, and what theatre-
going itself meant culturally and politically. The whole context of theatre-
making and theatre-going was taken into account as producing meaning,
including not just the more obvious components, such as a playwright’s
intention but also features that generally had been overlooked in analysis,
such as how the audience travels to and from a performance space to the
nature, history and resonance of the space itself.

A diverse tradition of ‘political’ theatre defined in broader terms was

revealed, especially where practitioners refuted the conventional
dramaturgical structures of Aristotelian unities and operated as part of a
growing avant-garde. This included, for instance, the theatre of stasis of
Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) and the theatre of Harley Granville
Barker (1877-1946). The politics of theatrical revolutionaries such as
Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) and Jean Genet (1910-1986) were reassessed
within this new tradition that embraced Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) and the
Surrealists as well as the ground-breaking theorist, designer, and director
Edward Gordon Craig (1872-1966). This framing can be used to trace a
heritage that can be seen, for example, in the work of Julian Beck and
Judith Malina with the Living Theatre, Peter Brook’s productions of Peter
Weiss’ Marat/Sade (1964) and US (1966), Richard Schechner’s Performance
Theatre, or The Wooster Group. In 2006, the German scholar Hans-Thies
Lehmann characterised this avant-garde practice as postdramatic theatre,
in which meaning is found in the overall aesthetic of a performance rather
than in a text.

Some might argue that the fluidity of meanings of the ‘political’ reached the
point at which the term lost its potency: if everything is political, then

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nothing is political as well. The term ‘political theatre’ embraced other
terms such as Epic, agitprop, and radical, and other types of theatre, such
as street theatre, protest theatre, and alternative theatre, in which a whole
set of practices and values are posed against the dominant, usually
commercially-based, form of theatre-making and theatre-going. To this
abbreviated list can be added forms of documentary theatre, such as
verbatim theatre or tribunal theatre, theatricalising real situations by real
as opposed to fictional people and which became particularly popular at
the beginning of the 21st century.

To many, the basic question asked of political theatre in whatever form it

takes is – can theatre change society? The answer remains complicated.
Most acknowledge that on its own theatre cannot induce political change,
but it can celebrate and stimulate individual political involvement and
collective political action, and give back to people a positive image of their
lives and struggles. In different ways, theatre carrying explicit political ideas
has continued to do this, as can be seen in the example of guerrilla theatre,
a form of ‘hit-and-run’ theatre usually performed outdoors and carrying a
simple and strong message, like the agitprop plays of the California
farmworkers’ group El Teatro Campesino, and the anti-capitalist pieces of
the San Francisco Mime Troupe.

To many, the problem of effecting change is related to the problem of who

makes the theatre, for whom and where. A major strand in political theatre
that seeks to confront this is theatre made by the subjects themselves. It is
often made in non-conventional spaces, with the help of professional
theatre people, but with the subjects in control. This kind of theatre is
known by different names in different contexts: Applied Theatre, for
instance, often tackles issues such as housing, poverty, social exclusion,
mental health, and the criminal justice system – issues faced by people
seen as living on the margins of society. Whereas Theatre for Development
is associated primarily with postcolonial, mostly rural communities and their
relevant issues.

In terms of political theatre as a form of intervention, many have adopted

and adapted practices from Brazilian director and activist Augusto Boal’s
Theatre of the Oppressed. Here, theatre techniques are designed to effect
social and political change through transformation of the individual. Boal
experimented with popular forms of theatre that were able to respond
more directly to the increasingly repressive nature of his society: he

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explored ways of changing the relationship between actor and audience,
of creating a participatory theatre that aims to turn the passive victim into
a protagonist, first in the theatre and then in the world outside, a “rehearsal
for the revolution”, as he put it. By the early 21st century, Boal’s theatre
gained international prominence, just as the forms of agitprop he had
drawn on, which were unleashed by the Russian Revolution, had done so
decades beforehand.

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FURTHER READING
Boal, A. (1995). The Rainbow Desire. London: Routledge.

Boal, A. (1998). Legislative Theatre. London: Routledge.

Boal, A. (2008). Theatre of the Oppressed. London: Pluto Press.

Brecht, B. (2014). Brecht on Theatre. London: Methuen Drama.

Chambers, C. (1989). The Story of Unity Theatre. London: Lawrence &

Wishart.

Chambers, C. (2011). Black and Asian Theatre in Britain: A History. London:

Routledge.

Craig, E. (1983). Craig on Theatre. London: Methuen Drama.

Goodman, L. and Gay, J. (2000). The Routledge Reader in Politics and

Performance. London and New York: Routledge.

Himelstein, M. and Gassner, J. (1963). Drama Was a Weapon. New

Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers Univ. Pr.

Kelleher, J. (2009). Theatre and Politics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kershaw, B. (1992). The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge.

Kott, J. (1964). Shakespeare, Our Contemporary. London: Methuen.

Leach, R. (2006). Theatre Workshop. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.

Lehmann, H. (2006). Postdramatic Theatre. London: Routledge.

McGrath, J. (1981). A Good Night Out. London: Methuen.

Piscator, E. (1963). The Political Theatre. London: Methuen.