Political theatre

P is for political theatre

It may not be able to topple governments, but it informs, illuminates, entertains and raises awareness – and it's impossible to imagine life without it

Michael Billington

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 27 March 2012 12.43 BST


New Labour uncovered ... A Walk on Part by Chris Mullin at Soho Theatre, London. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

"Does political theatre ever have any impact?" That, more or less, was the question that came from the floor during my session with David Hare during the Guardian Open Weekend. I replied that it was pointless to expect political theatre to topple governments or provoke legislation. What it can do, I suggested, is inform, illuminate, entertain, raise awareness: sometimes, if we're lucky, all at once. "I'm glad you answered that," said Hare afterwards. "It comes up at every forum I do. I'm starting to run out of replies."

My feeling is that those of us who actively enjoy political theatre should start banging the drum a bit more. Above all, it's time to point out that political theatre is not synonymous with boredom, but covers a huge range of forms and styles: everything from Schiller's Don Carlos to Yes, Prime Minister, from Shakespeare's Coriolanus to Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia, from Caryl Churchill's Light Shining in Buckinghamshire to Ayckbourn's A Small Family Business. I don't go along with Simon Stephens who, at a recent Oxford panel on the subject, argued that all drama is political. But I would admit that I am more likely to be engaged by a play with a political theme than by the one that revolves around whether A slept with B.

To prove my point about the infinite variety of political theatre, I wanted to cite four recent examples. The freshest in memory is Michael Chaplin's distillation of Chris Mullin's diaries, A Walk on Part, at London's Soho Theatre. What you get is an extraordinary panorama of life under New Labour: everything from the bright, glad morning as Tony Blair arrived in No 10 in May 1997 to the aching despair and disillusion that accompanied Gordon Brown's departure in 2010. But we see everything through the observant eyes of Mullin, who combines a social conscience with a Pepysian love of gossip. My favourite story concerned Clare Short who, during an audience with the Queen, not only allowed her pager to go off but also instinctively glanced at it. "Someone important?" enquired Her Majesty with a cool irony that does her credit.

For a more tragic kind of political theatre, you have only to turn to Edward Bond's Bingo, which closes at the Young Vic this Saturday. I am astonished by my more stiff-necked colleagues who see this as a reductive, Marxist vision of a Shakespeare who ends his life in brooding contemplation in his Stratford garden. For a start, it seems to me far more plausible than the image of Shakespeare, sanctified in the bust in Stratford's Holy Trinity Church, that makes him resemble a self-satisfied pork butcher. But Bond raises the stakes by making Shakespeare confront the question that must have haunted a writer who dealt obsessively with the threat of civil chaos, the fallibility of power and humanity's capacity for cruelty: was anything done?

I also look to political theatre both to inform and heighten consciousness; and no one has done that more assiduously than Nicolas Kent in his 28 years at the Tricycle theatre in London. His final grand project, the multi-authored The Bomb, reminded us that Britain's supposedly independent nuclear deterrent is no more than a form of symbolic willy-waving. We were also asked to face up to the nonsensical paradox posed by possession of the bomb: that to retaliate, in the event of a nuclear attack, would be monstrous, whereas not to retaliate renders the whole project valueless. As for Gillian Slovo's verbatim piece, The Riots, I can only express my astonishment that one writer managed to cover so much ground and offer such a plurality of views about the causes of last summer's eruptions on our city streets.

I am not saying I want every show I see to be directly political. I am very happy to go to Gypsy, Hay Fever or One Man, Two Guvnors. I also acknowledge that you can have bad political plays as well as good ones. But I think we should count ourselves lucky that, over the last 65 years, British dramatists have refused to dwell in ivory towers, and have seen themselves as a part of society rather than apart from it. It has made our theatre all the richer.

Read on: Theatre of War by Eric Bentley, 1972 (Eyre Methuen)

Now see: Ralph Fiennes's new film of Coriolanus

Adolf Hitler speaking at the 1933 Nuremberg rally
(Wiki)