ABSTRACT
BEFORE SOMEBODY SAYS ‘ALL theatre is political’ – a statement which should be banned from this discussion as diversionary, if true – let’s agree to talk about the theatre that exists somewhere within the shadow (or at least the penumbra) of the ideas of Marx and the Marxists. Let’s talk about theatre that has as its base a recognition of capitalism as an economic system which produces classes; that sees the betterment of human life for all people in the abolition of classes and of capitalism; that sees that this can happen only through the rise to state power of the current under-class, the working class, and through a democratization – economic as well as political – of society and of its decision-making processes. A theatre that sees the establishment of socialism, not as the creation of a utopia or the end of the dialectic of history, but as another step towards the realization of the full potential of every individual human life during the short time that every individual has to live. Socialist theatre. There are other kinds of political theatre. There is the anarchist theatre, for example, which, when it is conscious of anything at all, sees the struggle for state power as a self-defeating aim and appears to insist on every individual making their own bid for revolution and immediate fulfilment. Or the social democratic theatre which, in its rare moments of theoretical insight, sees the betterment of the working class as a process of gradual gains within a basically capitalistic framework, needing no revolution of power or consciousness, merely material improvement which requires as its precondition the health of the capitalist system – all that is to be arranged thanks to the great man in whose hall we now prepare to dig holes and fill them in again. I can’t speak for those varieties of political theatre; I disagree with their theoretical base and rarely enjoy their practice. So I can only talk about socialist political theatre.
