ABSTRACT
Writing in 1929, four years before Hitler is made Reich Chancellor of Germany, Walter Benjamin puts forward a ‘Program for a Proletarian Children’s Theatre’, although it remains unpublished in his lifetime. Reading this six-page essay in 2005, I am struck by how much the times have changed. In an era in which global capitalism seems to have reached into every nook and cranny of our daily lives it is hard, if not impossible, to conjure up a theatre that might be Proletarian, that might explore the possibilities of a society that is founded on the principles of Marxist doctrine and ideology. Even harder is the thought that such a form of theatre could exist for children. Just imagine the headlines in our tabloid newspapers. They would surely rage against the alleged misuse of taxpayers’ money pursued in the name of indoctrination (remembering, of course, that the hypocrisy of this accusation is always lost to the leader writer and newspaper editor). Even taking this into account, such a programme sounds dour and somewhat irrelevant. It is an invention emanating from a world that is so completely different to the one that we live in today; one in which the political dividing lines were clearly marked out and particular ideological formations were seen to provide the answer to all the ills of society.
