Arts & Culture
A little treatise on theatre
Published 04 August 2003
In recent decades, our culture has become increasingly parochial and disengaged, writes Tariq Ali. But never has there been a greater need for provocative political drama
Walter Benjamin once evoked Plato in order to understand Stalin. Writers would be exiled from Plato's "perfect republic" because it was "perfect". It had no need for critical voices. In Stalinist Russia, poets or theatre directors who refused to toe the line on "socialist realism" were arrested and sometimes shot. Nothing like that could happen here, thankfully, but the market realism that gripped the British arts world during the 1990s had a similar cultural impact. Lowest-common-denominator populism was good. "Elitism", which became a code word for diversity, innovation and experimental projects, was bad. British theatre, cinema and television all aimed at the same market. This new Blaircherite political consensus made it difficult for a young Joan Littlewood or Peter Brook to emerge.
We live under a system that appears to be in the throes of a long and slow death agony. The old neoliberal consensus is bleeding, but nothing new is yet struggling to be born. It is this strange transition that is affecting both politics and culture. A couple of Brechtian maxims come to mind: "Don't start from the good old things, but the bad new ones"; "The struggle against ideology has become a new ideology". We could add: "Human rights imposed with cluster bombs are inhuman"; or "Privatisation is the heroin of the oppressor, celebrity-worship the cocaine of the deprived".
I was out of the country when the Guardian ran its recent series on political theatre in the Saturday Review. Reading all of these articles in a single sitting last week, I was struck by the provincialism of some of the contributions and the narcissism of others, with the single exception of a passionate contribution from Naomi Wallace - an American playwright who lives in Yorkshire. It is a strange paradox that, in the epoch of globalisation, our culture has become intensely parochial and far less engaged than it was three or four decades ago.
David Hare wrote warmly in the Guardian of Bill Gaskill and the Brechtian phase of the old Royal Court, but there were others who were effectively politically engaged at this time. In 1964, the Royal Shakespeare Company's Peter Brook stunned audiences with his visionary production of Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade - a play about the French revolution that resonated strongly in the 1960s. Two years later, he brought the Vietnam war to packed houses at the Aldwych with US. And there was John McGrath's pioneering group of travelling players, 7:84. The clue lay in the name: in 1971, 7 per cent of Britons owned 84 per cent of the country's wealth. Then, in 1980, John Dexter staged Bertolt Brecht's Life of Galileo at the National. Before all of these, in 1963, Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop had produced Oh! What a Lovely War, the structure of which owed a great deal to both Brecht and Vsevolod Meyerhold. The debt to the latter was rarely acknowledged: for the official communist left, Meyerhold had become a non-person following his arrest and execution in a Stalinist prison camp.
Bertolt Brecht was only too well aware that Meyerhold's assault on naturalism had revolutionised the theatre. Whereas, in pre- revolutionary French classical theatre, chairs were placed on the stage for selected aristocrats to observe the actresses close up, in the aftermath of the Russian revolution, Meyerhold brought the ordinary people on to the stage - literally. More than that, he was a master of the visual. His constructivist stage designs, inspired by Tatlin and Malevich, reflected the early hopes of the revolution. He would have recognised parts of himself in Simon McBurney's work with Complicite today. Meyerhold productions were rarely complete without the use of grotesque elements, pantomimes, acrobatics and other "biomechanical" features to stress the non-verbal side of a production. He eliminated the curtain from the theatre, something that is now commonplace. As the regime in Moscow ossified, this approach was prohibited and all state subsidies to his theatre were stopped - a prelude to his own arrest and death. It was Meyerhold's outspoken opposition to "socialist realism" in the 1930s that brought about his downfall.
It is especially surprising that none of the Guardian contributors mentioned Dario Fo. He was the comic genius who gave us Accidental Death of an Anarchist, Can't Pay? Won't Pay! and many scabrous attacks on the Vatican and Italian political life, biting satires that enraged the establishments of both right and left and the critics who wrote for them. Fo, the son of a railway worker, began his career as a writer-performer in satirical cabaret revues. His outrageousness drew audiences that otherwise avoided the theatre.
To the surprise and horror of his critics, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997, for "emulating the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden". Well-intentioned words, but Fo was never a court jester. He is the perennial outsider, and it is this detachment that informs all his work and which translates easily into every language. I first saw Accidental Death at a tiny theatre in London in 1979. It was a Belt and Braces production: the unknown actor playing the anarchist was Alfred Molina, with Andy de la Tour as the inspector. The produc- tion was superb. De la Tour went on to adapt Fo's The Pope and the Witch in 1991, and has just completed his own Greater Good, a view of the moral vacuum at the heart of new Labour. Not a pleasant sight.
A political playwright of a very different sort was the East German writer Heiner Muller, who died in 1995. In some ways, he was Brecht's only true heir, understanding well the dilemmas and contradictions that confronted a creative artist in the old East Germany. In a tribute to the old man, a quarter-century after his death in 1956, Muller wrote in "Brecht v Brecht": "Brecht was an author without a present, an oeuvre between past and future. I hate to say this critically. The present is the time of industrialised nations; future history will not be made by them alone. Kafka's Statue of Liberty carries a sword rather than a torch. To use Brecht without criticising him is betrayal."
In Hamletmachine, one of Muller's most savage and destructive plays (written in 1977, but rarely performed in this country or the United States), he was remarkably prescient:
I am not Hamlet. I don't take part any more.
My words have nothing more to say to me.
My thoughts suck the blood out of the images.
My drama doesn't happen any more.
Television. The daily nausea Nausea
Of prefabricated babble. Of decreed cheer
How do you spell GEMUTLICHKEIT?
Give us this day our daily murder
Give us this day our daily murder
Since thine is nothingness Nausea.
If, 25 years ago, a soothsayer had informed the future members of the 2001 new Labour cabinet that they would be defending neoliberal hegemony and all that it entails - speculation as the hub of economic activity, mass-marketing of pension funds, extending the sway of private capital in health and education, and loping alongside the US in the Middle East and elsewhere - more than half would have laughed at the thought. Given the scale of the problems today, targeting individual politicians is not enough. It is our culture itself that needs to be attacked, as Howard Brenton and David Hare understood so well with Pravda in 1985. It is worth recalling that the target of that play - Rupert Murdoch - is more powerful than ever before, and his press and TV empire is staunchly backing the Bush-Blair axis.
Tariq Ali's new play, The Illustrious Corpse: a homage to Dario Fo, opens at the Soho Theatre, London W1, as an after-dinner entertainment at 9.30pm daily from 8 September. For bookings, call 020 7478 0100 or visit www.sohotheatre.com
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
