A cast never on stage before: revolution, utopia and social critique in David Caute’s Comrade Jacob and Caryl Churchill’s Light Shining in Buckinghamshire

Abstract

This essay shows how David Caute’s historical novel Comrade Jacob (1961) and Caryl Churchill’s play Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (produced by the Joint Stock Company in 1976) participate in the ‘reinvention of the question of Utopia’ (Jameson) through a rediscovery of the political, social and religious ideals of Winstanley and the Diggers in the seventeenth century. Reframing the question of utopia in terms of Jacques Rancière’s notion of the redistribution of the sensible, the essay focuses on the specific formal strategies through which Caute and Churchill intimate the vision of a malleable world, open to the emergence of a collective identity, the redistribution of property and the reconfiguration of meanings.