Theatres of the Left 1880-1935: Workers Theatre Movements in Britain and America by Raphael Samuel, Ewan MacColl, and Stuart Cosgrove

Abstract

Reviews93 or who otherwise fear, with Papp for instance, white autonomy over the third-world theater. An incidental bounty on the historical side is the emergence with the black Shakespeareans of original black drama, including King Shotaway produced by the African Company in the early 1820's with James Hewlett and several melodramas written for Morgan Smith who, in the 1860's and 70's, billed as the "Coloured American Tragedian," toured the British provinces in an enormous repertory. Two melodramas on the Haitian revolution were acted in Chicago and New York (1893, 1912) by Henrietta Vinton Davis, who ended in the Marcus Garvey movement, and the Negro units of the Federal Theatre Project produced some original plays. Professor Hill's compatriot, that admirable actor Errol John, not only performed Othello at the Old Vic in 1963 but also wrote Moon on a Rainbow Shawl (1958, revised 1962), acted in London by Earle Hyman and in New York by James Earl Jones. In the 1970's we had half a dozen books on black actors in movies. We need not regret that their halting though already considerable history in Shakespeare permits no such largesse (or redundancy?) when the one book we have, munificently illustrated, is definitive. DAVID W. BEAMS Borough of Manhattan Community College Raphael Samuel, Ewan MacColl, and Stuart Cosgrove. Theatres of the Left 1880-1935: Workers Theatre Movements in Britain and America. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985. Pp. 364. $16.95. This book possesses many of the characteristics of the very political theater movements that it discusses: energy, experimentation, confusion, and disorder. It is Professor Samuel's attempt to preserve the history of Britain's fragmentary left-wing theater movements, whose pulsating rises and falls accompanied Britain's turbulent socialist/literary activity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet, uncertain as to whether his mission would be best served by a scholarly analysis, an edition of historical documents, a compilation of oral histories, or an anthology of key plays, Samuel composes his book with nearly equal parts of each. The resulting collage is troublesome; the book is awash in a sea of valuable but unwieldy information. Samuel, a widely-respected social historian, does justice to his material when he concentrates on historical analysis. His opening chapter, "Theatre and Socialism in Britain (1880-1935)," is a stunning overview of the relationship of literature to late nineteenth-century British socialism and the relationship of political drama to that literature. Yet for all its virtues as an article, it does not serve adequately as an introduction to the book. There is not a word in the chapter on England's Yiddish-speaking Workers ' Theatre, but a later chapter on that very subject includes no author's introduction—only a few random documents and a participant's memoir. Similarly, the chapter on the Workers' Theatre's ongoing debate over naturalistic drama would have benefitted immeasurably from a substantial 94Comparative Drama commentary on the political and artistic implications of the radical theater 's rejection of naturalism. As it stands, the chapter contains only the reprints of four articles on the subject from the Workers' Theatre Movement house organ. It contains no discussion of their significance to the Movement, to socialist literature, or to radical drama. A final objection must be raised against Stuart Cosgrove's essay on the political stage in America during the same period—an attempt to compare and contrast two fascinating phenomena in theater history. To his credit, Cosgrove penetrates the superficial similarities between the two movements to point out significant differences, such as the American movement's concern with race relations and government support of American radical theater during the New Deal. But what could have been an invaluable essay is weakened by an apparent lack of thoroughness (Cosgrove does not appear to have made very much use of standard works in this area, such as Clurman's The Fervent Years or Himelstein's Drama Was a Weapon) as well as occasional oversimplification: This anti-racialist stance [in American labor drama] was a reaction to two related reactionary trends which threatened to divide the American working class. The first trend tried to set up...