Workers' theatre 1926–36

Abstract

‘Cultural Politics’ in Britain is today very largely a preoccupation of the New Left, and the proliferation of socialist theatre groups – perhaps its most vigorous expression in recent years, and certainly the one which has made most impact on the labour movement – is peculiarly a phenomenon of the 1970s: 7:84, probably the best known of the new theatre groups, was only founded in 1971, Red Ladder in 1968, CAST (Cartoon Archetypal Slogan Theatre) around 1966. The new troupes are determinedly experimental, and insofar as any lineage is recognised at all, it does not go beyond Unity Theatre, which is vaguely associated with the 1930s, and remembered only in its moribund later years, or Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop, founded (with Ewan MacColl) in 1945. Yet many of the questions discussed today were burning issues for socialist theatre workers in the 1920s, in now-forgotten movements like the Workers' Theatre Movement (WTM), and the idea of a political theatre can be traced back as least to the 1900s. It played an important, if subsidiary role, in the early socialist movement (1880—1914), as also in the suffragist agitation of the time, and it is possible that diligent research may drive the frontier back still further. When – to take an instance from trade union history – the operative stone-masons employed on building the new House of Commons went on strike in 1841, they hired the Victoria theatre for a benefit, and presented a dramatised version of their case.