Political Playwright Research Articles

Joint Stock: From Colorless Company to Company of Color

Joint Stock: From Colorless Company to Company of Color Joyce Devlin The Joint Stock Theatre Company did not begin from an ideological viewpoint , but acquired a point of view through the development of their work. Aesthetics took precedence over politics. In this way, Joint Stock differed from many of the socialist theatre companies of the period. In 1977, Max StaffordClark , co-founder of the company, described Joint Stock as "a rather colorless company, in the sense that we take on the color of the material and of the writer we're working with" (Bradby 305). Colorless in a different sense, the company was all Caucasian. Gradually, over a period of years, Joint Stock transformed from a Caucasian company into a committed, multi-racial collective. This diversification made a significant impact on the content of their scripts, the actors' ethnicity, the audience composition, and the organizational and artistic policies. For many years Joint Stock had a poor record of representing people of color on stage. It was not until their nineteenth production in 1981, Borderline by British Pakistani Hanif Kureishi, that black actors joined the company.1 In 1984 Joint Stock employed black actors again in Sue Townsend's The Great Celestial Cow, and again in 1985 in Egyptian-born Karim Alrawi's Fire In the Lake. Yet ultimately Joint Stock became a totally integrated multi-cultural company. We can gain an understanding of this radical transformation through a brief examination of the company history. Joint Stock was founded in the summer of 1973 by Max Stafford-Clark, David Aukin and David Hare. The three men had considerable theatrical experience—Stafford-Clark had been the artistic director of Edinborough's Traverse Theatre, David Aukin had co-founded the touring company Foco Novo, and David Hare had co-founded Portable Theatre which dated from the late 60s and became one of the earliest political theatre companies. For their first production Bill Gaskill joined Stafford-Clark as adaptor and co-director of the Heathcote Williams book The Speakers, a documentary about four Hyde Park speakers in the early 1960s. In an unpaid workshop, the two 63 64 Joyce Devlin directors and the actors explored the text through a variety of acting exercises— both borrowed and discovered. At the end of the workshop, they applied for an Arts Council project grant, compiled a script, rehearsed and toured. The production was innovative in its use of space—the audience was free to move around the actors, becoming part of the performance. According to Gaskill, "The success of The Speakers and the pleasure we all had in working together made another show inevitable" (Ritchie 105). However, this production, and the following four, contributed little to the creation of Joint Stock's distinctive working method or to the company's cultural diversification. During the course of the next ten years Gaskill and Stafford-Clark directed or co-directed nineteen productions for the company. While Gaskill's interest was in creating a common method of work and Stafford-Clark's was in altering methods to suit the particular material, between them they developed what became known as the Joint Stock method: a workshop in which directors, actors and writers research and improvise around a particular subject, a break where the writer writes the play, followed by an extended rehearsal period. Some of Britain's best known political playwrights have used this method when writing for Joint Stock: David Hare, Caryl Churchill, Howard Brenton, Snoo Wilson, Howard Barker, and Hanif Kureishi. Joint Stock's reputation as one of Britain's leading touring theatre companies developed while they actively produced an average of two new plays a year. They are noted for their consistent originality, their method and the range and style of their work— sparsity of sets, directorial clarity, and committed ensemble acting. Although the rehearsal methods in their early productions were unique, in 1974 Joint Stock's sixth show, co-directed by Stafford-Clark and Gaskill, effectively politicized the company and profoundly changed its organizational structure, disrupting the traditional hierarchy and the conventional patterns of production. The company became a collective in an attempt to understand the content of the script, David Hare's Fanshen, based on William...

Franz Xaver Kroetz: The Emergence of a Political Playwright by Richard W. Blevins (review)

Book Reviews 141 critics, often fascinated by abstract theories or seemingly perfect methods. too frequently forget: that literature and theater do not exist as the subject of critical methods, but come into being as the human expression ofprofoundly human experience. FRANCO ZANGRILLl, BARUCH COLLEGE, CUNY RICHARD W. BLEVINS. Frallz Xaver Kroetz: The Emergence afa Political Playwright. New York: Peter Lang Publishers 1983. Pp. 295. Franz Xaver Kroetz caused a sensation on the West German theater scene with the premieres of his plays Harlfliickig and Heimarbeit in 197I. These brutally naturalistic dramas portrayed the problems of society's poor and underprivileged, those whose inarticulateness and entrapment within a morality deformed by a capitalistic economy resulted in self-destructive acts of violence. In recent years, Kroetz has come te mistrust the effectiveness of this dramaturgy and moved towards a more positive realism. His continued success has been astonishing in light of what he describes in a 1980 interview as the difficulties realistic authors face when asserting themselves against the more resigned and self-reflecting "new subjectivism" which has pennealed West Gennan theater since the mid-seventies. In Gennan theater, he states with some uneasiness, there exists little between "abstract" and "naturalistic." What links these seemingly disparate trends in contemporary Gennan theater is a common attitude towards language: the inadequacy of language to reflect and portray social reality. The "politicization" of the theater that began in the sixties was followed by a growing skepticism in the power of theater to effect social change. Contemporary German tbeater is a reflection on the modern chasm between language and social reality, on the relationShip between theater and politics. This issue is as central to a Handke as it is to a Kroetz. For a playwright whose intentions are as expressly political as they are for Kroetz, the issue is particularly problematic. Through his precise and detailed portrayals of the everyday problems of working-class citizens, Kroetz hopes to expose the destructive mechanisms ofcapitalistic West Gennan society. Richard Blevins's book focuses on the sociopolitical substance of Kroetz's plays, and on the extent to which they succeed or fail in realizing the author's intentions. Tracing Kroetz's political development from "angry young man" to active member of the West German Communist Party, Blevins undertakes to discuss the effect of this development on his quite considerable artistic production between 1968 and 1978: some thirty plays (including TV scripts and mdio plays), a collection of interviews with Bavarian workers, a report on fanning conditions in the GDR, as wen as extensive essays, speeches, and interviews. Blevins organizes his material according to the various stages which reflect the particular aesthetic questions confronting the author as his political intention became more defined and as he responded to critical reaction: the brutal naturalism and dramaturgy of ucompassion" of the early plays, the experiments with Brechtian and agitprop techniques, the return to the '42 Book Reviews working class and a modified brand of proletarian realism which portrays average workers who possess a greater ability 10 articulate their problems and are capable of some positive development. Criticism of Kroetz generally falls into two main categories: that which deals with Kroetz's oeuvre as a whole, focusing on the "development" described above, and that which concerns itself primarily with detailed analyses of the linguistic mechanisms and dialogue structures of individual plays. Belvins's approach is the fonner, and although one must admire the exhaustive effort involved in dealing with Kroetz's artistic and theoretical output in its entirety, such an approach necessarily suffers the drawbacks of the comprehensive overview. Blevins's central thesis, that "the fundamental issues and basic subject matter of Kroetz's plays have remained constant" (p. 9), and that "virtually all of Kroetz's dramas are both naturalistic and political" (p. 92), would benefit from a greater awareness of just how heavily these plays depend on Kroetz's manipulation of language/dialogue for their formal and thematic unity. (Much of the literature based on this recognition is conspicuously absent from Blevins's bibliography.) The most widely acclaimed of Kroetz's plays seldom point as directly or explicitly as Blevins would have us believe to the real social and political forces...

Brecht in Context: Comparative Approaches by John Willett, and: Beyond Brecht ed. by John Fuegi, Gisela Bahr, and John Willett (review)

Brecht in Context: Comparative Approaches by John Willett, and: Beyond Brecht ed. by John Fuegi, Gisela Bahr, and John Willett (review)

The Family and Society in the Plays of Ionesco

Ionesco is not in the first instance a social or political playwright, and he has expressed scorn for those who claim that the theatre must be political. Nevertheless, some of his plays, such as Rhinoceros and Machett , have obvious political implications, and his work as a whole does express a view of society and politics. His vision of society, however, is not based on a realistic sociological, economic or political analysis. He sees society in an abstract, absolute way stemming from the nature of man and the basic human reactions which originate largely in the family. The author's ideas on the family, then, and his particular experience of family life, some of which he has described in his autobiographical writings, are an important source for his social thought and shape the way he sees the world.

The Family and Society in the Plays of Ionesco

Ionesco is not in the first instance a social or political playwright, and he has expressed scorn for those who claim that the theatre must be political. Nevertheless, some of his plays, such as Rhinoceros and Machett , have obvious political implications, and his work as a whole does express a view of society and politics. His vision of society, however, is not based on a realistic sociological, economic or political analysis. He sees society in an abstract, absolute way stemming from the nature of man and the basic human reactions which originate largely in the family. The author's ideas on the family, then, and his particular experience of family life, some of which he has described in his autobiographical writings, are an important source for his social thought and shape the way he sees the world.