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Alternative Histories in Contemporary British Drama

WS 2005/06; Prof. Dr. Christoph Houswitschka

Weitere Texte, die am 8.10.2005 nicht versendet wurden (die Seitenzahlen beziehen sich auf D. Keith Peacock, Radical Stages. Alternative History in Modern British Drama, Greenwood Press 1991.)

Edward Bond: "Our age, like every age, needs to reiterpret the past as part of learning to understand itself, so that we can know what we are and what we should do." (1)

Gareth Lloyd Evans about Bond: "Bond is a notable example of the bucaneer's way with history. He doesn't ignore it, but he makes it walk the plank of concepts, values, shibboleths, opinions - of which those contemporary with the events knew nothing, or knew them in forms very different from the modern shpe he gives them." (3)

See Griffith for a definition of historical play:

It's important to respond to historical plays as art-works, not as selected documentary accumulations containing historic-political speculations evaluable largely in terms of "known" historical and political reality. And we must learn to look for "historicity" more as Lukacs finds it in the histories of Shakespeare. As for example when Lukacs says: "Shakespeare states every conflict, even those of English history with which he is most familiar, in terms of typical-human opposites; and these are historical only in so far as Shakespeare fully and directly assimilates into each individual type the most characteristic and central features of a social crisis." Nairn's it's-either-historically-"accurate"-or-it's-purely-and-only-"symbolic" is just too crude and unfruitful a measure of the value of a play (or, indeed, of anything else). [Trevor Griffiths, "In Defence of 'Occupations'", Occupations ( London: Calder & Boyars, rev. 1980), p. 7] (4)

Influential E.H. Carr, What is History? (1961): History is interpretation." and "By and large the historian will get the kind of facts he wants."

Example: Bond claimed the events in Early Morning to be true. The deeper truth: "By employing a combination of anachronism and surrealistic imagery Bond suggests that not only Victorian capitalism but also its apparently more benevolent manifestation dpend for their survival upon the selfish exploitation or 'devouring' of one social group by another." (11)

Example of Shakespeare's Richard III: historical record hardly to compare with the deformed monster of Shakepeare's theatrical imagination. But he is a "physical embodiment of that new satanic Machiavellianism which Shakespeare and his contemporaries sw an insidious threat." (12)

"As a result, in almost every period of theatrical history, governments hve sought to promote tht mythic history which conformed to their ideologies or have attempted to suppress those which do not." (13)

Conclusion: "While, from the 1960s, academic historians were providing the appropriate source material, the new theatre's social conscience was also to offer both the platform and the necessary motivation for dramatists such as Wesker, Arden, Bond, Brenton, Griffiths and Hare to alter the focus of historical drama from the personal and individualistic towards the public and private." (17) In 1960s this resulted in a "'populist' historical drama", but in the 1970s it developed in "the deconstruction and reconstruction of the public's perception of history". (17)

The New British Theatre after 1956:

"The New British theatre of 1956 was ... born out of a sense of frustration. ... In contrast to the dominant thatre which had preceded it, The New Theatre did indeed introduce new and often shocking subject matter and replaced the earlier rational explorations of ethical, moral and spiritual concerns with often emotinally charged studies of various aspects of sexuality, of violence and of alienation. It also now encompassed a broader social mix of characters." (23) "Although often anti-institutional and anti-establishment in approach, the writers of the post-1956 theatre also exhibited no common political stance." (24)

Bolt still uses history "to provide theatrical spectacle and to intensify the consequence of the play's moral, ethical or spirtual concerns." (25) Terence Rattigan, A Bequest to the Nation (1970), describing Lord Nelson's affair with Lady Hamilton, is still in "the 'history lesson' tradition of historical drama" (25)

Change with Brecht's visit to Britain in 1956 with the Berliner Ensemble. See Kenneth Tynan's criticism of Bolt's More as opposed to Brecht's Galileo (1943) (26) Tynan distinguishes "between Bolt's private and individualistic and Brecht's public and materialistic interpretation." (hier: 27; Kenneth Tynan, Right and Left (London: Longmans Green, 1967), p. 27)

The traditional historical Play confirms the audience in the belief that history does not change, that man has always been the same. Brecht explains in "A Short Organum for the Theatre" (1948), in Willett, Brecht on Theatre, p. 190, that for him and Shaw history is, as Peacock summarizes, "primarily important as a record not of continuity but of change". Brecht writes: "... we must drop our habit of taking the different social strcutures of past periods, then stripping them of everything that makes them different; so that they all look more or less like our own, which then acquires from this process a certain air of permanence pure and simple." (hier: 27)

The critic Tynan demanded:

- preference for the public rather than the private approach

- concern not simply with a collection of facts and dates but with the working of historical processes

- not with the deeds of individuals but with the experience and influence of the mass of ordinary people. (28)

Osborne, Luther: Like Bolt, Osborne also doesn't give up individualism in describing Luther. Osborne's source was Eric H. Erikson's psychological study Young Man Luther (1959) (28). Tynan criticizes Osborne's pseudo-Brechtian structure. (29)

This was different with the new socialist writers: "For these dramatists whose political smpathies, while not identical, were broadly socialist, all history was now to become contemporary history. It was to be employed primarily as a means of dicussing the present and as a vehicle for confronting public rather than personal issues." (30)

The Documentary

The centre and model for Documentary Chronicle plays was the Victoria Theatre-in-the-Round Company which established its home in 1962 under the direction of Peter Cheeseman. in a working-class district of Stoke-on-Trent. Most of the documentaries are regional in order to present regional problems. Cheeseman adopted the communal role of theatre, to explain the use of history in documentaries: "One of the things wrong with our society is that too few people have a sense of history. We have lost in our society the sort of natural structure whereby old men pass down knwledge to the young in the community and people are taught history intelligently. In this sort of atmosphere it seems to me that our obligation is to show people the past of their community in a way which will give them a sense of that past, in the knowledge that they stand not alone in the present but are part of a historical perspectiv. This will give them a sense of self-consciousness and importance." (43; Peter Cheeseman, interview quoted in G.A. Elvgren, "The Evolution of a Theatrical Style: A Study of the Interrelationship of Select Regional Playwrights, the Director, the Community, and the Round Stage at the Victoria Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent", Unpubl. Ph.D. Thesis, Florida State University, 1972, p. 220)

John Arden and the epic

Influenced strongly by Brecht. Arden conceives of hs charcters not simply as individuals but also as members of particular social groups, each with his or her own role. "His historical drama is, then, like Brecht's essentially public rather than private in conception." (47). See e.g. the "free paraphrase" (Arden) of Goethe's Goetz, namely Ironhand.(47f.) "Throughout the play Arden effectively conveys a sense of the mechanisms of political diplomacy and by this means ensures that it does not simply become the kind of character-drama represented by Bolt's A Man for All Seasons but is instead a much more far-reaching illustration of poltical processes in action in which the play's central characters merely play a part." (51)

"After 1968, the rise of the political theatre movemnt marked a distinct change in the ue of history. There emerged a new generation of political dramtists who, joined by such old-timers as john Arden and Edward Bond, began to move away from that utopian socialism or anarchism which had been communicated in the historical darma of the 1960s, towards a more politically self-conscious and radically revolutionary socialism and Marxism. History was now carefully appropriated as part of the armoury of the left-wing political theatre, and the supplanting of personal by public history was also, for reasons described by Colin MCarthur in his mnograph Television and History, now clearly defined as ideological concern.

The emergence of the capitalist mode of production with its characteristic economic relations where individual men and women are 'free' to sell their own labour power or buy that of others required a concurrent philosophical definition of men and women as separate and autonomous entities, precisley as individuals. Just as in our society the notion of usury has become naturalised, regarded as a timeless 'fact of life', so too has the notion of men and women as individuals. In fact, this notion had to be laboriously constructed as an ideology of the rising bourgeoisie to render coherent its throwing off of feudalism.

[...] During the 1970s this radical treatment of history was intended to achieve a number of political aims. These were variously: to convince ordinary people that they could be agents of their own destiny; by means of iconoclasm to demythologise bourgeois history; to suggest the reasons why, during the post-war years, socialism had not won the hearts and minds of the British public; to present history in Marxist terms and one of class conflict; and to utilise dramatic form in order effectively to achieve these ends." (67-8)

Chapter 5: A Usable History

In the 1970s it is Trevor Griffith who is one of the main representatives of a radical political theatre making it the forum for dialectical debates. A "usable history" is "a left-wing history that would offer, in terms of perspective and/or subject matter, an alternative to the Establishment version of the past and, most importantly, would be directly applicable to the social and political concerns of contemporary Britain.Thus was created an historical drama that placed emphasis primarily upon social class but whose dramatists, as the decade progressed, were increasingly concerned to find ways of effectively commnunicating the private experience of public events. Its themes were to offer a clear reflection of the aspirations, activities, and worries of the Left during the 1970s, ..." (79)

McGrath in his notes to the published text:

This play tries to show why the tragedies of the past happened: because the forces of capitalism were stronger than the organisation of the people. It tries to show that the future is not predetermined, that there are alternatives, and it is the responsiblity of everyone to fight and agitate for the alternative which is going to benefit the people of the Highlands, rather than the multinational corporations, intent on profit. (John McGrath, "Note to The Cheviot, The Stag and The Black, Black Oil, p. 2)

Brenton's treatment of history in The Romans in Britain has a number of features common with his earlier works

-"interweaving of past and present, the aim here being to suggest that England's treatment of Ireland is yet another example of that process of colonization from which, the play suggests ironically, the English nation was itself created." (128)

-"demystification of that form of myth-making employed by one other race to characterise another and thereby to justify ity colonial ambitions." (128)

-demagnification (Caesar's and his army's failures are exposed

"While employing myth and history in the construction of his play, Brenton also successfully deconstructs both of these in order to reveal their purpose and effect as demonstrated in English attitutdes and behaviour in relation to Northern Ireland." (133)