Introduction

Abstract

When work on this book began in 1989, the Soviet Union was a one-party state, as it had been since 1917. The ‘Berlin Wall’ still divided East and West Germanies, standing as an obstructive monument to the Cold War, as it had stood for almost half a century. Nelson Mandela was in his twenty-sixth year of political imprisonment. Now as the project nears completion, all these familiar landmarks of my own generation’s political world, each a great symbolic focus for political emotion and a framework for political organisation (anti-Stalinism, ‘Eurocommunism’, antiapartheid), have vanished, apparently for good. Symptomatically these alterations testify to shifting configurations of circumstance and event which can induce a vertiginous dizziness, if we try to seek a firm foothold on such a rapidly-spinning globe. If these potent symbols of political oppression can evaporate so swiftly, then all that is solid may truly melt into air, and the clearing of these and other obstacles to human emancipation may signal a huge resurgence of political liberation.

Is political theatre a dead duck?

(Michael Billington, Guardian, 10 May 1980)