The Political Dramaturgy of John Arden

Abstract

There is a contemporary tradition of political drama in Europe which goes back from the radical theatre groups and artists of the 1960s and 1970s, through Brecht and Piscator, to the early Soviet theatre. Developed in conscious opposition to the ideologically and socially bourgeois character of the established forms of drama, this tradition is characterised mainly by an endeavour to re-widen the range of artistic, cognitive, and social resources and possibilities of the theatre, both as an art form and as a social institution.¹ In dramaturgic practice, this has meant mainly two integrally related things: one a focusing on the shared life of the community and its tensions; and two, a conscious return to the conventions, techniques and styles of the traditional, historically plebeian, cultural forms. Further, in terms of theatrical feedback, the effort to revitalise the theatre and to bring back to it those larger plebeian sections of society which the bourgeois theatre has systematically banished has involved some radical reconstruction of the naturalist stage, often breaking out of the fixed and enclosed locations of the conventional, middle-class theatres (with their fixed and individually marked seats, polite atmosphere, financially and socially restricted admission, and so on), and performing instead in open-air parks, noisy restaurants, crowded market-places or busy shop-floors, where the theatrical experience acquires a more pointed and, in Bakhtinian sense, truly ‘dialogic’ character.