My first encounter with the British political theatre of the Thatcher/Major Era occurred on a cold, snowy night in New York City in late 1992. I had just attended the American transfer of Caryl Churchillâs Mad Forest at The Cherry Lane Theater (which would later move to the Manhattan Theatre Club mainstage). For me, it was such a revelatory evening that instead of taking the subway from Greenwich Village back to my apartment in Morningside Heights, I walked. The depth and richness of Churchillâs dramatization of the fall of Ceausescu in Romania captivated me: the breadth of vision, the complicated and nuanced political appraisal which elided seamlessly with the struggles of the individual faced with overwhelming historical forces, the spare dialogue of acts one and three juxtaposed with the eyewitness testimony of act two, the command of her own artistry that allowed her to explore mythology (vampires) and history (the collaborations with the German occupiers), and the trajectory from the initial scene where the characters must silently (but effectively) communicate with one another to the concluding wedding scene when the characters attempt to talk over one another and the proceedings are reduced to cacophony and chaos. It represented the epitome of the collaboration between playwright and production (directed by Mark Wing-Davey). The effectiveness of the collaboration could be experienced in how chilling and foreboding the Securitateâs simple line of âWhat a beautiful day. What a beautiful countryâ (Churchill 1990: 19) could be.
Following that evening, I began to read extensively from the Churchill canon, a journey that would lead me to Cloud Nine , which is the first play this study investigates, providing it with the lineââthe history we havenât hadââfor its title. In December 1992, the USA itself was beginning to emerge from a long stretch of the deeply conservative governance of the Reagan/Bush years, and the American theatre too was trying to find its bearings in such an environment. It challenged the policies of those years, ranging from a lack of response to the AIDS crisis to cuts in arts funding, in works such as Larry Kramerâs The Normal Heart (1985) to Mac Wellmanâs 7 Blowjobs (1991). It was during this period that the American stage was beginning to construct a historical narrative outside of the hegemonicâAugust Wilson started work on what would eventually be The Pittsburgh Cycle , Arthur Miller presented his overlooked The American Clock in 1980âbut it did not yet have the depth or breadth of its British counterpart. It was Churchillâs ability to weave history into a larger more progressive vision of a community that caught my attention. I understand that to many theatrical scholars and practitioners of the theatre, the British theatre of 1980s pales in comparison with its achievements of the preceding two decades and represents missed opportunities and disappointments. Yet, there were moments that it excelled, that it did articulate a clear voice and alternative to that of the governmentâs. What I hope to offer on these pages is that there is much to celebrate and commend during those 18 years in the wilderness. The British theatre (including the larger subsidized houses) did find innovative strategies to utilize the stage to offer a starkly different image of Britain from the one being presented from Downing Street to the Fleet Street papers. History was a central part of that alternative program.
It is that dramatization of history that occupies the central discussion of this study. Novelist, critic, and biographer Peter Ackroyd writes in the first volume of his series on the history of England, âHistory is about longing and belonging. It is about the need for permanence and the perception of continuity. It concerns the atavistic desire to find deep sources of identityâŠThat is why some of the greatest writers have preferred to see English history as dramatic or epic poetry, which is just as capable of expressing the power and movement of history as any prose narrative; it is a form of singing around the fireâ (2013: 446). What a number of theatrical practitioners would do in this period, as many of their predecessors had done, was to move past âseeingâ English, or rather British, history as a prose narrative repurposing it as dramatic poetry. It was a dramatic poetry with a purpose to expand and redefine what it meant to belong within the national community and, in so doing, directly challenge the exclusionary expression of history promulgated by traditional centers of power, particularly the Thatcher (and later Major) Government. Frederic Jameson in The Political Unconscious argues that history is not a narrative, but it is only through narrative that we are able to excavate what is essential from history (1981: 102). That assessment crystallizes one of the theatrical communityâs missions in this period.
In the Spring of 1979 history touched upon, in intriguing ways, the realms of the theatre and politics. With regard to the former, Churchillâs Cloud Nine , written and workshopped the previous year, was first performed on February 14 at the Darlington College of Arts by the Joint Stock Company under the direction of Max Stafford-Clark. After a brief tour, it moved to the Royal Court Theatre (then under the artistic direction of Stuart Burge) and opened on March 25 (Little and McLaughlin 2007: 195). A work of innovation, Cloud Nine reassessed the imperial era and collapsed the distanceâboth in terms of time and spaceâbetween the colonized periphery and the metropolitan center. April de Angelis writing for The Guardian stated that the play (along with Churchillâs Top Girls , Serious Money , A Number , and Far Away ) is âa landmark in the history of our theatre cultureâ because the playwright changed the language of the theatre (2012). The play proposes that we view the history of empire through a feminist frame; scholars, including Apollo Amoko (who, as will be discussed later, takes issues with the workâs depiction of Africans), have noted that the play anticipates numerous aspects of Judith Butlerâs theories concerning the performativity of gender (1999: 50), marking it as a milestone of feminist theatre in emphasizing womenâs political and social struggles within the confines of the patriarchy. Churchill has engaged with history to offer a vigorous and incisive examination of belonging: who belongs, how we have defined it, and how we should redefine it.
On March 28, three days after the opening at the Royal Court, Prime Minister James Callaghan of the Labour Party suffered a vote of no confidence in Parliament. On April 7, he dissolved Parliament and called for elections. Britons went to the polls on May 3, which coincidentally saw the opening of another historical play (Bent by American playwright Martin Sherman concerning oppression of the homosexual community in the early days of the Nazi Regime). Callaghanâs coalition government was swept from power, and Margaret Thatcher would become Prime Minister. Thatcher would go on to win another two elections before losing the premiership in a leadership challenge from her own party late in 1990. On the night before the polls opened, Thatcher gave her final speech of the campaign over the radio. Though there has been much to unpack by both historians and political scientists in those remarks, there is one section (as reported by historian Peter Riddell), that is critical to this study, âSomewhere ahead lies greatness for our country again. This I know in my heart. Look at Britain today and you may think that an impossible dreamâ (1989: 7).The juxtaposition of âaheadâ and âagainâ suggests that Thatcher seeks to reverse what she sees as the failures of the previous decadeâof the collapse of empire, of economic woes, of the Winter of Discontentâand change the trajectory of the nation moving into the future, but the blueprints of that change lie in the past. Thatcher is longing for a glorified past that never existed.
For what Ackroyd expresses in humanistic terms, cultural critic Raymond Williams in his Keywords provides a more in-depth definition of history. He differentiates between Historie as something isolated to the past, while Geschichte âcan refer to a process including past, present, and futureâ (1976: 146â147). Longingâwith its sense of nostalgia, permanence, and example for the inferior present momentâfits under the rubric of Historie. The historical construct of the government, which falls within the parameters of heritage culture, fed into this sense of Historie with an emphasis on those institutions that would promote an ideologically narrow, nostalgic, and restrictive vision of the past in service of an economy shifting to the needs of the tourist industry. For instance, the budget during the Thatcher years prioritized tangible material objects found in museums and larger physical structures such as castles, great houses, and other historical sites of popular interest. Kevin Robins, investigating enterprise and heritage culture a year after Thatcher was forced out of 10 Downing Street, argues:
Both represent protective strategies of response to global forces, centered around conservation, rather than reinterpretation, of identities. The driving imperative is to salvage centered, bounded and coherent identities â placed identities for placeless times. This may take the form of the resuscitated patriotism and jingoism that we are now seeing in a resurgent Little Englandism. (1991: 41)
Yet belongingâwith its more active negotiation of what constitutes the larger national community as well as the interplay between past, present, and futureâfits within the space of Geschichte. The theatreâs representation of history by its very nature is ephemeral and impermanent. Multiple visits, even to the same play, yield different experiences; and different conversations across different plays at the same theatre would yield an even greater sense that history itself is in constant flux. The plays and productions under investigation actively engage in a reinterpretation rather than in a conservation of identity; they problematize history rather than offering the soothing tones of the traditional narrative.
Williamsâs historical distinctions offer a useful methodology for discussing the oppositional history play of the period. Similarly, Walter Benjaminâs critical perspective affords an equally useful understanding of history in his âTheses on the Philosophy of Historyâ. He argues that to represent the past one does not present it as it was but as a means of seizing âhold of memory as it flashes up in a moment of dangerâ (1968: 255); the mission therefore is to prevent the contents of history and those who receive those contents from becoming âtools of the ruling classâ (1968: 255). Later, in describing Paul Kleeâs âAngelus Novusâ, Benjamin depicts the angel of history being thrust into the future while focused on the past and seeing the entirety of the past as the totality of a singular catastrophe (1968: 257). The journey of the angel belies the idea of the march of progress as the angel comprehends that it is part of a nightmare that it cannot escape (Wohlfarth 1996: 201). As with Williams, Benjaminâs frame places the past and present (and future) in proximity to one another, in conversation. Rather than a chain of events, they inform one another in a systemic way that creates a communal sense without interference from traditional temporal boundaries. Within this context, one period is not valued above another. Wh...