not gone, not forgotten
June 19th, 2008 • teaching, theatre
I think have to disagree with Lyn Gardner’s assessment that post-’68 political and radical theatre is undocumented and in danger of being forgotten - not least because the majority of companies she references (Red Ladder, Joint Stock, Monstrous Regiment, Inter-Action and Welfare State) turned up on the course I taught at Glasgow University last semester.
I’ll admit that some of the playtexts concerned are hard to find (as my students will attest) and that the pool of scholarship isn’t as deep as that surrounding other periods of theatre, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into an amnesia amongst theatre practitioners or scholars.
Where to start? Lizbeth Goodman’s formidable Contemporary Feminist Theatres (alongside her series of interviews with women in contemporary British theatre) are both invaluable and gladly still available. You could read John Fox’s Eyes on Stalks, an account of his work as artistic director of Welfare State International.
More recently, there’s Max Stafford-Clark’s Taking Stock, a collection of nine production casebooks which brings together Stafford-Clark’s contemporary diaries with interviews of cast members. Baz Kershaw (currently teaching at Warwick University) has published several books on radical performance from the period - pick up The Politics of Performance or The Radical Performance if you can.
Archives of an increasing number of theatre companies - including Welfare State, the Half Moon Company and Gay Sweatshop - are now accessible, many through institutions within the greater London area.
There is, though, still need for projects like Unfinished Histories. Even with the sources suggested above, the experience of teaching a course on such companies has shown that there’s no danger of a surplus of available material. Oral histories in particular may present an especially valuable opportunity to explore and record the personal relationships between ideology and theatre practice in the period.
But in danger of being forgotten? Not quite yet.
