230568 Political Drama in Britain after 1945 (S) (SoSe 2007)

Between the late 1950s and the period of Thatcherism in the mid-1980s, the theatre scene in Britain witnessed a wave of alternative and experimental drama that voiced political protest against the power structures implied in the class system and its basis in capitalist ideology. Political dramatists tended to believe in the power of theatre to promote social and political change, and with heir themes and aesthetics they also protested against the traditions of the British theatre system. However, the plays that may be subsumed under the rather broad heading 'political' are far from homogeneous, for they follow diverse developments and display a number of tensions: Some playwrights found ways of addressing topical issues of most recent politics, whereas others turned to rewriting history; from the didactic and symbolic techniques of agitprop, political drama moved towards a more naturalistic, documentary style, that allowed more subtle analyses of the functioning of social subsystems. In the 1990s, political theatre turned international, paying attention to political conflicts outside Britain emerging from the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989. In this seminar, we will read four plays representative of the different stages of these developments. The following texts will be made available in a reader from mid-March on: John Arden, Live Like Pigs (1958); Howard Brenton, Magnificence (1973); Caryl Churchill, Top Girls (1982); David Edgar, Pentecost (1994).