Is mainstream theatre politically engaged enough? | The debate
Director Max Stafford-Clark and actor/playwright Stephanie Street debate South African writer Athol Fugard's claim that today's theatre does not engage properly with political issues
YES - Max Stafford-Clark , theatre director
Athol Fugard's own stand against apartheid and his work in attacking it was absolutely exemplary, but that doesn't qualify him to talk about what's currently happening on the British stage. His view is diametrically opposed to my own belief about the state of theatre at the moment.It's an extraordinary time for political theatre in this country. London's Tricycle is a terrific example of a smaller fringe theatre leading the way. Its Afghan season has led to one play, Blood and Gifts by the American writer JT Rogers, going to the National, so the influence of the smaller theatres over bigger ones within the subsidised sector is enormous and proof again that yesterday's experimental theatre becomes tomorrow's mainstream. JT's previous play, Vast , was about the massacre in Rwanda, which refutes Fugard's claim that British theatre isn't tackling African issues. Another example is Moira Buffini's Welcome to Thebes, Currently at the National, that the debate on the situation in Liberia and is set in the background of ancient Greece, and then with ' Earthquakes in London , which explores climate change.
I was lucky to escape to the Royal Court, when socialism and feminism were the main issues in the day, but now with extremism is one of the key issues being actively discussed on our stages today. Mixed Up NorthWhich I have set before Christmas, specifically about Burnley, addressing issues of extremism and racism, which contributed to there and bled. Just playing I 'm working at the moment, The Big Fellah, is about the Irish-American community raising money for the IRA in New York, contrasting Muslim terrorism with Irish terrorism as one of the themes of the play. It's a tremendously important subject that has not been explored either in journalism or, as yet, in theatre. And although the Troubles are now hopefully over, the debate about them has only really just begun. I rejoice in the fact that my working career has taken place at a time when the theatre is the medium in which the debate about how we live our lives and how we have lived them is conducted.
Theatre has a responsibility to hold a mirror up to our society and necessarily that is to reflect our political activity. I think that over the last five years the vigour, pertinence and virility of political theatre in this country has been unmatched. Particularly when you compare it to political theatre in America. In America everyone is always looking for the next big hit; the big buck that will transfer to Broadway, and the anticipated response of the New York Times trivialises every debate.
In the UK, we again 'far less likely to think that way, and plays, for example, Enron, The Power of Yes, Chic at the Royal Court (which was totally relevant coming up to the election as it showed the kind of backgrounds the likes of Cameron and Osborne came from) as well as Roy Williams's play about prisons, Category B, demonstrate that as well as tackling international issues, British theatre has considered almost every subject that is politically relevant to our own society.
And political issues should be tackled by theatre because that's what it does best. Whether you're talking about Chekhov or David Hare or all our best writers today, what unites them is that their feet are in the mire while their imagination and heads are in the clouds. And that seems to me to be the best place for theatre to be: with its head in the clouds and its feet in the shite. What the theatre does is bring a subject into the realm of public and popular debate. That's its brief and I think it is absolutely fulfilling it at the moment.
NO â€" Stephanie Street, actor and playwright
I believe in theatre's unique ability to change the way people think. It humanises ideas by making you laugh and weep for the human reality of ideologies. When it works, an audience will be changed by the experience. This does not happen enough in our contemporary political theatre.
As churlish as this may sound, it was easier for Fugard, with all his courage, to make theatre that fought his system. His political reality was a polarised one with an understood, binary right and wrong. Now, our political landscape is far more slippery and nebulous and our problems too complex for the theatrical modes that worked in the heyday of political theatre, in the 1970s and 80s. There is not just one bad guy to kick against, but many, and we are far more bound up within their systems than we might like to believe.
Theatre is no longer the dissenting voice that challenges the status quo â€" it is so inextricably bound to the status quo that it is hard to know where to aim the punches. Somewhere along the way, theatre has stopped being the voice of the outsider, fighting to be heard. I wish today's theatre-makers were still the terrifying outsiders Mamet describes, who were buried at the crossroads with a stake through the heart.
Theatre now, like everything else in Britain, is a commercial enterprise more concerned with box-office figures and profit margins than artistic matters. "Political" has, in fact, become something of a dirty word for audiences and producers, as if it's allowed to happen once in a while but not too much. As if too much would overburden a theatre's season. The theatre that will do justice to our political reality will never make money because it will never be simple, it will never attract big Hollywood names to act in it.
There are, of course, companies and individuals who buck this reality â€" Out of Joint and the Tricycle stick their necks out and do potentially unmarketable work. But contemporary theatre cannot have its conscience salved by the work of a few companies. For political theatre to live and breathe again, in the way Fugard describes, will take commitment from buildings and companies across the country to be brave, keep the profits to the minimum and the discussions moving forwards.
I am fiercely proud of the work I've done over the last two years: Shades , about young British Muslims, The Contingency Plan, about climate change, Mixed Up NorthOn racism in Burnley - each of them was an important step in the right direction for new political order in the theater. But we can not simply "a play about British Muslims," or "play about climate change", tick the appropriate boxes and be happy in it. Each room has a very complex and requires numerous, diverse exams. The Big Fellah, which I'm currently acting in, is not just "another play about the IRA".
Contrary to what so many people suspect, audiences like to be challenged. People who saw Sisters (my play about British Muslim women which reopened the Sheffield Crucible studio earlier this year) liked how diverse the 17 characters were, how unpredictable their experiences. But in the main, my generation of writers and theatre-makers are often only encouraged to make work about where we come from and what we know. We are worryingly tied into a culture of authenticity, sprung from an oversaturation of reality TV. If the reach of political theatre is to grow to fit the boots of the current moment, we need to be emboldened and enabled to make bigger, more complex plays.
The Big Fellah, directed by Max Stafford-Clark and featuring Stephanie Street, is at Royal and Derngate theatre, Northampton, Tue-Sat, then touring nationwide; outofjoint.co.uk
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