This is a tangential response to Andrew Haydon’s post “Political”.
I have a big problem with the attribution of the word “political” when it comes to a piece of theatre.
We have a popular canon of plays we deem to be “political” ones, we have writers we call “political playwrights”. These have a commonly accepted engagement with the “big issues”.
And to an extent this is all well and good. There is a sense that someone like Caryl Churchill acted as a vital part of a national expression of antagonism towards Thatcher, for example. Or that someone like David Hare is a little like the Archbishop of Canterbury but with better swearing – a benign estate, pulling sway over the polity in the great balance of powers.
Until you come to consider, what does that mean for those plays which are not “political plays”?
Suddenly we have these things that are.. what.. Plot driven? Character driven? About ordinary people? Entertainment? Well what then is plot, character, people and desire? Is Top Girls a political play because it features public women from history, but A Number not because it features men talking privately?
Are these non-political plays supposed to suddenly escape what it means to represent something? To ignore the process of framing, of making value judgements, accepting, assigning, rejecting social meaning? They are supposed to not depict people in social relationships, in historical moments?
Because people are these things. This is the truth of people. A play about an ambitious prince could be called a play about ambition, but ambition outside of the context of his being a prince would be partial, and to call it only thus would be to utterly misdescribe the situation. You are a sparkling and unique individual, no doubt, but who you are is also a composite of those “extrinsic” things which define you.
To me, criticism that refuses to recognise the political dimension of all plays, which start from a moment of contingency, a blank page, and have to construct a recognisable world with all the value judgements that entails - is guilty to some degree. Far too often it naturalises and essentialises, lazily resting on assumptions, positing hazy universalism and false historical continuity - “‘tis the ‘umin condition”, “‘twas ever thus”.
And to miss the contingency of art and the world is to limit the possibilities of your understanding both.
But also that it diminishes the beauty and power of theatre, to grasp us, as we are, and speak to and move us.
Perhaps it matters less that this is a form of depoliticsation akin to deforestation - obliterative and frankly alarming. But more that it won’t let theatre say important, beautifully crafted, and revelatory things about cultural politics – cultural politics that are not somehow separate from ourselves, that happen when we put on our political voices, but are just the matter of fact way we live our lives.
So how about we rename them “public plays”, and give theatre its full due?
