Committed Drama and the Dissemination of Dissent

• Main Author: Georges Fournier
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centre de Recherche et d'Etudes en Civilisation Britannique 2017-07-01
• Series: Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique
• Subjects: agitprop; theatre; commitment; Joan Littlewood; verbatim
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/1513

During a BBC programme devoted to her career, Joan Littlewood described her experiment in committed drama with her company, the Theatre Workshop. Very popular in the 20s and 30s in the United-States, but also in Russia and in Germany, the formula consisted in extracting information from the press, to which the company would bring a fictional treatment that would put a highly political and critical outlook on the issue at stake. Joan Littlewood compared this type of performance to the journalistic version of a “happening”. She would see the staging of information as an invitation to resist the trivialization of topical issues due to journalism and its highly repetitive treatment of news and current events. Though the original themes were primarily social, the scope of investigation of committed drama widened very quickly to cover political issues. More recently, the war in Iraq brought about the rebirth of the epic theatre genre, on both sided of the Atlantic, with performances that challenged governmental policies. Verbatim plays such as Guantanamo (2004) and Called to Account (2007) were staged in both institutional and less conventional venues, from theatres to campuses, as part of a larger project to set up itinerant performances designed to provide dissenting perspectives on international issues. The purpose of this paper will be to try and examine committed drama from aesthetic and political angles and see how far, at critical periods in the British history, it tried to familiarize audiences with divergent viewpoints on topical issues.