In this year where everyone is on their tiptoes awaiting one form of political turmoil or another, my thoughts have been drifting toward political theatre which, like politics itself, often drives me crazy. I have been re-reading some of the works of Harold Pinter, England’s leading playwright of the 20th century. Early in his career, he publicly shunned any sort of political protest and barely proffered much of his political thought, but his later career was almost solely devoted to political activism. While his early work, his “comedies of menace” such as The Caretaker and The Dumb Waiter, were about power and subjugation, he still (in the ‘60s) did not consider himself a political person.
As time went on, however, he was more known as an activist than as a writer, much like Arthur Miller. Unlike Miller, Pinter wrote some fine plays in his later period, especially Mountain Language, Moonlight, Ashes to Ashes, and his final original work for the stage, Celebration, which is criminally underrated. Though Pinter became a political firebrand, he knew the deeper the idea was buried in character, plot, action, and theme, the more his ideas would take flight in the lives of theatregoers, especially after they left the theater and had time to mull them over. Still, he used his 2005 Nobel Prize lecture to denounce both the US and the UK for their involvement in the invasion of Iraq (though he, rightfully, gave a bit more bile to America). Well, the problems in the Middle East have not gone away, but Bush and Blair have. We still have Pinter’s plays, but his Noble Prize lecture is, for the most part, passed its “sell by” date.
It has always been my in my nature to avoid politics. It doesn’t take a lot of involvement to realize once you go into those waters, you rise out muddied and riddled with leeches. As far as politics in dramatic genres, it seems to me television is the only fair form for political satire. My generation had Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show and South Park. They responded, in real time, to real-life situations. The effect was immediate and worked because television is ephemeral, but some episodes of Park make little sense today outside of their original context because the news is always focused on something else by the next day. Stage plays, on the hand, are meant to be immortal so it’s the immortal themes they should focus on. If one writes about a specific political engagement at a very specific point in history, there is no guarantee it will be even understood in latter times.
This is not true of all political theatre, however. Some significant plays have achieved immortality but only because they advance an idea without being preachy or polemical and if they still tell a human story. Some of the great examples are Sophokles’ Antigone, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Miller’s The Crucible, Hwang’s M. Butterfly, and a few others. Yet, most political theatre has no future destiny. I remember a play running Off-Broadway in my college years with the title George W. Bush is an Idiot. Without even having to go to the show, which I wouldn’t have anyway, I knew the tenor and tone of the evening and I knew I wouldn’t walk out of the theater enriched.
Many of the plays being produced in New York now are, if not directly political, take one side or another on matters. Given NY’s cultural status in the world and the people who can afford to go to the theatre, these pieces are almost always preaching to the choir. If the subject is politics, one would think the writer would do the most to provoke and subvert what audiences are expecting, but audiences have become more homogenous, expecting to hear something specific now—they want their herd mentality validated. Such an evening sounds intolerable to me, but I suppose I’m not the only one alive.
I can think of no other more pointless act among human endeavors than writing, for example, an anti-war play. I can’t think of a single one that achieved its goal. The play will run a couple of months and the problem it addresses will resolve itself and that’s the end. As sincere as these plays might be, they are akin to most political protests of this day, which also fall on deaf ears and disappear rapidly. In today’s protests, there is none of the intelligence of Gandhi’s Salt March or Martin Luther King’s marches—there are only half-thought-of posterboard signs and a lot of anxiety bubbling over into violence.
However, if one uses metaphor or allegory or myth to get their point across, one can be moved by a political play. I mentioned The Crucible and others to contrast them with the polemical works of Bertolt Brecht and others of his brood who certainly entertained the theatre-going public, but always had a sermon somewhere. I’ve wrestled with Brecht since college and, I don’t know what it is, but it’s hard to think much of a playwright who, in his final years, admired Mao and even adapted Coriolanus to preach Maoist principles. It is true some of Brecht’s work have outlasted his theories and politics. People seem to be moved by Mother Courage, though Bertolt himself would have despised that.
No, television is the place where you can best do that sort of writing because of its immediacy. The theatre is also ephemeral, but plays do get published and revived. Like the news, there is always more copy the next day for satirical television. The great playwrights, on the other hand, are great because they are writing for eternity, prosperity. In other words, they’re writing about the things that matter in the larger sense—the things that aren’t going away such as God, birth, death, sex, taxes, and war (the general fact of war, not specific wars). These themes are givens on this planet, and they shan’t ever go away despite who’s in office.