Michael Patterson. Strategies of Political Theatre: Post-War British Playwrights.(Book review)

Publication: Comparative Drama

Publication Date: 22-JUN-05

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Michael Patterson. Strategies of Political Theatre: Post-War British Playwrights. Cambridge Studies in Modern Theatre. Ed. David Bradby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. $85.00.

However advanced, every student of contemporary English theater and drama would be well advised to consult Michael Patterson's study Strategies of Political Theatre: Post-War British Playwrights. In it, he presents a concise but compelling taxonomy of the way some of the leading politically engaged playwrights of the postwar period approached the fraught, tense, and often difficult-to-stage social, economic, and political issues that simmered beneath the surface of an apparently placid consensus in English politics. The book examines the historical contexts, political thrust, production backgrounds, and dramaturgy of nine plays by nine playwrights: Arnold Wesker, John Arden, Trevor Griffith, Howard Barker, Howard Brenton, John McGrath, David Hare, Edward Bond, and Caryl Churchill. In doing so, it fruitfully distinguishes between what Patterson calls the "reflectionist" and the "interventionist" strategies for staging politics.

These rubrics are useful to the extent that they argue against thinking of political drama as always taking part in a monolithic, ideologically consistent, dramaturgically undifferentiated theatrical project. Patterson identifies the "reflectionist strain" as an attempt to portray accurately, if not naturalistically, the current state of affairs, and to lay it open to debate and rational inquiry by presenting characters and situations to which the audience might easily relate. The "interventionist strain" by contrast, employs more recognizably Brechtian distancing effects to urge audience members to consider the possibilities of a world unlike the one they inhabit, and often marking that difference by...

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