What’s Left on the Left?
A long piece in yesterday’s Observer by Jay Rayner wants to know where are the right-wing dramatists. It’s not really a question worth asking. Most people who work in the theatre do so because they are not right wing.
And those that are — the late Ned Sherrin, perhaps, Ray Cooney possibly, Ken Dodd certainly — are part of another generation with reason to be suspicious of ideology with no basis in experience.
Funny how food critics are suddenly ripping into the theatre, as if what’s on their plate already isn’t sufficiently serious food for thought (it isn’t). First A A Gill, now Jay, who reveals he worked as a drama critic on the Ham and High for three months. He’s a good bloke, and a good writer, but obviously no great loss to drama criticism.
Except for a period in the 1970s when certain agitprop drama was preaching to the converted — and providing a useful focus for necessary campaigns in feminism and gay liberation — audiences don’t really think of writers being left-wing or right-wing.
Howard Brenton is held up as a leftie but only by people who don’t understand his work. The most sympathetic characters in his plays are often right-wing, just as Brecht’s most vivid characters are political individualists, eg Arturo Ui and Mother Courage.
It is true that the collapse of Communism made things tricky for a while for Brenton and David Edgar. But both have rallied magnificently to write plays about faith and political carve-ups in Eastern Europe.
Michael Billington’s new book is going to be a touchstone in future arguments on this subject. I think he’s wrong about Noel Coward, who was a radical writer in many ways; even a play like Nude With Violin, thought to be a simplistic attack on modern art, can be viewed in a different way (indeed was, in a brilliant production by Marianne Elliott at the Royal Exchange) as a satire about snobbism. I also don’t agree that Tom Stoppard is right-wing. He’s a libertarian intellectual with a much broader canvas than, say, Mark Ravenhill or Roy Williams.
Trevor Griffiths and David Mercer were the best left-wing dramatists — on television and in the theatre — in the 1970s, but their subject was often about the practical consequences of self-improvement in the working class, a subject that could be interpreted as right-wing.
And supposedly bourgeois playwrights like William Douglas-Home and Robert Bolt were no such thing. Douglas-Home was a conscientious objector and wrote a great play against capital punishment; and Bolt was a card-carrying CND member. Terence Rattigan wasn’t an uncomplicated Establishment figure: he supported the early plays of Joe Orton.
John Gielgud was never as much at ease with the new generation in the theatre as was Laurence Olivier; when he went to play Shakespeare in Edward Bond’s Bingo at the Royal Court, he muttered about people in beards and sandals sitting around reading Proust, an image that bore no relation to the reality.
He had no great sympathy, either, with Bond’s play: but he gave a great performance anyway as a man of genius with the politics of a ruthless landowner. And how right-wing was John Osborne, for God’s sake?
November 15th, 2007 at 10:46 am
Interesting Michael. You say the question is barely worth asking, and then seem enough to find enough to say in answer to it to fill eleven paragraphs. You also say I ‘reveal’ that I was the theatre critic on the Ham & High. It wasn’t much of a revelation to you was it. That’s when we first met. You also know full well that unlike other restaurant critics I have written on numerous subjects over the years including, regularly, theatre. Check with that nice Mr Google if you need to.
Take issue with my piece by all means, but please don’t anchor your argument in spurious claims.
November 15th, 2007 at 12:27 pm
Interesting, Jay. Well, no, it wasn’t a revelation to me but it was presumably to your readers. Sorry you missed the Tristram Shandy point of saying the question wasn’t worth asking then answering it in part and at length and indeed not at all. I wonder how all this ties in with the current question about right wing art? I just sense the wrong terms are being deployed. I bumped into David Edgar and asked him had he seen your piece. He said he hadn’t but that he’d pay more attention when there were some left wing newspapers! Surely the dear old Obs isn’t lost to the left merely because it supports the war in Iraq and takes a pretty hard line these days on Muslims and multiculturalism? Don’t forget to eat.
November 16th, 2007 at 9:31 am
For what it’s worth I did approach David Edgar. He never responded to me.
As to terminology I do understand that, and didn’t ignore it in the piece. Twice there are references to how fluid and uncertain the terms left and right have become.
One thing is gatifying. Whatever people say about the piece the blogs are talking about it and, much more importantly, the issues raised. To my mind that means it did its job.