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In 1956, in the play that inaugurated the New British Theatre, John
Osborne's Jimmy Porter looked back in anger at what he considered
to be his country's spiritual decline. In the years that followed, many
British dramatists were also to reveal an acute consciousness of his-
tory, particularly of English history, and were repeatedly to exhibit
an almost reflexive tendency to evoke the past in their dramatic
exploration of hitherto neglected areas in the social and political life
of their country. As Edward Bond has written, "Our age, like every
age, needs to reinterpret the past as part of learning to understand
itself, so that we can know what we are and what we should do." 1
Indeed, in a theatre that was attempting to chart the kind of new
territory referred to above and was to associate itself predominantly
with those ideals of social democracy which marked the early years of
the post-war period, the examination and use of the past was to
become as important as the analysis of the present. Most signifi-
cantly, in the 1960s historical drama increasingly began to reflect the
aspirations and activities of ordinary people rather than the lives and
achievements of their rulers and in the 1970s was to become closely
associated with the political aspirations of the New Left. It is with
the nature and evolution of this radical British historical drama over
three decades that this book is concerned.
It must be admitted from the outset that the post- 1956 dramatisa-
tion of history has in many cases proved controversial. As might be
expected from a theatre born in a period of social protest and associ-
ated with youthful rebellion, its opposition to the values and assump-
The problem with Jim Allen's play was that it suggested that, with
the aim of building up a case for the establishment of the new state of
Israel, Hungarian Zionists had collaborated with the Nazis in send-
ing Jews to the gas-chambers. In spite of attempts by Allen to draw a
distinction between Judaism and Zionism, there were accusations
from the Jewish lobby of "anti-semitism" and the dramatist was
accused of employing factual inaccuracies and out-of-context quota-
tions in an attempt to mount an ideological attack. While disputing
the validity of such accusations, Allen was prepared to admit that his
socialist sympathies for the oppressed had indeed in this instance led
him to sympathise not with the Zionists but with the dispossessed
Palestinians. In common with many left-wing dramatists during the
previous thirty years, Allen had himself come face to face with that
sacred cow, agreed history, assault upon which would, apparently
inevitably, always be taken as an attack upon a whole culture.
Let us not run away with the idea that it is only the Establishment
which seeks to maintain and if necessary defend its own version
of history. As Trevor Griffiths was to discover from the critical
responses to his own play, Occupations ( 1970), those who are opposed
to the Establishment are as keen to maintain their own mythic his-
tory as they are to deconstruct that of their political opponents. In the
wake of the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Griffiths'
play at The Place in London in 1971, in an article in 7 Days Tom
Nairn criticised its portrayal of the Italian Marxist, Gramsci, and its
dramatisation of the potentially revolutionary factory occupations
that took place in Italy in 1920. Griffiths' letter of response to Nairn
is appended to the published text of the play. As in most other
debates concerning historical drama, the argument centred upon the
For the sake of clarity and mindful that some readers may not
already be acquainted with the overall development of the British
theatre of the period, I shall, as far as possible, work chronologically,
dividing the book into two parts. The first is concerned with the ante-
cedents and evolution of the post-1956 historical drama up to 1968;
the second, with the years of its consolidation during the 1970s, con-
cluding with a reflective glance at the 1980s. Firstly, however, to the
modern British theatre's interpretation of the genre itself.