Challenging the Centre: Two Decades of Political Theatre
Edited by Steve Capelin
Playlab Press
Reviewed by Dave Riley
Today, if I employed the term "agit-prop", very few people would know what I mean — and many of those who perchance recognised the term would sneer. Agit-prop, or theatre for agitation and propaganda, is supposed to be old hat. The last thing we are supposed to expect from a night out is political alignment (or realignment if the performance proved effective).
But the agit-prop movement was a vibrant element of popular political theatre in the 1920s and 1930s. Initially emerging in the Soviet Union, it soon spread throughout the west, aided in most instances by local communist parties.
Overwhelmingly, small groups of amateur performers aggressively recruited non-theatre audiences in their working and living environment. Presenting their short plays on makeshift stages in the street or at a union rally, they tried to popularise a radical political program, often by employing the language of comedy and satire.
Agit-prop began to lose its edge and momentum, then die out, when the Stalinised parties softened their agitational thrust during the popular front period of the late '30s. It wasn't until the 1960s that the techniques and much of the advocacy of agit-prop were revived by a new generation.
Street theatre
This style is now generally referred to as political street theatre; in Australia, it dates back to the movement against the Vietnam War. Then, in most states, activists tried to apply theatre as a weapon by utilising it in political campaigns. Befitting the mood of the times, it seemed that radical culture and politics could be fused into a useful vehicle that was as alternative as it was oppositional. There weren't many radical troupes formed during this period, and those that were tended to be short lived as the wave of radicalism subsided and practitioners abandoned the street for the orthodox stage.
With the increasing professionalisation of theatre in the '70s, the boldness and crudity of the early experiments in modern agit-prop techniques tended to be disowned. As government subsidies increased, the theatre that was underwritten became increasingly facile (albeit more consciously artistic) as its passion for radicalism waned.
Now, street theatre passes as a form of organised begging, as buskers work city malls for the small change in the pockets of passers-by. If you want a message with your show, then you have to catch the Salvation Army Band next time they gig locally.
This waning of radical people's theatre has been an international phenomenon in the imperialist countries. However, in the Third World, and especially next door to us in Asia, this form of theatre has been drawn on most effectively by cultural workers determined to spread a radical message.
Best known of these is PETA — the Filipino radical theatre company which is one of the world's leaders in what is now known as theatre of liberation. Over the past 20 years, PETA and professional theatre workers elsewhere in the Philippines have established a nationwide network of community theatre groups run by industrial workers, fisher people, peasants and students. At the time of the fall of the Marcos dictatorship in February 1986, this network comprised almost 300 groups that were highly instrumental in the mobilisation of the popular masses in Manila and elsewhere in the archipelago.
Similar success has been recorded from a kindred approach by cultural activists aligned to Indian revolutionary groups such as Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist). Safdar Hashmi — who was murdered by right-wing goons while performing in 1988 — was a renowned exponent of this form of agit-prop theatre.
Elsewhere in Asia, tireless practitioners — several of whom have died or been tortured — have won the greatest respect for their capacity to fuse their political commitment with their artistic sensibilities, while generating a popular following.
In contrast, theatre in this country presents as stolid, highly commercialised and generally elitist (even if sometimes avant-garde). Yesterday's radical dramatists now feed a market that stretches from the local state theatre companies to the ubiquitous film script seeking investment. Despite the increasing aesthetic or literary value of much Australian theatre, its lack of relevance — especially to the lives of the mass of the population — has made it a cultural indulgence enjoyed mainly by the well heeled. The last thing such a theatre would seek to espouse is anything crudely didactic, let alone passionately committed to the wrong side of politics.
Brisbane experiments
Challenging the Centre is something of a swan song for experiments in radical political theatre in Brisbane. Of the three companies it focuses on, only one remains, and that — Streets Arts Community Theatre — is different in its approach from the message orientation of the other two. Indeed, Streets Arts is a long way from the agit-prop tradition. Nonetheless, the work of the three companies is linked by the same developmental thread and personnel.
The Popular Theatre Troupe, formed in 1974, garnered a major reputation for its repertoire of socially committed material — more than 30 issue-oriented performance pieces, generally less than an hour in length. After the troupe's funding was withdrawn by the Australia Council, the company was disbanded in 1983.
The work of PTT was to be continued by Order By Numbers — which put on three shows, heavily influenced by stand-up comedy and rock 'n' roll, during 1985 and 1986. Several PTT members would later work with and have significant influence on Street Arts.
This last company (formed in 1982), the only one surviving, currently requires an annual income of around $200,000 — mainly drawn from government subsidy — to stay afloat and pursue its community projects while maintaining its professional setup.
Role of budgets
Such budgetary matters, rather than the politics of the performance, determine whether such theatre survives. This is really unfortunate, because most of the book also reproduces some of the scripts that have been performed over the last 20 years. It is this material which is most exciting. What once was written only to be shouted into the wind is here preserved so that others can draw inspiration. Of these scripts, The White Man's Mission (1975) by Richard Fotheringham and Albert Hunt stands out. Tighter and more confident in its theatrics than the plays that were to follow, The White Man's Mission is 36 pages about racism, slavery and exploitation in Australia that surely deserves to be revived.
Most of the rest of the book comprises contributions by the practitioners themselves, either relating the history of the troupe they worked with or describing its creative process. So the method of doing it — and doing it well — is picked over.
Nonetheless, as editor Steve Capelin concedes, this style of performance is not taken seriously by the theatrical establishment. Indeed, what is relevant and worthwhile theatre was a major bone of contention between PTT and Street Arts. As David Watt describes it:
"The Popular Theatre Troupe saw itself as a 'left wing theatre group', which places it in a particular tradition which predates the essentially counter-cultural forms and strategies of Street Arts ... Street Arts, on the other hand, emerged from a set of notions about grass roots politics and community activism which was much more distinctively counter-cultural, and saw itself more as a facilitory organisation using theatre as a tool."
Shifting perspectives
This disagreement is not just one of temperamental difference unique to theatre practitioners. At its core is a shift in perspectives that has marked much radical politics these last 20 years. In part it records the impact of a green-left divide and the veering away from didactic theatre that tries to present ideas — generally socialist ones — to a theatre employed as an empowering instrument of oppressed communities. One tries to be political, in a programmatic sense, and the other doesn't.
Indeed, if both groups can be called political, then one's politics is very different from that of the other. David Watt again: "The former [that of PTT] is a 'top down' approach, which assumes the superior knowledge of the company, and thus runs the risk of patronising its audiences. The latter, a 'bottom up' approach, assumes that a community knows its own circumstances best and merely needs to be 'voiced', which runs the risk of never moving beyond the political understanding with which it started."
This perhaps simplifies the differences, but it says a lot about what theatre activists think they are doing now and what they thought they were doing yesterday.
Unfortunately, while Challenging The Centre is keen to present such methods as a blueprint, perhaps to stimulate emulation, the significance of the thin thread of subsidy in deciding the future of "political theatre" is not addressed. This is probably a major contradiction that confronts any enterprise in this direction, one that will inevitably determine its fate unless it can assert its independence. I cannot help feeling that if theatre like this is to survive, then it must be adopted by enthusiastic amateurs who are also committed political activists.