The revulsion against political plays is expressed with such wit in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, that it is irresistible. Annie has taken up the cause of Brodie, a soldier facing six years in prison for vandalizing a war memorial. He has written a play, and Annie wants her lover Henry, a playwright, to read it, perhaps improve it.
Henry: It’s no good.
Annie: You mean it’s not literary.
Henry: It’s not literary, and it’s no good. He can’t write.
(Annie suggests he write the play himself. Henry says he can’t.)
Annie: Why?
Henry: Because it’s balls. Announcing every stale revelation of the newly enlightened like stout Cortez coming upon the Pacific war is profits, politicians are puppets, Parliament is a farce, justice is a fraud, property is theft. … It’s all here: pages and pages of it. It’s like being run over very slowly by a traveling freak show of favourite simpletons, the India rubber pedagogue, the midget intellectual, the human panacea.
Who has not, including the most politically engaged of writers, been embarrassed by “messages” in a work of art when they are presented without grace, style, wit, subtlety? And there are enough instances of this to give political theatre a bad name.
But do not these instances (and their easy susceptibility to ridicule, as by the talent of a Tom Stoppard) make the rest of us somewhat cautious about writing political theatre? Of course, we are rightly warned against writing bad political theatre. But is not the bar set higher, even if only slightly, for plays that have political themes?
I suspect this is truer in the United States than in England. Was not David Hare’s Stuff Happens, an in-your-face slap at the Bush administration and its war in Iraq, a hit in London? But it has had a more difficult time in this country, even though it did have a run at the Public Theater in New York, a reading in Provincetown, and a showing at a small theater in Boston.
Hare told the Boston Globe: “I was appalled and depressed and horrified by the resistance of the American theatre to putting this play on. I think the American theatre has gone into a collective funk since the invasion. … Everybody is going to Disney musicals. That’s a response of a mature nation to the most important historical event of our lives?” In Washington, D.C., where the action of the play is located, Hare found that no one would put it on. One theater told him: “We are so frightened by this kind of thing we won’t even do plays about Abraham Lincoln.”
Even if this is an exaggeration, and even if Hare, as the playwright, may be especially quick to see political censorship, it is hard to discount completely the idea that political plays have a harder time than others, and that writers must be aware of this.
Another play about the Iraq war, a one-woman play by Heather Raffo, whose father is Iraqi, opened around the same time as Stuff Happens. Unlike Hare’s play, there is no clear position taken on the war. The playwright was asked in an interview why theatres were more willing to put on her play than Hare’s. She gave two reasons. One, that his play had twenty characters, obviously difficult to stage. “Also, this play is not agitprop and not political theater.”
The barrier of “twenty characters” did not exist for the one-woman play My Name Is Rachel Corrie, which, after a successful run in England, ran into difficulties being produced in New York, where, unquestionably, the political viewpoint of the play led to it being postponed, in the words of the New York Theater Workshop, “indefinitely.”
The play was ultimately produced, but does not the event strongly suggest that a writer of a political play, especially one that arouses hostility from an influential part of the public, must face a special barrier? And if so, is it not reasonable to think that at least for some writers, there would be an inclination, perhaps unconscious, toward self-censorship?
The history of theatre is rich with powerful political plays, from Aeschylus and Sophocles to Jean Giraudoux, Arthur Miller, and Tony Kushner. So the tradition is there, to inspire playwrights in our time. We live in a time of endless wars, unnecessary poverty and disease, ruthless political leadership, and attacks on free expression. Should we not, as writers, take up the challenge, defy the barriers, whether from the outside or from our own disposition to caution, and make the stage part of the eternal struggle for peace and justice?