Carry on Understudies

Theatre and Sexual Politics

Michelene Wandor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN:
  9780415119559
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135794866
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Arts de la scène

`one hell of a seminal read ... Here is a book that grapples, with energy, ingenuity and terrific intellectual rigour, with a bewildering forest of issues around gender and politics ... illuminating, insightful, perceptive.' - Women's Review

1: Contexts

Early political theatre and feminism

Theatre and performance skills of all kinds have always played a role during periods of social and political change in Britain. Emerging political movements have used theatre and music to express and support their struggles, and radical social change has also affected the avant-garde wings of theatre, which are always receptive to new ideas. During the 1840s plays were performed in support of the Chartists, and in the course of the nineteenth century various attempts were made in London to establish theatres and produce plays for ‘worker-audiences’.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, with the founding of the Independent Labour Party and the Co-operative Movement, the influence of socially conscious playwrights, such as Ibsen and Shaw, took root in a climate of radical debate in Britain. Political activists drew sustenance as well as entertainment from the work of such playwrights. Eleanor Marx translated the first English version of Ibsen’s play, An Enemy of the People, in 1888 (published in 1890). In 1885 she had taken part in a reading of The Doll’s House, together with Edward Aveling and George Bernard Shaw. Although there is still a strong tendency in this country to pretend that ‘art’ and ‘politics’ have little or nothing to do with one another (or should have little or nothing…), there is an enormous amount of evidence to show how theatre is continually influenced by the new political ideas of its time.

In the early years of the twentieth century a National Association of Clarion Clubs (associated with The Clarion newspaper) put on plays with socialist and labour themes. The Workers’ Theatre Movement (WTM, 1928–36) directed its attention to the rapidly changing political situation since the First World War. Receptive to cultural and political influences from Germany and the Soviet Union in particular, it introduced the agitprop montage form into British theatre, drawing on indigenous popular forms—sketches, music-hall, cabaret—harnessing theatre as a direct adjunct to the class struggle (for instance, during the General Strike of 1926).

The WTM was essentially an amateur theatre project; in 1936, when Unity Theatre was founded, the contribution of professional theatre workers politicised in particular by the anti-fascist movement, was an important factor. Unity’s aim (shared with the New Theatre League) was to mobilise a united front of progressive theatre workers, just as the Left Book Club (started by publisher Victor Gollancz) and Left Review (a literary/political journal) did with writers and readers in the 1930s. In 1937 the Left Book Club started a Theatre Guild which by 1938 consisted of about 250 groups all over the country.

The growing agitation for women’s suffrage in the second half of the nineteenth century, with its campaigns for women to be fully admitted into the professions, helped bring women more actively into radical theatre work. Many actresses were instrumental in producing and performing Ibsen’s plays, both because of the ideas about women and independence with which he dealt, and because it gave them opportunities as actresses to play more challenging roles:

What you won’t be able to imagine…is the joy of having in our hands…such glorious actable stuff. If we had been thinking politically, concerning ourselves about the emancipation of women, we would not have given the Ibsen plays the kind of wholehearted enchanted devotion we did give…. Ibsen taught us something we were never to unlearn.

(Actress Elizabeth Robins, quoted in Julie Holledge, Innocent Flowers, Virago, 1981)

In December 1908 the Actresses’ Franchise League was formed, dedicated to supporting the struggle for female suffrage. At first they provided poems and monologues to entertain at political meet ings, but soon began writing and producing short plays, as a way of contributing their professional talents to the cause. The plays were simple parables, based largely on the satirical, naturalistic sketch, but they are interesting because, although they mostly address themselves to showing how essential the vote is to women, they also reveal a broad grasp of the situation of women. The plays satirise what we would now call male chauvinism— crude male prejudice against women. They satirise the upper-class men and women who were against women’s suffrage, and although often offering little more than a sophisticated version of the working-class stereotype, the plays do express sympathy with the plight of working-class women. In one play, An Englishwoman’s Home, by a man, Arncliffe Sennet, men are wittily offered the franchise of sharing housework and childcare in return for the vote and the same work opportunities. The plays deal with the material conditions of women’s lives, without much confrontation with psychological oppression, or sexual relationships. Three of these fascinating plays are included in Julie Holledge’s excellent book Innocent Flowers: Women in the Edwardian Theatre (Virago, 1981).

Around 1913 the actresses turned their attention to conditions for women within the acting profession, beginning to campaign against its prejudices against women in certain jobs. An Independent Women’s Theatre Company flourished briefly, but with the First World War and the muffling of suffragette militancy, this early feminist theatre largely faded from the public eye. During the 1920s and 1930s organised political feminism was far less visible; struggles to improve the position of women in society continued, but less publicly. Organisations continued to argue and work around specific issues, such as contraception and childcare, and within working-class organisations such as the Co-operative Guild feminism still found a presence. But theatre work controlled by women, and linking feminism and aesthetics, ceased to command its own space. There were a number of women who were very active within the Unity Theatre movement (such as sisters Angela and Joan Tuckett in Bristol) and there was the occasional play about the ‘women’s question’—equal rights for women, equal educational opportunities, abortion. But it was only well after the Second World War that feminism and theatre again came together; this time in a greatly changed social and political situation in which radical post-war changes to the family had produced intense and contradictory pressures on women.

‘Emancipation’ and after

In 1928 women were finally granted the vote on the same terms as men. Many people assumed that the expression of women’s needs and interests through the ballot box was therefore assured, but the historical and political complexity of social organisation is such that the freedom to vote is only one step along the way to self-determination. As Engels pointed out in his preface to The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884):

The determining factor in history is, in the last resort, the production and reproduction of immediate life. But this itself is of a twofold character. On the one hand, the production of the means of subsistence, of food, clothing and shelter and the tools requisite therefore; on the other, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species.

In today’s advanced industrial society we take it for granted that these two forms of ‘production’ are separate: on the one hand the world of ‘work’ produces the material means of subsistence, and on the other is the ‘family’—the centre of personal and emotional life. But the family is also in one sense a place where production of a fundamental and vital kind takes place—the production of human beings, and their reproduction (both biologically and socially) as the next generation of working people. Sociologist Ann Oakley has summarised the growing rift between paid work and the family as follows:

1) from 1750 until the early 1840s, when the family was increasingly displaced by the factory as the place of production, but women followed their traditional work out of the home; 2) from the 18408 until 1914, when a decline in the employment of married women outside the home was associated with the rising popularity of a belief in women’s natural domesticity; 3) from 1914 until the 1950s, when there is a discernible, though uneven tendency towards the growing employment of women, coupled with a retention of housewifery as the primary role expected of all women.

(Housewife, Allen Lane, 1974)

With the separation of productive work from the home and family unit, the balance of relationships within the family shifted. As the factory system replaced the family income with the man’s wage, the notion of man as sole breadwinner took on a material reality. Working-class men were excluded more and more from a practical share in running the home, while woman acquired a two-fold responsibility: not only looking after home and children, but also having to work outside the home with fewer job choices and lower pay than men. At the same time, with the growing affluence enjoyed by the expanding middle class, the situation of privileged women narrowed down. For the Victorian patriarch, the idleness of his women became a symbol of the extent of his wealth. The image of the pale lady, languishing on her invalid bed, in semi-darkness, protected from the harsh light of reality and society, conveys perfectly the contradictory way in which the Victorian middle-class woman was idealised. On the one hand she was released from domestic drudgery by having servants; on the other she was somehow forced to retreat into a twilight of invalidism to give her any function at all. And as the gulf between rich and poor widened, so did the gulf between men and women within each of those two classes.

In the twentieth century, two world wars have ironically produced opportunities for women denied them during peacetime; extra state support, job opportunities, education, welfare and nurseries have all been made available in the interests of the war economy. After each war, many facilities were withdrawn, nurseries closed, and women were shunted back into the home to ‘liberate’ jobs for men, and to resume the task of rebuilding the population. However, the 1944 Education Act consolidated and advanced opportunities for higher education for both sexes, and the third Labour government of 1945–51 launched a programme of partial nationalisation and welfare reform. With the establishment of the Welfare State, it was widely assumed that the class war was finally over. But although social benefits and growing national affluence improved the quality of life for most people, an oppressive social and sexual division of labour still existed, and new contradictions emerged:

By the early fifties Keynesian capitalism had eliminated mass unemployment and allowed a steady increase in the material standard of living of the working class. It thereby appeared to annul the positive case for socialism that had been made for fifty years by the working-class movement: that capitalism was unable to prevent cyclical hunger and destitution. Simultaneously the Cold War allowed capitalist regimes everywhere to establish powerful negative identification of socialism with the political order of the Soviet Union under Stalin.

(Perry Anderson, New Left Review, Jan.—Feb. 1965)

By the late 1950s the impact of the post-war boom was being felt: the expansion of the white-collar sector to service material expansion produced a new professional group. With the increase of material consumer goods developed a mass-distributed culture through TV, cinema and popular music. But the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and the university-based New Left, which both formed during this period, reflected a political concern for more than mere material improvement. CND, in its concern for a world threatened by the destructive aspects of nuclear power, drew into its membership working-class and lower-middle-class people in a new resurgence of political protest. The New Left initiated a revived interest in Marxist theory, and in Continental Marxist writing, as well as pinpointing the contradiction between the so-called liberal values of an affluent society with education available to all, and the realities of adult life in a society where young intellectual professionals were able to do little more than slot into a bureaucratised and technologised capitalism.

At the grassroots level of everyday and personal life, post-war society had a dramatic impact on the family; an extensive rehousing programme eroded the security of many working-class communities and attenuated family networks. The new technological consumer affluence brought many labour-saving devices for the housewife: vacuum cleaners, fridges, more efficient stoves, etc.; the matching advertising campaigns emphasised the self-sufficiency of each family unit; one of the effects of this was to isolate the woman at the centre of her individual family.

All these various changes produced new patterns of family life, with which sociologists and psychologists tried to deal throughout the 1950s and the 1960s. The reality was that large numbers of women still worked outside the home, but women’s magazines extolled the virtues of feminine wife and mother, and domestic craft skills. In particular, graduate women were the object of a barrage from psychologists and the media on the ideals of wife and motherhood as an alternative ‘career’ for the educated woman, in which she not only nurtured her children in time-honoured fashion, but also acted as informal educator. At the same time new scientific advances—in particular improved forms of contraception — meant that women were no longer as tied to their childbearing function as their mothers had been. Whereas for men sexual pleasure and procreation had always been separate options, for the first time Western women were approaching a point where those options could be a reality for them too.

The material changes pressuring the family from outside, and the internal changes brought about by new conditions for women, were indirectly acknowledged in a number of legislative reforms passed by the Labour government during the second half of the 1960s. In 1967 an Abortion Act and an Act partially legalising male homosexuality were passed (female homosexuality has never been illegal—popular myth has it that when the first anti-homo-sexual legislation was passed in 1885, Queen Victoria was so horrified at the mere thought of lesbianism that she refused to believe it could exist, and hence it could not be made illegal…). In 1969 the Divorce Reform Act eased conditions for divorce, and in 1970 the Equal Pay Act proposed that equal pay for men and women should become a reality by the end of 1975. (It hasn’t, unfortunately. Women’s average earnings are still only about 70 per cent of men’s average earnings.)

Although the State was indirectly responding to the changing conditions of family life, and although the problems were being aired in some areas—such as a running debate about the role of education for women—throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, all women were still being exhorted to find contentment in hearth and home. However, some people noticed and took the symptoms of growing female discontent seriously. In Britain sociologist Hannah Gavron conducted research on housebound working- and middle-class mothers in 1960–1; the results were published by Routledge & Kegan Paul and then Penguin in 1966 under the title of The Captive Wife. The book explored the problems of boredom, isolation and frustration experienced by women of both classes. In the United States journalist Betty Friedan wrote a book called The Feminine Mystique, published in 1962. Her book tackled the ‘problem’ of self-contained, suburban affluence more directly. Analysing and quoting from experiences of suburban housewives, she dissected the affluent American Dream as it turned into a nightmare for many of the women who had been expected (and who themselves expected) to find happiness and total fulfilment. She pinpointed the new symptoms of discontent, but could not yet identify the causes, nor, with any confidence, suggest a solution. For her the problem crystallised particularly around the fact that women were experiencing a very profound identity crisis. She called it ‘the problem with no name’; it took the rest of the 1960s to be further identified, and it took the political and cultural watershed year of 1968 to supply a reservoir of activism from which theatre and feminism could draw new energy.

1968—politics and theatre

During the early 19608 a restless youth movement, more affluent than their parents’ generation, challenged the blandness of the dominant cultural offerings in television, cinema and popular music. Rock music, pop festivals, the ‘underground’ culture with its superficially ‘permissive’ attitudes to pleasure and sexuality (love and peace…) drew on the experiences of CND as well as exploiting the expansion of mass media such as the record industry. As world political events became more momentous (the Chinese cultural revolution in the mid–1960s, the American war in Vietnam, the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the French students’ and workers’ protest in 1968), increasing militancy from the working class, the New Left and the students resulted in a publicly visible renewal of class conflict and a socialist challenge to bourgeois ideology. The political and cultural exuberance of young people in 1968 drew attention to the passivity of the consumer alongside the exploitation of the worker, insisting that the day-to-day lives of ordinary people could be ‘politicised’ and changed, and that the quality of relationships between people was as important as greater material benefits. The bringing together of ‘public’ and ‘private’ concerns by a new generation of young socialists of different tendencies met the legislative liberalising (through reforms of laws dealing with the family and sexuality) of the 1960s.

The liberalisation of the State’s attitude to divorce, certain aspects of sexuality and the family, and the new cultural lifestyles of the younger generation, were part of the climate in which theatre struggled for its own liberation from censorship. Theatre censorship had remained an anomaly among the arts. Films had to be scrutinised by censors in order to be given a certificate to be shown, but only after they were already made. Books could be prosecuted for being obscene (i.e. D.H.Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960), but play manuscripts had to be submitted before production to the Lord Chamberlain, and could not go into rehearsal without his (sic) approval. He was empowered to demand changes in the text, and, as Kenneth Tynan pointed out in a beautifully turned article in the Observer (1965), combining wit with barely concealed fury:

Since he is appointed directly by the sovereign, he is not responsible to the House of Commons. He inhabits a limbo aloof from democracy, answerable to his own hunches. The rules by which he judges plays are nowhere defined in law…

However, Tynan astutely summarised the way these unspoken and unwritten laws of censorship invariably worked in practice, on the real ideas and words in contemporary theatre:

Since he is always recruited from the peerage, he naturally tends to forbid attacks on institutions like the Church and the Crown. He never permits plays about eminent British subjects, living or recently dead, no matter how harmless the content and despite the fact that Britain’s libel laws are about the strictest on earth. Above all, he feels a paternal need to protect his flock from exposure to words or gestures relating to bodily functions below the navel and above the upper thigh. This—the bedding-cum-liquid-and-solid-eliminating area—is what preoccupies him most, and involves the writers and producers who have to deal with him in the largest amount of wasted time.

(A View of the English Stage, Paladin, 1975)

It is interesting that in this somewhat satirical (but accurate) description, Tynan shows how censorship was applied to the most ‘public’ of subject matters (Church and Crown) and the most ‘private’ of bodily functions. Sexuality could not be represented in any way which was thought to violate ideas about ‘public decency’ and ‘privacy’; love scenes (where they appeared) could not be acted on beds (the ‘one foot on the floor’ syndrome), if they were heterosexual; if they were homosexual, they had to be cut completely. Overt representations of, and references to, homosexuality were strictly taboo.

The actual process of submitting plays to the Lord Chamberlain was long and tedious. And once approved, a text could not be changed. Obviously this meant restrictions on subject matter, forms of imaginative expression, and the impossibility of very topical plays. Of course, theatre had always found ways round censorship (the proliferation of club theatres between the two world wars, for example), but as the 19608 progressed, the forces of liberalisation gained ground, and in 1968 the office of the Lord Chamberlain was finally abolished. Plays could now (in theory) be about anything, be topical, be subject to change from performance to performance, could include improvisation, and could match the needs of the theatre industry, within which there were changing attitudes to management, int...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Carry on, Understudies
• Extracts from press reviews
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Curtain-raiser
• Preface to the second edition
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to the first edition
• 1: Contexts
• 2: Cross-dressing, sexual representation and the sexual division of labour in theatre
• 3: The first phase: 1969–73
• 4: The second phase: 1973–7
• 5: The third phase: from 1977
• 6: The skilled process
• 7: Finding a voice: women playwrights and theatre
• 8: Political dynamics: the feminisms
• 9: Radical plays before 1968: the crisis of virility, the ‘feminine’ and the ‘female’
• 10: Men playwrights in the 1970s
• 11: The fourth phase: women playwrights in the 1970s and early 1980s
• 12: Conclusions and the future
• Appendix: All Het Up in Bradford
• Notes
• Bibliography