Routledge Revivals: Theatres of the Left 1880-1935 (1985)

Workers' Theatre Movements in Britain and America

Raphael Samuel, Ewan MacColl, Stuart Cosgrove, Raphael Samuel, Ewan MacColl, Stuart Cosgrove

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315445946
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Drama
• Index: Literature

First published in 1985, this book examines how workers theatre movements intended their performances to be activist — perceiving art as a weapon of struggle and enlightenment — and an emancipatory act. An introductory study relates left-wing theatre groupings to the cultural narratives of contemporary British socialism. The progress of the Workers' Theatre Movement (1928-1935) is traced from simple realism to the most brilliant phase of its Russian and German development alongside which the parallel movements in the United States are also examined. A number of crucial texts are reprints as well as stage notes and glimpses of the dramaturgical controversies which accompanied them.

Theatre and socialism in Britain, (1880–1935)

Raphael Samuel

I

British socialism, in the formative years of its existence, seems to have had an especially strong appeal to those who, whatever their particular walk in life, regarded themselves, or were regarded by others, as 'artistic'. The term was then a great deal less exclusive in its connotations than it was to become with the advent of 'highbrows' and a self-consciously minority avant-garde. It was freely applied to certain classes of artisan, as well as to the many classes of under-labourer (e.g. engravers and copyists) engaged in the lower reaches of the cultural industries and trades. It was also widely used as a synonym for the unconventional and Bohemian, for those who (like Edward Carpenter's gardener-comrade, George Hulkin) were 'not too exact or precise about details'.¹ A housepainter could be regarded as a 'bit of an artist', like Owen, the hero of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, or Robert Tressell, his real-life original, whose frescoes have recently been retrieved.² The artistic impulse was particularly strong (though sometimes unacknowledged) in the more revolutionary wings of the socialist movement - nowhere more so than in the 'impossibilist' and apparently severely Marxist Socialist Labour Party, for whom, in the early 1900s, james Connolly was spouting translations of Freilig-rath's poetry on the Glasgow street corners, and whose members' staple reading (when not The Communist Manifesto) was Eugene Sue's romantically revolutionary fictions.³ To these one might add the thousands of scribblers who contributed verse to the socialist press (as late as the 1930s there was still a poetry-lovers' corner in The Daily Herald)', the amateur librettists who mounted operatic and choral concert-meetings; and the open-air 'stump' orators who electrified the crowds by reciting verse as much as by preaching the socialist Word - Shelley's 'Men of England' was for decades a standard peroration in platform oratory, as it had been in that of John Bright during the 1840s.⁴

The aesthetic components of socialism were, in its early years, open and acknowledged. British Marxism, as Belfort Bax noted, was in the first place a 'literary' movement and its most famous exponent was neither a trade unionist nor an economist but the poet-artist, William Morris.⁵ 'The first revolt', Sidney Webb noted in 'The Historic Basis of Socialism' (one of the Fabian Essays of 1889) came from the 'artistic' side, in the rejection of 'squalid commercialism' and mechanical market laws.⁶ In the epoch of Walter Crane and the first May Days, it was pictorial art (of the kind lovingly gathered together in John Gorman's Banner Bright) which both shaped the vision of the socialistic future and provided a visual allegory for the Golden Age of the past - that processional dance of bucolic peasants and artisans which served as an emblem of the solidarity of labour and the brotherhood of man. The struggle between labour and capital was conceptualized in terms of the age-old division between rich and poor rather than that of employers and employed; it owed more to 'democratic readings' from the poets than to detailed engagement with the class system, 'Socialism' wrote Keir Hardie, 'was the poetry of the poor': it exalted the masses; it transported them from the mean conditions of their everyday existence to a state of imaginary transcendence. Like poetry, it depended for its enchantment on the willing suspension of disbelief, a self-abandonment to the power of the Word. This was certainly the leading appeal of Ramsay MacDonald, in later years Labour's first Prime Minister, who intoxicated his listeners with the spell of beautiful images. The famous oration on the death of Keir Hardie, delivered to a rapt audience of the Glasgow 1LP in 1916 - the speech which made him the idol of Red Clydeside - is a representative example:

Keir Hardie: there was your old-fashioned man. Every line, every item of his home, his own characteristic. There was your man of individuality. You saw him in the Strand in London, crowded with thousands upon thousands of feet; this great river of ordinary commonplace humanity, where even strong individuality is apt to be lost. But there he was like a great boulder of whinstone, telling of the freshness of the hills. There he was, this strong individuality, amidst men, and yet above men: human and yet separate. You sing in Scotland 'I to the hills will lift mine eyes'. There are some men who are like the hills; when you look at them you feel that strength, that power of eternity, that solidness which does not pass with a generation, but which stands the storms and the climates, which gladdens your eyes and which your children to generations will see after you have gone and slept and been forgotten. There are some men whose personalities give you the impression of eternity and unshakeable foundations and everlastingness. Hardie was one of those men. Such a man of rugged being and massive soul, of imperturbable courage and of mystic insight, was the man who founded the I.L.P.⁷

There is no doubt that MacDonald saw himself in this light, 'a man of rugged being and massive soul', a politician who was also a poet and a singer, a mystic who carried within him the vision of the city on the hill. In his peroration - which had an extraordinary impact on listeners and was talked about in Glasgow 'for years afterwards' - the religious and aesthetic notions of transcendence are fused:

The old order passes away, and you and I, standing once more at Hardie's tomb, having lingered the past hour with his memory and thoughts of him in our minds, we go back into the world to do our duty, to reconstruct society, to rebuild the fabric that has fallen, to make good the walls that have been crushed; to put a new idea, a new beauty, a new holiness into the lives of the people of Europe.

The cult of beauty, deriving from the Pre-Raphaelites, and earlier still from Shelley, as well as from such better known sources as Ruskin and Morris, and no doubt owing much, too, to the 'aesthetic' movement of the 1880s and 1890s, formed part of the 'common sense' of the Socialist movement of the time. It was the imaginative basis both of its critique of individualism and its vision of a collectivist future. Socialism was the talismanic term for the beautiful; it represented, in the moving terms of Oscar Wilde's Soul of Man Under Socialism, all that was potentially 'fine'; capitalism, by contrast, was an incarnation of the 'base', the 'mean', the 'sordid'. Visually socialism was represented not by the proletarian fist, but by the flowing robes of the indeterminately medieval peasants, artisans and goddesses of Walter Crane's engravings. Beauty comprised both nature and culture, the unspoiled and the innocent - the simple home, the dignified work, the craft that was 'true to materials' - but also the highest products of literature, music and the fine arts. It was a unifying, integrative principle, a way of restoring wholeness to the world. Hubert Manning, Ann Veronica's civil servant suitor - 'a socialist of the order of John Ruskin' - wanted to shout when he saw beautiful things, 'or else ... to weep'.⁸ Robert Tressell, the Hastings house-painter, was no less ecstatic when, in the coda of his novel, he projected the 'gilded domes and glittering pinnacles' of the beautiful cities of the future 'where men shall dwell in true brotherhood and goodwill and joy'.⁹ 'We also had a handsome "hammer man" who worked shifts at the local steel forge', Alice Foley recalls of her Bolton Socialist Sunday School. 'He was remarkably well read and a passionate devotee of poesy and beauty. After separation into small groups he introduced us to purple passages from Keats's Eve of St Agnes and his lovely intonation of an Ode on a Grecian Urn'.

Thou still unravished bride of quietness
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time
still lingers in the chamber of memory.'¹⁰

Ethel Snowden, 'a great snob' according to the jaundiced Diary entry of Beatrice Webb, but a very popular speaker at ILP assemblies, sounded a similar note in her speeches. 'There is a great deal of truth in the words of that distinguished Frenchman who said that we can "live without bread, but not without roses'" she told a mass assembly of London and home counties co-operators in 1927:

. . . What he meant was that life without music and musical appreciation, without art and artistic understanding, without books and the power to read and comprehend, without earnestness of spirit and spiritual devotion to the community's interest, is not life, but existence. Therefore we struggle to add something to the richness of culture not only to our own lives, but to the lives of everyone around us. I emphasise the need of culture to make us gentle and good, to banish hate from our hearts, and to plant therein righteousness and the love of humanity. A mind of culture makes good things possible to us, and enables us to love what is beautiful and true. Our movement is only one of many struggling for that ideal. Co-operation is eternally and in all things the law of life. Let us take up this task eternal, this burden, and this message. Confident in the righteousness and nobility of our great cause and lofty principle of co-operation, let us go forward hand-in-hand and heart-to-heart, certain that in God's good time that cause, the eternal cause of our common humanity, will be carried to a crowning and triumphant victory.¹¹

As in MacDonald's funeral oration over the body of Keir Hardie, as in that vast outpouring of ILP rhetoric, transcendental longings, aesthetic ideals of beauty and ambition for cultural attainment are fused in a single discourse.

In another, more heroic, idiom, early socialism drew heavily on literature for its imagery of struggle. Thus, for example, one finds George Edwards, the self-educated secretary of the Agricultural Workers Union (he had been taught to read by his wife), signing off an annual report in 1909 as follows:

Courage then, my Brother,
The day has come at last;
The clouds are lifting quickly,
The right is breaking fast.
Be strong then of courage,
Our cause is just and right.
And he who holds by justice
Is sure to win the fight.¹²

Shakespeare, that favourite author of the nineteenth-century working-class stage, was a frequent source of texts. Julius Caesar in particular - 'a mighty political drama, not just an entertainment', as the young J. R. Clynes discovered when reading it in the library of the Oldham Equitable Co-Operative Society¹³ - seems to have provided some popular models of heroic achievement. Socialist funeral addresses, like that of Ramsay MacDonald on Keir Hardie, drew heavily on Mark Antony's oration in the Forum, while other famous passages served as calls to duty and service. Alfred Greenwood, the very militant secretary of the South Yorkshire glass bottlemakers, and a friend of Eleanor Marx-Aveling, fills his quarterly trade union reports with quotations from...