Guest post: Profoundly political

Jun 2nd, 2020 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Originally a comment by Tim Harris on Like an awkward impulse buy.

Many plays by Shakespeare and writers of his time are profoundly political (European visitors were shocked at what the English companies got away with, for you simply could not be so political in any other European country), and if the director does not recognise this, or seeks to foist on plays some obvious contemporary ‘relevance’ that has nothing to do with the issues that are addressed in the plays, then that is a recipe for rendering the plays as dead as doornails. European (non-Anglophone) productions of Shakespeare, and particularly Kosintsev’s great film versions, often recognise the politics of the plays far better than most Anglo-Saxon productions do. I think that after the Civil Wars, it became difficult to address political matters on the English stage, and then in the Victorian Age, individualism, the growing lack of a sense of the common weal, and mere pathos came to dominate the theatre – and this continued into the 20th century in the Anglophone world. ‘Politics’ was thought to be in rather bad taste, an attitude that pervades modern journalism in the Anglophone sphere, particularly the USA, with its ‘both-sides-ism’. ‘”Hamlet” is about Hamlet,’ said Peter Brook in an interview on Japanese television about his pared-down version, a very unsatisfactory remark that went with a very unsatisfactory production – it is this attitude that I take strong issue with in my essay on the production. This is not to say that there not have been productions that recognise the importance of the political: Michael Bogdanov’s come to mind, and there is a very good RSC production of ‘Julius Caesar’ with an all-black cast, directed by Greg Doran. Speaking of this last play, there’s a wonderful film of it performed in Italian by the denizens of a high-security prison in Italy (that is, by men who are members of the Mafia and other ‘societies’): these men absolutely understand hierarchy, intimidation, vaunting, the politics etc from the inside, and it shows: ‘Caesar Must Die’, directed by Paolo & Vittorio Taviani.

There was also the matter of censorship: censorship in Shakespeare’s time was there, of course, but it was rather loose. But in 1737 a law was brought in that put the Lord Chancellor’s office in charge of licensing plays for performance – Robert Walpole didn’t want any satirical takes on his government appearing on stage. In the 19th century, Ibsen was banned from the British stage. The first great British political play in Britain in the 20th century was Harley Granville Barker’s ‘Waste’ (1907), which was banned from public performance by the Lord Chamberlain’s office, and remains still too little known.

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