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Poaching in Thatcherland: a Case of Radical Community Theatre

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Baz Kershaw
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Abstract

EMMA was one of the many small-scale touring groups which flourished as part of the community theatre movement of the 1970s. That it died within a year of the Thatcher decade was due, ironically, not to direct political intervention but to a financial crisis within its funding body, East Midlands Arts, brought on by its attempt to centralize community projects and render them safely retrospective. Here, Baz Kershaw compares the practice of EMMA with its stated intentions, and looks in detail at one of its self-created plays, The Poacher, as an example of ‘performative contradiction’ – in this case, the making of a subversive political statement within the ostensibly safe ambience of the rural nostalgia industry. Baz Kershaw, who lectures in Theatre Studies at Lancaster University, wrote for the original Theatre Quarterly on the rural community arts group Medium Fair. He has also contributed to Performance and Theatre Papers, and was co-author with Tony Coult of a study of Welfare State, Engineers of the Imagination. His most recent work is The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention (Routledge, 1992).

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 9 , Issue 34 , May 1993 , pp. 121 - 133
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

Notes and References

1. East Midland Arts, Annual Report, 1979–80 (East Midlands Arts, 1980).

2. Eagleton, Terry, Ideology: an Introduction (Verso, 1991), p. 53Google Scholar. Eagleton defines a ‘performative contradiction’ as a contradiction ‘between what the members of a group do, and what they say: they may officially accord loyalty to a regime while demonstrating their indifference to it.’ Such performative contradictions in theatre may appear between a company's stated policy and the nature of its shows, between what the context of performance requires or expects a company to do and what it actually does, and so on. In my view too little critical attention has been given to performative contradictions in the work of alternative theatre groups.

3. See, for example, Chambers, Colin and Prior, Mike, Playwrights Progress: Patterns of Postwar Drama (Amber Lane, 1987), p. 59Google Scholar; Davis, Andrew, Other Theatres: the Development of Alternative and Experimental Theatre in Britain (Macmillan, 1987), p. 207CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gooch, Steve, All Together Now: an Alternative View of Theatre and Community (Methuen, 1984), p. 57Google Scholar. Barker, Clive has recently essayed a more balanced view in ‘Alternative Theatre/Political Theatre’, in The Politics of Theatre and Drama, ed. Holderness, Graham (Macmillan, 1992)Google Scholar.

4. Accurate statistics for alternative theatre are hard to come by (a measure of its general marginalization by serious researchers). Information can be found in Cork, Kenneth, Theatre Is for All (Arts Council of Great Britain, 1986)Google Scholar; Feist, Andrew and Huchison, Robert, Cultural Trends in the Eighties (Policy Studies Institute, 1990)Google Scholar; Myerscough, John, Facts about the Arts II (Policy Studies Institute, 1986)Google Scholar; and in the journal Cultural Trends.

5. Details of the growth of alternative theatre can be found in Kershaw, Baz, The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention (Routledge, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. Manley, Andrew, EMMA Theatre Company Report, 02 1977Google Scholar.

7. Ibid.

8. Williams, Raymond, Keywords: a Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Fontana, 1976), p. 66Google Scholar.

9. Manley, op. cit.

10. EMMA leaflet, 1981.

11. Figures for the preceding years were 1974–75: 97; 1975–76: 194; 1976–77: 217.

12. The debate about the democratization of culture (versus cultural democracy) was initiated by the Council of Europe in the mid-1970s. See Simpson, J. A., Towards Cultural Democracy (Council of Europe, 1976)Google Scholar.

13. On Centre 42, see Coppetiers, Frank, ‘Arnold Wesker's Centre 42: a Cultural Revolution Betrayed’, Theatre Quarterly, Vol. V, No. 18 (1975)Google Scholar.

14. Hawker, James, A Victorian Poacher: James Hawker's Journal, ed. Christian, Garth (Oxford, 1961)Google Scholar.

15. Andrew Manley and Lloyd Johnston, The Poacher, unpublished manuscript. All quotations from the play are from this source.

16. Edgar, David, The Second Time as Farce: Reflections on the Drama of Mean Times (Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), p. 226–46Google Scholar. See also McGrath, John, The Bone Won't Break: on Theatre and Hope in Hard Times (Methuen, 1990), p. 153–4Google Scholar; Baz Kershaw, op. cit., p. 67–84.

17. East Midlands Arts, Annual Report 1978–79 (East Midlands Arts, 1979).

18. Ibid.

19. Thornber, Robin, ‘The Dilemma of EMMA’, The Guardian, 20 01 1981Google Scholar.