"Is everything history?": Churchill, Barker, and the Modern History Play

Abstract

Whiten the English theatergoer thinks of the category play, is likely to be Shakespeare that first comes to mind. Shakespeare wrote his two great tetralogies of history plays in the 1590s against a background of unprecedented political instability. The prolonged European war and the tax burden of fighting it, repeated disastrous harvests and plague outbreaks from 1585 onwards, religious strife exacerbated by the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, high levels of unemployment in key industries such as cloth leading to frequent riots, and political factionalism all served to ensure that Queen Elizabeth's popularity sank disastrously as the century drew to a close. In that context, the nostalgic strain of patriotism in Shakespeare's histories, bookended as they are by the successful reigns of Henry V and Henry VII, the latter the founder of the Tudor dynasty, can be perceived as an attempt to rebuild the by representing its past civil and foreign broils as capable of glorious transcendence, however embarrassing and complex the questions are that must be asked along the way. If the past is, as they say, another country, it is a country that Shakespeare fought hard to conquer for the present. Although recent appetite for history seems voracious, as is evident from the proliferation of televised series and the plethora of on-screen pundits, the nature of that interest is all too often in history commodified, packaged, and sanitized for a viewership that wants personalities and good stories. History appears depoliticized in this process, rendered unproblematic and stripped of any living tendrils to the present. Television at least does history, however. In British theater, history is virtually unrepresented. It is not very difficult, perhaps, to suggest reasons why in the British theater of the last thirty years there has been very little that resembles a modern play. At the most general level, one can point to those theories of the postmodern that have called for or predicted the end of narrative history. Stopping short of the textualizing, ironizing, or undermining of history itself--and more directly relevant to the theater--are those accounts of the recent institutional history of theater that have argued the impossibility of any form of political radicalism to be found in scripted performed within a theater building. Baz Kershaw, in The Radicalin Performance and in a series of articles, has argued eloquently the case that the ending of theatrical subsidy in the Thatcherite 1980s led to the emergence of powerful national theatrical institutions with an inbuilt antiradical bias. Commodification of theatrical entertainment and the marketing of culture to theatergoers defined as customers from the late 1970s onwards, has led Kershaw to believe that it is only outside custom-designed buildings, and through the move from drama to performance, that politically interrogatory and challenging live events can be found. (1) One by one, the contributors to the recent influential Cambridge History of British Theatre point to the clear division, in terms of political commitment, between the older generation of post-World War Two British dramatists--Arden, Bond, Pinter, Griffiths, Edgar, Wesker, Churchill, Hare, Brenton, Barker, Wertenbaker--who variously attempted to use or explain history, and to locate the individual within a social, political, and thus often historical context and later issue-based writers, operating outside the theater mainstream, who have no significant interest in the shaping of the present by past events. (2) Even within the list of historically inflected writers compiled by Gottlieb, although some have written influential state of the nation plays, and others have produced work that looks at history through the refracting glass of myth or fiction, relatively few have confronted directly the events taking place in tracts of historical time. My purpose in the present article is to consider two writers, Caryl Churchill and Howard Barker, who have been among the last to retain the ambition to dramatize involvement in the process of English history, and to make relevant connections between the nation's present and its past. …

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