Abstract
In the mid-1920s the Communist-inclined Workers’ Theatre Movement was founded, but it was only when Hackney People’s Players took it over that it began to organise and influence socialist and workers’ theatre. Prolonged and fierce debates produced a determination to make it ‘a propertyless theatre for the propertyless class’. Its chosen form was ‘agit-prop’—short productions of agitational propaganda. It was only later that Soviet judges scoffed at such crudity. Before that nearly a hundred agitprop troupes had appeared across the country, performing—despite police interference—in support of workers on strike, tenants in dispute and left-wing or Communist Party election candidates. Tom Thomas’s Their Theatre and Ours dramatised their purpose, contrasting it with the banal vacuousness of commercial theatre and films. Using a revue-like structure, WTM groups presented undisguisedly political propaganda through songs, sketches, choral speech and, crucially, audience participation.
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Notes
- 1.
Red Letters, No.10, 1980, p. 5.
- 2.
Trotsky, Leon, Literature and Revolution, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1971, pp. 226, 238.
- 3.
Red Stage, February 1932.
- 4.
Goorney, Howard, and MacColl, Ewan, Agit-prop to Theatre Workshop, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986, pp. xxi, xxvi.
- 5.
Daily Worker, 8 February 1930.
- 6.
Loveman, Jack, Workers Theatre: Personal recollections of political theatre in Greenwich during the 1920s and 1930s, unpublished typescript, Greenwich W.E.A., 1979, p. 5.
- 7.
Stourac, Richard, and McCreery, Kathleen, Theatre as a Weapon, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986, p. 255.
- 8.
Ibid., pp. 305–306.
- 9.
Red Stage, April–May 1932.
- 10.
MacColl, Ewan, Journeyman, London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1990, p. 207.
- 11.
Goorney, Howard, and MacColl, Ewan, op.cit., p. xxv.
- 12.
MacColl, Ewan, op.cit., p. 200.
- 13.
Red Stage, June–July 1932.
- 14.
Red Stage, November 1932.
- 15.
Samuel, Raphael, MacColl, Ewan, and Cosgrove, Stuart, Theatres of the Left 1880–1935, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985, p. 77.
- 16.
New Red Stage, February 1932.
- 17.
History Workshop Journal, November 1977, No.4, p. 137.
- 18.
New Red Stage, September 1932.
- 19.
Clark, Jon, Heinemann, Margot, Margolies, David, Snee, Carole (eds), Culture and Crisis in Britain in the Thirties, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1979, p. 212.
- 20.
Loveman, Jack, op.cit., p. 4.
- 21.
WTM Monthly Bulletin, No.3, 1933.
- 22.
Red Stage, April–May 1932.
- 23.
Red Letters, No.10, 1980, p. 6.
- 24.
Red Stage, April–May 1932.
- 25.
Goorney, Howard, and MacColl, Ewan, op.cit., p. xxi.
- 26.
Ibid., p. xx.
- 27.
Branson, Noreen, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1927–1941, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985, p. 71.
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Leach, R. (2023). The Workers’ Theatre Movement. In: British Socialist and Workers Theatre. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25682-0_8
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