Conclusion: Political Theatre as Political Practice

Abstract

Shaw, Brecht, Sartre, and Ionesco were all involved in a common project, though they did not see it that way. The differences that divided them were emphasized much more than their commonalities. Neither their critics, nor their political enemies, nor they themselves considered them to be allies in either art or politics. Brecht once said that he never laughed as hard in his life as “when I heard Shaw is a socialist.” For Brecht, the elitism of the Fabian world-view was irreconcilable with the populism of Marxism. Ionesco conceived of both Brecht and Sartre as ideologues, shoving communist conformity down the throats of independent artists such as himself. This conception was incredibly ironic in the case of Brecht, who had been condemned by Lukács and the Soviet establishment for his formalism, and who was bombarded by critics of all stripes for his own refusal to align himself with a particular party or creed. Ionesco’s critique of Sartre was more justified, as Sartre condemned Ionesco in a manner reminiscent of Lukács’s dismissal of Brecht:

Ionesco’s whole work is the proverbial society of union among men, but seen in reverse. And these writers’ [the absurdists] problem is the problem of integration—in this respect they are the only dramatists of our time (they shatter the bourgeois theatre in which this integration is taken for granted beforehand)—but the problem of integration as such, of any integration at all, of their integration with any sort of society; while they are nonpolitical in this sense, they are also reactionary.” ¹