with the British press may not be astonished at the outcome. TheGuar-
dian’s critic found Churchill’s play‘a heartfelt lamentation for [ ... ]
future generations’, which confirms‘theatre’s ability to react more rapidly
than any other art form to global politics’. TheSunday Timesdescribed it
as typical of the‘enclosed, fetid, smug, self-congratulating and entirely
irrelevant little world of contemporary political theatre’.^2
The term‘political theatre’, together with the idea that political theatre
could be an independent theatrical genre, is frequently associated with
the pioneering work of Erwin Piscator, who published a book calledThe
Political Theatrein 1929.^3 Clearly, though, the political significance of
theatre stretches back before the twentieth century. Broadly speaking, the
topic of this chapter is the relationship between theatre and politics. To
understand Churchill’s play and the controversy that surrounded it, one
would have to research the play itself, its alleged invocation of antisemitic
tropes, the history and context of the Gaza War, along with that of the
playwright and the Royal Court Theatre, not to mention the singular and
incendiary role that Middle Eastern conflicts play in the British public
sphere. The point of this chapter is not to attack or to defend Churchill’s
play–or any other specific attempt to combine theatre and politics. Nor
do I offer an account of whether plays ought or ought not to encourage
political actions of various kinds. Given the volume and variety of mate-
rial on this subject, my aim is rather more modest: to give a sense of some
of the different issues that arise when thinking about theatre and politics
and to explore one of the better known accounts of this relationship.
Churchill’s play, together with the reactions it produced, reminds us that
political theatre is still with us, that it still provokes, that it touches on the
most controversial, most inflammatory issues of the day. It also reminds us
that the relationship between theatre and politics is often not a matter of
eternal rules, but frequently of specific encounters between playwrights,
companies and spectators at a specific place and time, which deserve con-
sideration in their own terms. The analysis of political causes and effects
for some particular performance, or set of performances, might want to
take into account facts about how that performance is funded, who creates
and performs it, who sees it and how it is received. Nonetheless, there is a
place for some analysis at a theoretical level. We’ll begin by making some
distinctions that will help to give a shape to the discussion.
Three distinctions
Politics in the narrow and the broad sense
Afirst distinction to make is that between what I’ll call‘politics in the
narrow sense’ and ‘politics in the broad sense’. The narrow sense of
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