by Beth Frieden
What is the place of radical theatre in
Scotland today? You sometimes hear people talk about theatre as a bourgeois
pasttime only available to posh privately-educated toffs. For sure, going to see a play is usually more
expensive than going to see a film, although not always (certainly not if you
get a 50p ticket to a production
at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow). But
there are also various traditions of class-conscious radical theatre being
carried on in Scotland today. (And let me assure you, the vast majority of
actors, techies and directors are not, in fact, rolling in capital.)
Augustus Boal, in his seminal text Theatre of
the Oppressed, wrote about how the theatre tradition handed down from
Aristotelian Greece functions as an outlet of emotion and pressure for
protelarian audiences and can therefore work as a method of control (similar to
big A to B marches through urban wastelands on Saturdays, which use up a lot of
energy planning and getting people out for, but have no disruptive effect on
the running of government and business and are thus usually toothless). If people go to the theatre, watch a nice
cathartic play and feel good, they’re less likely to revolt. Bertolt Brecht tried to change this effect by
writing plays that were intended to make people think, to make them angry
rather than to resolve their anger, but Boal argues that he doesn’t go far
enough because his audiences are still passive.
Boal argues for an interactive Theatre of the Oppressed that is used to
help communities act. He advocates
sometimes guerilla theatre tactics, to disrupt everyday capitalism and intrude
upon it, and sometimes community workshops to explore the problems of the
working class and imagine solutions to them.
He would most likely be excited to see the work that Active Inquiry does in Edinburgh,
where they promote “increased participation in the arts as a catalyst for
active involvement in society”. Their
Forum theatre show, Divided
We Fall? has just closed after a run in Leith.
 |
| Beth as Grusha Vashnadze in The Caucasian Chalk Circle by Bertolt Brecht, Whitman College. |
There is also another tradition of radical
theatre, one which comes perhaps from the Aristotelian tradition but which
focuses on telling the stories of the working class, stories of
resistance. This is the tradition that
Acting Strange participates in, and it includes a wide variety of plays,
sometimes from unexpected sources. The
National Theatre of Scotland has recently brought Glasgow
Girls to the stage, a new musical by top-of-the-game playwright David Greig
about the experience of asylum seekers in Glasgow. It portrays the UKBA as a traditional villain
in no uncertain terms (a portrayal which I’m sure anyone who has actually dealt
with them will agree with!) and highlights the resistance and solidarity
efforts of teenage girls in Glasgow to keep their friends from being
deported. It didn’t challenge the actual
system quite enough for me but it is bringing much-needed publicity to the
desperately unjust asylum system and casts its lot with refugees.
Smaller and lower-budget theatre companies are
tackling radical subjects as well. Tent City Theatre Company, "a
political theatre company of bright, creative and variously un(der)/employed
people involved in many types of activism" is performing their Jésus
de Glasgow this Saturday, December 15th, in Kinning Park. About the
play: "When Cristóbal, the Basque rebel clown prince of Hell Bent Theatre
Company, is commissioned by a priest to revive a tired performance of the
Stations of the Cross, the Reverend Hannah is so shocked by the socialist
rewrite of the Sermon on the Mount that she shuts down the production – with
tragic results. There is a happy end." They also performed Shock
Doctrine at the Pearce Institute in Govan and the Doune the Rabbit Hole festival
this year.
Acting Strange works to tell stories of the
working class, like Grainne’s Soldier and Bread and Roses, and also to imagine
alternative futures, one of the exciting possibilites inherent in
storytelling. In our radio soap opera, Tales
from the Gareloch, debuting in the new year, we explore an independent
non-nuclear Scotland from the various points of view of characters in a small
town in Argyll. Theatre allows you to
act out ideas, to watch them concretely in front of you – it tries things out
and explores them like a good novel, but it has an immediacy that a novel can’t
achieve. When you challenge the
capitalist system, or the pretended “democracy” of our representative
parliaments, people argue, “But there is no alternative! What other system
could possibly work? How would it work?
What are you arguing for?”
Theatre gives us an opportunity to explore any situation in a concrete
way that is connected to people and relationships. It is still an important tool in the
radical’s repertoire.
About Beth:
She graduated from Whitman College with a B.A.
in Theatre and is now building her acting career in Scotland in English and in
Gaelic, which she teaches to adults. She recently wrote and appeared in
her two-hander, Daolag, at the Royal National Mòd in Dunoon. Beth will star in Acting Strange Theatre co's upcoming podcast, "The Bridge." Find
out more about Beth at www.bethfrieden.co.uk
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