Anglo-American Stage and Screen Drama: The Post-Democratic World Order 3031451988, 9783031451980

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
1 Introduction: Anglophone Drama in a Post-Democratic, Post-Truth World
The Dramatic Paradox
Political Drama on Stage and On Screen
The Drama Forum as a Catalyst for Change: Some Insights from Sociocultural Theory
Relevant Critical Literature Related to Stage and Screen Drama
2 Western Theatre as Sociopolitical Forum—A Short History
The Ancient Greek Model and Its Influence: Drama and the Civic Forum
Anglophone Political Stage Drama from the Early Modern Age to the Twentieth Century
Anglophone Political Drama of the Postwar Period
The Landscape of Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Political Theatre
3 Progressive Western Cinema—An Overview
A Companion Form to Stage Drama
The Silent Era and the Political Struggle in Hollywood
Political Constraints in Cinema in the Era of the Code
Politics in Non-anglophone ‘New Wave’ Cinema
From the New Wave to the New Millennium
4 Case-study Films and Plays from the First Decade (Part One) ‘Patriot Acts’—The War on/of Terror
Preamble: Drama and the ‘New World Order’
Critiquing the ‘War on Terror’
Case Studies
Guantanamo—Honor Bound to Defend Freedom (Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo, U.K. 2004)
Stuff Happens (David Hare, U.K. 2004)
Syriana (Stephen Gaghan, U.S. 2005)
Drunk Enough to Say I Love You (Caryl Churchill, U.K. 2006)
In the Loop (Armando Iannucci, U.K. 2009)
5 Case-study Films and Plays from the First Decade Part Two: Corporate Malfeasance and Political Corruption
Preamble: Farce, Fundamentalism and Dystopias
Case Studies
Silver City (John Sayles, U.S. 2004)
The Manchurian Candidate (Jonathan Demme, U.S. 2004)
The Constant Gardener (Fernando Meirelles, U.K. 2005)
for Vendetta (James McTeigue, U.K. 2005)
Enron (Lucy Prebble U.K. 2009)
6 Case-study Films and Plays from the Second Decade Part One: The Politics of Race, Gender and Class
Preamble: Stage and Screen Drama and the Culture Wars
Case Studies
Selma (Ava DuVernay, U.S. 2014)
Sweat (Lynn Nottage, U.S. 2015)
I, Daniel Blake; (Ken Loach, U.K. 2016)
Until the Flood (Dael Orlandersmith, U.S. 2018)
Sorry to Bother You (Raymond ‘Boots’ Riley, U.S. 2018)
7 Case-study Films and Plays from the Second Decade Part Two: The International Politics of Surveillance, Control and Resources
Preamble: Depictions of ‘Collateral Damage’
Case Studies
Chimerica (Lucy Kirkwood, U.K. 2013)
Oil (Ella Hickson, U.K. 2016)
Wild (Mike Bartlett, U.K. 2016)
Snowden (Oliver Stone. U.S. 2016)
Official Secrets (Gavin Hood U.K. 2019)
8 Conclusion: Progressive Drama and its Potentialities
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Anglo-American Stage and Screen Drama The Post-Democratic World Order Mike Ingham

Anglo-American Stage and Screen Drama

Mike Ingham

Anglo-American Stage and Screen Drama The Post-Democratic World Order

Mike Ingham Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, UK

ISBN 978-3-031-45197-3 ISBN 978-3-031-45198-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45198-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

This study is dedicated to those people in my life who inspired me to think critically and educated me about the political world I was growing up to be part of, especially my parents, Pat and Peggy, and my teacher and later great friend, David Lewis. They encouraged and nurtured my love of drama in various ways, sometimes unwittingly, in my father’s case. Although they are gone, their inspiration has remained and has been with me in writing this book. I also dedicate it to all those principled dramatists, journalists, lawyers and others working in the cause of genuine democracy against systematic deceit, corruption and state-sponsored terror inflicted by 21st century governments on both sides of The Atlantic and around the world.

Acknowledgements

My sincere thanks for their insights, feedback, reading of and response to draft chapters and general interest in my project go to Dr Julia Chan and Dr Miryana Dimitrova, as well as to Dr Andrew Barker, Dr Jessica Yeung, Dan Hamilton and Mat Little for their valuable suggestions and recommendations. I also wish to thank my editor Naveen Dass for his kind understanding and patience and his colleague Eileen Srebrenik for her encouraging feedback on my initial book proposal. In Memory of dear Buddhajan, the Coolest Cat.

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Contents

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Introduction: Anglophone Drama in a Post-Democratic, Post-Truth World The Dramatic Paradox Political Drama on Stage and On Screen The Drama Forum as a Catalyst for Change: Some Insights from Sociocultural Theory Relevant Critical Literature Related to Stage and Screen Drama Western Theatre as Sociopolitical Forum—A Short History The Ancient Greek Model and Its Influence: Drama and the Civic Forum Anglophone Political Stage Drama from the Early Modern Age to the Twentieth Century Anglophone Political Drama of the Postwar Period The Landscape of Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Political Theatre Progressive Western Cinema—An Overview A Companion Form to Stage Drama The Silent Era and the Political Struggle in Hollywood Political Constraints in Cinema in the Era of the Code Politics in Non-anglophone ‘New Wave’ Cinema From the New Wave to the New Millennium

1 1 13 16 22 29 29 37 41 48 57 57 59 68 77 87 ix

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Case-study Films and Plays from the First Decade (Part One) ‘Patriot Acts’—The War on/of Terror Preamble: Drama and the ‘New World Order’ Critiquing the ‘War on Terror’ Case Studies Guantanamo—Honor Bound to Defend Freedom (Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo, U.K. 2004) Stuff Happens (David Hare, U.K. 2004) Syriana (Stephen Gaghan, U.S. 2005) Drunk Enough to Say I Love You (Caryl Churchill, U.K. 2006) In the Loop (Armando Iannucci, U.K. 2009)

5

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Case-study Films and Plays from the First Decade Part Two: Corporate Malfeasance and Political Corruption Preamble: Farce, Fundamentalism and Dystopias Case Studies Silver City (John Sayles, U.S. 2004) The Manchurian Candidate (Jonathan Demme, U.S. 2004) The Constant Gardener (Fernando Meirelles, U.K. 2005) for Vendetta (James McTeigue, U.K. 2005) Enron (Lucy Prebble U.K. 2009)

93 93 96 106 106 111 117 121 126 131 131 135 135 138 145 151 157

Case-study Films and Plays from the Second Decade Part One: The Politics of Race, Gender and Class Preamble: Stage and Screen Drama and the Culture Wars Case Studies Selma (Ava DuVernay, U.S. 2014) Sweat (Lynn Nottage, U.S. 2015) I, Daniel Blake; (Ken Loach, U.K. 2016) Until the Flood (Dael Orlandersmith, U.S. 2018) Sorry to Bother You (Raymond ‘Boots’ Riley, U.S. 2018)

165 165 177 177 184 189 196 202

Case-study Films and Plays from the Second Decade Part Two: The International Politics of Surveillance, Control and Resources Preamble: Depictions of ‘Collateral Damage’ Case Studies Chimerica (Lucy Kirkwood, U.K. 2013)

209 209 213 213

CONTENTS

Oil (Ella Hickson, U.K. 2016) Wild (Mike Bartlett, U.K. 2016) Snowden (Oliver Stone. U.S. 2016) Official Secrets (Gavin Hood U.K. 2019) 8

Conclusion: Progressive Drama and its Potentialities

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217 223 229 238 249

Bibliography

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Index

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Anglophone Drama in a Post-Democratic, Post-Truth World

The Dramatic Paradox Politics in a work of the imagination is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert…It clashes with the sound of all the instruments.1 Stendhal (Le Rouge et le Noir/The Red and the Black)

As Stendahl’s above aphorism implies, there is a common misconception that politically conscious literature—and by extension, stage and screen drama—is necessarily discordant, preachy and even culturally vulgar. However, many of the most acclaimed stage and screen dramas of the past have made a significant emancipatory contribution in their social contexts and were highly political in their time, even though they may appear less obviously so when viewed retrospectively. Such plays and films are simply regarded as good plays and good films today, many of them featuring regularly, for example, on online audience surveys of best dramas. At the time of their appearance they may well have been banned, censored, or, as is more often the case in modern times, critically dismissed, by conservative voices and their influential proxies in the

1 Stendhal, Henry Beyle. Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black). Ch. 52, 372. My translation. https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Le_Rouge_et_le_Noir/Texte_entier.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Ingham, Anglo-American Stage and Screen Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45198-0_1

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society. The aim of this book is to show how dramatic work in Anglophone theatre and cinema of the twenty-first century contributes to social debate and offers a platform for intervention in the sociopolitical sphere. It will argue that dramatic arts have played and can continue to play, a critically important role in the struggle for the survival of social democratic values and critical, ethical decision-making. In today’s so-called culture wars—in which construct the reactionary right’s ‘war’ metaphor is particularly apposite—theatrical and cinematic drama has a significant role to play, as participant and not just observer, as my book will show. Although socially and politically engaged drama may be dismissively labelled ‘arthouse’ and ‘woke’ liberal by right-wing media,2 the spate of socially and politically conscious dramas on stage and screen since the millennium is playing its part in fostering influential alternative ideas. Such ideas are alternative, not only to the perspectives of the political establishment and elite classes, but also to populist mainstream discourses. In the past, in the right-wing ethos of 1950s North America, for example, drama has functioned in the public domain as a de facto oppositional art form. Arguably, it has resumed that function in today’s climate of primarily populist right-wing agendas. For example, George Clooney’s 2005 biopic, Good Night and Good Luck, recounting veteran radio and TV host Ed Murrow’s courageous campaign against the McCarthyite anti-leftist witch-hunts, resonates with the need to ‘speak truth to power’,3 as the dictum puts it, rather than tamely capitulate to it. Dramas that have impact in and beyond their own time tend to be of this type, not simplistically doctrinaire or tendentious, but thoughtprovoking, eliciting our empathy, as well as engaging our critical judgement. At best, their words and actions are transmuted into memes and tropes that proliferate in the social discourses; moreover, their protagonists become symbols of social and political vices and virtues. Although they may not achieve sociopolitical change in any direct, demonstrable way, in times of repression they inspire belief in the possibility that

2 For example, Daily Mail (2 February 2016) reviewer Quentin Letts referred to Caryl Churchill’s unsettling ecological disaster play Escaped Alone (2016) as “posh tosh”, a judgement strongly repudiated by his fellow critic Michael Billington of The Guardian see article ‘Knockabouts, Nobles and Nukes’ (Guardian Arts, 27 June 2018). 3 The phrase is credited to Bayard Rustin, a black civil rights advocate and committed Quaker, in ‘Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence’, published by a Quaker organisation in conjunction with Rustin, 1955.

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things can improve. In such situations speaking ‘truth to power’, or more appropriately to the powerless, as Noam Chomsky argues,4 is not just the responsibility of the dramatist or director, but of all who share the experience and respond to it in whatever way they can. The fact that theatre has been attacked, censored, banned and generally marginalised, virtually from its inception as a forum of social debate and critique in ancient Greece, depending on the tolerance levels of the incumbent power elite, means that it has been, and in some places still is, viewed as potentially dangerous and subversive. Poets (and dramatists) would be banned in Plato’s ideal state, whereas in Aristotle’s they play an intrinsic part, albeit with their social roles and aesthetic conventions prescribed by the precepts advanced in his Poetics. The paradox that Denis Diderot discusses in his 1773 essay Paradox of the Actor (Paradoxe sur le Comédien), whereby drama is founded upon ‘fake’ emotions and belief systems on the part of the actor5 —as aptly conveyed in Hamlet’s “O what a rogue and peasant slave am I” soliloquy in the lines: “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her?”6 —but at the same time conveys trenchant truths about human motives and behaviour, goes to the heart of the argument. As Diderot presciently observed in his dramatic dialogue essay, the greater judgement and control the actor exercises, and conversely the less genuine raw emotion expressed, the more mimetically convincing the performance is likely to be, a point picked up later by Konstantin Stanislavsky. Hence, the doubleness of theatre and its relationship with human life as well as with the human unconscious, a doubleness that theorist-practitioners, notably Artaud,7 continued to explore in the twentieth century, seeking to break down the artificiality of conventionalised dramatic genres and types. Blurring the distinction between the reality and its representation, as well as between conscious and unconscious reception, is a useful paradigm for the socially engaged drama of today’s stage and screen.

4 Noam Chomsky Interviewed by David Barsamian. ‘Manufacturing Dissent’ in Arthur Naiman, ed. How the World Works, Soft Skull Books, 1992, 323. 5 Denis Diderot, The Paradox of the Actor (Paradoxe sur le Comédien), CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 1st edition, 2015. 6 Hamlet. Act 2, 2, lines 531–532. 7 See Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double (Le Théâtre et Son Double), Grove

Press, 1994.

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My study will explore this pervasive attribute of Western drama as a form that imitates social behaviour, not just as ritual, as in earlier incarnations of the dramatic form, but also as critical ‘mirror’ held up to human nature and human institutions. Drama’s double mimeticcorrective impulse is reflected in Hamlet’s exhortation to the players who are about to perform ‘The Murder of Gonzago’: “to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure”.8 As M.H. Abrams maintained in his critical study of literary representation The Mirror and the Lamp,9 the mirror image, as reflection of the real world, was a key motif of mimesis prior to the Romantic era. In respect of psychological realism, which remains highly pertinent to both stage and screen drama, I would argue that this mimetic function persists, even if it now seems less germane to printed literary forms. What human beings see in this ‘mirror’ rarely flatters to deceive; rather, the dramatic images are likely to invoke a sense of critical self-awareness that is fundamental to civic education and intellectual honesty and responsibility in an open and civilised society. While much twentieth-century drama of social comment and engagement can be seen as the critical and intellectual response to iconoclastic nineteenth-century ideas from Fourier, Marx, and other sociopolitical theorists and reformers, the dramatic form’s penchant for uncomfortable social critique, whether implicit or explicit—from Euripides and Aristophanes onward—has been an enduring and inherent characteristic of Anglophone speech drama. It flourished in the twentieth century partly in a response to the wars and crises of an “age of extremes”10 as Eric Hobsbawm christened it, summing up the century’s conflicts and polarities. Notwithstanding deep ideological and aesthetic differences between the different schools of thought and artistic practice in twentieth-century theatre and cinema, the emergence of a social libertarian and egalitarian consciousness in and through the respective media was evident in the work of great stage and screen artists such as Bertolt Brecht, Charles Chaplin, Arthur Miller, Joan Littlewood, Costa Gavras, Harold 8 William Shakespeare, Hamlet Act 3, 2, lines 22–25. 9 M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition,

Oxford University Press, 1971. 10 Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991, Abacus, 1995.

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Pinter, Caryl Churchill and many others engaged with social realism in their widely different dramatic styles of representation. This strong social commentary function in both theatrical and cinematic representations is discernible in a range of forms and genres, including epic and naturalistic theatres, expressionist and realist cinema, community theatre, drama-documentary and forum theatre, among others. A product of this trenchant new wave of drama-writing, the playwright Caryl Churchill dryly observed that “Most plays can be looked at from a political perspective…whatever you do, your point of view is going to show somewhere. It usually only gets noticed and called ‘political’ if it’s against the status quo”.11 As Churchill’s comment indicates, drama that does not conform to the expectations of the status quo often situates itself in opposition to it, which has sometimes been a dangerous position to occupy. The gradual removal over time of many of the restrictions and censorship controls in more progressive societies has perhaps led to the assumption that the fight against censorship and political persecution of stage dramatists, including Brecht, Václav Havel, Wole Soyinka and Athol Fugard and filmmakers and screenwriters, such as Chaplin, Sergei Eisenstein, Dalton Trumbo and Joseph Losey, is essentially a thing of the past. If the twentieth-century stage—and to a somewhat lesser extent the cinema—was marked by a tendency that was predominantly socialist or leftist-progressive in orientation, the twenty-first shows signs of a less politically engaged, more economically selfish impulse; this phenomenon may well reflect aggravated social schisms, disparities and human rights abuses in society. In the context of a cancel culture that seeks to close down debate rather than promote it, nonconformist thinking in contemporary democracies can easily become marginalised or even stifled. A major contention in my study is that progressive drama offers a paradigm for critical artistic representation of, and inquiry into, today’s propagandist political orthodoxies and contentious ‘fake news’ discourses. Such discourses of the alt-right are rarely, if ever, portrayed positively in dramatic representations, and the theatre and independent cinema are usually considered as hostile institutions by far-right demagogues. If the discourses of progressive drama constitute a form of critical opposition 11 Caryl Churchill, from a 1987 interview, cited in Elaine Aston and Elin Diamond. Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Caryl Churchill, Cambridge University Press, 2009, 1–17, 1.

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to the neoconservative mainstream, as I will argue is the case, it will be instructive to assess the quality and characteristics of their sociopolitical intervention. Adopting a critical parti pris position, as in postcolonial or feminist studies, but eschewing the more doctrinal assumptions of midto-late twentieth-century Marxist theory, which have been overtaken by post-millennial realities, the study is intended to engage polemically, but analytically, with post-democratic discourses and social phenomena. Thus, in my first and second chapters I will explore why stage and screen drama has been seen, and indeed should be seen, as a fundamentally beneficial and ameliorative form of cultural engagement. One of the significant cultural functions of drama can be to critique or subtly subvert, in the manner of Oscar Wilde, the institutions and media in which they are framed, institutions that may be unsympathetic to the ideological stance of writers and performers. Through the acts of writing, directing and performing they can shape and transform the cultural-political orientation of the respective institutions. This collaborative ethos of drama upon which the transmission of meanings depends will also be analysed from the perspectives of visual and verbal signification and what Martin Esslin, terms “a hierarchy of meanings”,12 depending very much on contexts of both production and reception. My framing discussion in these chapters engages with the social meaning of theatre and cinema, and refers to examples from a pre-socialist theatre, from Ancient Greek dramas to early modern and modern theatre, as well as the relationship between social and secular drama and religious plays. In their different ways they will be proposed as forms of cultural production that created the possibility of both alterity and empathy by dialectically counterposing conflicting views related to social obedience and the transgression of such social codes. I will argue that, as John Osborne put it, referring to the stage, drama can be “a minority art with a majority influence”13 and that this applies as much to independent progressive cinema as it does to the theatre. Nevertheless, in today’s world the pendulum has appeared to swing much more towards theatrical and cinematic drama as escapist entertainment, precisely because the exterior controls and interior inhibitions 12 Martin Esslin, The Field of Drama: How the Signs of Drama Create Meaning on Stage and Screen, Methuen Drama, 1987, 154–178. 13 Remark by John Osborne. Cited in Simon Callow, ‘Staging Dissent’. https://jou rnals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0306422018770113.

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are no longer perceived to be imposed in a “free” society. In consequence, there seems to be a comfortable presupposition on the part of a number of today’s critics and audiences that Western drama’s long struggle for freedom of expression is over, and is now guaranteed under the contemporary ‘liberal-minded and democratic’ postwar sociopolitical consensus. According to this narrative, the collapse of repressive ‘iron curtain’ communism in Eastern Europe, and elsewhere, and the benefits of globalisation would herald in an age of pluralism in which freedom of all artistic forms is a sine qua non, a brave new world of greater economic prosperity for all via the proverbial trickle-down effect. While there is a modicum of truth in such perceptions—at least in some former ‘iron curtain’ countries—the replacement of these flawed hierarchical social systems by an equally pernicious monopoly capitalism, characterised by corporate neoliberal acquisitiveness and blatant political lobbying and gerrymandering, is beginning to turn the twenty-first century into a different, if potentially nightmarish, age of extremes. Many more developed countries have witnessed the rapid development of a sociopolitical ‘underclass’, not only abandoned by these socioeconomic developments, but marginalised, voiceless, harassed and demonised by those with wealth, privilege and power. A familiar example of this can be observed in the annual meetings of the key political and economic figures at Davos in Switzerland, where policies for further eroding the rights of their populations are formulated by the sycophantic elected fraternising with the narcissistic unelected. On issues including environmental conservation, poverty and precarity, civic rights of subaltern groups and minorities, social welfare and healthcare, education rights, workers’ rights, civil liberties, freedom of expression and academic freedom the twenty-first century appears to be veering inexorably towards a world order dominated by oligarchy and despotism. The relentless erosion of these hard-won rights is reminiscent of establishment hostility towards the Chartists and nascent Trades Unionist movement in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, when the very word ‘democracy’ had negative, even dangerously subversive, connotations for the ruling class.14 The major difference, however, between the reactionary sociopolitical forces of nineteenth and twenty-first centuries is that today’s opinion 14 Richard Ingham, ‘The Cradle of Parliamentary Democracy?’ in Annamária Fábián, Armin Owzar and Igor Trost, eds. Linguistische, literaturwissenschaftliche, historische und politikwissenschaftliche Perspektiven, Berlin: Springer, 2022, 191–206.

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leaders often affect enlightened perspectives that reflect an increasingly tokenist political correctness. One commonly used designation that characterises this ideology of ‘freedom’ and ‘economic liberalism’ is the term ‘post-socialism’. We have entered, it would appear, the post-socialist age—from the United States and Europe to Africa and China, with strenuous efforts being made to undermine any social democratic governments that come to power in Central or South America by their superpower northern neighbour. Peaceful co-existence of diverse sociopolitical systems and toleration of self-determining communities is not on the agenda of those who pursue a neoconservative hegemony. Given the sabotage of independent, collective and democratic social organisations and representative government by such manifestations as the insidious ‘Military-Industrial Complex’ in the United States, as well as the threats to social democratic institutions and aspirations posed by religious extremism, legitimised bigotry, political ‘doublethink’ and other blights, twenty-first-century prospects for democracy itself—let alone a democracy founded on social justice, equality of opportunity and respect for individual freedoms—seem bleak. In a contemporary age increasingly designated post-socialist and even post-democratic,15 it is apposite to consider, as with the concept of posthumanism or post-feminism, exactly what is being viewed as ‘post’. In his collection of short critical terminological essays Keywords Raymond Williams, having traced the etymology and usage of the term, characterised socialism as a social form “which depended on practical cooperation and mutuality” and, following George Bernard Shaw’s definition in his Fabian Essays, “the economic side of the democratic ideal”.16 Williams does not include the recent coinage post-socialist’ in his cultural glossary, but under the same rubric ‘socialist’ he notes that populism is sometimes confused with socialism, but “is now often used in distinction from socialist, to express reliance on popular interests and sentiments rather than particular (principled) theories and movements”.17 Williams seems to have been prescient in adding this critical and theoretical distinction, 15 See Colin Crouch, Post-Democracy, Polity Press, 2004 and ‘The March Towards Post-Democracy, Ten Years On’, The Political Quarterly, January–March 2016, 87(1). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-923X.12210. 16 Raymond Williams, ‘Socialist’ in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Fontana Press, 1976, 286–288. 17 Ibid., 90.

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since much of the indignation of the marginalised, impoverished, underrepresented and disenfranchised of today has been skilfully channelled into grassroots populism by demagogues, autocrats and vested interest ‘think tanks’, all dedicated to “manufacturing consent”.18 Nurtured in an environment of counterfactual, post-truth19 politics and smear campaigns, in which discredited ‘disinformation’, popular myths and blatant fabrications are given as much, if not more, media space as verifiable fact, politicians, corporation and media organisations have no qualms in today’s eminently ‘post-everything’ era about manipulating facts and data to fit their ideological narratives for the benefit of the gullible and ill-informed. It appears to be an age of the unthinkable, of the preposterous even, one in which the 45th President of the United States, supposedly the biggest democracy in the world, felt justified in expressing admiration and envy for the summary abolition of presidential term limits by his dictatorial counterpart in the world’s most populous autocracy, China. In a 2018 speech to fund-raising dinner guests President Trump, under the thinly disguised conceit of a tongue-in-cheek joke, and, with the obvious approbation of his counterpart Xi Jinping, opined “maybe we should give that a shot some day”.20 Such unthinkable, and, more to the point, previously unsayable, views are becoming commonplace in the current geopolitical climate, one in which kneejerk populism ardently supports chauvinistic, xenophobic and frequently misogynist autocracy. The alternative ‘facts’ to be presented when facts are inconvenient is another blight of our times: truth, as Trump’s former legal advisor Rudy Giuliani once put it, “isn’t truth”.21 Exploiting, and often distorting, postmodernist concepts, neoconservative ideologues like to postulate a post-racist, post-feminist society. 18 See Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Pantheon Books, 1988. 19 It is no coincidence that this now-ubiquitous term was coined by a playwright, Serbian-American Steve Tesich, in a 1992 essay in The Nation discussing “post-Watergate syndrome”. In his piece the author deplored the state of affairs in which the people “didn’t want bad news any more” and “looked to our government to protect us from the truth”. 20 See ‘Trump Praises Chinese President Extending Tenure ‘For Life’ David Shepardson, Reuters, March 4 2018. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-trump-china-idU SKCN1GG015 21 See CNN interview, Sunday 16 August 2018. https://edition.cnn.com/videos/cnn money/2018/08/19/giuliani-truth-isnt-truth-nbc-rs-vpx.cnn.

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Nevertheless, their manifest or less manifest ideological claims are usually unsupported by social reality or common human experience, and their discourse can often be perceived as implicitly racist and anti-feminist. Other significant postmillennial studies, such as those by Ralph Keyes and Colin Crouch on the post-truth era and the post-democratic society respectively,22 have also served to sharpen awareness of the power elite’s use of fashionable ‘post-’ abstractions to subvert more egalitarian social contract philosophy and often taken-for-granted civil rights. In this scenario a socially conscious theatre would appear to be a nostalgic irrelevance, while a post-socialist theatre seems to represent a mere ‘bread and circuses’ triumphalism of allegedly ‘free-market’ forces catering to a consumerist and complacent cultural constituency. However, in his 2021 manifesto Towards a Civic Theatre Dan Hutton advocates passionately for a distinctly localist theatre culture to help us grasp the implications of these issues at a grass-roots level: Theatre may not seem like a natural place to go in order to understand and counter these forces. In a world dominated by Netflix, Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter and any number of other online platforms, the idea of using theatre to drive change and inform our political life may seem naive, even quaint.23

This David-versus-Goliath quality of reformist, progressive theatre has often appeared to be a ‘quaintly’ uneven struggle, perhaps, but not a fruitless one. Drama of the past has exhibited the capacity to function both as a cohesive social experience and simultaneously a Tartuffe-like force for exposing self-aggrandisement and power abuse, even at the risk to dramatists and performers of political censure and persecution. Nikolai Gogol, writing in 1837 about his aim to shake up Russian theatre with his satirical new comedy The Government Inspector, sums up the urgent need for this theatrical function in a voice that seems remarkably fresh today: We have turned the theatre into a plaything, something like a rattle used to entice children, forgetting that it is a rostrum from which a living lesson is

22 Colin Crouch, Post-Democracy, Polity Press, 2004 and Ralph Keyes, The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life, St Martin’s Press, 2004. 23 Hutton, Dan. Towards a Civic Theatre, London: Salamander Street, 2021. Introduction. Kindle location 73.

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spoken to an entire multitude, a place where […] secret vice shows its face and elevated emotions, timidly hidden from view, make themselves known before hushed murmurs of common sympathy.24

Gogol’s grasping mayor, Anton Antonovich, resembles many ‘men of straw’ in our own time, using their public office to serve themselves and not the community, which helps to explain the work’s enduring popularity. Moreover, his assessment of the theatre of his age resonates with the commercial theatre of the 1980s and 1990s and now, against which today’s sociopolitically engaged drama has reacted. Likewise, the secret—and not so secret—vice of our own age needs to be represented in our dramas; thus, the ambiguity inherent in the title of Adam McKay’s 2018 satirical biopic of Dick Cheney, Vice, perfectly illustrates perfectly illustrate Gogol’s point. Concomitant with the spread of ‘evangelising’ neoliberal ideology is the virulent attack on the values and goals of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury social democracy of emancipation and a fashion for employing the neologism post-socialism more widely than before. The term has gained considerable traction since it was first coined in the early 1990s and seen as “both an analytical concept and a historical condition”, although, as social anthropologist David A. Kideckel has observed, it is “an amorphous concept that defines societies by something they are not, instead of what they are”.25 For the most part, post-socialist drama has tended to be discussed hitherto in the context of Eastern European theatre and film, following the demise of Soviet-style communism. In the current cultural and ideological climate, however, there is a cogent case for extending these earlier parameters of study to include new and contemporary theatre and cinema on a broader basis. Since the early 1990s the Eastern European post-communist emancipatory discourse has become steadily appropriated by neoconservative interests spreading the right-wing populist message that egalitarian aspirations and socially

24 Nikolai Gogol, ‘Russian Theatre in the 1830s’. Petersburg Notebooks, 1837’ in Milton Ehre and Fruma Gottschalk trans and edited, Nikolay Gogol - Plays and Selected Writings, Northwestern University Press, 1994, Appendix, 167. 25 David A. Kideckel, ‘The Unmaking of an East-Central European Working Class’. Chapter 6 in C.M. Hann ed. Postsocialism: Ideals, ideologies and practices in Eurasia, Routledge, 2003.

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progressive cultural intervention are redundant to today’s increasingly dominant neoliberal model. Despite this gloomy assessment, and perhaps somewhat against the cold “cultural logic of late capitalism”26 —to borrow Marxist critic Fredric Jameson’s term—drama as a form of cultural intervention continues to offer us alternative perspectives that defy the rhetoric and hyperbole of neoliberal argument. What is clear is that it tends to operate in a sociopolitical climate that is hostile to concepts of egalitarianism and social justice. Thus, rather than read “post-socialist” unproblematically according to the neoconservative agenda in ways that tend to obscure contemporary global inequalities, I propose to interpret the term in a more critical and analytical sense. ‘Post-socialist’ in the contemporary context does not elide the concept of socialist any more than terms such as ‘postfeminist’ or ‘post-capitalist’ succeed in dismissing the socially acquired and embedded ideas to which they refer; indeed the ‘post’ prefix can be said rather to problematise these terms and ideas. Post-socialist theatrical drama is hardly an established genre in itself; like post-socialist cinema, the term is usually applied to societies that have undergone change from a socialist to a capitalist system, especially Eastern European countries in the former Soviet bloc. It is also applicable to countries where the socioeconomic system is fundamentally both capitalist and autocratic, even if the ruling class makes the spurious claim that it operates a socialist system; contemporary China, with its mega-rich and dynastic political elite, is a good example of this ‘doublethink’ phenomenon. Reflecting these complexities, the drama examples discussed in the present study for the most part do not align themselves with an overtly socialist agenda or specific political manifesto. For this reason we cannot refer to them as exclusively and intrinsically socialist in the political sense, rather as sharing many ideals inherent in acknowledged democratic socialist or socially progressive agendas. A further consideration is the twenty-first-century shift away from the established voting demographics of the previous century. Political economist Thomas Piketty’s 2018 essay ‘Brahmin Left vs. Merchant Right: Rising Inequality and the Changing Structure of Political Conflict’, tracing voting trends in three democracies, the U.S. France and Britain, in the post-World War II era, indicates that political affiliations and preferences have been conventionally split down the middle in all three along 26 Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press, 1991.

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the established left–right division. However, he identifies a new kind of political divide becoming increasingly apparent in the current sociopolitical landscape: an increasingly educated, entitled elite leading each faction, whether conservative or progressive, and an increasingly disenfranchised mass unrepresented and manipulated by both sides. According to Piketty’s analysis, the old socialist-leftist versus capitalistrightist paradigm is becoming obsolete. Instead, he proposes a division characterised by factors of high educational levels, wealth, privilege and/ or upward mobility, on the one hand, and limited education, low income and/or impoverishment and powerlessness on the other. He refers to these two sociopolitical demographics as “globalists” and “nativists”,27 respectively, but fundamentally they represent a simpler distribution— ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’—with the latter group, in an overwhelming majority, focused on their own economic survival and often narrow selfinterest. Trickle-down economics and Keynesian redistribution of wealth to promote a more egalitarian society no longer seem relevant in the slightest to current sociopolitical realities. In such a society theatre and cinema would appear to be the preserve of the leisured, educated and moneyed minority with increasingly prohibitive costs and highly commercialised marketing strategies. Where it is targeted at mass audiences and made more affordable and transnationally distributed, as for example with Hollywood blockbuster films, it functions essentially as an antidote to social consciousness, and, for the most part, reinforces establishment ideology and interests.

Political Drama on Stage and On Screen Cinematic and television drama, in view of their broader dissemination and impact, and stage drama, in view of its propensity for transformative effects and direct communication between performers and audience, remain viable forums for debating alternatives beyond a sociopolitical orthodoxy that affirms only the interests of the patricians and oligarchs, as well as offering a platform for critical social discourses. Nevertheless, I would argue that, as a critical medium for dramatic critique of power abuse, television generally lacks the institutional autonomy and relative 27 Thomas Piketty, ‘Brahmin Left vs. Merchant Right: Rising Inequality & the Changing Structure of Political Conflict’, World Inequality Database Working Paper Series 2018/7, March 2018. http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Piketty2018.pdf.

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freedom from corporate control, and in most cases also the cultural mission, to challenge hegemonies in any profound sense. There are, naturally, exceptions to this tendency, especially as more sophisticated digital television technology provides ever-wider viewer choice on platforms such as Netflix and HBO that purposely blur the boundary between cinema and television as channels of entertainment. For example, the proliferation of dramatic miniseries based on novels of socially progressive authors, such as the MGM/Hulu extended adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, suggests that this picture may be changing. While television has a greater potential for influence in view of its reach, its domestic mode of reception arguably qualifies it less as an eloquent public forum than is the case with more independent and socially conscious artists among the theatre and cinema cultural circles. The episodic nature of television drama series, with their emphasis on suspenseful continuity and cumulative identification with the protagonists, may also serve to mitigate a critical perspective on the events portrayed. We should also recognise that in an age of digital and streamed cinema the strict boundary between theatre and cinema established after the commercial ascendancy of the Hollywood style has begun to be renegotiated. As a number of commentators and theorists of intermediality and remediation, such as Philip Auslander and Martin Barker,28 have noted, the concept of liveness in theatre and cinema has been transformed by new forms of reception, including theatrical productions broadcast in cinema. Thus, the electronic/live dichotomy is not the only criterion for categorising forms and functions of drama. A further argument in favour of combining theatre and cinema is that in terms of public engagement the two forms have more commonalities than divergences. Martin Esslin has confronted the conventional critical preconception that theatre and cinema “are fundamentally different art forms” most persuasively in his discussion of the signs of stage and screen: …while the differences are very real and must be fully understood, the cinematic types of drama share so large a gamut of signifying systems with the live theatre that the differences between them can be usefully and

28 See Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 2nd edition, Routledge, 2008 and Barker, Martin, Live to Your Local Cinema: The Remarkable Rise of Livecasting, Palgrave Pivot, 2013.

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fruitfully accommodated within the single concept of ‘drama’ and ‘dramatic performance’29 ;

He goes on to contend that cinema’s facility for conveying rapid spatial and temporal shifts, with effects such as intercutting and flashback, has played a significant part in transforming the way live drama is written and staged—“another clear sign of the deep underlying unity of the dramatic media”.30 Moreover, a significant number of dramatists today, including David Mamet, Hanif Kureishi and Martin McDonagh, as well as directors such as Stephen Daldry, Julie Taymor, Sam Mendes, Patricia Rozema and Richard Eyre, produce exceptional work in both dramatic media and seem to move effortlessly from one medium to the other. Despite the considerable impact of experimental crossover theatre throughout the twentieth century, dramatic narratives in the form of authored stage plays have continued to thrive. Much of its dramatic innovation was generated by social idealism, on the one hand, and a strong indictment of the status quo and its manifest failings, on the other. At the same time, theatre and cinema have faced challenges to their survival as serious dramatic forms that engage with their times as a consequence of various factors—commercial, as well as aesthetic and technological. Rather like Mark Twain’s like Oscar Wilde’s quip about reports of his death being greatly exaggerated, the preconception that post-dramatic theatre would bring about the demise of the stage play has been demonstrably inaccurate. In this respect post-dramatic theatre, like other ‘post’ concepts such as ‘postmodern’ and ‘post-feminist’, has tended to be an additive rather than a replacive category. As Esslin and other critics recognise, when it comes to the work’s meaning much depends on the individual audience member’s decoding or interpretation of dramatic signs, and it is difficult to establish what constitutes a collective reception. Thus, it is unwise to draw instant, hard-and-fast conclusions as to the unified signification of the multiple signs generated by a particular dramatic performance, whether on stage or screen. Retrospectively, a critical consensus as to the play’s or film’s meaning emerges, but immediate responses to a new work often reveal division of opinion or even downright perplexity. Esslin’s example of 29 Esslin, The Field of Drama: How the Signs of Drama Create Meaning on Stage and Screen, 91. 30 Ibid., 100.

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Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is instructive in this context. Back in the 1950s when it premiered critics and audiences alike were so challenged by its enigmatically plotless plot that many were at a loss to ascribe any meaning at all to the work. Sixty years later we think we know exactly what it means—but it is a sobering thought that all the accumulated received wisdom regarding the play’s meaning may well have caused us to miss alternative hermeneutic possibilities. Marco de Marinis has made the extreme case that dramatic performance “is, at bottom, no more than the accumulation of the results and resonances of the emotional, intellectual, and pragmatic effects which it provokes in the audience and society” in order to argue, almost from an anthropological perspective, that the socio-cultural context within which a theatrical event finds meaning is “absolutely indispensable”.31 De Marinis’s argument with its Brechtian overtones and its emphasis on social reception is relevant to the scope of the present study: the stage plays and screenplays under discussion in the study underline the collective and collaborative nature of dramatic art and its responsibility to stimulate social reflection and engagement, rather than solipsistic ‘art-for-art’s-sake’ aestheticism or distraction.

The Drama Forum as a Catalyst for Change: Some Insights from Sociocultural Theory As will be explored in the following chapter, the theatrical space in Western culture evolved from its public value as entertainment in the agora (marketplace) and forum in Ancient Greece and Rome. The virtual agora of modern theatre no longer involves the physical configuration of a marketplace, but functions as a specially designated social and discursive domain. Three relevant cultural critical theories illuminate this important function, whereby stage and screen give the author and director the licence to engage the audience in public debate, namely, Michel Foucault’s heterotopian theory, intersectionality theory and Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action. Of course, one important distinction is that modern works do not usually enjoy the privileged status that Ancient Greek drama had at the Festival of

31 Marco De Marinis, Marco de Marinis, “A Faithful Betrayal of Performance’: Notes on the Use of Video in Theatre”, New Theatre Quarterly, 1985, 1(4): 383–389, 384.

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Dionysus, film and arts festivals notwithstanding, and thus compete in a very different kind of modern marketplace. The potential of theatre, and in certain contexts cinema, to function as virtual communal agora exemplifies heterotopia theory in the sense proposed by Foucault—the term itself being derived from the Greek words for ‘other’ and ‘place’—signifying a re-enacted analogue to reallife interaction, as well as a virtual zone with its own parallel-universe laws and conventions. Foucault presents the liminal concept of an indeterminate, discontinuous space between the real and the fictional, as applied, but only en passant, to both theatre and cinema as examples in his third principle of heterotopias in his essay: The heterotopia has the power of juxtaposing in a single real place different spaces and locations that are incompatible with each other. Thus, on the rectangle of its stage, the theater alternates as a series of places that are alien to each other; thus the cinema appears as a very curious rectangular hall, at the back of which a three-dimensional space is projected onto a two-dimensional screen.32

A fundamental example of a heterotopian space for Foucault’s theory is the mirror; a motif that corresponds closely to the mimetic function of drama in its mirror-like reflections of society alluded to in the preamble of this chapter. As discussed above in relation to Hamlet, this is a key trope in much Western illusionist theatre. Foucault’s theory helps to unify the various metaphors of dramatic representation as a correlative reflection of nature and reality, while emphasising their artifice. His work in general is notable for its epistemological and sociopolitical critique, and his construct in this case is conceived as a forum for engagement with real-world scenarios, rather than the representation of an escapist alternative reality. As he suggests, although without the detailed elaboration that would have been out of place in the context of an essay, theatre and cinema are particularly adept at blending temporal and spatial discontinuities in a fluid and evocative way, and thus reconcile physical with mental spheres in the manner of a heterotopia. Regarding the other element of Foucault’s essay topic, the notion of potential utopias is never

32 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’ in Neil Leach, Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, Routledge, 1997, pp. 330–336, 335.

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far away from the field of dramatic art or literature in general, as it is likewise never far away from socialist theory, even if brutal sociopolitical realities and bitter struggles are prerequisites. At the same time, he crucially distinguishes between the idea of utopias that create a fictional fantasy of a better world and heterotopias that challenge the boundaries of the fictional and the real critically and creatively. For Foucault, since the heterotopian space is not subject to the laws and conventions of everyday public spaces and is thus non-hegemonic, it creates possibilities that may point in the direction of potential utopias, but these cannot simply be invoked by wishful thinking. The pre-millennial concept of intersectionality advanced by feminist scholars33 also dovetails well with the broad-ranging and often interlocking themes that progressive drama on stage and screen engages with. As a theory, although primarily feminist in orientation, its focus on unity among marginalised interest groups is multidimensional, and incorporates identity issues of gender, sexuality, race and class. By its very nature it is emancipatory and designed to promote civil rights, accountability and more democratic decision-making. In the field of social sciences the ‘network society’ theory of Jan Van Dijk, Manuel Castells34 and others, according to which the contemporary ‘information age’ involves living in a technologically networked social structure, has emphasised ideas of agency through social movements rather than passive acceptance of one’s role as a mere individual cog in the industrial and/or post-industrial machine. Cultural and political participation and ‘networked advocacy’ via social media and independent networking have been transformative, as numerous examples in various local, national and international contexts attest.

33 The term was first used by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw with specific reference to feminist resistance against patriarchal oppression by a broad cross-section of marginalised groups. The theory has come under critical fire from various quarters, but has continued to be seen as valuable and applicable to social justice issues where solidarity is a significant factor in generating change. See K. Crenshaw, ‘Mapping the margins: identity politics and violence against women of colour’, Stanford Law Review, Stanford Law School, 43(6): 1241–1299. 34 See Jan Van Dijk, The Network Society, SAGE, 2012, 3rd ed. and Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, John Wiley and Sons, 2010, 2nd ed. and Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age, Polity Press, 2012.

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A strong rationale for invoking intersectionality theory and networked advocacy in the present study is that more plays and films have started to take the subject of race discrimination seriously in the way it has interacted with issues of gender and class since the millennium. While there have always been bellwether dramas that represent discriminated individuals and groups in society and challenge unethical behaviour by vested interest elites, the way these aspects of social justice are being addressed both in society and in dramatic heterotopias is probably more critically integrated than heretofore. Prior to the intersectional turn, films and plays that depicted power abuse, oppression and injustice were more likely to deal with isolated single-issue dramas that resonated with particular social themes; for example, Ken Loach’s 1966 television drama Cathy Come Home highlighted the problem of homelessness, or Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist focused on state-sanctioned police brutality. Today’s drama reflects a broader and, arguably, more integrated critical discourse, enabling a constellation of issues, including race, gender, human trafficking, disability, climate change and environmental degradation to be raised, as appropriate to the creative conception. That is not to say that long-established independent drama groups— for example, the San Francisco Mime Troupe and Teatro Campesino (literally ‘Peasant Theatre’) in the U.S. and Theatre Workshop and 7:84 in the U.K.—have not been extremely successful in exploring a multidimensional range of progressive, often controversial, social themes, either as individual or interrelated topics. On the contrary, what we now perceive as an intersectional method of social commentary and intervention was at the core of these companies’ respective missions. Likewise, as Powers and Duffy have argued, Augusto Boal’s groundbreaking Theatre of the Oppressed in Brazil provides a strategy for syncretising a broad range of burning social issues through the socially subversive dramatic concept of forum theatre.35 Since the millennium, however, a plethora of plays and movies have reflected the current spirit of métissage and syncretism, embracing gender and sexual identity, race and colour, poverty and social marginalisation, environmental degradation and other issues in contemporary stage and screen productions. 35 Beth Powers, Peter B. Duffy, ‘Making Invisible Intersectionality Visible Through Theater of the Oppressed in Teacher Education’, Journal of Teacher Education 67(1): 61–73. Article first published online: September 23, 2015; Issue published: January 1, 2016. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0022487115607621.

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Despite the various institutional limitations that exist and, as Hutton points out, have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic closures, stage and screen dramas, as shared public experience, retain their propensity for acting as a catalyst in what Jürgen Habermas has pithily termed ‘communicative action’. In his 1981 two-volume work translated as The Theory of Communicative Action 36 Habermas argued that through language, especially in the form of argumentation and intersubjective rationality, social values of morality, legality and democracy can be advanced. He lays stress on the important role of aesthetics and, in particular, performance in mediating ideas and facilitating reflective social behaviour through dialectical interpretation: A work validated through aesthetic experience can then in turn take the place of an argument and promote the acceptance of precisely those standards according to which it counts as an authentic work.37

In this respect what Habermas postulates in his critical manifesto has much in common with the notion that theatre is a forum for sociopolitical debate. Correspondingly, I would argue, the dramatic language of stage and screen in its use of speech acts and non-verbal signification simulates (and stimulates) this process of communicative action. Both its positive and negative depictions can serve as models of social discourse and behaviour that are insightful and “therapeutic”, to use Habermas’s term, to society, although this form of ‘therapy’ should not be seen as a mere cathartic exercise and nothing more. Dramatic representation in thoughtful and provocative films and plays helps to counter reductive representation of issues in populist media or the purely analytical representations of the ‘quality’ media, fusing critical thought with emotion, and in the process nurturing the viewer’s capacity for reflection and emotional intelligence. The present study will trace how a blend of social and aesthetic theory and dramatic praxis, from concepts of the social forum to intersectional gender, race and class methods, can be used to understand and situate discourses and events in our stubbornly neoliberal age. This blend of theories and praxes is fit for purpose, since 36 Jürgen Habermas, trans, Thomas McCarthy, Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns 1 & 2 (The Theory of Communicative Action, Vols 1 & 2), Suhrkamp/ Beacon, 1981/ 1984. 37 Habermas (trans. McCarthy), Vol. 1, 20.

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drama is a socially and structurally integrative form of aesthetic expression; hence, a theoretically integrative model is best able to articulate the ways in which it responds to the pressing issues that twenty-first-century society is confronting. No single theoretical model has succeeded in evoking the quintessence or multiplicity of dramatic practices, and in privileging a singular approach the critical theorist is liable to neglect other significant aspects of its form and content. Alternative social values related to principles of mutualism, reciprocity and social justice are implied as the antithesis of the flawed and unethical social conditions evoked in many of the case-study dramas, whether represented seriously or satirically. Thus, by presenting stage and screen drama as a forum for sociopolitical thinking in its principal case studies and other texts, the study’s aim is to adumbrate a praxis for communicative action. It explores drama’s capacity for resistance to the prevailing social, political and economic orthodoxies, by engaging with more imaginative, if, for the power elite, heterodox, ideas. Drama is advanced as a social poetics; a moral compass for society and a touchstone for much-needed social justice predicated on its perceived role as ‘double’ or ‘mirror’ of the world and social reality. In light of this social imperative, the principal aim of my book is to articulate how and why the imaginary worlds of drama constructed by dramatic authors, screenwriters, performers and, crucially, audiences are vital in this supposedly post-socialist age, when social democratic values and ideas are under attack in many contexts. As the study in general and the case studies in particular argue, dramatic texts and performances intervene in social and political contexts more metaphorically and obliquely than do political organisations and advocacy groups, but often with wider and more lasting impact on human consciousness. The fictions, semifictions and, in some cases, re-conceived and dramatised real-life events discussed in this study are far from irrelevant to the sociopolitical sphere. Rather, they open a space for reflection on a range of sociological and political issues by constructing hypothetical scenarios and parallel worlds. A further consideration that makes this topic worthy of critical scrutiny is that there has been a resurgence in political dramas in cinema and theatre since the millennium. In general, there has been relatively little book-length scholarship to date on the role of the two dramatic institutions in promoting progressive sociopolitical critique among contemporary audiences, with a view to ameliorating present and future social conditions. There has also been relatively little critical engagement with

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the broader spectrum of both theatrical and cinematic political drama in the new millennium specifically, and much of the existing scholarship devoted to drama’s social and political impact has tended to emphasise historical and diachronic perspectives. My emphasis, by contrast, is more contemporary, while also referencing earlier political stage and screen drama in order to illustrate the genealogy of today’s political stage and screen dramas.

Relevant Critical Literature Related to Stage and Screen Drama A number of the more contemporary drama studies of the past thirty years have focused principally on British theatre. David Edgar’s 1988 essay collection The Second Time as Farce: Reflections on the Drama of Mean Times addressed questions of drama’s potential for culturalpolitical intervention in the 1980s and early ‘90s within a specifically U.K. social milieu, as did Aleks Sierz’s 2001 In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today, which reviewed and assessed the 1990s theatrical zeitgeist. Moving to more contemporary dramatic commentaries, Vicky Angelaki’s 2017 study Social and Political Theatre in 21st Century Britain explores the response of millennial British playwrights—some established, such as Caryl Churchill and Martin Crimp, and others more recent dramatists—to sociopolitical crises. Andy Lavender’s 2016 Performance in the Twenty First Century: Theatres of Engagement assessed what he sees as today’s post-postmodern theatre more from the standpoint of performance events, multimedia devised work and cutting-edge companies than of stage plays. Lavender argues that contemporary theatre performance exhibits a greater desire for engagement with politics and society, in sharp contrast to the ironic, detached or self-reflexive mode of much postmodern, post-dramatic theatre. Jenny Hughes’ 2011 Performance in a Time of Terror: Critical Mimesis and the Age of Uncertainty engages perceptively with post-millennium conflict and propaganda, as explored in British theatre, whether more mainstream (Frayn and Churchill)38 or more fringe/alternative. Her study analyses significant theatrical performances throughout Britain that 38 Michael Frayn, Democracy, directed by Michael Blakemore for the National Theatre, London, 2003 and Caryl Churchill, Far Away, directed by Stephen Daldry at the Royal Court, London, 2001.

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responded to the turbulent world events of the first decade of the century, a number of them semi-documentary, so-called ‘tribunal’ plays mounted by companies such as Tricycle Theatre and Theatre Veritae, and makes pertinent reference to cultural critics such as Slavoj Žižek and Judith Butler. Despite its British theatre focus, the scope of Hughes’s work was both contemporary and international in subject-matter. Sarah Grochala’s 2017 study, The Contemporary Political Play: Rethinking Dramaturgical Structure, emphasises the dialectical method at the heart of contemporary theatre, with a strong focus on British political theatre. Advocating critical focus on “a politics of form as opposed to a politics of content”,39 her study effectively prioritises dramaturgy and structural innovations in the performance itself over the author’s creative mediation of social and political subject-matter. Relevant as this formalistic approach is, the wider sociopolitical concerns that inspired the playwright to produce the work in the first place also need to be addressed. As regards the relationship between cinema and politics in today’s technologically revolutionised film culture, featuring increasingly sophisticated computer-generated effects and carefully calculated formulaic plots designed for global blockbuster dramas, it may appear counter-intuitive to claim that it continues to exist at all. Notwithstanding, there is undoubtedly a significant body of creative work that supports the idea of an enduring political cinema movement in many countries. Likewise, a number of postmillennial studies, such as Chris Robé’s 2010 book Left of Hollywood: Cinema, Modernism, and the Emergence of U.S. Radical Film Culture and Robert P. Kolker’s Politics Goes to the Movies: Hollywood, Europe, and Beyond suggest renewed critical interest in the subject. In the main, such studies, while informative and relevant to the background, are either quite narrowly focused, or adopt a more historical angle, as is the case with Kolker’s 2018 book. Even recent companions and guides, such as The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Politics (2106), understandably explore the intersection of cinema and politics from a predominantly twentieth-century perspective, with relatively few contemporary twenty-first-century films included in the discussion. Many such studies of political drama have focused on pre-millennial stage and screen works for the very good reason that they have established

39 Sarah Grochala, The Contemporary Political Play: Rethinking Dramaturgical Structure, Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 17.

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a place in the dramatic or cinematic canon and are often hallowed by the passage of time; being classics they are open to allegorical interpretation, with felicitous contemporary subtext to complement their historically situated frame of reference. By contrast, much contemporary playwriting and screenwriting tends to be less allegorical and indirect and more literal and direct, confronting immediate issues that may not be conducive to gaining an extensive afterlife for the work. Nonetheless, their strength lies in this quality of specificity and sometimes in the sociopolitical controversy that they provoke. While the more specifically targeted studies, such as those by Angelaki and Sierz, are emblematic of the enduring connection between British drama and sociopolitical perception and experience, there is scope for a wider assessment of drama’s role in attempting to influence global critical thinking and respond to neoliberal globalisation. This broader orientation, concerning drama’s role as a channel for critical agency in the post-socialist and post-democratic era we have entered, is highly topical. I argue that both theatre and cinema, as public forms of dramatic entertainment, can constitute a forum for public reflection and consciousnessraising. As theatre did in earlier times and places, they can encourage audiences to adopt more reflective and informed views on sociopolitical issues. This important concept of the public forum is not only reminiscent of the ancient Athenian theatrical institution; it also connects with Boal’s pioneering work engaging audiences via his Forum Theatre participatory model that formed part of the Theatre of the Oppressed project. Following a broader overview of what constitutes critical intervention through theatre and film in the opening chapters, the core chapters of my study focus on specifically selected case-study plays and films. All are twenty-first-century works that exemplify the sociopolitical engagement of the respective dramatic media, either separately or collaboratively, as in the increasingly popular theatre broadcast of stage plays. Issues raised explicitly or implicitly by these case-study dramas and other plays and films cited range from wars of aggression masquerading as defence of a fearinduced population, secretive mass surveillance in nominally democratic countries, climate change and environmental degradation for the sake of vast corporate profit to race, gender and class conflict, employment abuses

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and wide-scale impoverishment, all consequences of what Naomi Klein’s 2007 book defines with the apt term “disaster capitalism”.40 The unifying factor that makes these diverse subject-matters cohere in relation to my post-democratic, post-socialist drama paradigm is that they are all related to sustainable development agendas which call for urgent change in the way the world is run.41 The call for radical change can also be seen at more grassroots level in the phenomenon of ‘umbrella’ activism, as reflected by the growing significance of online and social media activist groups. The targets of these campaigns often intersect in various ways, and are reflected in today’s plays and films, where they may likewise intersect in a constellation of themes. Intersectional contiguity can be discerned in a number of films and plays that will be discussed and complemented by a robust spirit of resistance against an increasingly belligerent neoconservatism. According to the perspective adopted in my study, drama of the ‘posttruth’, ‘post-democratic’ era does not celebrate the decline of socially ameliorative constructs and aspirations; rather, it alerts society to the dangers posed by what is touted as ‘the post-socialist age’ and offers a blueprint for nuanced debate on a range of urgent issues. Challenging widespread propaganda of capitulation to the supposed neoconservative orthodoxy, the new wave of political drama in theatre and cinema represents drama’s longstanding capacity for critically and emotionally intelligent dissent. The opening of Harold Pinter’s 2005 Nobel Prize Lecture, which he entitled ‘Art, Truth & Politics’ and which represented an artist’s denunciation of state iniquity in the tradition of French novelist, Emile Zola’s ‘J’accuse’ open letter, argued the validity and necessity of dramatic art’s ‘true’ and ‘untrue’ attributes. It helped to set the tone for the wave of dramatic critiques that inaugurated the new millennium: In 1958 I wrote the following: ‘There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.’ I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the

40 Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Allen Lane—An imprint of Penguin Books, 2007. 41 See, for example, United Nations report ‘Review of the Implementation of Agenda 21 and the Rio Principles’, United Nations, January 2012. https://sustainabledevelop ment.un.org/content/documents/641Synthesis_report_Web.pdf.

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exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them, but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?42

Thus, two key research questions underpin my approach: first, how can film and stage fictions and dramatic non-fictions interact meaningfully with today’s political arena as a forum for progressive ideas and values? Second, what are the commonalities and the differences of approach across the two media and how are these capable of affecting audience reception? The case-study dramas presented in the study in both live and electronic contexts typify cutting-edge drama at its best; they also exemplify intersectional and other social justice discourses, including the communicative action model propounded by Habermas and the heterotopian perspective of Foucault, as forms of critical engagement with the sociopolitical truths and falsehoods of today. Both theatre and cinema will be proposed as forums for a dynamic cultural politics of communicative action in which topical issues can be aired and viewed. This performative interaction is generally conceived from more critically nuanced and imaginative angles than the short-term perspectives of mainstream news and current affairs discourses. Although I have employed Anglophone stage and screen dramas as my case studies for the sake of consistency, I try to avoid a Eurocentric or Western-centric approach in general, certainly in the context of broader discussion in my preliminary overview chapters on stage drama and screen drama, respectively. At the same time, the emphasis of the study will be on critically acclaimed stage and screen ‘global–local’ productions that correspond to broadly recognised ‘world theatre’ and ‘world cinema’ criteria, notwithstanding the vagueness and inadequacy of these categories. It has become the norm for high-profile non-Anglophone stage dramatists, such as Yasmina Reza, Florian Zeller, Franz Xaver Kroetz or Wajdi Mouawad to produce dual-language versions of plays in collaboration with an Anglophone or bilingual dramatist, such as Christopher Hampton. Moreover, subtitled and dubbed original-language films in a wide variety of formats have made non-Anglophone culture films more accessible and appealing to international audiences than at any time since the silent film era.

42 Harold Pinter, ‘Art, Truth and Politics’, Nobel Prize for Literature Lecture, 2005. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2005/pinter/25621-harold-pinternobel-lecture-2005/.

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The definition of political drama varies considerably depending on contextual factors and cultural differences, and many non-Western theatre and cinema productions tend quite pragmatically to eschew overt contemporary political themes in favour of more indirect social commentaries. The study will also engage with similarities and differences between the way political drama is mediated by theatre and cinema, respectively, the former often more explicitly and discursively, and the latter often in a more indirect and refracted style, making use of established genres, such as the thriller, biopic or human interest drama, as well as the futuristic dystopian narrative. Despite these generic differences among the case studies in this book, their common potentiality for acute social commentary and for conveying illuminating and revelatory perspectives on today’s many sociopolitical challenges informs and shapes the present cultural and political critique. My study makes a cogent case for drama as public forum for social debate and as a tool for what Stephen Greenblatt has described, referring to Shakespeare, as “the freedom of the artist to remake the world”.43 In a contemporary context in which genuine political opposition groups are marginalised and even disenfranchised—not only in autocratic countries but also in putatively democratic ones—sociopolitical debates need to be re-framed and re-legitimised. As intellectuals, including Chomsky, have noted, the scope of sociopolitical debates has been consciously framed to preserve the vested interests of the status quo; in some cases such official narratives may masquerade as progressive discourses. Drama plays a valuable part in the necessary process of distinguishing genuine progressive discourses from sanitised and disingenuous ones, by re-conceptualising and re-drawing these frames in such a way that you, the viewer, “free yourself intellectually.”44 This kind of sceptical, independent thinking regarding official sociopolitical narratives has been intrinsic to stage drama

43 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare’s Freedom, University of Chicago Press, 2011, 13. 44 Noam Chomsky, interviewed by David Barsamian and edited by Arthur Naiman,

‘Manufacturing Dissent’ in How the World Works, Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Books, 2011, pp. 320–324, 323.

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over the centuries, while the same applies to much art-house and independent cinema, even if Hollywood, for the most part, finds official narratives palatable because they are also profitable.45 The theoretical precepts and general principles according to which stage and screen dramas transmit—often sub-textually and by insinuation—values of social justice and social reform in a given society will be discussed in the case studies in relation to the synergies of an intersectional critical approach. Although the latter might, at first glance, appear to comprise an arbitrary selection of texts, they are chosen for their diversity of dramatic method and thematic content and thus cover a broad range of relevant political topics. One important strategy for critique is via the depiction of negative examples of social interactions by individuals or abuses of power by elite groups. Conversely, examples of resistance against abusive or unjust individuals or authorities that inspire what Habermas refers to as “communicative action”, within the context of social and individual conflict, abound in both theatre and independent cinema. The chapter that follows focuses on stage drama as a civic forum by developing the arguments for its diachronic and synchronic social relevance, citing and analysing examples and investigating the relationship between signs and intrinsic/extrinsic meanings in the case-study texts and performances.

45 See, for example, David Sirota, ‘Inside The Military-Entertainment Complex’, The Lever, Levernews.com, 6 June 2022. https://www.levernews.com/inside-the-military-ent ertainment-complex/.

CHAPTER 2

Western Theatre as Sociopolitical Forum—A Short History

The Ancient Greek Model and Its Influence: Drama and the Civic Forum Dramatic theatre in the West has a long history of public social engagement in various manifestations that go back to Ancient Greek and Roman practices. In his 1992 study Understanding Greek Tragic Theatre Rush Rehm observes that “we should never lose sight of the fact that the Greek theatrical drive was towards reality, a grounding of issues in a public forum […] a theatre where the world was included rather than shut out.”1 Likewise Lucy Jackson, discussing the annual theatrical festival of Dionysus, argues: Theatre in democratic Athens was a forum for exploring the most contentious of political issues. For the duration of the festival law courts would be closed, governmental and municipal business suspended and people who lived in the neighbouring rural townships would leave their agricultural tasks and flock to the city.2

1 Rush Rehm, Understanding Greek Tragic Theatre, Routledge, 2nd edition, 2017. 2 Lucy Jackson, Archive of Performance of Greek and Roman Drama website. http://

www.apgrd.ox.ac.uk/learning/an-introduction-to/an-introduction-to-ancient-greek-the atre.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Ingham, Anglo-American Stage and Screen Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45198-0_2

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While it should be remembered that a relatively small proportion of residents of ancient Athens were eligible to be considered citizens, and that women and slaves were all excluded, the apogee of the Athenian democratic political model and the emergence of the city-state’s greatest playwrights—Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes—coincided almost exactly. In subsequent times and cultures indebted to Classical Greek models, both politically and aesthetically, this close affinity between rational representative governance and theatre as moral compass is also emphasised. German Enlightenment dramatist Friedrich Schiller noted the close connection in his influential 1784 publicly read essay ‘Theatre Considered as a Moral Institution’. In that essay Schiller pointed to the Greeks as forerunners: What bound the Greeks so firmly together? What was it that drew its people so irresistibly to its stage? Nothing other than the patriotic content of their pieces; it was the Grecian spirit, the great, overwhelming interest of the republic, and of a better humanity which lived and breathed within them.3

Less interested in the ‘patriotic content’ than the depiction of virtues and vices in dramatic performance, Schiller’s essay picks up the mirror metaphor of Hamlet: “in the theatre’s fearsome mirror, the vices are shown to be as loathsome as virtue is lovely”,4 and boldly argues that drama is actually more powerful than either religious morality or state laws. An important facet of Ancient Greek drama that connects it with social debate was the concept of agon, the etymology of which is linked to the words for the dramatic actors (protagonist and antagonist). The word has various meanings and, depending on the context, can refer to a contest with prizes, a dialectical debate or the arena in which such a debate or performance takes place. Its polyvalence also incorporates the idea of ‘gathering’ or ‘assembly’—linking it with the marketplace or agora—as 3 Friedrich Schiller, ‘Die Schaubühne als eine moralische Anstalt betrachtet’. Paper delivered to Deutschen Gesellschaft (Elector’s German Society) in Mannheim, 26 June 1784. Translated as ‘Theatre Considered as a Moral Institution’ by John Sigerson and John Chambless for Schiller Institute. https://www.schillerinstitute.org/transl/schil_theatremo ral.html. 4 Schiller, Ibid.

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well as ‘conflict’ and even ‘battle’.5 The concept is closely associated with the older type of Greek comedy, being represented by argumentative dialogue between either an actor and the chorus, or between two opposing actors, each supported by one half of the chorus. Through the argument of opposing principles, the agon in these performances resembled the dialectical dialogues of Plato. In contemporary sociopolitical discourse the concept of agon is also used to refer to the theory that the conflict of opposing forces and ideas necessarily results in progress and economic growth. Although ‘agonism’, as it is termed, is seen by some theorists as pluralistic and democratic in its competitive spirit, it is also associated with dominance and hegemony; a perspective that reflects at bottom neoliberal, monopolistic ideology.6 This more tendentious recent application is a distortion of its original sense involving balance, even-handedness or equivalence. Rather than connoting domination, the notion of the public forum is enshrined in the particular meaning of the Greek agora, a place of commercial and political activity as well as a civic and cultural focal point. Greek and Roman audiences were exposed to histories and contemporary comedies about sociopolitical issues that were often related to their contemporary experience, particularly the satirical comedies of Aristophanes in Greece and Plautus and Terence in Rome. That said, the site of public performance in the more sophisticated period of drama’s development in ancient Greece was no longer the agora or forum itself, but the purpose-built theatre, located adjacent to it. In ancient Athens and Rome theatre, at its most potent, provided an outlet for sociopolitical debate and the playing out of topical issues, whether expressed in serious or more comedic, satirical vein. Thus, although the theatre was not the agora or forum itself in a physical or literal sense, it represented an alternative and, at least theoretically, less threatening space for civic debate and reflection. It provided an arena for tragic or parodic treatment of currently or historically significant social concerns in the lives of citizens and enjoyed a considerable degree of festive licence. Performances in the drama festival associated

5 See Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, Oxford University Press, 10. 6 See for example Claudio Colaguori, Agon Culture: Competition, Conflict and the

Problem of Domination, de Sitter Publications, 2012 and Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, London, New York: Verso, 2000.

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with Dionysus offered, therefore, both a civic platform for the more positive Apollonian aesthetic values and the satirical perspectives of comedy connected with the Dionysian cult of ecstasy and the senses and of disruption of social order. This dichotomy between rationality and irrationality, intellect and intuition/emotion, order and subversion, intrinsic to the spirit of the festival and associated with the respective cults, has been extremely important for understanding the relationship between critical and creative forces in modern culture, and is central to Nietzschean philosophy, for example.7 The dialectical relationship between the Apollonian and the Dionysian provided an outlet for the social representation of darker passions, as exemplified by the great tragedies depicting revenge, hubris, excessive ambition and murder by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Their tragedies were already a blend of ancient history and myth in their own time, but were allegorically linked to contemporary life, as they often are in modern-day performance. By contrast, the comedies were more explicitly political and contemporary in their reference and usually their setting. This release function of poesis, whereby the passions and emotions associated with historical and contemporary social and political topics could be safely explored via performative representation, came to be known in Aristotelian theory by the metaphor katharsis . Not only an individual act of purgation, catharsis constituted a public ritual both in Aristotelian theory and in ancient Athenian theatregoing. The relationship between the cathartic experience for Greek audiences and socially and politically conscious drama was not necessarily a direct one, and plays that were overtly critical of Athenian political figures or actions must have formed a minority. However, those plays that have come down to us that critique or question state actions and the behaviour of those in authority, whether allegorically in tragedy, e.g. The Suppliant Women (Aeschylus), The Trojan Women (Euripides), Antigone (Sophocles), or more directly and specifically in comedy, e.g. The Frogs, The Birds, The Clouds and Lysistrata (Aristophanes) have nevertheless a socially conscious and cohesive function. Catharsis was not just an individual experience in the theatre but a collective, communal one; it could only be achieved if social and political strife were addressed in stage representation acting as a social safety-valve. 7 See Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Clifton P. Fadiman, The Birth of Tragedy (Die Geburt der Tragödie), Dover Publications Inc., 1995.

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Aristophanes’ parodic and bawdy political burlesques constantly pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in democratic Athens, beset as it was by the challenges of the Peloponnesian War, threats to its democratic system from would-be oligarchs and various other crises. Although his comedies were specifically targeted in their references, the satire, like that of great theatre satirists of later times and cultures, is transferable to other contexts which explains why they have been read and performed out of their original context. Aristophanes doesn’t purport to find solutions, but, by inviting his audience to laugh at absurdities of policy and conventional thinking, his plays also encourage them to think more critically and coolly. Often provoking the politicians and public figures in his comedies, as well as mercilessly lampooning the tragic poets for good measure, it is no surprise that the playwright had to defend himself in court and was fined heavily for his savagely witty portrait of the powerful demagogue Cleon in his second comedy The Babylonians. The punishment doesn’t appear to have limited his freedom of speech in subsequent satires, however, despite an unsuccessful attempt by Cleon to deprive him of his birthright of Athenian citizenship. Aristophanes hardly appears contrite in his debate comedy The Wasps, for example, where he turns his nemesis into the work’s subject-matter, so that the play’s agon represents a dispute between father (Procleon) and son (Anticleon) as a parody of legal procedure. The son’s position is that his father is merely a dupe of the oligarchy in his poorly paid work as juror for the law courts, and that his father is dangerously addicted to the illusory sense of power the responsibility gives him. The litigious Cleon’s populist jury system permits him to suppress pacifist opposition to his bellicose strategies against neighbouring cities in the Peloponnese. The argument, since this is a comedy, is inevitably one-sided, and favours the son’s more rational stance. Moreover, evidence of Cleon’s and his fellow oligarchs’ corruption is provided in the mock trial. Freedom of expression in the forum of the City Dionysia may well have been as dangerous a freedom as it had been in earlier centuries, and still is today.8 But rather like Shakespeare’s ‘licensed fool’, the poet-playwright enjoyed considerable latitude due to the nature of the Festival specifically and also to the 8 The brazen murder of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi on the highest authority of his country’s government in their Istanbul consulate on 2 October 2018 is an all-too-familiar example of this. It didn’t take long for the initially ‘shocked’ U.S. and the U.K. to revert to business as usual with the totalitarian Saudi state.

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polis’s association of censorship with tyranny in general. As David Barrett argues in his introductory commentary on The Frogs: “Apart from politicians, orators and sophists, whom nobody trusted, only one kind of man was in a position to influence the ideas and attitudes of the public—the poet.”9 Similarly, the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, though lacking the contemporary referentiality of Aristophanes, remain timeless in their themes, and each enacts its own agon between power and desire on the one hand and righteousness and duty on the other. In some cases, as in Sophocles’ timeless Antigone, there is an even-handed dialectical argument that may leave the spectator’s or reader’s sympathies divided. The agon device in these plays was intrinsic to its design, inviting audiences to listen and think critically in response to the various competing voices, ideologies and motivations within its plot. Empathy, concentration and judgement were all required of an audience, and some characters and viewpoints represented by dramatists might not necessarily elicit initial sympathy. Classical scholar Edith Hall sees Euripides—himself the butt of a number of Aristophanes’ satirical barbs—as a particularly provocative dramatist for his time, describing his work as “subversive, experimental, playful and eccentric in an identifiably modern way.”10 Citing striking female protagonists in his work such as Medea, Phaedra, Helen and Elektra as well as Hecuba and the Trojan women, Hall goes on to make a convincing case for Euripides as an unlikely proto-feminist figure. She argues that in his burlesque The Frogs Aristophanes represents Euripides as claiming to have made tragedy “more democratic by keeping his women…talking alongside their masters”, and points out that the tragedian’s “best thinkers and talkers are women”.11 Since its resurgence in popularity in the 1960s, Ancient Greek theatre has flourished in contemporary culture through innumerable adaptations and variations on the originals, and a number of modern plays are conceived from the Greek notion of theatre as public and civic arena. To an extent this renaissance may reflect a scholarly or a meta-theatrical 9 The dramatic poet, that is. See David Barrett, Introduction to David Barrett, trans. Aristophanes, The Wasps, The Poet and the Women and The Frogs. Penguin Classics, 1964, 152. 10 Edith Hall, Introduction to James Morwood, ed. Euripides - Medea and Other Plays, Oxford World Classics, 1998, x. 11 Hall, Ibid., xxvi.

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interest; in the main, I would argue, it can be seen as interacting with the forum theatre emphasis of both Brecht’s and Boal’s twentieth-century experimental progressive work. An important distinction is that Brecht’s and Boal’s theatre was designed to effect social revolution and was interventional and formative in intent and, in Boal’s case, in theatrical method, whereas the Greek theatre was seen more as a commentary and debate on the existing society. Nonetheless, the construct of representing history and myth (tragedy) and the contemporary sociopolitical scene (comedy) on stage in the context of critical forum was rooted in the Greek model. The great Greek dramas are patently transferable to other times and contexts, and it is precisely in this capacity of the critical public forum that they come down to us today. Scottish dramatist-poet Liz Lochhead’s 2001 adaptation of Euripides’ Medea in Scots dialect emphasises the play’s underlying feminist sympathies more overtly, and supports Hall’s judgement on the play’s inherent potential for an assertively feminist reading. Likewise, the recent reworking by Scottish dramatist David Greig of the only extant Aeschylus play from his Danaïd trilogy, The Suppliant Women, was given a distinctly modern feel in Actors’ Touring Theatre and Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh’s 2017–18 touring version, precisely because the themes and motifs of the play are remarkably resonant in our own times—“Borders; Cultures; Asylum; Migration…Women; Prayer; Persuasion; Violence…and then Democracy”, to quote director Ramin Gray. As Gray goes on to point out in his house progamme introduction, Aeschylus’s play contains the oldest reference we know to the word ‘democracy’. The fact that it is enshrined in one of the oldest dramatic texts in the Western canon is no coincidence and establishes a strong and enduring association between drama and polis, despite its frequent applications to religious rites and rituals in various societies and contexts. Among other post-‘60s adaptations, several of Steven Berkoff’s controversial plays reflect the actor-playwright’s notion of Ancient Greek theatre updated to address contemporary sociopolitical concerns. Greek (1980), for example, is set in the East End of London and is a modern version of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, blending Artaud’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ with the Ancient Greek model. It addressed what Berkoff saw as the moral vacuum of 1980s Thatcherism and the theme of social decline, utilising the concept of individual tragedy as emblematic of a wider social malaise. Timberlake Wertenbaker’s 1998 play After Darwin, as Maya Roth and Sara Freeman argue, takes its cue “directly from the ancient Greek civic

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theatre in function, just as many of her plays draw directly from ancient Greek theatre in reference.”12 The agon in Wertenbaker’s play concerns on one level an evolutionary debate between Darwin and the captain of the ship HMS Beagle, but on the meta-theatrical level it metamorphoses into a personal forum in the context of a pub theatre performance, reflecting a Darwinian socioeconomic ethos. This civic function in Wertenbaker’s dramatic writing tends to determine her often disputatious dramatic structures and exchanges. Similarly, but in very different cultural and political contexts, Athol Fugard’s apartheid-era take on Antigone, entitled The Island (1973), and Wole Soyinka’s Yoruba-inflected version of The Bacchae (1973) drew on the elemental power of Greek theatre for inspiration, while Marianna Calbari’s 2017 Medea—the Barbarity of Love took Euripides’ play back home for the Athens Epidaurus Festival in a compellingly updated and relevant reading. Analogies with the Ancient Greek forum can also be applied to many other playwrights, filmmakers and directors whose works engender public debate, and even arouse controversy. Referring to the “powerful echo” that Greek theatre can still have with contemporary audiences in a piece related to the University of Cambridge triennial Greek drama production, classical scholar Simon Goldhill identifies many parallels between the issues and themes of then and now and observes: “as with the fifth century BC, our age is obsessed with the tension between the brutal realities of war and the rhetoric of politicians: Greek tragedy anatomises this tension with painful insight.”13 In one such twenty-first-century example Brad Mays’s quasi-documentary The Trojan Women (2004) deployed contemporary news footage of the Iraq invasion of the previous year to connote the relevance of Euripides’ critique of Greek aggression with that of the equally ill-justified assault by U.S. and U.K. forces on Iraq.

12 Maya Roth and Sara Freeman, International Dramaturgy: Translations and Transformations in the Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker, Peter Lang, 2008, 172. 13 Simon Goldhill, ‘Greek Tragedy: Setting the Stage Today’, University of Cambridge website, 1 Feb 2008. http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/greek-tragedy-setting-thestage-today. See also Simon Goldhill, How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today, University of Chicago Press, 2007, especially Chapter 4: Tragedy and Politics: What’s Hecuba to Him?

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In general, though, films that adapt Greek tragedy and tragic themes14 tend to raise sociopolitical questions more indirectly than plays, since their effect depends less on rhetoric and more on suggestive imagery. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex (Edipo Re, 1967), with its framing allusions to Freudian Oedipal theory, used Sophocles’ play as an analogue to the Fascist political system under which he was raised as a child. Pasolini was also drawn to Euripides’Medea (1969) as an archetype of a strong woman who reacts with tragic results against patriarchy and marginalisation. Similarly taken by the Medea trope, if less successful in its outcome, Jules Dassin’s 1978 modern screen version of Medea, A Dream of Passion (Cri de Femme), connects an actress playing the role to a woman serving a life sentence for the same crime as Jason’s vengeful wife. Jean Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s 1992 Antigone shares a Brechtian genealogy with much of their cinematic output and employs Sophocles’ protagonist, as many modern plays have done, as a signifier of youth rebellion. Tony Harrison’s Prometheus (1998), also inspired by the theme of rebellion, was a hybrid film-poem about social class attitudes in pre-millennial Britain based loosely on the plot of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound. However, probably the most ambitious and critically acclaimed parallel version was Theo Angelopoulos’s 1975 film, O Thiassos (The Travelling Players ), which explored Greece’s recent political past under totalitarian and colonising forms of government, including the Nazi occupation, through the prism of the betrayal and revenge themes of Aeschylus’s Oresteia. As is the case with the plays also discussed, the Ancient Greek sources in such films can generate psychosocial meanings that resonate in the temporal and geographical context in which they are reproduced.

Anglophone Political Stage Drama from the Early Modern Age to the Twentieth Century Drama has continued to encounter censure and tight controls throughout history, whether on religious or political grounds, but has maintained its sharp, though sometimes subtle and allusive, edge, notwithstanding. Seen from a different perspective, it was viewed as ideologically valuable in

14 For a good account of this phenomenon see, for example, Pantelis Michelakis, Greek Tragedy on Screen, Oxford University Press, 2013.

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medieval Europe, when miracle and mystery plays, or autos in the Spanish context, contributed to a moral discourse and ethos in Christian societies. As a medium of performance, even more than a literary practice, it faces constant challenges and limits to its creative autonomy and its institutional independence. In the late medieval and early modern periods the English cultural renaissance saw the introduction of more contentious themes, often substituting foreign polities for England in order to express criticism of political and religious institutions obliquely and allegorically. One of the more effective critiques was Scottish playwright David Lindsay’s 1540 drama Ane Pleasant Satyre of the Thrie Estaits, a remarkable secular version of the medieval morality play, treating the subject of vices and virtues. The work represented the three estates of clergy, lords and local government representatives symbolically in the figures of Spiritualitie, Temporalitie and Merchant, all venal and corrupting influences on the non-specific young King. Proverbial human figures, John Commonweal and The Poor Man intervene with appeals on behalf of the common people, which ultimately prove successful. Lindsay’s dramatic genius in this play was to take a well-worn religious genre and subvert it into a trenchant political drama under the guise of a morally improving entertainment. The play was adapted by Scottish playwright John McGrath as A Satire of the Four Estaites, to include the media as the fourth estate, and presented at the Edinburgh International Festival in 1996. Elizabethan and Jacobean dramas were rife with veiled, or thinly veiled, political satire, and some authors fell foul of the authorities for their disrespectful allusions to the court and nobility, and even to the monarch in a few cases. Early modern atheist Christopher Marlowe set his devastating critique of what he saw as the hypocrisy of all revealed religions, The Jew of Malta (ca 1590), on foreign shores. His play was clearly designed to impugn not only Protestantism and Catholicism but also the Jewish and Islamic faiths into the bargain. In its time, it was highly political and remains a controversial performance text even today. Most of Marlowe’s oeuvre was likewise controversial, even if more direct critiques of the ruling class and the monarchy were out of the question, given that plays had to be submitted to the Master of the Revels for scrutiny and censorship prior to performance. Shakespeare largely avoided brushes with the authorities by setting his political plays, particularly the histories, in earlier times and places, but many of his plays have political overtones, or, like The Tempest, feature

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meditations on good governance. In 1601 the production of Shakespeare’s Richard II at The Globe Theatre on the eve of the Earl of Essex’s rebellion was sponsored by the rebels with the apparent aim of fomenting insurgency by portraying the deposition of a tyrannical and irresponsible monarch. Fortunately for Shakespeare, the play performance, while intended as political allegory by its disaffected patrons—Richard II having become associated in the minds of dissidents with Elizabeth II— appears to have been successfully explained away as a purely commercial proposition for his company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. In general Shakespeare and his peers took care to avoid controversy, but some, like Shakespeare, were more successful in doing so than others. Ben Jonson was among the least successful, enduring prison terms for his collaborative work on political satires Eastward Ho and The Isle of Dogs. He was also accused of ‘popery’ and treason on the basis of his Roman tragedy Sejanus, His Fall, which some interpreted as an allegory of the fall of either the Earl of Essex or Sir Walter Raleigh. Despite escaping prison for his perceived political allegory, Jonson continued to attack his political enemies covertly, notably in his 1607 ‘beast fable’ Volpone, which Richard Dutton has persuasively linked to The Gunpowder Plot of 1605.15 Jonson appeared to have connections with the fellow-Catholic plotters, and, although he was not directly implicated, Volpone can be read as his subtle indictment of powerful and unscrupulous government figure Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury. John Webster’s plays The White Devil (1612) and The Duchess of Malfi (1613), both set in Italy, tend likewise to be read as political metaphors criticising the English court of James I and the clergy; Thomas Middleton’s 1624 satire A Game at Chess, his last play, mocked political-religious antagonism between England and Spain by conceiving of negotiations between the respective sides as chess moves. A Game at Chess was banned after nine sell-out performances and those involved prosecuted, even though the Master of the Revels had approved it. The subsequent rupture with Christian doctrine, as Western drama became more secular, did not entirely obviate this ethical function, and what one might describe as the productive tension between its proclivities for both didacticism and entertainment continued to generate discussion, as twentieth century Brechtian theory exemplifies. Late nineteenth- and 15 See Richard Dutton, Ben Jonson, Volpone and the Gunpowder Plot, Cambridge University Press, 2012.

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early twentieth-century political dramas, like those of earlier ages, had their detractors but playwrights were generally not subject to the same kind of political suppression common in earlier centuries. The critical, reform-minded plays of Ibsen found their Anglophone counterpart in the critical dramas of George Bernard Shaw. Plays like Pygmalion (1913), Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893), Man and Superman (1905) and The Apple Cart: A Political Extravaganza (1929) resonated with Shaw’s avowed Fabian socialist perspectives. His plays by implication advocated independent thinking and gradual reforms in sociopolitical matters, and were well-wrought stage dramas in a similarly modernist style to those of Ibsen. Unlike those of Brecht and other European dramatists, they favoured gradualist democratic transformation in the polity brought about more by enhanced education and debate than insurgency. In the fictional character John Tanner’s handbook of maxims associated with the play Man and Superman Tanner/Shaw cautions against simplistic political opinions and solutions in a particularly relevant ‘revolutionary maxim’: “Beware of […] false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.”16 In addition to Shaw’s considerable body of work, reformist and progressive themes are evident in early twentieth-century Anglophone drama. The theme of bitter class struggle is evident in both Harley Granville Barker’s 1907 play Waste and John Galsworthy’s 1909 drama Strife. The Suffragettes’ struggle to gain votes for women was reflected in Cicely Hamilton and Christopher St John’s 1910 drama How the Vote was Won. In the context of Britain’s imperialist suppression of Irish home rule and the bloody Civil War that led to independence for the majority, but not all, of the country, pacifist socialist playwright Sean O’Casey’s three great plays The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926) expressed the aspirations and perspectives of ordinary working-class Irish men and women. Like Brecht’s, O’Casey’s body of work reflects his passion for social and political themes and a strong empathy with the oppressed. Across the Atlantic two notable women playwrights, Susan Glaspell (Trifles, 1916) and Sophie Treadwell (Machinal, 1928), made an impact with feminist themes that were more indirectly than directly political. However, the dire

16 Bernard Shaw, ‘The Revolutionist’s Handbook and Pocket Companion’ published together with Man and Superman. See https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26107/261078.txt.

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socio-economic effects of the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression led to greater consciousness of profound social injustices in American society; this was reflected in the openly political plays of Clifford Odets, especially his 1935 one-act drama Waiting for Lefty. Odets’ approach earned his work the label ‘proletarian’ drama, but his output of scripts for both film and theatre was diverse and nurtured by his fervent aspiration for a more genuine democratic system in his nation. Another milestone in socialist drama in the U.S. in this fraught period was the 1936 stage adaptation of leftist writer Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Can’t Happen Here, a cautionary tale in which a fascist demagogue takes advantage of economic turmoil to subvert the country’s democratic system. One of the outstanding theatrical dramas of the century, and a perennial favourite in both professional and amateur Anglophone theatre, was J.B. Priestly’s An Inspector Calls, written in 1945. It was a work that was born out of the embedded class distinction of the earlier half of the century, but in the shape of its enigmatic inspector figure the play can be seen as heralding the socially progressive politics that were introduced into the U.K. after the 1945 general election, in which the ruling classes were defeated by a genuinely reformist Labour Party. While An Inspector Calls can be seen as a modern morality play about the suicide of a working-class female employee and the culpability of a rich family, it was at the same time a drawing-room drama in the realist tradition of Ibsen and Shaw.

Anglophone Political Drama of the Postwar Period In the second half of the century stage realist dramas with political undertones were more common in the U.S. particularly in the plays of Arthur Miller, whose All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949) and A View From the Bridge (1955) combined individual tragedies with collective responsibilities. Most memorably, in these plays Miller called into question so-called American values and the notion of the American Dream. Miller’s most damning political drama was the historically set The Crucible (1953), which employed the allegory of the seventeenth-century Salem witch trials to condemn the contemporary witch-hunt of leftleaning writers and stage and screen directors under McCarthyism. Miller was himself brought before the self-aggrandising House Committee for daring to criticise them, albeit indirectly, but stood his ground, refusing to name names; no charge against him was proved. Fortunately for

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modern drama, he was not hanged for his defiance, as happens to his protagonist John Proctor in the play. Another powerful stage allegory on McCarthyism was Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s courtroom drama Inherit the Wind (1955), a fictionalised account of the so-called ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’ of 1925 when a teacher in Tennessee was put on trial by for daring to teach Darwinian evolution in the classroom. In its passionate defence of intellectual freedom Inherit the Wind remains relevant in today’s climate of populist anti-intellectualism. Less obviously politically oriented in his plays than Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams created a memorable dramatic world of social misfits and outsiders, implicitly critiquing racism, homophobia and male chauvinism, and by extension fascism, in his dramatic output. His depiction of sexuality on stage conveyed a powerful challenge to audiences in an era when non-conformism to stifling gender stereotypes was tantamount to sociopolitical deviancy. The theme of racism came increasingly to the fore during the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and ‘60s, and the standout play of the period was Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959) which challenged segregationist housing practices in Chicago. It was the first play written by a black author and directed by a black director to be produced on Broadway, and became an instant classic. The most influential figure in British political theatre in the immediate postwar period was Joan Littlewood whose radical views caused her to be placed under surveillance by MI5 for a time. Littlewood and her husband Jimmie Miller (Ewan MacColl) together with other Theatre Union members formed Theatre Workshop in the early Fifties, eventually setting up a residency at the Theatre Royal in Stratford, East London. Theatre Workshop staged the British premiere of Brecht’s masterpiece Mother Courage in 1955, with Littlewood playing the title role. The company’s most famous anti-establishment production was the 1963 musical satire Oh, What a Lovely War! By the late 1950s the tone of much U.K. playwriting had become more abrasive and socially critical under the influence of Brechtian and Artaudian dramatic ideas and values, with London’s Royal Court Theatre providing a welcoming venue for some of the most politically trenchant work. The influence of Brecht’s irreverent and confrontational theatre was especially notable in the epic theatre works of John Arden and Edward Bond, as well as the sexually frank social comedies of Joe Orton. Employing kitchen sink realism in his early plays like Look Back in Anger (1956), John Osborne was particularly critical of the conservative establishment and dull conventions of the decade.

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Littlewood’s radicalism opened the floodgates of radical creativity over the subsequent decades, with a prolific new wave of political playwriting that lasted until the close of the century. Other landmark political plays of the 1950s and ‘60s include Arden’s anti-imperialist Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance (1959), Arnold Wesker’s gritty social class trilogy Chicken Soup with Barley (1958), Roots (1959) and I’m Talking About Jerusalem (1960), Edward Bond’s Saved (1965) about disaffected unemployed youths in London,17 Peter Brook and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s experimental anti-Vietnam War play US (1966) and Peter Barnes’ black satire on the British upper classes, The Ruling Class (1968). The experimental and experiential theatre of the New Yorkbased experimental company The Living Theatre led by Judith Malina and Julian Beck included several collaboratively devised protest pieces against the Vietnam War, Mysteries and Smaller Pieces (1964), Frankenstein (1965) and Paradise Now (1968); one of their most powerful stage creations, Seven Meditations on Political Sado-Masochism (1973), was a response to incarceration by the Brazilian military regime. They had pledged to fellow prisoners they would tell their story to put pressure on the regime to respect fundamental human rights. In the fading years of the military regime Boal returned from exile and put into practice a ‘living theatre’ of his own in the form of the Theatre of the Oppressed. Responding to the second wave of feminism in the 1970s Caryl Churchill and Pam Gems in the U.K. and Wendy Wasserstein and Maria Irene Fornés in the U.S. produced powerful political theatre related to women’s rights, creating damning dramatic portraits of patriarchal societies, past and present. Stand-out plays included Churchill’s Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (1976) about the struggle for an egalitarian society following the English Civil War in the mid-seventeenth century, Cloud Nine (1979), a farce-like subversion of colonial and patriarchal forms of repression, Fen (1980), and Top Girls (1982), a mixed mode play about opportunities for women in the male-dominated world of work, featuring anachronistic appearances of inspirational women of the past. In both the U.S. and the U.K. theatre became more antagonistic to the Western

17 Saved was notorious for its effect on censorship of stage plays in the U.K. by the Lord Chamberlain, still in effect when it premiered in 1965. After private performances of the Royal Court production were arranged to defy the heavy censorship of the play, political pressure on the government to end theatre censorship was finally rewarded by the Theatres Act of 1968, dispensing with the role of the Lord Chamberlain.

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power elite, predominantly white, male and wealthy. Racial and feminist themes intersected in Ntozake Shange’s 1975 choreopoem drama For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf. Probably the most internationally important political play of the late twentieth century was originally not an Anglophone drama, but an Italian work by political farceur and Nobel laureate Dario Fo. Such was the impact of his 1970 play Accidental Death of an Anarchist that it became a modern-day classic performed in more than forty countries and locally adapted and translated to fit the political context in each of them. Fo’s burlesque on police brutality and blaming of left-wing activists for crimes by right-wing extremists is as popular in theatre today and just as relevant as it was in its own time. Prolific playwright John McGrath’s 1973 play The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black Black Oil was a popular political theatre piece about the ruthless capitalist exploitation of Scotland’s abundant natural resources under the British Empire. The influence of both Brecht and Littlewood was evident in the production by McGrath’s company 7:84 (a reference to 7% of the U.K.’s population at that time owning 84% of its wealth18 ), and the play employed the indigenous musical ceilidh device, as well as other direct address methods, to tell the bitter tale of Highland clearances, forced emigration and domination by the English Parliament in an engaging style. The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black Black Oil toured throughout Scotland, and was a significant factor in arousing the sense of Scottish national consciousness that ultimately led to the demand for devolution, and, later, for Scottish independence. In Northern Ireland similar questions about the repressive English presence in the country were raised by Brian Friel’s contemporary play The Freedom of the City (1973), which reflected the harsh sectarian conflicts of the 1970s. Around the same time, two important anti-establishment theatre companies emerged in the U.K. namely Monstrous Regiment, a radical feminist-socialist group, and Joint Stock Theatre Company, among whose founders were the prolific playwright David Hare. Hare and Howard Brenton wrote one of the most successful

18 Although this inequality ratio has fallen since its highest point in the 1980s, a

different kind of wealth gap exists, as shown by the fact that, at the time of writing, the richest 50 families in the U.K. are wealthier than over 50% of the remainder of the population put together. See ‘Income and wealth inequality explained in 5 charts’, Mike Brewer and Thomas Wernham, Institute for Fiscal Studies, 9 November 2022. https:// ifs.org.uk/articles/income-and-wealth-inequality-explained-5-charts.

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political satires of the 1980s, Pravda (1985), based on the megalomaniac media mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose influence has, unfortunately, long outlasted the play that satirised him. Brenton’s earlier plays The Churchill Play (1974) and Weapons of Happiness (1976) manifested strong support for the Trades Union movement and corresponding critiques of the British establishment. In 1980 his anti-Thatcher play, Short Sharp Shock, co-written with Tony Howard, caused considerable controversy, given its grandiose aim of bringing down her neoconservative government. The production’s graphic publicity poster, featuring a photomontage of the head of the Tory leader being hit simultaneously by a hammer and a sickle, exacerbated the bitter controversy surrounding the play. Courting further controversy, Brenton’s other play from 1980, The Romans in Britain, compared the abuses committed under British imperialism to the brutal subjugation and colonisation of Britain by the Roman invaders. The play’s director Michael Bogdanov was subject to a private prosecution on charges of obscenity based on the play’s depiction of homosexual rape brought by pro-Thatcher ‘morality campaigner’ Mary Whitehouse. While the Old Bailey trial created considerable publicity for the play in the right-wing as well as the liberal media, the prosecution’s case was dismissed by the judge. Not only had Whitehouse not seen the offending play, she had persisted with the private prosecution after the Attorney General had refused permission to prosecute under the Theatres Act of 1968. Steven Berkoff’s almost Jonsonian ad hominem satirical drama Sink the Belgrano (1986) was a broadside against the British establishment and against the Prime Minister herself, in the pseudonymous persona of the caricature figure, Maggot Scratcher. The play was written as an indictment of Margaret Thatcher’s order for the titular Argentinian troop carrier to be torpedoed with extensive loss of life; in the process she successfully torpedoed an American peace proposal to end the 1982 Falklands War. The play took the not unreasonable view that the unpopular Tory leader was a warmonger, seeking to boost her credentials with a gullible electorate in order to win re-election. Sink the Belgrano was one of the most uncompromising political plays of the period, and inevitably earned the opprobrium of the mainly right-wing British press on account of its scathing critique of the ‘Iron Lady’. Although much of Berkoff’s illustrious career as actor and dramatist has involved robust social comment and portrayal of marginal figures, Sink the Belgrano was his most polemical political intervention. Unlike Harry Hill’s 2023

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musical Tony, The Tony Blair Rock Opera, which entertainingly sends up the humbug ex-Premier, Berkoff’s Thatcher caricature corresponded to vengeful Juvenalian satire. David Hare’s political criticism is couched in less sensational and more dialectical theatrical language than that of the above-mentioned peers, and he remains a pre-eminent figure among the U.K.’s living dramatists. His state-of-the-nation trilogy Racing Demon (1990), about the Church of England, Murmuring Judges (1991), about the legal profession and The Absence of War (1993), about the polity, and his indirectly political masterpiece Skylight (1995) all involve passionate debate between agonistic characters with conflicting sociopolitical values. In his postmillennial dramatic writing Hare has remained politically engaged, but, following the repeated failures of progressive party politics in the U.K., he has focused more on international situations and issues. Not noted for direct political engagement in his eminent early and middle career dramas, Harold Pinter produced a series of short uncharacteristic political plays in the 1980s and ‘90s. The trio One for the Road (1984), Mountain Language (1988) and The New World Order (1993) challenged the notion that human rights violations and political violence were the preserve of less civilised, undemocratic and non-Western governments. Pinter employed techniques from his earlier comedy-of-menace plays to portray torture and sadistic intimidation by agents of the state against dissenters or minority groups. In all three short plays the political interrogations that take place in the plots are inflected with Western Anglophone cultural allusions, and characters are assigned familiar Anglophone names. In Mountain Language he evoked the idea of English as an imperialist language used to suppress and marginalise local languages perceived as inferior. In a twenty-minute short play consisting of four scenes Pinter depicts an unspecified mountain people banned from speaking their native mountain language by a brutal unspecified regime. Through his portrayal of linguistic imperialism—a theme that Brian Friel also memorably treated, though more specifically and expansively, in his Ireland-set play Translations (1980)—the author implicitly condemns Western linguistic hegemony over indigenous languages and cultures; the work reveals the violent and coercive behaviour that goes hand-in-hand with language imperialism. Similarly, in The New World Order he challenged the aggressive Western domination that emerged out of the First Gulf War in a work that was almost prophetic of testimonial theatre about the human rights abuses at Guantánamo. Performing the role of the

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sadistic and entitled interrogator Nicholas in One for the Road (a production I was privileged to see), Pinter brought a suave sense of menace to the role, savouring his speech with clinical precision, as though language itself was an instrument of physical torture. The 1980s and ‘90s also saw an expansion in political theatre engaging with racism, sexism and capitalism, with the three themes commonly intersecting in both U.S. and U.K. plays. August Wilson emerged as an outstanding U.S. dramatist on racial issues, with his plays focusing on black urban experiences of past and present challenges for black citizens, notably his Pulitzer Prize-winning plays Fences (1985) and The Piano Lesson (1987). Although his works are implicitly, rather than explicitly, political, they trace the historical impact of the black political struggle back to the era of slavery and also cover different decades of the twentieth century in their settings. In the context of the South African antiapartheid struggle, Anglophone playwrights were few and far between, but Athol Fugard stood out. Fugard’s political dramas Boesman and Lena (1969), Sizwe Bansi is Dead and The Island (1972), Master Harold and the Boys (1982) and Blood Knot (1987) were designed to evade political censorship, and in some cases play to black audiences in townships, but during the apartheid era his activist theatre approach was severely restricted by government intervention and harassment. Nevertheless, he produced a substantial body of dramatic work that has outlasted political censorship under the former racist regime. In 2005 he adapted his novel Tsotsi with director fellow-South African director Gavin Hood into an Academy Award-winning film. Other significant political works of the post-apartheid era in South Africa related to the Truth and Reconciliation Committee’s work include The Story I am About to Tell (1997) by Duma Kumalo & Bobby Rodwell, a significant piece of straightforward testimonial theatre, and Jane Taylor’s Ubu and the Truth Commission (also 1997) for South African artist/ director William Kentridge and the Handspring Puppet Company. In the latter case, Taylor and Kentridge employed the burlesque, scatological style of Alfred Jarry’s original Ubu plays, while freely adapting the material; thus, in their version Pa and Ma Ubu become symbols of apartheid-era oppression. The theatricality of their widely acclaimed multimedia production depended on a highly effective combination of live acting and puppet theatre, in which the notorious antagonists were played by human actors whereas the witnesses providing testimonials to the committee were represented by puppets, voiced by human actors.

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Standout political plays of the 1990s included Eve Ensler’s taboobreaking feminist hit The Vagina Monologues ( 1996), exploring female sexuality with frankness and humour in direct address mode, and Paula Vogel’s nuanced study of grooming and sexual abuse, the Pulitzer Prizewinning How I Learned to Drive (1997). Sarah Kane’s ‘in-yer-face’ anti-military drama Blasted (1995), portraying sexual violence and genocide in a surreal dramatic context, was itself blasted by the media and dismissed as an attempt merely to shock and provoke the audience. Posterity has vindicated the late author, and her debut play is now regarded as one of the key stage dramas of the past half-century in its graphic indictment of a perverted capitalist, militarist world, in which sex and violence are virtually synonymous. Another dramatic work of the early Nineties that ranks among the most admired of the past half-century is Tony Kushner’s Angels in America diptych, Millennium Approaches (1991) and Perestroika (1992). The twin plays represented the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and ‘90s as the political issue that it was, facing severe social and political discrimination and stigmatisation. Kushner’s multi-award-winning work was an exemplum of moral theatre, a work whose impact continued into the twenty-first century, in part thanks to a screened theatre version of the London West End revival by the U.K.’s National Theatre and an HBO miniseries adaptation. The success of Angels in America in breaking the mould of what counts as legitimate theatre, in addition to British author-director Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking (1996), created an opportunity for playwrights of the new century to explore the politics of sexuality and representation more fully in their works.

The Landscape of Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Political Theatre Perhaps the above broad-brush account of the past century’s dramatic work fails to take into account more socially conservative genres that either embraced the values of the established order by benefiting financially from them, or that were more engaged with individual perspectives than with social and collective ones. In terms of both quality and quantity, however, Western speech drama was a form that became influential transnationally precisely because it engaged with the present moment,

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either directly, as in Soviet and other Agitprop theatres, British ‘KitchenSink’, or the Brazilian Forum Theatre of Augusto Boal, or more allegorically, as in Jean Anouilh’s updated version of Sophocles’ Antigone in occupied Paris. In Anglophone contexts, socially and politically engaged theatre flourished in the second half of the century, and has continued to reflect social realities through a wide range of genres, styles and subjects. Plays of the new century like Churchill’s Far Away (2000) and Escaped Alone (2016), Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park (2010), Pearl Cleage’s The Nacirema Society Requests (2013), Charles Mee’s Global Warming (2013), Lynn Nottage’s Ruined (2008) and Sweat (2016), Ella Hickson’s Oil (2016) and Dael Orlandersmith’s Until the Flood (2018)—a docudrama account of the 2014 murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri—fit this pattern. So too does Nottage’s Mlima’s Tale (2018) about the web of capitalist complicity surrounding ivory poaching and trading. If this profusion of dramatic offerings seems to present a reasonably rosy picture of progressive dramatic advocacy, however, U.S. playwright Karen Malpede provides reasons for a critically sceptical outlook regarding the influence of new playwriting in her home country, not on account of overt censorship, but on grounds of politically correct selectivity: Here is a short list of subjects you are unlikely to see on the institutional or commercial American stage: abortion, treated fairly, objectively, or even mentioned, for that matter, and other reproductive rights; corporate malfeasance, especially related to any bank or corporation that sponsors a cultural institution...pro-contemporary labor union organizing plays; manmade climate change addressed as the scientific fact it is. Also, these truths about the Iraq war: the U.S. invaded under false pretences; the war, which killed, wounded and displaced millions of Iraqis, was illegal and immoral; more U.S. combat veterans will soon be dead at their own hands by suicide than were killed in fighting…You won’t see plays that speak to the issues raised by the Occupy Movement, like the burden of student debt...nor will you see plays that advocate nonviolent resistance to any of the above injustices.19

19 Karen Malpede, ‘On Being a so-called Political Playwright’, posted on Howl Round: A Knowledge Commons by and for the Theatre Community’, 29 February, 2012. http:// howlround.com/on-being-a-so-called-political-playwright.

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Stressing what she sees as a pro-violence agenda on the part of the government and a toleration of violence against women in particular, Malpede’s scathing critique in her blog article gives much food for thought. It is easy to be seduced by the pious ‘feel-good’ factor that is often generated by high-profile dramas supportive of marginalised groups and individuals, even if the issues they dramatise are insidiously systemic and resistant to definitive change. Highlighting the specific issue on stage or screen is an effective attention-getter, but scripts and subject-matter tend to be vetted for sociopolitical acceptability, as Malpede points out. Even though Malpede asserts her faith in the possibility that drama can effect change “within the individual and within the social contract,”20 to limit the scope of its forum to safe, fashionable or non-contentious topics ultimately reduces potential social impact. Fortuitously, since the appearance of her online piece in 2012 there have been a number of key productions, such as Nottage’s factual, research-based labour rights drama Sweat , that address contentious social issues in her divided nation and still make it to Broadway.21 Thus, while the intersectional approach is undeniably a valuable tool for addressing issues of social justice and ecological urgency via cultural production, some topics, certainly in the U.S. context as well as in other supposedly pluralistic societies, are likely to be either off the agenda or confined to independent local or regional groups such as San Francisco Mime Troupe, Interact (Philadelphia) or Stage Left (Chicago). An unacknowledged censorship policy in relation to certain topics continues to operate, against which writers, directors, producers and companies continue to battle. A case in point that is perhaps pertinent to Malpede’s censure of the politically cautious ethos surrounding subsidised theatres would be the June 2017 production for Shakespeare in the Park of Julius Caesar in New York’s Central Park. The production’s portrayal of the ambitious Roman demagogue as a latter-day Donald Trump doppelgänger

20 Malpede, Ibid. 21 After a critically lauded off-Broadway run at The Public Theater Sweat opened on

Broadway at Studio 54 on 28 March and closed on 25 June 2017 after 105 regular performances, “the latest victim of a crowded season” in which musicals take precedence. See New York Times, 13 June 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/13/theater/ lynn-nottages-sweat-to-close-on-broadway.html.

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prompted fury among his supporters, who whipped up sufficient controversy for Delta Airlines and Bank of America to withdraw their sponsorship of the Public Theatre free admission open-air event. Eminent U.S. Shakespearean scholar Stephen Greenblatt was vocal in his support of the production’s artistic credentials,22 while fellow Shakespeare academic, Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Diana Henderson, commenting on the furore noted, “Going to see the show was in itself a significant political act”23 The Fox News report was based primarily on the remarks of an indignant Trump partisan whose comments had been picked up by Trump’s then guru, Steve Bannon. The latter initially omitted to mention that the offending play was Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The most risible part of the misleading article was the remark that although Trump “is not named in the play the fact that […] he is being stabbed by women and minorities gives it away.”24 The irrational argument of the piece, playing fast and loose with the facts of the production and typifying white conservative patriarchy, illustrates why intersectional advocacy through stage and screen drama has a significant, if challenging, role to play in facilitating a paradigm shift in attitude. It should be acknowledged at this point that, as many playwrights have recognised, dramatic works written to an agenda and designed primarily for didactic purposes rarely have the emotional impact that less doctrinaire and more narrative-inspired drama has. As Ella Hickson, author of the play Oil , has observed in interview, “there’s so much you want to teach an audience about […] our responsibility, but that’s a lecture, and you have to find the right kind of interpersonal drama to allow people to connect.”

22 Stephen Greenblatt, quoted in article ‘Trump as Julius Caesar: anger over play misses Shakespeare’s point, says scholar’, Lois Beckett, The Guardian 12 June 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/jun/12/donald-trump-shakespeareplay-julius-caesar-new-york. 23 Diana E. Henderson in ‘Hard Hearts and Coronets: Anatomizing Resistance and Community with Shakespeare Now’, Keynote address at ESRA Congress Gdansk, ´ ‘Shakespeare and European Theatrical Cultures: An Atomizing Text and Stage’, 27–30 July, 2017. 24 ‘NYC Play Appears to Depict Assassination of Trump’, Fox News, 11 June 2017. http://insider.foxnews.com/2017/06/11/donald-trump-julius-caesar-stabbed-deathwomen-minorities-shakespeare-central-park.

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She argues that stage drama’s “depth of metaphor and depth of intellectual interrogation”25 exceeds other forms of entertainment with the possible exception of some fiction films and documentaries. This broader geopolitical scenario that Hickson’s Oil and plays of Caryl Churchill, Lynn Nottage and other contemporary dramatists evoke in their writing is by no means limited to the intersection of race, gender and sexual identity issues. Given its established ethnicity-gender emphasis, invoking intersectionality as a methodology for sociopolitically activist dramatic praxis, is appropriate, but the terminology can be adapted to reflect extended application. In this connection, I would propose an umbrella term, namely intersectional contiguity, in order to convey the idea of a raft of different but interrelated topics by engaged writers, which implies adjacent, overlapping interests and concerns, while retaining all the progressive associations implied by the concept of intersectionality. This more flexible construct can be aptly applied to the broader ambit of current progressive theatre and cinema. I would argue that intersectionality’s intrinsic inclusiveness as a model for both creative and critical cultural intervention necessarily permits a considerable degree of morphing and extension. While intersectional, multidimensional thinking is necessary in our twenty-first-century world at societal and transnational levels, it is salutary to recall that drama functions as a public forum for the dissemination of thought and feeling in the culture, not as the begetter of sociopolitical reform. Moreover, the mirror of dramatic mimesis can only reflect the world as it is, as well as reflecting possibilities of how it could be. As the founder and dramatist of Scottish theatre group 7:84 John McGrath points out: “the theatre can never ‘cause’ a social change. It can articulate pressure towards one, help people celebrate their strengths and maybe build their self-confidence […] Above all, it can be the way people find their voice, their solidarity and their collective determination.”26 Likewise film, in spite of the various manifestos and creative projects promoting cinema as a force for social and political activism, from Eisenstein and Brecht to

25 Ella Hickson in interview with Almeida Theatre. https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=vCqmdNgIwXk. 26 John McGrath, Introduction to The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black Black Oil, Methuen Drama Modern Play Series, Bloomsbury Academic, reissued 2019, xxvii.

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Godard and Third Cinema praxis, remains primarily a form of entertainment and recreation, rather than an ideological tool of either progressive or conservative factions. In today’s globalised, transcultural scene one key difference between stage and screen drama’s respective capacity for sociocultural intervention is that Hollywood’s longstanding pre-eminence as so-called ‘Dominant Cinema’, largely propagating overt or covert, reactionary and pro-establishment ideology,27 has no exact counterpart in theatre. The transformation of the stage musical, pre- and post-millennium, into a more socially and politically conscious form of theatre than it had been since Porgy and Bess or the Brecht-Weill collaborations of the 1920s and early ‘30s, with less conventionally ‘safe’ productions such as Rent (1996), Hedwig and the Angry Inch (1996), Billy Elliott (2005), Hamilton (2015), Freedom Riders—the Civil Rights Musical (2017) and Me, the People—The Trump America Musical (2017), suggests the stage is less restrictive in subject-matter in that genre than cinema. There are always exceptions, such as the multi-award-winning 2005 stage version of Stephen Daldry’s 2000 film Billy Elliot, which was arguably somewhat less potent a critique than its source. Both dramatic media, as cultural institutions, have the tendency to function more as an outlet for expressing acceptably progressive ideas and values, rather than more radical ones, and for catering to liberal and educated audiences, thus tending to preach to the converted. An obvious analogy would be with the Aristotelian concept of catharsis, because, from a more sceptical non-mainstream perspective, theatre and cinema purge emotions or assuage consciences, rather than inciting and advocating sociopolitical insurgency or change. It was with good reason that Brecht’s theatrical praxis was emphatically anti-Aristotelian. As Joe Kelleher points out, these reasons also apply in contemporary theatre: At the heart of Aristotle’s account of the way that catharsis is able to channel and nullify all shocks to the social system is an operation that has haunted ‘radical’ performance right up to our own day, rendering the most ‘transgressive’ or ‘subversive’ art forms, particularly in later capitalist societies, liable to co-optation by an economic system that is always able

27 See Toby Miller, ‘Geopolitics and cinema’ in The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Politics, Routledge, 2016, 27–39 and Miller et al., Global Hollywood, 2nd edition, B.F.I., 2004 for an extended treatment of the subject.

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to make room at home and fatten itself upon what pretends to threaten it. We see this in the constant ability of the cultural mainstream to absorb and promote influences that, only yesterday, were being denounced as shocking or threatening to society.28

Notorious exceptions, such as Lindsay Anderson’s Paris 1968-inspired film If and Sarah Kane, whose 1995 play Blasted epitomised ‘in-yerface’ theatre at its most provocative, have tended to underline the rule as regards the policy of major film and theatre companies and institutions. However, to pick up on the critical observation above by McGrath (no liberal middle-of-the-roader in his own productions), both film and theatre can raise consciousness and articulate the need for collective action, intervening in their unique way to bring about change. The works of great world dramatists of the stature of Shakespeare, Ibsen and Brecht, despite the assimilation of the first two into the cultural mainstream, are testimony to drama’s enlightening influence. Drama, whether on stage or screen, is one of the first things to be censored and banned by political dictatorships lest it become a focus for opposition. In stark contrast, more covert censorship and interference in supposedly freer, more open societies in the creative autonomy of play production, as Malpede argues above, are perhaps easier to miss. For example, having been commissioned by the National Youth Theatre of Great Britain in 2015 to create a large-cast work about perceptions of young Muslims in the UK and explore the possible reasons for increased radicalisation, the play ‘Homegrown’ was withdrawn following local government and police intervention. Commenting in a Guardian article on the, for them, similarly themed but much less authentic play at the National Theatre on the same topic, Another World: Losing Our Children to Islam by non-Muslim stage-writers Gillian Slovo and Nicholas Kent, writers and directors Omar El-Khairy and Nadia Latif confront the hypocrisy of racial and political stereotyping among the U.K. theatre establishment. As they saw it, the suppression of their production was “just another case in the shameful back catalogue of censored work in Britain”,29 but the response to their work-in-progress underlines the important distinction between work that is written or devised for stage 28 Joe Kelleher, Theatre and Politics, Bloomsbury, Methuen Drama, 2009, 50. 29 Omar El-Khairy and Nadia Latif, ‘Drama in the Age of Prevent:

Why can’t we move beyond Good Muslim vs Bad Muslim?’, Guardian, 13 April

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and screen and what is actually selected for production, based on various factors—ranging from budgetary considerations to the familiarity of both the dramatic author and the topic, to representation of social groups. Even if contemporary dramatic writing for theatre has the potential to be profoundly stimulating, or even disturbing, the institutions themselves may be less open to provocative progressive work than they were prior to the millennium, intersectional trends and developments notwithstanding. On a positive note, the theatre is already recovering, albeit slowly, from the dire effects of the pandemic shutdown, in much the same way that Elizabethan, Jacobean and Carolingian theatre bounced back after the periodic plague closures and bans. It needs to be nurtured, not only in the metropolis but more importantly at local grass-roots level, to give a voice to those marginalised by today’s political oppression and cost-of-living crises. In Towards a Civic Theatre Dan Hutton makes a valuable critical distinction between theatre performed in the community and theatre of the community. The latter type has a close affinity with local audiences, whereas the former type is more of a generic, non-local product: Where is the space for community? Have we lost a sense of theatre as a shared, public forum, as a small space carved out within a bigger space whose sole purpose is to think, as a collective, about the world and what it means to be human? The problem goes deeper than pure economics. Due to the local authority cuts…the increase of co-productions and the slow invasion of luxury aesthetics into their spaces, too many theatres came to exist in communities, but not of them.30

As Hutton argues here, contemporary community theatre needs to provide the kind of locally focused forum for critical discussion of the issues affecting people’s everyday lives that Boal and his followers developed and performed with such impact. An aesthetics of resistance to globalist and corporate interests and subservient national governments doesn’t necessarily involve tedious didacticism; rather, it can promote a judicious balance of entertainment and sociopolitical argument. There is also a need to find a balance between writing and productions that

2016. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/apr/13/drama-in-the-age-of-preventwhy-cant-we-move-beyond-good-muslim-v-bad-muslim. 30 Dan Hutton, Towards a Civic Theatre, Chapter 2, A Short History. Kindle location

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focus on the individual and those that focus on the collective, and in which the representation of individual actions functions metonymically to arouse empathy and identification, on the one hand, and critical awareness among audiences, on the other. Amid the complex challenges of a very different twenty-first-century world, dramatists and theatre companies can take inspiration from the notable achievements of earlier generations of writers and performers, often working in adverse circumstances, who created dramatic work that spoke eloquently to audiences about the world around them.

CHAPTER 3

Progressive Western Cinema—An Overview

The problem is not to make political films, but to make films politically. Jean-Luc Godard, 1968

A Companion Form to Stage Drama This chapter will discuss the history of feature film as a form of cultural intervention and a socially and critically engaged dramatic art up until the new millennium. It will provide a genealogy of progressive cinema from its early years at the turn of the last century up until the turn of the millennium. As Raymond Williams argues in his and Michael Orrom’s ‘Preface to Film’ (1954), film drama has taken its place among the dramatic arts and has evolved, just as stage drama evolved in various styles and dramatic traditions: Dramatic methods change, in the work of dramatic writers; and so also the conditions of performance of this work change. But all are changes within the dramatic tradition; and this is also the case with film, covering the

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changed conditions of performance, and the changed dramatic methods which these have made necessary.1

Williams makes a compelling case for seeing screen drama as a companion form to stage drama within the context of broader cultural forms and traditions. Writing in the early postwar period in an era of cultural renaissance and inclusivity, Williams argues the necessary link between what he sees as “the creative experiments” that the film medium engages in and “the general tradition of drama”.2 He thus rejects the modern ‘habit’ of seeing film drama as belonging to a quite separate institution and as a fundamentally different cultural phenomenon. Having discussed and conceded the differences between cinema and theatre in terms of audience presence, conventions and technological factors, Williams finds common ground in the integration in both performance media of speech, movement and design. For Williams, both dramatic arts express ‘a structure of feeling’—to refer to the critic’s key theory on the relationship between tradition and innovation—that reflects social and aesthetic conventions and changes. Despite the greater appeal of the dramatic film in the context of mass culture, the documentary form has been more typically associated with investigative, and in some cases polemical, sociopolitical intervention. The drama film tends to be considered a more escapist, apolitical cultural product, at least from the profit-making perspective. For Jean-Luc Comolli and Paul Narboni, however, in their era-defining 1971 article in Screen,3 all cinemas can be seen as political, because they are it is produced within the framework of an ideological apparatus. Although their argument holds true in broad terms, I propose to adopt a more selective approach in my discussion, in order to highlight specifically politically engaged feature films, particularly those with a directly or indirectly progressive aim. The genealogy of progressive films presented here will focus principally on more mainstream cinema that has reached a wider national and transnational audience. Radical alternative and activist or 1 Raymond Williams, ‘Film and the Dramatic Tradition’ (extract from Raymond Williams and Michael Orrom, ‘Preface to Film’, 1954), Chapter 2 in John Higgins, ed. The Raymond Williams Reader, Blackwell Publishers, 2001, 26. 2 Ibid., 26. 3 Jean-Luc Comolli & Paul Narboni, ‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism’. Screen, 12(1): 27–

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avant-garde cinema, rather like radical fringe theatre, has the tendency to preach to the converted if it remains ‘underground’ and limited in distribution and exhibition. The gradually encroaching censorship of cinema, particularly from the synchronised sound era onward, suggests that the various establishment bodies in many countries saw film as a powerful social tool to be controlled and even manipulated. Thus, it was often incumbent on directors and screenwriters who sought to make socially progressive films to convey ideas non-didactically through strong narratives and performances, gently nudging audiences, as opposed to buttonholing them. The common practice of adapting screenplays from canonical or contemporary stage plays and novels was generally a factor in promoting progressive ideas through cinema. At the same time, screen adaptations often failed to convey the full range of ideological meaning to be found in their source texts, precisely on account of the pragmatic and commercial exigencies of the medium; these include the collaborative nature of film production and distribution, the demands and expectations created by the star system and formulaic narrative conventions, and the ambivalence of screen images in themselves. As in the previous chapter on theatre, this chapter will elaborate on the diachronic features and developments of cinema, and discuss the historical affinity between theatre and cinema. It will argue that cinema has the capability to produce hard-hitting, but also emotionally and intellectually engaging, dramas that are progressive in orientation, in contradistinction to the generally conservative orthodoxy established by the studios and film corporations. The chapter will present an overview of the socially engaged history of mainstream cinema, from the expressive silent cinema of Eisenstein, Chaplin, Lang and others to the politically engaged cinema of the 1930s and ‘40s, and from the counter-culture of the 1960s and ‘70s to the emancipatory films of race, gender and class that defied fin de siècle neoconservatism.

The Silent Era and the Political Struggle in Hollywood It may appear a bootless task to claim that cinema in general is a socially progressive and engaged art form in view of its proclivity for commerce and profit-driven development over aesthetic and all other considerations. Such a perspective, however, tends to foreground latter-day Hollywood

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and its imitators at the expense of other varieties of cinema. It also fails to take into account the social engagement that can be discerned in the film medium from the early silent film era onward by prioritising Hollywood and the globalised market and disregarding other vibrant ‘small-nation’4 and larger-nation cinema; while Hollywood may be the key player in the evolution of film technology and in audience-building, in terms of substance—i.e. thematic, narrative and ideational content—it is rarely revolutionary in any sense of the word. Its predilection for predictability in market terms is all-too-frequently carried over into its predictability as a storytelling form and its inherent conservatism in both artistic and sociopolitical arenas. That said, certain Hollywood directors and actors have earned a reputation for ‘going against the grain’ and resisting mainstream conformity. The institution’s emphasis on mass audience entertainment that reflects the broader interest of establishment bodies, whether corporate or governmental, has of course been instrumental in stifling more progressive or socially critical voices. Nevertheless, even in Hollywood, mainstream actors and directors such as Robert Redford, Warren Beatty, Oliver Stone, Spike Lee, Tim Robbins, Meryl Streep and George Clooney—not to mention progressive directors of the past such as Charles Chaplin, Frank Capra, John Huston, Orson Welles and Stanley Kubrick—have bucked the inherently conservative corporatist system with their stubbornly independent and sociopolitically critical work. Steven J. Ross in Hollywood Left Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics (2011) has traced the political ramifications of the institution, from its rightwing corporatist cultural politics of intervention and propaganda in the Louis B. Mayer era at the MGM studio, to the upheavals caused by major left-leaning talents, such as Chaplin, Beatty, Jane Fonda and others. Ross’s narrative oscillates between left and right with chapters on such polar opposites as the leftist activist, Fonda, and the National Rifle Association’s former Vice-President and mouthpiece Charlton Heston, together with insightful chapters on other icons of the Neoconservatism such as Ronald Reagan and, in recent times, the less virulently doctrinaire Arnold Schwarzenegger. He argues for a more critical understanding of the relationship between the Hollywood machine and, not just the country itself, but the world at large. He also points to the longstanding manipulation of 4 See, e.g., Mette Hjört and Duncan Petrie (eds.), The Cinema of Small Nations, Edinburgh University Press, 2007.

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the mainstream film industry by political figures such as William J. Burns, J. Edgar Hoover and of course Mayer himself, whose masterminding of the 1934 ‘fake news’ campaign against a democratic candidate, the writer Upton Sinclair, pre-dated the Trump variety by eighty years. While the rise of independent directors working outside the studio system introduced more progressive ideas, reflecting Roosevelt’s New Deal welfare state policies, as Ross shows, Cold War paranoia brought a radical new conservatism. The most infamous manifestation of this cultural politics was the late 1940s–‘50s witch-hunt instigated by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee against a significant number of screenwriters, actors and directors, including Chaplin, Lewis Milestone, Dalton Trumbo, John Huston, Lillian Hellman, John Garfield, Joseph Losey, Paul Robeson and Carl Foreman (screenwriter of High Noon). There were many others, who were placed on the HUAC blacklist and intimidated, or in some cases, pilloried and hounded out of their professions. As Ross argues, this underlying right-wing evangelism in Hollywood became more overt following the charismatic appeal of actors such as Ronald Reagan, then President of the Screen Actors Guild, who testified against social progressives among his then-colleagues. For Ross this direct political participation and the accompanying celebrity consciousness among the public have weighted the scales of influence heavily in favour of the right: The Hollywood left has been more effective in publicising and raising funds for various causes. But if we ask who has done more to change the American government, the answer is the Hollywood right. The Hollywood left has the political glitz, but the Hollywood right sought, won and exercised political power.5

In his description of Louis B. Mayer as “the man who brought Hollywood into the Republican party”,6 Ross appears to imply that the institution has remained in alignment with that party’s agenda ever since. At the same time, he suggests that the benefits, interests and even the influences are not simply one-way. His book appeared before the ascent to power of Donald Trump in 2016; however, his above-quoted verdict 5 Steven J. Ross, Hollywood Left Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics, Oxford University Press (U.S.), 2011, 4. 6 Ibid., 5.

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on where the Hollywood money is always placed is vindicated by the election of the populist demagogue, whose familiarity as a television personality, rather than his political acumen or perceived competence for high office, appears to have been the major factor in his unexpected success. Isaac Asimov’s acerbic comment on American anti-intellectualism at the inception of the Reagan era seems even truer today than it did in the science-fiction writer’s original Newsweek opinion piece.7 This antiintellectualism is reflected in some parts of the media or in speeches by politicians in response to socially progressive Hollywood actors, directors and films, even though politically engaged films are relatively few and far between. As M. Keith Booker charts in his research guide Film and the American Left, the silent film era of the first few decades of the twentieth century was considerably more open and politically eclectic than the early ‘talkie’ period that followed. This was before the stranglehold, applied by the Hollywood studio monopoly and the personal intervention of Mayer, imposed what was in effect a moratorium on complete freedom of artistic expression. Silent feature films produced in the United States such as From Dusk till Dawn, also called Capital Versus Labor (Frank E. Wolfe, 1913), The Jungle (Augustus Thomas and George Irving, 1914), What is to be Done? (Joseph Leon Weiss, 1914), The People versus John Doe (Lois Weber, 1916), The Floorwalker (Chaplin, 1916), Contrast (Guy Hedlund, 1921), The New Disciple (Ollie Sellers, 1921) and The Big Parade (King Vidor and George Hill, 1925) were all written, acted and directed from a progressive, and in some cases openly left-wing, perspective. Moreover What is to Be Done was inspired by Russian dissident writer Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s socialist utopia vision in his homonymous novel of 1863. Many of the above films and others of the period depict labour abuses and disputes, portraying the effects of poverty, class distinction and appalling working and living conditions among the working class, as well as critiquing the mores of the upper classes and offering a more pacifist, egalitarian and internationalist viewpoint.

7 “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The

strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” Asimov, Opinion Column (My Turn), Newsweek, 21 January 1980. See https://media.aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/ 04/ASIMOV_1980_Cult_of_Ignorance.pdf.

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However, any category of politically significant films of this period must include one of the most innovative and influential works of the early cinema—but also one of the most crudely racist ever made—D.W. Griffith’s groundbreaking Birth of a Nation (1915). Based on the otherwise forgettable novel The Clansman by Thomas Dixon Jr, the film projected blatantly pro-Confederacy sympathies, partly inspired by the book but also by the experiences of Griffith’s father who fought on the side of the defeated confederacy of southern states in the American Civil War. By supporting, and indirectly reinvigorating, the ideology and actions of the white-supremacist vigilante group the Ku Klux Klan, Birth of a Nation had more lasting impact than any progressive movie of the era, not only because of its technical sophistication but also because of its explicitly racist content. The director’s more progressively inclined Intolerance produced the following year (1916) is often regarded as Griffith’s apologia for the unsubtly racist images that make Birth of a Nation a shocking cinematic experience, even by the standards of today’s unsubtle populist politics. As Booker and Steven Ross (2003)8 both point out, the power of the new medium to impact on and influence previously unimaginable numbers of people was quickly perceived by both sides of the political divide, and at first there was lively competition in transmitting their respective messages to the masses. These were direct in the case of pro-establishment documentaries, paid for by wealthy industrialists and corporations, or more nuanced and often packaged judiciously with a romantic sub-plot, in the case of more progressively oriented feature films. Regarding early left-wing cinema, there was a considerable influence from the largely progressive theatre industry, particularly from dramatiststurned-screenwriters some of whom were excited at the prospect of writing for the new medium. Such influences were not only of a technical nature, as discussed above, but also ideational and ideological. William De Mille, elder brother of the more mainstream Cecil B. De Mille, was one such playwright whose social justice-orientated plays transferred effectively to the screen. A major consideration in assessing the impact of the cinema on mass audiences in this era—and film’s demographic increased by almost geometric progression over the first two decades of its existence, with 8 See Steven Ross, “The Visual Politics of Class: Silent Film and the Public Sphere” in Film International 2, Vol. 1, No. 2, 2003. ‘Class Visions’: A Special Issue.

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cinema spectatorship far outstripping most other forms of public entertainment—was the fact that pre-sound films, with relatively few exceptions, were universal in their appeal. This meant that progressive European films and filmmakers from countries such as France, Germany, Denmark and Italy, and later the nascent Soviet Union, could easily be appreciated by ordinary people in the generally more conservative United States and United Kingdom. Also, the influx of talented foreign directors to Hollywood, such as Chaplin, Milestone (born Leib Milstein in Ukraine), Michael Curtiz, Maurice Tourneur, Erich Von Stroheim, Josef Von Sternberg (both born without their aristocratic ‘Von’ monikers) and Ernst Lubitsch—many of whose ideas and themes were more progressive than the most technically innovative American directors such as Griffith— opened up the field in ways that tended to challenge core American conservative values. Directors such as Curtiz and Von Stroheim also brought with them a clear understanding of the aesthetics of German expressionism. Ideological, if not technical and aesthetic, influence was subsequently constrained by the advent of talking pictures and the sovereignty of the studios, as well as the greater degree of control adopted by moguls such as Mayer and Irving Thalberg. The latter’s collaboration with Will H. Hays on the Motion Picture Production Code shortly after the introduction of sound films on spurious grounds of “morality” was certainly a major factor in ending the silent film era of greater political pluralism and thematic freedom. Proposed in 1930, but in effective operation from 1934 right up until 1968, the controversial code not only circumscribed directors who sought to depict scenes of sex and violence, but also, rather more covertly, those whose films conveyed any unwelcome anti-establishment message. Notwithstanding, before the door started to close on more socially progressive or left-wing films, coinciding to a great extent with the closing of the silent film era, a substantial number of films had been produced that were critical of the status quo in America, albeit often deploying melodrama as a vehicle to soften the criticism and idealise the downtrodden. As Booker has shown, activists and organisations, such as the field director of the Labour Film Service, Joseph Cannon, and other leftist filmmaking initiatives, such as the union-linked Federation Film Corporation and American Federation of Labour, supported the production and distribution of films that countered the propaganda of corporate and government bodies, and spoke to working-class concerns.

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At the same time, they realised that complex arguments needed to be eschewed in favour of dramatic styles and a mise-en-scène that spoke more directly and simply to audiences. The melodrama and romance conveyed by stylised and gestural acting techniques in these films were mostly imported from theatrical melodramatic styles and methods. Critics such as Nicolas Vardac (1949) and Brewster and Jacobs (1997) have traced the close relationship between the theatre of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theatre and silent cinema and the influence, not only of acting styles and mise-en-scène, but also of subject-matter of the former on the latter. The fact that many of the foreign directors of progressive silent films, as well as some of the indigenous ones such as Griffith and De Mille, had their artistic roots and training in the theatre also contributed to the rapid emergence of the new medium as more than a mere spectacle of attraction. Another progressive aspect of American silent cinema was the often overlooked contribution of women directors, the most notable among them being Ida May Park, Frances Marion, Lois Weber and, latterly, Dorothy Arzner. These former actresses (film editor in Arzner’s case) were also screenwriters and Weber a producer, while Marion subsequently became a novelist. Besides, one of the greatest stars of the silent era, the angelic-looking Mary Pickford, was in real life a shrewd businesswoman and, ultimately a producer, in an industry dominated by men. Her role in co-founding two major independent film production enterprises was also a factor in spreading the idea of females being empowered by cinema to be more than an object of ‘the male gaze’. Although many of these women’s prolific respective contributions involved so-called ‘women’s features’, providing wider and more appealing opportunities for women actors in the fledgling industry than might otherwise have been the case, they also explored social themes. Weber, in particular, openly advocated birth control in her films, notably Where Are My Children (1916) and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1917), at a time when it was not accepted by the male chauvinist establishment, especially the church authorities. Women’s suffrage features, such as What 80 Million Women Want? (1913) written by Florence Maule Cooley, and featuring Emmeline Pankhurst as herself, and Your Girl or Mine (1914), although directed by male directors, were also influential in highlighting the cause of voting rights for women, a goal that was fully achieved in all states by 1920 with the 19th Amendment to the constitution. Such progressive silent features were not particularly representative of the general ethos, however,

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and there were many anti-suffrage comedies and melodramas, as Kay Sloan has discussed,9 that satirised or ridiculed the progressive women’s movements. Unsurprisingly, the legacy of these female directors’ and screenwriters’ work has been less well preserved than that of many of their male peers. The advent of male chauvinist studio bosses—Louis B. Mayer being an egregious example—served to obscure their reputation, and inhibit opportunities for women directors in the synchronised sound era, although Dorothy Arzner proved a rare exception to that unwritten rule. Given that the silent era pre-dated the intrusive and often patriarchally motivated censorship of the Hollywood Code, censorship was a nebulous and negotiable area, and there was greater freedom for the expression of alternative thinking on a range of issues. Of all the progressive U.S.-based directors and creative talents of this period perhaps the most subversive of authority and the class hierarchy was the prodigiously gifted Chaplin. Through the expedient of mild and whimsical romantic comedy almost always revolving around the ‘little guy’, Chaplin was able to challenge the class distinction and elitist value system that he had known only too well in his poverty-stricken childhood in London. Chaplin’s egalitarian socialist and atheistic convictions underpinned his work; in the decent persona of his ingenuous but ingenious tramp character and his seemingly innocuous, farcical plot-lines his progressive values are subtextual but palpable, and are emotionally accentuated by a shrewd balance between absurdity, pathos and ultimate triumph against the odds. In his earlier shorts and features such as The Immigrant (1917), A Dog’s Life (1918), The Kid (1921), The Idle Class (1921) and others Chaplin’s work evinced a strong sense of sympathy for the underdog allied to a droll observation of pomposity and class snobbery that became his hallmark. In 1919, tired of the commercial constraints on his artistry imposed by the increasingly dictatorial film production companies, Chaplin took the unprecedented step of forming his own company, United Artists, in partnership with three other creative artists of the era, Griffith, and actors Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, in order to

9 See Kay Sloan, ‘Sexual Warfare in the Silent Cinema: Comedies and Melodramas of Woman Suffragism’. American Quarterly 33(4) (Autumn 1981): 412–436. Johns Hopkins University Press. https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/31143/SexualWarfareSi lentCinemas.pdf?sequence=1.

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exercise greater control over their own output. Chaplin financed and meticulously monitored every aspect of the production of his work and became entirely independent of the Hollywood studio system, once he had completed his contractual obligations to the First National corporation. The enormous social upheavals throughout Europe during and after World War I meant that early cinema across the Atlantic was heavily inflected with sociopolitical reference and resonance—as much, if not more so, than in the United States. French progressive films, such as J’accuse (Abel Gance, 1919) and Coeur Fidèle (Jean Epstein, 1923) and German expressionist cinema especially The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920), Doctor Mabuse—The Gambler (Fritz Lang, 1922) and Metropolis (1927), had substantial impact on the subsequent development of progressive cinema. Not only did their bold cinematographic innovations impact on directors and, to a lesser extent perhaps, audiences, but also their daring, though allegorical, subject-matter can be seen as an indictment of a corrupt and self-deluding society, ripe for authoritarian takeover. The relative simplicity of substituting alternative titles and inter-titles for those of the original versions meant that the content and implications of these films were universal, even if the cultural connotations and subtext might be somewhat more restricted. Many of the European directors of this period made no attempt to conceal their political engagement, although hardly any expressed a conservative or pro-establishment position. For this reason many of them were forced to flee the encroachment of totalitarianism in their home countries, particularly Germany, with a significant number finding refuge in Hollywood. Lang’s futuristic dystopian Metropolis with its powerful echoes of contemporary class struggle was screened in countries including the U.S.—as well as in the pre-crash Weimar Republic—so that when he arrived in Hollywood his work was already known. Also influential on the American left and on filmmakers and critics in other countries were the revolutionary silent films, revolutionary in technique and style as much as in subject-matter, of Soviet directors Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin. As well as having a background in architecture, the former had been engaged in revolutionary theatre until he realised the potential for transmitting a powerful Marxist message via the new art form. Eisenstein’s Strike (1925), Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October: Ten Days that Shook the World (1928) and Pudovkin’s Mother (1926), The End of Saint Petersburg (1927) and Storm over Asia

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(1928) represented not merely a progressive mode of filmmaking, but cinema as a powerful and direct form of political persuasion. Their radical use of montage editing to create symbolic and often highly emotive shot sequences was as much a breakthrough in suggestive cinematography as Griffith’s innovations had been a decade earlier. The radicalism of their political message was likewise inescapable, which explains why their films were banned outright or extremely restricted in their screenings in Western countries, just as Griffith’s Birth of a Nation had been banned in their country. Ironically the innovative works of the Soviet silent era were soon to fall out of favour in the directors’ own country, since Stalin’s tastes in socialist realism were far more hackneyed than the forward-looking dramatists and directors who had so idealistically promoted socialist emancipation. Eisenstein’s visit to the U.S. in 1930 involved meetings and attempted collaborations with left-leaning figures in Hollywood, specifically Chaplin and writer Upton Sinclair, with a view to shooting a revolutionary film in Mexico.10 Despite the frustrations Eisenstein encountered and the difficulty of gaining wider acceptance in Hollywood, there is no doubt that his influence, aesthetic and ideological, on succeeding generations of filmmakers, such as the young Orson Welles, was considerable.

Political Constraints in Cinema in the Era of the Code The transition to talking pictures that occurred at this time naturally detracted from the universalism of gestural, stylised acting, but it also enabled directors to embrace a more socially realistic mode of filmmaking, one that could deploy both montage and mise-en-scène techniques allied to synchronous spoken dialogue. At the same time, the relative freedom of artistic expression enjoyed during most of the silent era now became somewhat constricted by a combination of political pressure from the top, notably the subversion-obsessed Hoover and like-minded right-wing moguls such as Mayer, who cared much more about profits than civil and artistic liberties. Gradually during the 1930s, as the Hays ‘moral’ code 10 The film to be entitled, Que Viva México, was never completed for exhibition in cinemas and was reconstructed by the Soviet director Grigori Aleksandrov in 1979 and released by Mosfilm after Eisenstein’s considerable footage was sent to Moscow by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where it had remained following the abortive project.

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began to take effect in conjunction with the powerful lobby created by the newly formed League of Decency, the progressive ethos of cinema discernible in the 1920s faded. The studios increasingly turned to big musicals of the Busby Berkeley type, as well as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers romantic comedies, in an attempt to recoup their massive capital investment in synchronised sound technology and new movie theatres. One counter-current to this trend towards an escapist film culture that sought to entertain the public during the Great Depression was the ‘social problem’ genre preceding new President Franklin Roosevelt’s radical reform programme known as The New Deal. Films such as I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932), Heroes for Sale and Wild Boys of the Road (William Wellman, 1933) and Our Daily Bread (King Vidor, 1934) all reflect a spirit of critical rebellion against the stark social inequities of the post-crash era. Vidor’s Our Daily Bread— selected in 2015 for the Library of Congress National Film Registry as being a culturally and historically significant work—projects a socialistic bottom-up solution to agrarian poverty that challenges prevailing establishment ideology. MGM rejected it, and the film was made and distributed through the United Artists group. Alan Crosland’s 1934 Massacre, a melodramatic, if rare, critique of white racialism against native Americans, is also representative of the progressive pre-Code ethos, as was Victor Fleming’s 1932 adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s novel The Wet Parade for MGM. Sinclair’s ‘End Poverty in California’ gubernatorial election campaign in 1934 was notoriously undermined by fake newsreels issued by the latter organisation, presumably with the approval of Mayer. Among the most effective forms of sociopolitical critique of this era was the anarchic satire of the Marx Brothers’ comedic vehicles. These included Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933), A Night at the Opera (Sam Wood, 1935) and A Day at the Races (Sam Wood, 1937), all of which brazenly mocked the niceties of polite society and class distinction, as well as cocking a snook at authority by deploying Groucho’s caustic one-line gags and Harpo’s and Chico’s commedia del arte-inspired visual humour in an attractive potpourri of zaniness. In retrospect, Duck Soup, although the least commercially successful of the trio, was probably the most politically relevant of their films and incorporated more of the wacky anarchic spirit of their initial works for the screen. At the same time, some of the zestful spontaneity of the vaudeville stage that had characterised their first foray into cinema was toned down in the later films for MGM.

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Later Wood and McCarey would be among those who felt compelled to denounce their left-leaning Hollywood colleagues at the HUAC hearings. Chaplin, in contrast to the Marx Brothers, had been understandably reluctant to abandon his vaudevillian pantomime roots or his universal visual gags, and continued to make silent pictures. That said, a more marked sociopolitical subtext can be noted in his work, as the plots of his films became more complex. His friendship with Sinclair, and subsequently with Eisenstein, would have merely accentuated the spirit of social consciousness that was evident in the earlier short films such as The Immigrant. This is exemplified by both City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936), where the farcical portrayal of social class relations in the former and the dehumanisation of the assembly line in the latter provided a trenchant critique of an American Dream that had turned sour during the Great Depression. The comically whimsical strain in his earlier work remained, but was now accompanied by a more lampooning tone, as he moved from slapstick comedy towards more layered and sophisticated social satire that hilariously skewered the targets of his ridicule, and sought redemption in the common man and woman and the notion of a simple and independent life. A fable about the decent, common man beating the corrupt political machine, former Sicilian immigrant Frank Capra’s Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) was politically controversial on its release on the eve of World War II in Europe. The film picked up on the themes of common decency and social idealism conveyed in his 1936 movie Mr Deeds Goes to Town, of which the latter film was originally planned as a sequel. Both exhibited Capra’s faith in (or hope for) the survival of democratic American values and the need for goodwill and perseverance in the face of venality, manipulation and despair. Mr Smith Goes to Washington encountered considerable hostility from the political and filmmaking establishment in the United States, where it was branded antiAmerican and even pro-communist in conservative circles, and was widely banned in totalitarian countries. In the highly volatile and politicised climate of Europe throughout the Thirties and leading up to World War II several important sociopolitically conscious films were produced, some of which became cinematic milestones. These included the musical satire À Nous la Liberté, French director René Clair’s tale of an escaped convict who transforms himself into a wealthy industrialist, only to forsake his newfound riches for a life

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on the road. Somewhat akin to Chaplin’s Modern Times in its subjectmatter and narrative trajectory, and employing motifs of the assembly line and economic hardship, the 1931 film explores contrasting themes of wealth and poverty, collective enslavement to mechanisation and individual freedom. Clair’s subsequent films made in this period, particularly the 1934 Le Dernier Milliardaire/The Last Multimillionaire, were subject to criticism from the French right-wing, and he moved to Hollywood in 1939 when war with Germany was declared. In a similar vein Jean Renoir’s social satires Boudu Sauvé des Eaux/ Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932), La Grande Illusion/Grand Illusion (1937) and La Règle du Jeu/ The Rules of the Game (1939), were all subtly subversive of the received ideas and values of the established order. In retrospect these films, although critically praised in some quarters at the time, have come to be regarded as classics of cinema. The more ironic, melancholic mood of Grand Illusion and its pacifist humanitarian message contrasted sharply with the growing militarism and nationalism of Europe in the prewar years. In his depiction of the Jewish character, Rosenthal, Renoir was also critiquing the rising tide of antisemitism that was not only sweeping Germany but had long been prevalent in his own country. The film also challenged the idea that war was any kind of solution to humanity’s problems, and instead stressed the importance of cooperation and mutual respect as being more valuable than individual acts of patriotic courage. It was the first foreign language film to be nominated for an Academy Award in the U.S. and won other plaudits, but probably the most telling accolade was its banning both by the Nazis in 1938 and by the French government two years later. The war years had a seriously inhibiting effect on feature-film output— although cinema on both sides tended to serve the war effort and be used for propaganda purposes. Nevertheless, socially and politically resonant films of great quality appeared at this time. These included Carol Reed’s The Stars Look Down (U.K. 1940), set in a Northern English mining community, John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (U.S. 1940)—the film adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel of the grinding poverty and social injustice in the very recent Great Depression—and Orson Welles’s groundbreaking portrait of the rise and fall of a media magnate, a fictionalised version of the wealthy and powerful William Randolph Hurst, in Citizen Kane (U.S. 1941). Despite being recognised as an outstanding achievement by critics independent of the Hearst press empire, the virulent campaign against the film conducted by his subordinates effectively

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sabotaged its reception, and resulted in the film’s commercial failure outside New York. Welles’s increasing interest in amoral wartime business profiteers in the subjects of a number of his later films, allied to his filmmaking aesthetic for narrative complexity and length, made him an unwelcome figure in Hollywood and, for the latter part of his career, a directorial exile. He remained edgy and aesthetically sophisticated, while his nuanced portraits of despotism and megalomania were channelled through his noir masterpieces The Lady from Shanghai (1947) and Touch of Evil (1958) as well as in his Shakespeare adaptations. Two other significant movies of the early war years were comedies that derided Nazi militarism and aggression, but retrospectively in view of the Holocaust and the devastation and terrible death toll of the war, their satirical treatment may seem a little misplaced. German émigré director Ernst Lubitsch’s witty tale of a Polish theatre company’s resourceful acts of resistance against the Nazi occupiers of their country in To Be or Not to Be (U.S. 1942) and Charles Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (U.S. 1940) shifted the focus of progressive cinema somewhat, away from social justice issues and towards anti-Fascist themes. Chaplin’s first talking picture was a significant cultural contribution to influencing public opinion in favour of U.S. intervention against totalitarianism in Europe and Asia; The Great Dictator provided audiences in free countries at a critical stage of a war that the Axis powers finally appeared to be winning with a reminder of the dangers of isolationism and the benefits of democracy. In his trenchant parody of the histrionics of dictators Hitler and Mussolini, via their Adenoid Hynkel and Benzino Napaloni caricatures, respectively, Chaplin was ahead of the curve. This was the case in the United Kingdom which had originally considered banning the film when it was still in production, and later in the United States where Republican senators pushed for a Senate hearing against Hollywood’s supposed ‘war-mongering’ film propaganda. When The Great Dictator was released, it was deemed by certain right-wing politicians offensive to leaders of European governments with which the United States was, at this juncture, not at war. Chaplin’s closing speech as the Jewish barber impersonating Hynkel and extolling the virtues of democracy, in which he talks directly into the camera, has to be one of the defining moments of twentieth-century political cinema. However, he observed in his 1964 autobiography that had he known of the horror of the Nazi death camps at the time, he would never have contemplated making the satirical comedy in the first place.

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In 1941 with his reputation riding high after the box-office success of The Great Dictator, Chaplin became a founding member of The Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers (SIMPP), along with Orson Welles, Alexander Korda, Walt Disney and others, in an industry still dominated by the decisions and judgements of major studios. However, in the very different postwar climate pervading his adoptive country under the pernicious influence of the HUAC ‘witch-hunt’, Chaplin suddenly found himself persona non grata; despite the deep hostility that was expressed towards him by forces on the right and his open contempt for HUAC, he never appeared before the House Committee. Neither did he apply for naturalisation as an American citizen and, in response to an Immigration and Naturalisation Service enquiry, he declared that he considered himself “a citizen of the world”. The increasing anti-leftist hysteria of the latter World War II and early Cold War years meant that, as a perceived communist sympathiser who had long been on FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s blacklist, he was no longer permitted to work in the United States, and he left for London and then Switzerland, where he settled. Chaplin didn’t return to the U.S. for another twenty years after the Cold War paranoia had to some extent subsided. Even in his later talkies, Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and A King in New York (1957), the indictment of elitist authoritarianism and social injustice under capitalism is clearly conveyed—more trenchantly in the case of the former and more whimsically in the latter. It is no coincidence that the French term ‘Chaplinisme’, derived from the work of the man dubbed ‘Charlot’ in the French language, is glossed in English as ‘an expression of injustice’.11 Referring to his father’s legacy today, his eldest son Michael Chaplin remarked, “If you take the speech from The Great Dictator, that’s as relevant today as it was when it was written. The world hasn’t changed. There are still people running away from wars, displaced with nowhere to go—he knew all about that. He had lived it himself”.12 In the Hollywood studios in the postwar period, a few directors such as Nicholas Ray and Robert Rossen were prepared to make films that pushed the boundaries of conservative acceptability. Ray’s They Live by 11 See http://www.languefrancaise.net/Tintin/33454. 12 Michael Chaplin, quoted in an interview with Ed Rampell, 22 August 2016, for the

online U.S. magazine The Progressive July–August 2016. See https://progressive.org/mag azine/charlie-chaplin-hollywood-s-political-exile/.

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Night (1947)—about a doomed love affair between a wrongly accused young man from the wrong side of the tracks and the girl who helps him—and Rossen’s more politically sensitive adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men (1949) were rare examples of ‘unpatriotic’13 films that were made at this time. The latter was a thinly disguised portrait of the former Governor of Louisiana, Huey P. Long, not unlike Welles’s Citizen Kane in this respect. The film’s commercial success didn’t shield the director from being called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951 and 1953 and blacklisted as an alleged communist until he cooperated with the Committee. All the King’s Men’s noir picture of political manipulation and intrigue reflected the dangers of dictatorial power vested in populist demagogues such as Long. The Willie Stark central character starts out as a champion of the poor, as Long did, but his egomaniacal behaviour and disregard for the rights of others eventually leads to his demise in a revenge murder (as opposed to the real-life political assassination of Long himself). Among the most politically conflicted of directors working in Hollywood in the era of HUAC and the Code was Elia Kazan whose name will always be associated with betrayal in progressive circles. Despite having been a socially radical stage and screen figure himself earlier in his career, Kazan was willing to name former friends and associates when giving testimony to McCarthy’s insatiable committee. For this reason his Oscar-winning movie On the Waterfront (1954), though a well-made and well-acted story of corruption and racketeering on the New York docks, will be forever tainted with the suspicion that it functioned as a coded message of compliance to the McCarthyite right-wing agenda by associating unions with criminal syndicates. Kazan had also been willing to compromise the integrity of the ending of his 1951 screen adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s powerful stage drama A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), in order to comply with the Code, despite having directed the successful and uncensored Broadway production. His trite moralistic conclusion to the film—presumably intended to convey a sense of poetic justice meted out to the rapist Stanley Kowalski (Marlon Brando)—and his suppression of Williams’s clear references to Blanche’s dead husband’s 13 Actor John Wayne’s description of the script on turning down the role that Rossen initially offered to him, and subsequently to Broderick Crawford—who accepted it and won an Oscar for his performance. See Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg, Hollywood in the Forties, London: A. Zwemmer Ltd. 79.

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homosexuality weakened what could otherwise have been an outstanding screen adaptation. Kazan remained a controversial figure, but there was no poetic justice for him, as there was for his screen version of Kowalski, and he enjoyed a long and successful career in Hollywood. In the same year that Kazan was rewarded by the industry for On the Waterfront, blacklisted and jailed director Herbert J. Biberman together with blacklisted screenwriter Michael Wilson and producer Paul Jarrico made their strongly pro-labour Salt of the Earth, a reconstruction of a 1951 miners’ strike in New Mexico, in defiance of the political and Hollywood establishment. The police and mining company’s harassment of workers, inhibiting their right to strike, followed by the eventual victory of the miners, whose solidarity forces the company eventually to the negotiating table, is depicted in a graphically realist style. In extremely adverse political circumstances Biberman and Wilson achieved a minor miracle by deploying a cast of actual mineworkers and their families, supplemented by a handful of professional actors willing to defy the HUAC artistic stranglehold. Not only pro-union, the film was ahead of its time in its emancipatory, feminist theme; the wives of the mineworkers are portrayed as the decisive factor in the success of the strike as they take picketing action after their husbands are jailed. Despite the suppression of the completed film on the grounds of subversion in all but 12 movie theatres, and those mainly in New York, in addition to endless harassment of those involved in the courageous project by the authorities, it was well received by genuinely independent critics. Even today Salt of the Earth represents a testament to solidarity and courage in the long and difficult fight against the right-wing corporatist agenda. The film’s scenes of miners, their wives and children jailed by the authorities resonate with the caging of Mexican immigrant families by the Trump administration in one of the more contemporary violations of human rights in the U.S. With honourable exceptions, however, such as Biberman and Fred Zinnemann—whose High Noon (1952) has sometimes been interpreted as allegorical of the pusillanimity of the majority—many directors producers and screenwriters allowed themselves to be shackled by a combination of the Hollywood Code and the House Un-American Activities Committee. The studios, desperate to please their political masters—as well as to compete with the new entertainment afforded by television—went into overdrive producing one forgettable jingoistic, anti-communist conspiracy film after another throughout the 1950s, supplemented by equally jingoistic Westerns and Sci-Fi films as allegories

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of either White Anglo-Saxon Protestant conquest or external threat to ‘the American way of life’. In an era of extreme Cold War tension the American industry moved strongly to the right and in the process became something of a mouthpiece for hawkish government propaganda. The ‘film noir’ which emerged and flourished at this time can be seen as symptomatic of a malaise of mistrust thinly veiled by postwar affluence and a superficial social conformity. Much of the creative energy in the Hollywood industry in this ultra-conservative period was directed more towards enhancing technological reproduction of the screen image than to producing quality films; notable exceptions to this general tendency included directing talents such as Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, William Wyler and John Huston, all of whom who managed to channel the paranoia of the age into more nuanced, ambivalent screen narratives that subtly reflected the national psyche. Fortunately, a film renaissance was taking place elsewhere in the aftermath of war. In Britain this was reflected more by high-quality literary adaptations and ‘Ealing comedies’ than by socially conscious filmmaking, even though directors such as Anthony Asquith and Carol Reed chose sociopolitically challenging material in the contemporary plays of Terence Rattigan and Graham Greene, respectively. Another screen adaptation, the Boulting brothers’ (Roy and John) 1949 Fame is the Spur, continued the trend for political biopics in the wake of Welles’s pioneering portrait of Charles Foster Kane at the start of the decade. Howard Spring’s eponymous novel was based on the life of Labour Party founder member and leader Ramsay McDonald, and represents the u-turns and compromises made by McDonald’s fictional alter ego, Hamer Radshaw. In government he becomes less and less motivated by his working-class origins and egalitarian principles and more by the desire to hang on to power, despite being isolated and increasingly ineffective. In the context of the socially progressive years of Clement Atlee’s postwar government, it should be borne in mind that McDonald, who died in 1937, though controversial among Labour voters, by no means represented the all-powerful figure that Hearst was on the other side of the Atlantic. Nonetheless, the fiction film invited reflection on the direction that a strongly mandated postwar socialist government in Britain ought to take.

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Politics in Non-anglophone ‘New Wave’ Cinema In postwar Italy there was a corresponding sense of empowerment among progressive directors whose work had been stifled for the long years under Mussolini’s rule followed by the Nazi occupation. The result proved to be the extremely influential Neorealist cinema movement. Within the space of a few years the gritty new style, based on theories developed covertly by cinema writers and directors during the Fascist dictatorship, was unveiled in a slew of imaginative works focusing on the harsh lives led by ordinary people, both in the cities and the countryside. Many of them were shot on a shoestring budget, working with limited surviving film-stock and employing amateur actors, and made a virtue out of necessity. The most notable among these were Roberto Rossellini’s Roma, Città Aperta/ Rome, Open City (1945), capturing the tension and brutality of the Nazi occupiers of the city, and filmed even as they were being ousted from it and Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di Biciclette/Bicycle Thieves with its empathy for the dispossessed of Rome struggling to survive the consequences. Some of the Neorealist films also carried a more biting anti-capitalist message, including Luchino Visconti’s La Terra Trema/The Earth Trembles (1948) about worker exploitation in Sicily and De Sica’s later films with Cesare Zavattini, Miracolo a Milano/Miracle in Milan (1951) & Umberto D. (1952), both tales of urban destitution, the former with a fantasy twist and the latter grimly realistic. Giuseppe De Santis, one of the most passionately reformist of the Neorealist directors and a former member of the Italian anti-Fascist resistance, produced the Academy Award-winning drama Riso Amaro (Bitter Rice 1949)—also ambiguously conveying the meaning Bitter Smile—which depicted its range of characters, whether artisans and peasants or urban refugees, with humanist understanding. Leftist in sympathy, but eschewing crude propaganda, the Neorealist cinema of this period represented a creative commentary by former partisan sympathisers on the damage wrought in their country by the Fascists and by the industrialists who had supported them. Italian Neorealist films were screened overseas to critical admiration and their poetic realist strain particularly influenced Italian and French directors of the next generation. In Asian countries with a strong cinema tradition the socially critical Neorealist style was also associated with the early works of directors including Nagisa Oshima and Akira Kurosawa in Japan and Satyajit Ray in India. Kurosawa explored Western theatrical source material for some of

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his early films The Lower Depths (1957, based on Maxim Gorky’s play) and The Bad Sleep Well (1962), with its contemporary Japanese take on the corruption and revenge themes of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. While Oshima was the more obviously anti-establishment director, Kurosawa’s films derive from his profound sense of social justice and humanist feeling. However, probably the greatest influence of Neorealist cinema can be seen in Ray’s debut ‘Apu trilogy’—Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956) and The World of Apu (1959)—the first one shot with a cast of non-professional actors. Not only seminal figures in their respective national cinemas, but also highly influential international auteurs, the progressive sensibilities and ideals of all three are reflected in the style and subject-matter of their artistically rich works. The 1950s French Nouvelle Vague, or New Wave, manifesto proposing the radical ‘Politique des Auteurs’—despite its robustly independent approach to filmmaking—was only obliquely political in content, at least until Jean-Luc Godard’s mid-1960s output. The more poetic realist elements of Italian Neorealism may well be regarded as a precursor of this new wave of filmmaking, even if the themes of New Wave films were typically more individualistic than communal; these often focused on ‘outsider’ figures, especially social misfits or outcasts and small-time gangsters.14 If the flowering of Italian Neorealism was indebted to the ideas and writings of progressive filmmakers suppressed under the Fascist censorship, then it can be equally argued that the French New Wave originated from the critical and theoretical interest in cinema as art form expressed in the newly founded Cahiers du Cinéma in the influential writings of Alexandre Astruc, André Bazin, Robert Bresson, François Truffaut and others. The now government-funded Cinématheque Française also played an important part in revitalising French film culture after the war and making connections between the great filmmakers of the past and the New Wave. As with Italian theorist-filmmakers, such ideas and films had been suppressed during the years of Nazi occupation under the puppet Vichy regime, but were now in full flow. The magazine explored the work of the most independent Anglophone directors such as Hitchcock, Ray, Lubitsch 14 E.g. early New Wave films such as Les Quatre-Cent Coups/ The Four Hundred Blows (Truffaut, 1959), Bob Le Flambeur/Bob The Gambler (Melville, 1956) Et Dieu Créa la Femme/And God Created Woman (Vadim, 1956) and A Bout de Souffle/ Breathless (Godard, 1959).

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and Lang, while at the same time championing films by new postwar French directors; it also linked a predominantly mise-en-scène-related theory with the new films of Roger Vadim, Jean-Pierre Melville, Agnès Varda, Jacques Rivette and Alain Resnais and others, as well as those of Bresson, Truffaut and latterly more politically motivated theorist-auteurs such as Godard. This consciously theoretical meta-cinematic discourse transformed the way that cinema began to be perceived, and a clear division between mainstream and what has come to be designated ‘arthouse’ cinema emerged. However, the recognition of cinema as a significant cultural artefact and part of a cultural heritage was slow in coming, principally because government and corporate control within the conventional capitalist mode of production traditionally saw it as both anodyne entertainment medium and/or useful propaganda tool. Countering their late colleague Walter Benjamin’s essentially optimistic arguments on the beneficial effect of cinema on the masses in his 1936 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, the Marxist Frankfurt School—particularly the influential critic, Theodor Adorno—expressed deep scepticism about mass popular culture in the postwar period, whether in the form of popular music or cinema.15 Later Marxist philosopher, Guy Debord, in his thoroughgoing critique, La Société du Spectacle (The Society of the Spectacle, 1967), would stigmatise mass media, particularly cinema, as a socially inauthentic and politically recuperated institution, dominated by commodity fetishism. For some critics such as Debord, disruption of ‘the flow of the spectacle’ could result in a more authentic and critically engaged type of filmmaking, as in the ‘situationist’ mode that eschewed conventional narrative logic. Of the main New Wave filmmakers only the revolutionary Godard was impelled to go this far in deconstructing or subverting the conventions of narrative cinema. It is no coincidence that Godard’s most directly anti-bourgeois capitalist film Weekend (1967), comprising a seemingly unmotivated orgy of violence during a traffic jam on a French holiday weekend, was released in the same year as Debord’s book on mass media.

15 See, for e.g., Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, Routledge, 1991 for a sample of Adorno’s critique of the commodification of mass culture. See also Benjamin’s 1935 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections by Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt (Editor), Harry Zohn (Translator), Fontana Press, 1992 (reprint).

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Such claims and counter-claims regarding the values attached to cinema ultimately served to focus attention on the medium as controversial and as a subject of polemical debate, rather than just a cheap and disposable form of entertainment. If we accept the position adopted by Comolli and Narboni (referenced above in the preamble to this chapter) that all cinema is inherently political, we can better understand the excitement and innovative ethos of the postwar cinema, and its radical appeal to a younger generation of cinephiles in the 1960s and ‘70s. While Truffaut’s term ‘La Politique des Auteurs’ originally related more to ‘policy’ than ‘politics’ per se, the concepts of a personal politics and an identity politics that came out of emancipatory social movements of the late 1950s and ‘60s had the effect of conflating these etymologically linked terms. In that broader sense of ‘la politique’ the new cinema in Europe of this period reconciled individualist and collectivist thinking in a new politics that marked a distinctive break from what had gone before. Whereas the Hollywood studios and the Soviet and eastern European film productions were all subject to a greater or lesser degree of censorship and interference, the concept of artistic autonomy represented by the auteur director offered a direct challenge to the hegemonic practices of close corporate and governmental control over film production. In this connection, it was less the impact of a specific mould-breaking film than the general spirit of rebellious and critical counter-culture, fostered by the New Wave commentators and directors, that was game-changing. The New Wave and New Cinema movements in a number of European countries challenged what directors and screenwriters saw as hypocritical sexual mores and social values of the time, and in so doing were not only part of an aesthetic revolution in theatre and literature but reflected and influenced the spirit of change that was prevalent. Both new Italian cinema and the French New Wave represented a practical correlative to these discourses communicated in Cahiers and the other forward-looking cinema journals that sprang up in this postwar renaissance. Other European cinemas followed suit, including the British ‘Free Cinema’ and New Cinema movements of the late 1950s and 1960s, with key directors Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson and John Schlesinger presenting social-realist films that focused on workingclass protagonists, and implicitly or explicitly attacked the British establishment and the residual class system that was endemic in the society. Conveying a similar spirit as the stage drama ‘kitchen-sink’ realist movement, many films of the early part of this New Wave such as The Loneliness

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of the Long Distance Runner (Richardson, 1962), Billy Liar (Schlesinger, 1963) and This Sporting Life (Anderson, 1963) were based on novels or plays that emphasised class-consciousness. Another significant aspect of the films of this movement was that they launched the international careers of new-generation actors, such as Richard Burton, Laurence Harvey, Alan Bates and Julie Christie. One of the most shocking, as well as challenging, films that arose out of the movement was Anderson’s allegory of violent insurgency, If (1968), set in a British boys’ public (i.e. fee-paying) school where the boys run amok with guns in retribution for the traditionally harsh punishments meted out to them. The new cinema in Europe had its parallels in libertarian cinema movements in Latin America and Africa, where a powerful postcolonial cinema of resistance was developing. The notion of a so-called ‘Third Cinema’ (Tercer Cine)16 emerged in Argentina with the critical writing on film by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino and productions of their Grupo Cine Liberación. It theorised a spirit of revolutionary filmmaking practice that was already in force, and spread quickly throughout the sub-continent in response to emancipatory currents and anti-imperialist discourses. In most Latin and Central American countries, including Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Mexico, progressive filmmaking could only flourish under the aegis of a civilian democracy, usually in periods of leftinclined governments. However, the CIA-sponsored military dictatorships that emerged in the region from the 1960s onward drastically curtailed the radical new cinema in these countries during regular periods of totalitarian repression by right-wing regimes, among the most notorious of all, the Pinochet regime in Chile. Before the elected Allende government was violently overthrown, the cinema industry had begun to flourish there, and innovative filmmakers such as Miguel Littín, Patricio Guzmán and Raul Ruíz were active. These were all forced into exile subsequently. Documentaries, rather than dramas, became the most effective response to the regime’s atrocities. Third Cinema set itself up in solidarity with the peoples of the so-called ‘Third World’ countries of Latin America, Asia and Africa and in opposition to the forces of neocolonialism, and, despite censorship and many other difficulties, it was successful in promoting progressive, anti-hegemonic values. It was more of a regional artistic 16 See Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, ‘Toward a Third Cinema’ (Originally published as’Hacia un tercer cine’ in 1969) in Movies and Methods. An Anthology, edited by Bill Nichols, University of California Press 1976, pp 44–64.

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praxis than a transcultural cinematic exchange, since, despite the common liberation ideology of the movement, specific interests of nation and language imposed inevitable limitations on its internationalisation. Of all the young filmmakers in France that benefited from the New Wave’s auteurist approach and the anti-establishment radicalism of Godard’s experimental cinema of the 1960s, the one whose work was most politically engaged was neither French nor avant- garde. Costa (Konstantinos) Gavras was a Greek émigré who developed his career in Paris in the 1950s working with old-school directors René Clair and Yves Allegret. In a series of political thrillers—a sub-genre that U.S.-based auteurs, particularly Hitchcock, had employed more for its aura of excitement and mystery than for any critical purpose— Costa Gavras revolutionised the political film. Combining a well-paced but suspenseful plot-line, based on well-documented real-life events, expressing strong condemnation of human rights violations by authoritarian government and military figures, he produced socially conscious and critically acclaimed films. His films Z (1969), concerned with the political assassination of a democratic deputy in Greece in 1963, The Confession (1970), about Stalinist show-trials in postwar Czechoslovakia, State of Siege (1972), an indictment of CIA involvement in Uruguay that presciently foreshadowed the murderous Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, and Section Spéciale (1975), a controversially painful reminder of Vichy French collaboration in Nazi revenge executions, reached wide international audiences. Z won the Best Foreign Language Oscar and resonated powerfully with the mood of anti-establishment revolt throughout Europe and in the United States that characterised the 1960s and ‘70s. Gavras was particularly successful in his earlier films in drawing his audiences into the shadowy world of the far right’s goals of destabilising and subverting democracy, a theme that he and screenwriter Jorge Semprún communicated through their scripts without proselytising. In their films they asked more searching questions about responsibilities of Western democratic governments than virtually any other filmmaker of this period. Gavras’s best-known films starred French actor-singer Yves Montand, and were based on non-fiction sources, adapted by the director and Semprún. They implicitly, but unmistakably, targeted covert support for right-wing dictatorship among powerful Western governments, particularly in the United States. However, some of his later films, such as Hanna K (1983) and Betrayed (1988), tended to downplay the thriller

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element in favour of more investigative political intrigue, tending more towards political sermonising. A notable exception to this was his 1982 award-winning Missing, a film that challenged U.S. government lies about its complicity in the barbaric Pinochet coup d’état against the elected left-wing government in Chile in 1973. Based on a non-fiction book, as many Costa Gavras films tended to be, written by Thomas C. Hauser and entitled The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice, the film penetrates the web of deceit that has continued to this day about the coup and its aftermath, even if, typical of Gavras’s films, it avoids specifying the South American country in which it is set. The real-life Charles Horman was a U.S. journalist murdered by the Chilean military during their CIAbacked putsch, and Costa Gavras’s film raised broader questions about U.S. proxy imperialism than Hauser’s more specific narrative set out to do. Missing upset the Reagan administration and triggered a lawsuit (ultimately dismissed) brought by a fictionalised government diplomat for whom the cap obviously fitted. The film, which was made in the U.S. for MCA Studios, was critically acclaimed and earned international accolades, including the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, but was too near to the bone to be nominated for other awards. Interviewed by Maya Jaggi for The Guardian in 2009 for his latest film about an economic migrant from Greece, Éden à l’Ouest (Eden is West ), Gavras expresses deep scepticism regarding forms of political utopianism and revealed his philosophy of progressive cinema. He criticised conventional Hollywood for its “sedative” effect and adds: “I never forget that we’re making an entertainment…Cinema is about seducing an audience to have them go away and think”.17 Another Paris-based émigré director, also Marxist in his ideals and approach, was Italian Gillo Pontecorvo whose anti-colonial films included the groundbreaking quasi-documentary work La Battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers, 1966). Like his Neorealist predecessors such as Rossellini and De Santis, Pontecorvo used non-professional actors from the newly decolonised Algeria, including former members of the FLN resistance against French colonial government, in his depiction of the brutal shock strategies employed by the colonial paratroop forces and

17 Costa Gavras interview with Maya Jaggi, The Guardian, 4 April 2009. https://www. theguardian.com/film/2009/apr/04/costa-gavras.

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the revolutionaries, respectively. Inspired in part by the French political writings of Algerian Frantz Fanon, Pontecorvo’s reconstruction of events that took place during the Algerian independence movement in the mid-1950s was filmed in Algiers itself, and featured many scenes in the Casbah. The film was considered too sensitive for French tastes, with its director receiving death threats, and was banned for five years in his adoptive country, as well as being somewhat hypocritically condemned by Cahiers du Cinéma. Nonetheless, it has come to be regarded as a cinematic masterpiece and earned many awards. Pontecorvo’s subsequent film Burn (Queimada, 1969) also addressed anti-imperialist themes, this time related to Portuguese and British colonialism in the Caribbean Antilles, and was inspired by the real-life anti-colonial slave revolt in eighteenth-century Haiti led by Toussaint L’Ouverture. This second wave of Italian directors included other left-leaning directors such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose initial experience was as screenwriter for Fellini and whose own work created controversy among the more bourgeois and conservative elements of society. However, few of his films were directly polemical or socially realistic in style, even if most were provocative in their representation of sexuality on screen. A complex rebel in his fiction and poetry as well as his films, Pasolini mocked the values of the establishment, but opted to interrogate them rather through the lens of great literary works of the past re-conceived as parables of the present and of the national mythology. In stark contrast, the less well-known Elio Petri, who had worked as assistant to De Santis on Bitter Rice, produced a number of social-realist films, notably Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra ogni sospetto, 1970), The Working Class Goes to Heaven (La classe operaia va in paradiso, 1971), Property is No Longer a Theft (La proprietà non è più un furto, 1973) and One Way or Another (Todo Modo, 1976). Petri’s wry depictions put the spotlight on institutions such as the police, the Christian Democrats (Pasolini’s nemesis) and labour relations, specifically in his whimsically anti-capitalist The Working Class Goes to Heaven. Emerging slightly later, the New Cinema movement in West Germany brought to prominence the idiosyncratic independent films of RainerWerner Fassbinder, whose work, such as Ali—Angst Essen Seele auf / Ali—Fear Eats the Soul (1974), the story of a romance between an older German woman and a younger Moroccan immigrant worker, laid bare what Fassbinder saw as the spiritual vacuousness of West German society.

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Other socially critical and progressive directors such as Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe Von Trotta, who co-directed The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975) about terrorist paranoia and the politics of a voracious mass media, came to prominence at this time with films that not only challenged Germany’s past and present values, but made uncomfortable connections between them. Later Von Trotta would go on to make a number of important feminist films about significant women of the past, interweaving the personal with the political; these include Rosa Luxemburg (1986), her sympathetic biopic of the German female revolutionary. A similar backlash against Cold War conservative ideology had taken place in the United States in the 1960s with Stanley Kubrick’s historical epic Spartacus (1960) and his contemporary satire on the militaryindustrial complex Dr Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) released in the wake of the Armageddonthreatening Cuban Missile Crisis of the previous year. In an article entitled ‘Almost Everything in Dr Strangelove Was True’ written in The New Yorker for the film’s 50th anniversary in 2014, Eric Schlosser reveals how eerily accurate Kubrick’s farcical black comedy actually was regarding the state of control of U.S. thermonuclear devices in this period, even though the film had been dismissed as leftist fantasy and lies by Cold War hawks in the military.18 As Schlosser points out, the incoming Kennedy administration had tightened some of the lax controls in place earlier and demanded greater accountability from the Pentagon, but the Cuban Missile Crisis starkly illustrated the problems of the command structure. Kubrick’s film remains frighteningly relevant to the latter-day scenario of U.S. arms proliferation, and exposed the insanity of trusting the world’s future to the reckless military-industrial complex. John Frankenheimer’s mordant suspense film The Manchurian Candidate (1962), based on the 1959 novel by Richard Condon, was another Cold War satire that portrayed both the absurdity and the danger of Cold War politics in the aftermath of the Korean War. Its protagonists are soldiers returned from captivity in Manchuria, Eastern China, with apparent post-conflict stress issues that turn out to have been caused by systematic brainwashing. The plot involved a planned coup bringing a parodic version of Joseph McCarthy to power, with the twist that his wife 18 Eric Schlosser, The New Yorker, 17 January 2014. https://www.newyorker.com/ news/news-desk/almost-everything-in-dr-strangelove-was-true.

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is an undercover agent for the Soviets who support the hawkish Republican agenda for their own ends. Watching the film today uncanny parallels can be seen between its apparently preposterous plot and alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election that brought Trump to power. In retrospect the film has been hailed as a remarkable achievement, even though it failed at the box-office, and was withdrawn from public exhibition for some years. As with the subject-matter of Dr Strangelove, the novel’s and film’s basic premise of the possibility of brainwashing was widely dismissed, only to be revealed as a CIA secret project that actually took place during the 1960s. Frankenheimer’s follow-up political thriller Seven Days in May (1964), coming as it did in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, and dealing with a planned coup d’état by a rogue U.S. general, captured the mood of the times perfectly. Another aspect of the emancipatory surge of the 1960s and ‘70s in American cinema was the race relations film; good examples of these were A Raisin in the Sun (Daniel Petrie, 1961) based on an award-winning play by Lorraine Hansberry about race prejudice in Chicago, the Oscarwinning crime thriller In the Heat of the Night (1967, Norman Jewison) and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (Stanley Kramer, 1968) about an interracial courtship and the familial strife it engenders. Although a domestic comedy, the last-named succeeded in challenging America’s entrenched conservative attitudes to what was long seen as miscegenation. All three starred the charismatic and highly talented Sidney Poitier and fed into the conflicts and changes that were taking place during this decade of social upheaval. At this point, there had been few black directors in what had essentially been a white male institution with a few exceptions such as the pioneering black director of the 1920s–‘40s Oscar Micheaux. Lloyd Richards, black director of the successful Broadway run of A Raisin in the Sun, was rejected as potential director of the film version by Columbia Pictures in favour of white Canadian, Daniel Petrie, the bitter irony of which was presumably lost on the producers. This situation began to change in the 1970s as the so-called blaxploitation genre—reflecting the political impetus of the Black Power movement—brought to prominence directors such as Gordon Parks and Melvin Peebles. Racism continued to be a powerful theme, and iconic political figures Martin Luther King and Malcolm X a powerful influence, in the films of black directors such as Spike Lee. Lee’s critically acclaimed 1989 film Do the Right Thing portrayed simmering racial tensions in a whimsical style in a predominantly black district of Brooklyn. He courted

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controversy by dedicating the groundbreaking film to six black victims of police brutality in the United States. Racial issues and anti-Vietnam War protests between the late 1960s and mid- ‘70s produced an atmosphere of ethnic and inter-generational hostility in America that spilled over into direct political violence on the streets. Following the enforced resignation of then-President, Richard Nixon, as a consequence of his cover-up of the 1972 Watergate breakin, wiretapping and ‘dirty tricks’ campaign, a spate of political thrillers appeared that evoked the fraught zeitgeist of the period. The most significant were helmed by progressive directors: Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974) and Sidney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor (1975) echoed the conspiracy motif of Frankenheimer’s early ‘60s movies, while Pakula’s political thriller All the President’s Men (1976), based on Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s eponymous account of the Watergate break-in, exposed the culture of impunity and the disdain for democracy at the epicentre of the conservative political machine. Martin Ritt’s satire on McCarthyite paranoia and discrimination, The Front (1976), and Hal Ashby’s subtly scathing parable of sociopolitical appearance and reality, Being There (1979), an adaptation of the book by Jerzy Kosinski, were indicative of a national mood of scepticism and disillusion as the decade progressed.

From the New Wave to the New Millennium Reagan’s cinematic appeal had ensured that the progressive liberalism of the Carter administration was short-lived. At the start of the decade the spectacular failure of Michael Cimino’s exorbitantly expensive, if thematically progressive, Heaven’s Gate (1980) contributed to a situation whereby power and control over film production reverted to the studios following the more auteurist and independent work of the 1970s. Nevertheless, the Reagan and Thatcher decade of the 1980s saw a number of films that challenged the ultra-conservative policies and rhetoric on both sides of the Atlantic. These included two biopics based on the life and death of radical and idealistic Americans, one a historical figure and the other contemporary: Warren Beatty’s epic Reds (1981) was the little known story of radical American journalist and author John Reed, who chronicled the Russian Revolution of 1917 in his Ten Days that Shook the World, and Mike Nichols’s factually accurate Silkwood (1983) depicted nuclear power industry whistleblower and union activist Karen Silkwood

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and the sinister circumstances of her death in a supposed car accident. Both films were commercially successful and critically acclaimed, and featured star casts, with Reds winning Academy Awards, including Best Director. Costa Gavras’s Missing (1982, see above) was also a critical and commercial success, and Luis Puenzo’s La História Oficial/The Official Story (1985), by garnering the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, cast the spotlight on U.S. support for the Argentine military dictatorship, which had only recently collapsed. Puenzo’s gripping drama focused on an Argentine mother’s quest to find out the truth of her adopted daughter’s identity in the face of the obstructive tactics of her businessman husband, who has ties to the military government. Finding inspiration in U.S. labour relations history, John Sayles’s Matewan (1987) told the compelling tale of the real-life battle of Matewan, Virginia in May 1920, when miners and sympathetic local law officials resisted the intimidating hired agents of the Stone Mountain Coal Company in a dramatic shoot-out. Sayles’s filmic celebration of the unlikely victory of the mineworkers struck a note of defiance, as Reaganite anti-unionism took an ever-increasing toll on the working classes. A new anti-establishment director emerged during this decade, a man whose films have continued to generate controversy and epitomise the deep division in his country between neoconservative elites with their religious fundamentalist/redneck supporters and compatriots of a more progressive bent. Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989)—the first two of his Vietnam trilogy—were decade-defining works that invited audiences to reflect on the lies and dehumanising brutality of the Vietnam War, and in the case of the latter, to re-evaluate the idea of heroism from a dissentient perspective. Stone’s indictment of Reagan’s support for military dictatorship in Latin America in his 1986 film Salvador and his dissection of the ‘greed-is-good’ philosophy of Reaganite society, Wall Street (1987), put down substantial markers for alternative film culture in a decade of generally lightweight entertainment. Featuring box-office names as well as emergent star actors, Stone’s films quickly established a mainstream appeal based on the sensationalism of their subjects and treatment. For example, his 1991 depiction of the investigation into Kennedy’ assassination, JFK, featuring then star actor Kevin Costner as New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, was notable for its conspiracy theory outlined in Garrison’s non-fictional book on the subject. The

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suggestion that then Vice-President, and subsequently President, Lyndon B. Johnson, was complicit in the plot, acting in concert with the CIA and the Mafia, accentuated the controversy, but the film performed well at the box-office, and earned two Academy Awards. Never one to confine himself to the judicious centre-ground, Stone is a rare example of a sociopolitically progressive and outspoken director who has become a major figure in the film industry. Often contentious in his depiction of historical events in his drama films—as well as his often idiosyncratic documentaries19 —Stone makes no apology for adopting a combative political stance in a combative political culture. U.K. films of this period that directly or indirectly critiqued the parallel Thatcherite ideology regarding society (or rather its non-existence, according to that ideology) included Richard Eyre’s zeitgeist-capturing The Ploughman’s Lunch (1983), paralleling individual duplicity and calculating opportunism with its political variety, and set in the same year as Thatcher’s politically motivated Falklands campaign. With its script by novelist Ian McEwan and fine performances by Jonathan Pryce and Tim Curry in the lead roles, The Ploughman’s Lunch incorporated clandestinely shot footage of the chauvinistic Tory Party Conference in Brighton before the IRA assassination attempt on the Conservative Prime Minister. Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) also evoked parallels between the personal and the sociopolitical with its thoughtful portrayal of the relationship between a right-wing skinhead and a Pakistani immigrant entrepreneur in a script written by socialist novelist Hanif Kureishi. The less critically acclaimed Defence of the Realm (David Drury, 1986)— its title taken from the 1914 Act of Parliament clamping down on civil liberties—was equally topical, although a more straightforward political thriller in style. Its narrative, featuring a British-American cover-up of a nuclear accident, the framing of an opposition politician and the eventual murder of investigative journalists, was by no means far-fetched, and reflected the reactionary nature of the Thatcher-Reagan alliance and the toxic polarisation of societies on both sides of the Atlantic. As regards other progressive filmmakers in the U.K., the films of Ken Loach have probably been the most sociopolitically engaged on a consistent and long-term basis. Loach began with socially activist dramas for 19 Stone’s 2017 4-part documentary series of face-to-face interviews with Vladimir Putin, made for television, was particularly controversial, and, for some, his interview style in this came across as inappropriately adulatory.

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television in the 1960s, notably the acclaimed Cathy Come Home (1966) on the subject of teenage homelessness, followed by working-class-set features such as Poor Cow (1967) and Kes (1969). In subsequent decades he produced a steady stream of theatrical releases in conjunction with capable and articulate screenwriters such as Paul Laverty. Loach’s films are devoted to working-class or social underclass themes as well as the fight for genuine democracy and civil liberties, whether in Spain (Land and Freedom/ Tierra y Libertad, 1996) or in Ireland (Hidden Agenda, 1991 and The Wind threat Shakes the Barley, 2006). His films have often stirred controversy on account of their politically partisan positions, but they are well researched with strong screenwriting. They tend to be critically well received, if not so widely distributed and exhibited, at least until latterly, with more internationally known work that will be discussed in a later chapter. His body of work includes critical political documentaries, and he is without doubt a major international filmmaker. One emancipatory theme in film drama of the late 1980s that was arguably effective in heightening international consciousness concerned the situation in then-apartheid South Africa. The viciously racist political system had been tolerated, and even supported, by many Western countries for far too long, but the tide of opinion was beginning to turn against the regime by this point. Cry Freedom (Richard Attenborough, 1987)— in which a young Denzel Washington played black-consciousness leader Steve Biko—A World Apart (Chris Menges, 1998), and Sarafina (1992) and Cry the Beloved Country (1995), both directed by Darrell Roodt, employed different genres and approaches to highlight the struggle for democracy and human rights in the former white-supremacist republic. Only the last two could actually be made in South Africa following Nelson Mandela’s release and subsequent election to the presidency, whereas Zimbabwe substituted for South Africa in both A World Apart and Cry Freedom. Attenborough’s film focused more on the story of white activist journalist Donald Woods, on whose non-fiction account the film was based, than on the life of Biko or the activities of the ANC. Nevertheless, such dramatic representations of events in South Africa balanced the isolation effect of widespread boycotts by placing the country in the international spotlight. Major social and political changes were taking place throughout the 1990s, not only in South Africa, and these were reflected in films about Ireland (In the Name of the Father, Jim Sheridan, 1993, Michael Collins, Neil Jordan, 1996, and Some Mother’s Son, Terry George, 1996) and

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Spain (Land and Freedom, Ken Loach, 1996, and Libertarias, Vicente Aranda, 1997). In the United States the critical-satirical strain of filmmaking was strongest throughout the decade, suggesting a continued lack of trust in the country’s much-vaunted democratic system, despite the Democratic presidency of Bill Clinton. Films such as The Player (Robert Altman, 1992) and Bob Roberts (Tim Robbins, 1992) and, later in the decade, Wag the Dog (Barry Levinson, 1997), Bulworth (Warren Beatty, 1998) and Election (Alexander Payne, 1999) presented the political process as a cynical circus and the fictionalised political leadership as mendacious and self-serving. Payne’s critically and commercially successful satire conveyed the idea more humorously but no less caustically in the film’s allegorical high-school election campaign. Many millennial and postmillennial anglophone films like Frida (U.S. 2002), Whale Rider (Niki Caro, New Zealand/Germany, 2002), In This World (Michael Winterbottom, U.K. 2002), Fruitvale Station (Ryan Coogler, U.S. 2013), The Danish Girl (Tom Hooper, U.K./ U.S. 2015), Hidden Figures (Theodore Melfi, U.S. 2016), Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri (Martin McDonagh, U.K./U.S., 2017) and BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee, U.S., 2018) have crossed cultures, eras, subaltern social groups and narrative genres to highlight the potential of cinematic drama for redressing the balance in social, cultural and political representation. In the following chapters, an overview of significant stage plays and films from the first two decades, followed by in-depth case studies, will be discussed. As in the current chapter, film will be presented as a popular dramatic medium that has engaged productively with content related to human rights, social justice and democratic values. A number of directors, screenwriters, actors and producers have sought to bring such issues to wider public attention, and some of the filmmakers and film professionals discussed here have operated under conditions of adversity, or even of personal risk in certain countries. As I have argued in these opening chapters, there is a degree of reciprocity between cinematic and stage drama, and both can constitute sites of contestation and forums of sociopolitical debate. While the latter is more commonly credited with expressing nonconformist ideas and responding critically to social anomalies and injustices, the wider reach and more immediate imagery of cinematic drama have made it a formidable medium, given strong source material.

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Much of the progressive material adapted for the screen is derived from literary source material, non-fiction exposés and investigative print journalism; therefore, the case studies of the coming chapters will represent a cross-section of such material transfigured into potent cinematic dramas for our times.

CHAPTER 4

Case-study Films and Plays from the First Decade (Part One) ‘Patriot Acts’—The War on/of Terror

Preamble: Drama and the ‘New World Order’ To invert the old proverb, the sword of injustice never sleeps. This adapted adage is as true of the twenty-first century to date as it has been for previous centuries. The case-study plays and films for this chapter, focusing on the opening decade of the century, all reflect the interventions of what I have described earlier as forum theatre and cinema dealing with issues of social and political injustice that characterised the millennium and its immediate aftermath. Although certain other productions will be referenced in passing, the chapter’s principal case studies feature some of the top contemporary dramatists and filmmakers and a number of groundbreaking plays and films of the century’s first decade. These works are selected on the basis of their critical and aesthetic qualities as well as their penetrating sociopolitical content. They were also culturally impactful, to varying degrees, achieving public visibility on account of their divergence from theatre and cinema of the cultural mainstream. As discussed in the introductory chapter, a particular blight on the sociopolitical landscape has been the ever-increasing impact of hardright ideology and the neoconservative agenda on the political mainstream and social welfare in the latter decades of the twentieth century. This—for progressives and sceptics—unwelcome phenomenon has been exacerbated in the early twenty-first century by populist influencers and blatantly undemocratic vested interests of various types dominating print, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Ingham, Anglo-American Stage and Screen Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45198-0_4

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broadcast and, latterly, social media. Religious fundamentalism, typically associated with repressive ultra-conservative societies, sought political and intellectual respectability within democracies, having previously been marginalised during the increasingly secular twentieth century. Neoliberal economic advocacy groups, formerly considered fringe elements during the Keynesian postwar status quo, gradually began to occupy the political mainstream. In terms of the interrelationship between corporate globalism and geopolitical manipulation, the unelected and unrepresentative World Economic Forum exercised growing influence. Similar democratically and publicly unaccountable think tanks—most notoriously, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC)—pushed an aggressive agenda, advocating the hegemonic aims of the militaryindustrial complex, whose influence had been somewhat reduced in the Nineties by post-Cold War détente. The ‘new world order’ looked suspiciously like the Reaganite old world order, only more overt, belligerent and unilateral, manifesting sheer contempt for international consensus and trampling on international law. While there was strong political opposition to these developments in both the U.S. and the U.K., it proved mostly ineffective. At the same time, dramatists and filmmakers responded eloquently, and independent theatre and cinema institutions became crucial channels for countering the relentless propaganda disseminated by often counter-factual and ultra-conservative ideological sources. Discussion in the chapter will be developed thematically in relation to the broad topic of abuse of political power and social injustice, concentrating on post-truth, post-democratic developments in politics and society, with particular reference to the U.S. government’s ‘war on terror’, purportedly initiated in response to the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. It features a range of themes, notably the unlawful invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq resulting in illegal incarceration of individuals without due process or regard for the Geneva Convention and, more generally, the illegal nature of interventions by Western countries in the Middle East. In different ways the selected works treat the controversial subject of the U.S. and the U.K.’s specious ‘war on terror’ following George W. Bush’s controversial election victory in 2000. The plays and films discussed in this chapter, like those discussed elsewhere in the book, cannot be simply dismissed as ‘agit-prop’ stage or screen drama; they are too sophisticated, well-researched and fact-based to be discursively marginalised as strident anti-establishment propaganda.

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Stage dramas chosen to illustrate these key political themes of the decade are David Hare’s Stuff Happens (2004), Victoria Britain and Gillian Slovo’s Guantanamo (2004), and Caryl Churchill’s Drunk Enough to Say I Love You (2006). The case-study film texts discussed in tandem with the plays are Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana (2005) and Armando Ianucci’s In the Loop (2009). While some works are explicit in their reference to specific political events that took place in the course of the decade, others are more coded and implicit, particularly the satirical In the Loop. The stage plays have a documentary-drama emphasis, particularly the fact-based Stuff Happens and Guantanamo, but this is less true of the case-study films, none of which were conceived as docudramas. Syriana explored the dirty geopolitics of the oil industry and the U.S.’s involvement in nurturing Middle Eastern autocracies until they became unpalatable, as occurred in the case of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The film hinted broadly at one of the real reasons behind the PNAC’s enthusiasm for the Iraq invasion, and the roles played by Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz in the Bush administration in making the case for intervention. However, the setting and international relations portrayed in Syriana are generic and fictional, if instantly recognisable. Thus, one significant difference of representation between the stage and the screen relates to their treatment of factual material and reallife persons: whereas cinema, with the exception of the historical biopic, tends to leave this to specific documentary filmmaking practice, theatre is less constrained by issues of verisimilitude between actor and character/ subject or by the topicality of events represented. Not only was political engagement seen as hypersensitive for U.S. audiences, as Marvin Carlson has pointed out, there was more of a contestatory political theatre ethos across the Atlantic than in his own country: The British theater has had the good fortune of possessing a strong tradition of politically engaged drama, all through the past half century, a half century when the creation of such theater has never been more urgently needed. Unfortunately the United States, despite its significant (and often negative) contribution to the major political events all over the globe during this half century, has developed no comparable tradition, and only

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a handful of important dramatists seriously concerned with global and national political issues.1

Picking up on Carlson’s argument above, the U.K. theatre’s historical tendency to challenge political orthodoxies more directly than cinema is very much in evidence in the rapid response of a range of dramatic authors. By contrast, most U.S. stage dramatists opted to focus more on identity politics and domestic issues than on the controversies surrounding 9/11, the global ‘war on terror’, the invasion of Iraq and corporate fraud and abuse of power. That they did so was perhaps understandable amid the prevailing climate of hawkish patriotic sentiment, which made critical theatre works interrogating the ‘war on terror’ and challenging the government’s moral authority commercially and socially unviable. Nevertheless, U.S. filmmakers were less inhibited about confronting the official narrative promulgated by the government and the generally compliant mainstream media, even if their reception was muted or the quality left much to be desired. In the politically ambivalent context of the U.K. which had seen strong opposition to the Iraq invasion, both on the streets and in parliament, there was much less of a broad consensus for the unprovoked military action, and both playwrights and filmmakers took a much more critical line from the beginning.

Critiquing the ‘War on Terror’ Noam Chomsky aptly referred to the invasion of Iraq as “a gross violation of international law” by an “outlaw state”, citing the 1946 Nuremberg Tribunal to categorise it as “the supreme international crime” that “contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”.2 As has subsequently been argued during 20th anniversary reflections on the Bush-Blair axis of power, the falsehoods used to justify the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan appear to have been a major factor in eroding public trust in conventional politicians and largely responsible for paving the way

1 Carlson, M., Foreword to Karen Malpede, Plays in Time: The Beekeeper’s Daughter, Prophecy, Another Life. Extreme Whether, Intellect, 2017, 1. 2 Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian, What We Say Goes: Conversations on U.S. Power in a Changing World, Metropolitan Books, 2007, 3. Reference to Judgment of the International Military Tribunal for the Trial of German Major War Criminals, Nuremberg, Germany, 30 September and 1 October 1946.

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for the even crasser populist politics of today’s world.3 Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, then a parliamentary colleague of Blair but resolute opponent of ‘Blairite’ political ideology, commenting twenty years later about the terrible cost of the war, offered a damning verdict on his country’s responsibility for the after-effects: “Twenty years later, human beings are still living with the cost of war. 9.2 million Iraqis are internally displaced or refugees abroad. And they continue to face demonisation from the same media establishment that lobbied for the cause of their displacement. The UK’s culpability for the economic and political roots of displacement extends beyond Iraq.”4

From the Iraqi perspective, as Corbyn’s observation quoted above indicates, removing the formerly US-backed Saddam Hussein came at a terrible cost to the country’s infrastructure and its population. Moreover, Afghanistan today is back where it was when the U.S.-U.K. coalition invaded, once more under the oppressive and reactionary rule of The Taliban. In Iraq, following the removal of the brutal, but secular, Saddam, sectarian tensions between Sunnis and the now-dominant Shiites continue to simmer amid a toxic mix of corruption, nepotism and economic distress. The influx of jihadists that spawned the Islamic State and spearheaded the years-long ‘insurgency’ was augmented by the large numbers of unemployed and disaffected former soldiers set loose when the invaders disbanded Saddam’s army. Approximately, 300,000 Iraqis, mostly civilians, are generally estimated to have died during the invasion and its aftermath, in addition to roughly 4,500 coalition troops. Retrospective film and television documentaries, such as John Pilger’s Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror (2003), Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War (Robert Greenwald, 2004), Why We Fight (Eugene Jarecki, 2005) and Taxi to the Dark Side (Alex Gibney, 2007), as well as the later Netflix series ‘Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror’ (Brian Knappenberger, 2021), have responded 3 See, for e.g., Julian Borger, ‘How the Iraq War Altered US Politics and Led to the Emergence of Trump’, The Guardian, 16 March 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2023/mar/16/iraq-war-trump-republicans. 4 Jeremy Corbyn M.P, ‘Twenty Years on from the Iraq Invasion, We Must Continue Striving for a More Peaceful World’, Stop the War Coalition, 20 March 2023. https://www.stopwar.org.uk/article/jeremy-corbyn-20-years-on-from-theiraq-invasion-we-must-continue-striving-for-a-more-peaceful-world/.

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directly and factually to the Bush-Blair ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan and Iraq and the military-industrial complex. By contrast, there was a mixed bag of documentary-style dramas that directly or indirectly criticised the military intervention. These included Michael Winterbottom’s The Road to Guantánamo (2006) and Brian de Palma’s Redacted (2007); while the latter was poorly received by critics and the public, Winterbottom’s fine blend of documentary footage and dramatic reconstruction garnered critical plaudits and nominations. Other films adapted from works of fiction, such as Body of Lies (Ridley Scott, 2008), were conceived more as espionage thrillers than they were dramatic political critiques. Hollywood proved much readier to produce relatively uncritical action genre movies based on the coalition’s unjustified assault on sovereign countries than to explore the ramifications of the U.S. government’s interventionist policy. However, a number of mainstream films did offer a critique of the U.S. government’s actions, including Rendition (Gavin Hood, U.K. 2007), The Battle for Haditha (Nick Broomfield, U.K. 2007), Stop-Loss (Kimberly Peirce, 2008), Lions for Lambs (Robert Redford, U.S. 2008) and The Green Zone (Paul Greengrass, U.S. 2008). They varied in quality and critical reception as well as plausibility, but The Green Zone, set in Baghdad during the hunt for the calculatedly over-hyped weapons of mass destruction, successfully combined the action thriller genre with the motif of political conspiracy. Broomfield’s docudrama-style account of the massacre at Haditha in November 2005 of 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians by U.S. marines was as close an imitation of real events as possible, and was shown at international film festivals as well as being aired on Channel Four TV in the U.K. They indicated that a significant number of Hollywood household names, including Redford, Meryl Streep, George Clooney and Matt Damon as well as prestigious directors like Greengrass, Winterbottom and Broomfield, were willing to put their names to work deemed ‘unpatriotic’ by the significant number of conservative apologists for ‘the war on terror’. Similarly, Mike Nichols’ 2007 film Charlie Wilson’s War, featuring Tom Hanks as U.S. Congressman Wilson, provided valuable historical context for the Afghanistan invasion. The biopic movie tells the tale of Wilson’s wellintentioned and initially effective support for Afghanistan in its struggle against Soviet occupation in 1980 being subverted and assimilated by the CIA into its own mischief-making $500 million programme funded by the Reagan administration.

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In the 2006 political ‘mockumentary’ Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, Sacha Baron Cohen’s portrayal of spoof Kazakh reporter Borat was a savagely funny and critically acclaimed lampoon of conservative American values; it elicited a litigious response from those of them credulous enough to accept him at face value and, to an extent, endorse the simulated neofascist views he expresses in the film. In one of the most telling moments at a rodeo, the Borat character refers approvingly to Bush’s ‘war of terror’; ironically, the real-life redneck audience at the event doesn’t appear to notice his preposition switch. Clooney’s docudrama Good Night and Good Luck (2005) was probably the most politically engaged mainstream film to treat the pertinent topic of the media’s responsibilities, but presented it allegorically in connection with the McCarthyite political witch-hunts of the early 1950s. By contrast, Armando Ianucci’s darkly satirical In the Loop (2009) for BBC Films challenged the official British narrative on the Iraq invasion by skewering the Blair government’s farcical charade in its representation of Alastair Campbell’s role in facilitating the deception. The film repudiated by implication Blair and Campbell’s duplicitous (in the view of their many sceptics) attacks on the BBC for doing its job and holding them to account.5 The other notable movie satire related to the war on terror was The Men Who Stare at Goats (Grant Heslov, U.S./ U.K. 2009). The film, based very loosely on a 2004 non-fiction book by Jon Ronson, targeted the military specifically, lampooning the Pentagon’s research into New Age techniques of psychological warfare, and includes scenes set specifically in American-occupied Iraq. Typically, it was the British theatre that addressed the concoction of deceit, half-truths and barely veiled imperialist agendas more robustly and persuasively, deploying docudrama (Stuff Happens ), surreal political psychodrama (Drunk Enough to Say I Love You) and verbatim or nearverbatim documentary (Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom) to probe not only events leading up to the invasion, but also its aftermath. As Ariane de Waal has observed in Theatre on Terror: Subject Positions in British Drama, there was a broad range of responses by dramatists, from indictments based on factual and/or verbatim material to the more 5 Although the Hutton enquiry of 2003 did what it was seemingly set up to do and exonerated Blair and Campbell over their “sexed-up” dossier and their shameless treatment of the unfortunate Dr David Kelly, many remained sceptical of its bland conclusions, and, like this author, viewed the subsequent report as a whitewash.

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fictive reactions and perspectives of ordinary participants in the invasion. De Waal’s application of the Foucauldian theory of discursive formations sought to break the binary of justification for war and opposition to it, using drama as a tool explore a range of subject positions. Her study divided the plays into two categories connoting a wartime scenario, namely home-front plays and front-line plays. It served as a salutary reminder that playwrights are free to engage with controversial topics such as ‘the war on terror’ imaginatively and independently, and that theatre does not preclude voices critical of any position, whether conservative or progressive. Written the same year as de Waal’s analysis of British theatrical responses, Amir Al-Azraki’s article ‘Representations of Political Violence in the Plays about Iraq, 2003–2011’ critically assesses Iraqi playwrights’ responses following the invasion of their country via a spectrum of dramatic modes from mythology and fantasy to realism. Amir Al-Azraki’s piece takes a similar approach to de Waal in that it rejects crude proand anti-war binaries of representation, and includes non-coalition participants in Iraq in its condemnation of the violence experienced by the population. As an introductory overview, the author refers to Western theatrical works on the conflict and provides a useful typology of dramatic responses among Anglo-American writers, as follows: (1) plays that treat the politics of the invasion, usually written in verbatim, tribunal or documentary style; (2) plays that treat the front-line/home experiences usually written by “embedded” reporters; (3) plays adapted from a different era (classical or Shakespearean) and made relevant to the issue of the Iraq invasion; (4) plays that portray violence targeting Iraqis, terrorist (sectarian) violence and violence exerted by the Americans; and (5) plays that explore the issue of responsibility and relationship between the American and British soldiers/personnel and the Iraqis.6 Most of these categories are represented in the dramatic examples referred to below, excepting the third category related to contemporary political interpretations of Shakespearean or classical theatre. One obvious issue related to the first category of Al-Azraki’s taxonomy is that the verbatim, tribunal and documentary styles of play-writing involve representing real people as dramatic ‘characters’. David Hare, 6 Amir Al-Azraki, ‘The Representation of Political Violence in the Plays about Iraq, 2003–2011’ in The Theatre Times, 11 May 2017. https://thetheatretimes.com/represent ation-political-violence-plays-iraq-2003-2011/.

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whose play Stuff Happens does precisely that in respect of the majority of its cast—with the exception of a few nameless and generic spokespersons—commented on what he saw as the flaws in this modus operandi as far back as 1993 in Asking Around, his background book to his early 1990s dramatic trilogy on the institutions of church, judiciary and the Labour Party. As Sarah Grochala notes, Hare’s realist dramaturgy, which attempts to reproduce authentic world spaces, characters and situations, is predicated on verisimilitude as opposed to the precise reconstruction of reality. She refers to Hare’s argument that representation should restrict itself to reproducing the fictional world of the play and not attempt to stage real people and real events: “…no film seeking to explore the psychology of, say, Richard Nixon can do justice to the boundless complexity of the man himself”.7 Ironically, Hare ignores his earlier stricture in relation to biopics and bio-plays, by introducing real-world political figures—Bush, Powell, Blair and others—in Stuff Happens , while the non-fictional drama was still being played out on the real-world stage. Instead of attributing this argumentative incongruity to inconsistency or sophistry on Hare’s part, we should consider what has caused documentary and verbatim practices to flourish in early twenty-first-century stage and screen drama. What has changed, at root, is that, in the global post-millennial malaise we are currently experiencing, fictionalised representation is not always adequate to reflect the gross violations of social and political justice that the younger Hare, presumably, did not fully envisage. As a growing number of playwrights found, impersonating real-life figures on stage and screen, such as Nixon,8 was a powerful, politically astute tactic in the culture wars, enabling audiences to connect more directly with the dramatic discourse. Those largely responsible for the malaise are neither nineteenth-century melodramatic caricatures of capitalists, nor Shaw-like dialectical antagonists; they are recognisable contemporary figures in the governing and influencing classes. Employing verbatim extracts from actual speeches or press conferences by these players can be extremely effective, because, as the saying goes, ‘you couldn’t make it up’. The outcome of this strategy can be regarded as a kind of ‘super-mimesis’.

7 Hare, cited in Sarah Grochala, The Contemporary Political Play: Rethinking Dramaturgical Structure, Bloomsbury, 2017, 43. 8 See Peter Morgan’s 2006 play Frost/Nixon based on interview transcripts and also the subsequent film adaptation (2008) directed by Ron Howard.

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Unlike the largely timid response in the U.S. a significant number of U.K.-based dramatists addressed the issue of the ‘war on terror’ directly or tangentially, with many deploying the documentary method of verbatim theatre and devised theatre practice to a greater or lesser extent: for example, Robin Soans’ 2004 play Talking to Terrorists was a collaborative work commissioned by the Royal Court and Out of Joint. Soans, director Max Stafford-Clark and members of the ensemble interviewed people known to have been involved in committing terrorist acts, as well as those engaged in preventing terrorism, to provide the raw material. While not focusing exclusively on the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions, the play raised ethical and political questions about how terrorism was constructed by the Western politicians and media during this period, when the 9/11 terrorist attack was cynically used to justify any military intervention proposed in Washington. British plays that engaged with events related to the two invasions and their aftermath proliferated between 2004 and the end of the decade. Themes and settings were diverse, varying from Peter Morris’s commentary on brutalising social attitudes that led to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in his 2005 play The Guardians to Dennis Kelly’s Osama the Hero (also 2005) exploring the limits of free speech and divergent opinion in relation to the ‘war on terror’. Notable among these for its ‘in-yer-face’ style was Simon Stephens’ Motortown (2006), set in Dagenham (from which the play derived its title) and elsewhere in Essex, which explored the twisted psyche of an Iraq veteran from a non-judgemental and, in some ways, sympathetic point of view. The protagonist, Danny, has become addicted to casual violence and gratuitously shoots a teenage girl, whom he has dated behind her older boyfriend’s back, at close range. Stephens doesn’t explain the character’s motivation, but we are told by Danny that he didn’t commit atrocities, himself, while on duty in Iraq, even though he witnessed them. So we intuit that his action in casually murdering the black teenager is attributable to post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as excessive exposure to white-supremacist discourse when serving at Basra and elsewhere. While Danny’s anger is reserved for the multicultural society that Britain has become and the, for him, ‘woke’, anti-war attitudes that are opposed to his ‘patriotic’ endeavours in Iraq, Stephens gives very little hint of an authorial perspective. Nevertheless, by portraying his protagonist in the way he does, the playwright invites us to think who is responsible for the anomie of Danny and countless other working-class males sent to Iraq

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and Afghanistan. Unless we draw this conclusion, there would seem to be little point to the play. Another play that projected a white working-class male perspective was Gregory Burke’s acclaimed Black Watch (2006) for the National Theatre of Scotland, which highlighted the predicament of U.K. soldiers placed in grave danger by aggressive U.S. military strategy in Iraq. Black Watch was based on real-life experiences of soldiers sent to Afghanistan and was sympathetic to the long family traditions of the prestigious regiment. At the same time, it exposed the culture of toxic masculinity that both helped the Scottish soldiers to bond and made them easily exploitable by the British political and imperial classes. As in Stephens’ play, Burke’s method invited audiences to draw their own conclusions, plausibly representing the actions and reactions of young British men involved in a war with little grasp of the geopolitical issues that had led up to it. By sharp contrast, Mark Ravenhill’s cycle of 16 short plays Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat (2008) deployed so-called ‘In-yer-face’ theatrical form to create an impressionistic array of dramatic vignettes reflecting contemporary social responses to brutality and violence and using the trope of video games. Each play took its title from a classic literary epic, with the Iraq invasion piece named after Homer’s Odyssey. In the ironically entitled playlet ‘Birth of a Nation’, the author sets up a dramatically tense antagonism between the ‘freedom-and-democracy’-loving chorus of a recently ‘liberated’ city and the real audience, cast as sceptics and even potential ‘terrorists’. The overall effect of Ravenhill’s mini-dramas was to deconstruct the Western powers’ claim to export ‘freedom and democracy’, all the while wilfully eroding civil liberties and democratic rights in their own countries. Different again from the above examples, Tricycle Theatre’s trilogy The Great Game: Afghanistan, a cycle of twelve short plays by different authors, encapsulated an historical retrospective on the subject of Afghanistan and imperialism and neo-imperialism. The Great Game premiered at the Tricycle (now the Kiln Theatre) in London but was also staged on tour in New York. Under artistic director Nicholas Kent, Tricycle had established a peerless reputation for innovative cutting-edge theatre in the 1990s, specialising in tribunal and verbatim modes, often on contemporary political issues, with plays curated by Kent and written by Richard Norton-Taylor and others. Prior to The Great Game Kent and Norton-Taylor had staged two productions related to the involvement of the Blair government in Afghanistan and Iraq, Justifying War: Scenes from

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the Hutton Inquiry in 2003 and Called to Account: The Indictment of Tony Blair for the Crime of Aggression against Iraq: A Hearing in 2007. The Tricycle was also the theatre where the world-touring production of Brittain and Slovo’s verbatim documentary play Guantanamo—Honor Bound to Defend Freedom was first produced in 2004 before its transfer to the West End. The Great Game’s suite of plays presents a progression of significant events—from the nineteenth-century architects of ‘the great game’ between British and Russian Empires in the first cycle to the geopolitics surrounding the Soviet invasion in the second and the 2001 British-American intervention in the third—that has defined the country’s modern history of conflict and repression. The third and final part featured Abi Morgan’s The Night is Darkest Before the Dawn, Richard Bean’s On the Side of the Angels and Stephens’ Canopy of Stars, plays that explored the deleterious effects of Bush’s ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ on imaginary participants and victims. Aptly enough, this third set was entitled, with devastating irony, ‘Enduring Freedom’, and focused on the endurance of the various parties involved in the conflict, including British soldiers as well as ordinary Iraqi people. One of the most ambitious testimony plays in the U.K., substantially based on carefully compiled verbatim reports and eye-witness accounts, was Jonathan Holmes’s Fallujah, staged as a promenade production at the disused former Truman Brewery in London in 2007. It sought to convey to a British audience the horrors inflicted on the people of the city of Fallujah near to Abu Ghraib prison, when American forces conducted the 2004 offensive named Operation Phantom Fury intended to neutralise hostile forces. In an assault prompted in part by motives of revenge for the murder and desecration of the bodies of four American Blackwater employees, coalition troops used white phosphorus incendiary bombs indiscriminately in blatant disregard of Geneva Convention rules of engagement. In addition to the play’s profound sensory impact on audiences, Holmes’s production invited them to consider not only the basic violations of Iraqi human rights, but also the sheer irrelevance of U.S. notions of democracy for the trapped citizens of the ravaged city. Surveys were conducted among audiences to gauge their response to the production, but it was clear that Fallujah was created from the clear premise of opposing the invasion. However, the play’s indictment of the atrocities that took place focuses exclusively on the actions of U.S. participants,

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thereby reducing its impact on U.K. audiences and implicitly exonerating participants from their country: “Within the play’s laudable rebuilding of the war archive thus emerges its own blind spot, that of the U.K.’s complicity in the siege and the war crimes committed in Fallujah”.9 In a fascinating coincidental link between Holmes’s play and Burke’s, it transpired that The Black Watch was the British regiment mobilised at the siege of Fallujah to provide backup to American forces. A cross-section of plays on the theme of the respective invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq is also provided by American dramatist Karen Malpede’s Acts of War: Iraq and Afghanistan in Seven Plays, an anthology published in 2011 but consisting of plays from the century’s first decade, among which is Malpede’s own play Prophecy. However, with the notable exception of Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom, the selection for the most part reflects a greater focus on reactions to events in Afghanistan and Iraq in the West or by Westerners, than it does on those whose lives were torn apart by the hegemonic aims of the Bush “crusade”. Separately, Quiara Alegría Hudes’s trilogy of inter-connected plays Elliot, a Soldier’s Fugue (2006), Water by the Spoonful (2011) and The Happiest Song Plays Last (2012) dealt with the military service of males belonging to three generations of a Puerto Rican family during the U.S.’s Korean, Vietnam and Iraq invasions. While Hudes’s Pulitzer Prize-winning lyrical playwriting offered an indictment of America’s overseas aggression and the exploitation of its non-white citizenry by white elites, it also echoed the tendency of U.S. dramatists to focus on the subject predominantly from the invaders’ point of view. Veteran Canadian playwright and theatre academic Judith Thompson created one of the most politically pointed North American responses with her 2007 Palace of the End a triptych of monologues using some verbatim material, produced in association with Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre. Two of the monologues reflected the demonisation of real-life figures at the centre of controversies surrounding the Iraq conflict. The first monologue, ‘Pyramids’, is written from the perspective of the court-martialled American soldier Lynndie England, who casts herself as both victim and martyr, while the second, ‘Harrowdown Hill’, gives a voice to WMD inspector, Dr David Kelly, in his last moments. Thompson’s monologue appears to accept the official, though critically 9 Ariane de Waal, Theatre on Terror: Subject Positions in British Drama. Vol. 27 in series Contemporary Drama in English Studies, De Gruyter, 2017, 87.

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contested, suicide verdict on Kelly. The third is spoken from the perspective of an Iraqi mother and former prisoner in the Saddam Hussein’s prison, known as ‘Palace of the End’. All three monologues are valuable for reflecting the diversity of subject positions and the potential for creating empathy in dramatic treatments of those implicated in the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions, which de Waal’s study so effectively highlights. Finally, one of the decade’s most acclaimed British plays was not directly related to the ‘war on terror’ or the horrors of Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo, nor was it conceived and developed with the ‘war on terror’ in mind’; nonetheless, its physical and psychological torture references were extremely topical when the play premiered in November 2003, eight months after the invasion and approximately five months after the first reports of torture at detention centres run by the U.S. military emerged. Martin McDonagh’s award-winning 2003 play The Pillowman was about a children’s fiction writer living in a police state, who is being interrogated by two violence-addicted detectives regarding a series of child murders in an unnamed town. The work was inspired more by interest in the relationship between fictive and actual brutality ingrained in cultural traditions, but its terrifyingly written interrogation scenes left plenty of room for audience reflection on the endless capacity in human nature for abusive and sadistic behaviour. Above all, The Pillowman poses the legitimate question, does art imitate life, or does life imitate art? By extension, does the graphic violence seen in action and war movies desensitise us and inspire violent behaviour in its turn? And where does individual responsibility for it begin and end?

Case Studies Guantanamo—Honor Bound to Defend Freedom10 (Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo, U.K. 2004) Certainly, the plethora of British plays emerging during the first decade formed part of a lively public debate on British involvement in the American hawks’ propagandistic ‘war on terror’. Moreover, the ready availability of first-hand material in addition to the contentious nature of the public discourse tended to favour documentary-style dramatic work. 10 Note: the play title dispenses with above the second syllable of the place name.

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Journalist Victoria Brittain and novelist Gillian Slovo’s testimony play Guantanamo—Honor Bound to Defend Freedom was a significant milestone, as one of the earliest Anglophone theatrical responses. The second part of the play’s deeply ironic title, ‘Honor bound to Defend Freedom’, is taken from the motto displayed at Camp X-Ray (Camp Delta in its more permanent form after April 2002) run by the Joint Task Force at Guantánamo Naval Bay; this motto was clearly designed to give a veneer of legitimacy to the detainment camp in addition to reminding the soldiers stationed there of their putatively patriotic mission. Constructed as a series of sequential but mostly non-interactive monologues based on numerous interviews and supplemented by transcripts of speeches or press conferences, Brittain and Slovo’s documentary drama was originally commissioned by Nick Kent at the former Tricycle Theatre. It was imaginatively directed by Kent and Sacha Wares. Kent was a combative director known for his politically engagé approach in staging works focusing on sociopolitical injustice, notably Richard Norton-Taylor’s acclaimed tribunal play related to the infamous Stephen Lawrence murder case, The Colour of Justice (1999). The popularity of Guantanamo—Honor Bound to Defend Freedom among audiences at the small Tricycle Theatre earned it a subsequent successful run in the West End, culminating in an acclaimed New York off-Broadway production in August 2004 that happened to coincide with Bush’s re-election celebrations. Among Brittain and Slovo’s interviewees were the detainees themselves and their solicitors, as well as family members and a British citizen named Tom Clark, whose sister was among the victims of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in September 2001. In addition, they inserted excerpts from speeches or press conferences by Donald Rumsfeld and then British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, as well as opening and closing the play with pertinent extracts from a 2003 lecture by Lord of Appeal, Lord Justice Johan Steyn. The latter was a veteran British-South African judge specialising in human rights cases, who clashed with the Blair government on the issue of the unlawful detention without trial of British citizens in Guantánamo and Belmarsh Prison in the U.K. Apart from an excerpt from Straw’s announcement of the impending release of five of the detainees, the British government’s position is not reflected; according to the published play-script, the authors made numerous attempts to seek interviews with government officials with the goal of reflecting their views, but no members of the government or

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their representatives were willing to express their side of the argument for inclusion in the dramatic debate. Their silence on the issue spoke volumes. Steyn’s authoritative view frames the drama and informs the audience’s understanding of the situation. Retrospectively, we know it is based on factually accurate information regarding the situation in Guantánamo, despite protestations to the contrary by the Blair government and their media apologists. In the prologue speech, he delivers a stinging indictment of the camp’s function: The purpose of holding the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay was and is to put them beyond the rule of law, beyond the protection of any courts, and at the mercy of the victors…What takes place today in the name of the United States will assuredly, in due course, be judged at the bar of informed international opinion.11

Unfortunately, in respect of the above quotation, history proved Steyn’s prediction inaccurate, since those responsible for the promotion of the ‘war on terror’, clandestine rendition, extrajudicial detention, interrogation under torture and forced ‘confessions’ have not faced judgement for their war -crimes. In his corresponding framing epilogue, the anguished limbo faced by prisoners is defined as “a legal black hole”, and the illogical and arbitrary decision-making by the U.S. authorities is resoundingly challenged. What is apparent from Brittain and Slovo’s wellresearched piece is that the majority of prisoners in Guantánamo were innocent of any act of terrorism or affiliation to a terrorist group; their release without charge, therefore, must be taken as a tacit admission on the authorities’ part of their unlawful incarceration. On a more positive note, the four prisoners whose cases are followed in the play, all of them either British citizens or officially domiciled in the United Kingdom, were subsequently released without charge, some of them before the play was premiered. As is pointed out in Steyn’s speech that closes the play, it was decided beforehand that the British detainees would not face the death sentence if the military tribunal established their guilt, revealing the utterly discriminatory nature of the 11 Lord Justice Steyn, 27th F.A. Mann Lecture, 23 November 2003, quoted in Brittain/Slovo, Guantanamo—Honor Bound to Defend Freedom, 7. Steyn was involved in controversy over his human rights advocacy and pressurised by the Blair government to stand down from an official hearing on its policy of indefinite detention of terror suspects in 2004.

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proceedings. Steyn’s ironic observation that this example of inequality before the law gives a new dimension to the concept of “most favoured nation”12 is apposite. As the play’s closing voice-over makes clear: “Most [of the detainees] are from countries with even less power than Britain to influence events”.13 The three-act play follows the four detainees’ misfortunes at Guantánamo in the second and third acts, having in the opening act provided their back-stories, informing us how they came to be there; this was predominantly as a result of kidnappings conducted by the CIA or the U.S. military after which they were airlifted to the naval base from the notorious Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan. If there is a central character in the narrative, it has to be Moazzam Begg who was released from Guantanamo in 2005 after nearly three years in captivity. Begg, who is now a campaigner on behalf of the remaining prisoners and also collaborated on a later book with Slovo about his experiences, provides a lengthy backstory concerning his decision to go with his wife and young family to work in education and poverty relief in Afghanistan. His father also bears witness to the agony endured by the parents of prisoners, who were in most cases denied accurate information by the American and British authorities about the whereabouts of their sons. The latter’s input, together with Wahab Al-Rawi the elder brother of detainee Bisher Al-Rawi, places the detainees within a domestic family framework, and enhances audience empathy for the inmates. Wahab, whose family ironically came to Britain as refugees from Saddam’s Iraq, was soon released and allowed to return home, unlike his brother. As we learn in the play, Bisher liked adventure and bold enterprises, hence the brothers’ business concept for The Gambia, where they were detained without any reason given. It is suggested in the play that Bisher has a working relationship with MI5, which has been corroborated outside the scope of the play itself14 , but which was denied at the time by representatives of the organisation. So, in contrast to the other three, Bisher appears to have owed his incarceration more to British duplicity than to American. 12 Steyn, cited in Brittain and Slovo, Ibid., 58. 13 Brittain and Slovo, Guantanamo—Honor Bound to Defend Freedom, 59. 14 See ‘Courted as Spies, Held as Combatants’ by Craig Whitlock, The Washington Post ,

2 April 2006. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/01/ AR2006040101465_pf.html. Also, ‘The Rendition Project’, https://www.therenditionpro ject.org.uk/prisoners/rawi_banna.html.

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Narration of the complex and diverse back-stories of the four detainees represented by actors in the play enables the audience to see beyond the stereotypical profiles of them peddled via U.S. and U.K. government dis/ information channels. What emerges from their cases is the arbitrary and inept nature of the U.S. government’s attempts to track down genuine terrorists in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks. Brittain and Slovo’s dramatic strategy was designed to humanise the dehumanised of Guantanamo, and give them a voice. As the narrative makes clear, the prisoners were isolated for long periods, deprived of their basic human rights and depersonalised as numbers under the camp system. Miriam Buether’s expressive stage design conveyed the voicelessness of their predicament: thus, the voices of the detainees in their foreground spoken narratives— taken from either personal letters, or in some cases from post-release interviews—are symbolically juxtaposed with stage images of detainees lying silently on their beds, or restlessly pacing their cramped cages throughout the performance. Their narratives, complemented by relatives’ character portraits and family histories, together with testimony by their solicitors back in the United Kingdom, form a bizarre counterpoint to the mime-show taking place on stage behind them. Major Michael Dante (Dan) Mori, assigned as Defence Counsel of Australian detainee David Hicks, offers one of the most damning indictments in his testimony in Act Three. Mori was a member of the U.S. military appointed to represent Hicks by his superiors. Instead of playing along with the intended charade of legal representation at Guantánamo, he represented his client vigorously, to the apparent detriment of his own career opportunities. He subsequently earned the American Civil Liberties Union’s Medal of Liberty award, and was presented with civil justice awards by Australian lawyers and its Bar Association. After taking the Navy to court in 2010, he quit the U.S. Navy and relocated to Australia. His insights on the Guantánamo detentions are particularly valuable: It seems very contrary to fundamental fairnesses….You need to have an independent judge, you need an independent review process. The system can’t be controlled by people with a vested interest only in convictions…The problem with this system [is] it’s not a justice system, it’s a political system.15

15 Brittain and Slovo, Guantanamo—Honor Bound to Defend Freedom. Ibid., 56–57.

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This statement reflects the plight of Moazzam Begg, as articulated by his father’s plea: “I’m not asking mercy from anybody. I’m asking justice”.16 As a powerful broadside against the human rights violations inflicted on detainees by the U.S. and U.K. governments, Brittain and Slovo’s testimony piece informed and, to a modest extent, influenced public opinion on what was happening in their name. The postscript to this infamous miscarriage of justice is that, as of the time of writing in 2023, Guantánamo and Belmarsh Prison continue to house 30 and 687 detainees, respectively. Among Belmarsh internees, Australian investigative journalist Julian Assange, whose WikiLeaks organisation published factual and potentially incriminating information against the Bush and Blair administrations in relation to both the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, remains in limbo at time of writing, despite intense and widespread pressure for his release without charge. Stuff Happens (David Hare, U.K. 2004) Nowhere was the evangelising imperialistic rhetoric of hardline neoconservative discourse that sought to justify the ‘shock-and-awe’ tactics used in the military interventions, more robustly challenged than in two plays by veteran leftist British playwrights David Hare and Caryl Churchill. Together with Brittain and Slovo’s piece, the 2004 National Theatre play Stuff Happens and the 2006 Royal Court production, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You, were among the standout theatrical offerings in the bitter ideological war between those who supported and those who opposed the intervention. Similarities of theatrical background notwithstanding, the two authors produced qualitatively different dramatic disquisitions on the conflict. Hare opted for a quasi-historical reconstruction and representation of real events and players employing direct address at key points of the drama, whereas Churchill’s take was characteristically allegorical, blending realistic and surrealistic writing and staging. One of the main reasons that Hare’s play was an unlikely popular hit on stage at the National Theatre’s Olivier Theatre in 2004 was that it challenged the ubiquitous grand narrative of the pro-war lobby. It also offered a clinical analysis of the motivation behind the Bush government’s decision to invade, as well as defining each step in the process that led to

16 Ibid., 57.

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military aggression. His title was based on an infamous comment made by then U.S. Secretary for Defence Donald Rumsfeld, “stuff happens”, when he responded to journalists on reports that there had been destruction and looting of valuable cultural artefacts in Baghdad following the invasion. Analysing that callous remark a few years later in interview, Chomsky scathingly riposted: “Here it’s just “Stuff happens”. Not there. They care about their culture and civilisation and their life”.17 Stuff Happens particularly resonated in the U.K. because it portrayed Tony Blair and his closest advisors becoming increasingly caught up in the machinations of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz and other neocon fundamentalists; in the play, we see how the latter exploited public figures reputed to be more ‘trustworthy’ or ‘moderate’, notably Blair and U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, to advance the case for invasion, thereby gaslighting the public in both countries. As Hare takes pains to point out, Stuff Happens is essentially a creative work and not a theatrical documentary. While it is, in part, based on transcripts derived from public records and draws on extensive research from multiple sources, only a quarter, or possibly a fifth, according to the author himself18 consists of quotation. Neither is it a piece of tribunal theatre, passing judgement on the instigators and those who fabricated the case for war. Rather, the play blends reportage of actual speeches, high-level meetings and press conferences with convincingly imagined versions of private meetings that involved Bush and Blair and members of their respective administrations. A considerable proportion of the play entails direct address to the audience by key figures as well as by narrators, and much of the direct address of the play is based on reportage and verbatim comments or fact-checked information provided by members of the ensemble. It switches seamlessly to ‘fourth-wall’ mode in scenes involving formal meetings or impromptu discussions among participants. In these latter scenes Hare reverts to the dramatist’s poetic licence to supplement what was reported and summarised in the media, drawing on a wealth of script-writing expertise to get inside the heads of his real-life characters.

17 Chomsky, What We Say Goes, 70. 18 This estimation was provided by Hare himself during a New York-based interview

show entitled ‘Theater Talk’ in March 2006. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sle ehnwNovo.

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By 2004 when the play was premiered in London, memories of the widespread anti-war protest march there and in other cities across Europe and the U.S. were still very fresh. By this point, the tactics of spin and disinformation had become increasingly associated with Blair and his artful director of communications and strategy, Alastair Campbell, which made Stuff Happens topical and timely. Hare describes the piece as “a history play, which happens to centre on very recent history”,19 and this designation hints at the play’s purpose, namely to shed light on the events and the motivations of the real-life actors in this early twenty-first-century quasi-Shakespearean drama. In a 2006 interview with New York-based ‘Theater Talk’s’ Michael Riedel and Susan Haskins, prior to a performance at the Newman auditorium of the Public Theatre in New York, Hare made pertinent analogies between his play and both Greek and Shakespearean tragedies. His original idea was to provoke a more critical level of public discussion on the actions and decisions of the political elites on both sides of the Atlantic: “I wanted to make it like a Greek theatre—like a public forum”.20 In the same interview he asserts that it was “not just the events themselves, but the response of the audience to those events” that inspired him to develop the play at a time when mainstream American theatre was studiously avoiding any kind of political controversy. In his dissection of the events, Hare sought to reflect differing perspectives from key U.S. and U.K. government figures, to U.N. and French diplomats, Western journalists, Iraqi exiles, U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix, and even, briefly, Saddam Hussein. This dialectical method in the play recalls Brechtian dramatic strategy: it involved synthesising and juxtaposing the core material in such a way that audiences’ awareness of the teleology of events is heightened. The overweening ‘world policemen’ role assumed by the U.S. and the U.K. is placed under the theatrical microscope, and the war coalition’s justifications are critically challenged; conversely, in order to acknowledge adversarial arguments in the West which were commonly expressed at this time, Hare includes interventions from apologists of the invasion, namely a journalist and a New Labour politician. These representative figures argue the legitimacy of the

19 David Hare, Stuff Happens , Faber and Faber Limited, 2004, author’s prefatory note, 20 Hare comments on the elements of the play that are reminiscent of Greek or

Shakespearean tragedy in the ‘Theater Talk’ interview. See note 5.

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‘Iraqi freedom’ operation in terms of basic humanitarianism, but appear to have no misgivings about the disproportionate ‘collateral damage’ that is wreaked on the country and its population by Western forces. A contrary position to these pro-invasion views is expressed, with similar critical ardour, by an anonymous ‘Brit in New York’ in a later monologue. Perceiving American justification for the invasion as payback for the World Trade Center outrage, the notional Brit rhetorically asks: “If the principle of international conduct is now to be that you may go against anyone you like on the grounds that you’ve been hurt by somebody else, does that apply to everyone? Or just to America?”.21 In the case of Stuff Happens the dramatic tension generated by a play of which the outcome is universally known in advance is created not by what happens or how it happens, but by why it happens, or rather, why it is inevitable that it happens. Thus, Hare replaces the individual psychological motivation of protagonists in conventional domestic speech dramas with the competing interests and motives of the key political players and groups in the U.S. and the U.K. His play charts precisely how Blair and his inner circle, described in the script as ‘The Downing Street Group’, capitulated one step at a time to U.S. power politics in the face of strong opposition among the MPs and, in some cases, ministers of the Prime Minister’s own party and the general public. Blair’s true motivation, as widely perceived in the British public’s conception of him as ‘Bush’s poodle’, is laid bare in a scene with his advisors: “With the Americans there’s one rule. You get in early. You prove your loyalty…if even for a moment we come adrift from Washington, our influence is gone”.22 Nonetheless, the dramatist credits him as nurturing ambitions as a global peacemaker, at least at the outset, and when he attempts to pressurise Bush into reviving the stalled Middle Eastern peace process it is clearly for benign reasons. Hare’s Bush character is represented, in contrast, as opaque, without explicit goals; he appears to adjudicate and balance the views and proposals of the hawks in his administration with those of the more cautious Secretary of State, Colin Powell, and supposed friend and ally, Blair. In reality, he has already decided on his course of action, which accords with the belligerent aims of the PNAC zealots, but is not giving anything away.

21 Hare, Stuff Happens , 92. 22 Ibid., 88.

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As Hare notes in the same interview with Riedel and Haskins, Bush is represented in the play as laconic, inscrutable and ultimately “cunning” in his policy meetings. In the opening self-presentation section, where the key figures introduce themselves in direct address to the audience, Bush’s claim to be inspired directly by God, following his born-again conversion to fundamentalist Christianity, is significant. Again, quoting the actual words of the 43rd President, the character expresses the conviction that as “commander…I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation”.23 Hare skilfully shows how this arrogant belief in the infallibility of his ‘divinely ordained’ mission is the real wellspring of the Iraq crusade. Dramatic irony is a key component of the play’s structure and tone, which is reflected in Powell’s role in the negotiations with the U.N. and his initial support of the second resolution, together with Blair. Powell’s lack of awareness of Bush’s bad faith is echoed by that of Blair across the Atlantic, as Hare’s implication is that they are both duped by the pro-war cabal, tacitly supported by Bush. Consequently, the dramatic action is set in motion as in a classical tragedy, where, to quote Jean Anouilh’s chorus character in Antigone: “Maintenant, le ressort est bandé. Cela n’a plus qu’à se dérouler tout seul. C’est cela qui est commode dans la tragédie”.24 The tragic dénouement for the putative ‘good soldier’, Powell, is that he allows himself to be coerced into continuing to play his role of representative of a President that had pre-determined the invasion of Iraq; he grimly realises that his good intentions have been ruthlessly exploited, but decides not to expose the falsehood: BUSH: We’ve all been looking at the intelligence, we’ve all been assessing it. POWELL: Yes, we have. BUSH: We know exactly how strong it is. POWELL: Yes we do. (Long silence) POWELL: Excuse me, sir. Just to be clear. Who would be making this presentation? BUSH: Well, that’s what I was saying. People trust you, Colin. And you feel strongly. It would have to be you.25

23 Ibid., 9. 24 “The spring is wound up tight. It will uncoil of itself. That is what is so convenient

in tragedy”. Jean Anouilh, Antigone. trans. Lewis Galantière. 25 Hare, Ibid., 105.

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In the subsequent scene, where Powell makes the case at the U.N. for the invasion of Iraq, Hare highlights the incongruity between what Powell believes to be his diplomatic ‘Adlai Stevenson moment’ and what is caustically referred to by White House staff as ‘the Powell buy-in’.26 Following his 2006 resignation, Powell is quoted in a fraught exchange with BBC anchor Jeremy Paxman, who invites him to “apologise for misleading the world”,27 an admission that the embattled former diplomat refuses to make. Hare uses a verbatim extract from the real interview with Paxman to reveal how Powell was fatally compromised by his duplicitous colleagues in the Bush administration; having offered disingenuous excuses to interviewer and audience, the Powell character abruptly leaves the play. The scene segues into sound-bites from other key players, such as Condoleezza Rice and Blair cynically absolving themselves of responsibility. Hare skilfully juxtaposes these disclaimers with Bush’s delusional Christian fundamentalist justification for the carnage and mounting chaos inflicted on Iraq: “God told me to strike at Al Qaeda, which I did, and then He instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did”.28 Again, with acute dramatic irony, it is reported how Bush reneged on his commitment to reviving the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians, which was supposed to be Blair’s bargaining counter for joining the Americans’ war coalition. The closing external intervention is that of a putative Iraqi exile who escaped Saddam’s brutal regime, but is horrified by Rumsfeld’s blasé ‘stuff happens’ remark, which he describes as “racist”. The last of Hare’s diverse invented monologues, this probably carries the most impact of all. It is the play’s vitally important epilogue and aptly shifts the perspective to that of the people of Iraq. We assume from the monologue that this figure is an Iraqi returnee, initially happy to see his country rid of the dictator, but now thoroughly disenchanted by the turn of events: …Iraq has been crucified. By Saddam’s sins, by ten years of sanctions, by the occupation, and now by the insurgency…people say to me: ‘Look, tell America.’ I tell them: ‘You are putting your faith in the wrong person.

26 Ibid., 105. 27 Ibid., 118. 28 Ibid., 118.

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Don’t expect America or anybody will do it for you. If you don’t do it yourself, this is what you get.’29

This closing monologue reflects Hare’s sympathies: while he gives a voice to pro-invasion viewpoints in scenes that feature hard-nosed ideologues in the Bush administration, as well as via the interventions of the journalist and the New Labour politician, this final monologue and the earlier one by a Palestinian academic (perhaps a subconscious avatar of Edward Said whose premature decease occurred during Hare’s research for the play) are the most incisive and telling. This earlier monologue also answers the question “why Iraq” with great clarity and conviction, outlining the various reasons, but emphasising the overarching one, namely “defending the interests of America’s three-billion-dollar-a-year colony in the Middle East”, i.e. Israel.30 So, ultimately the play isn’t an attempt to present an impartial debate on American aggression any more than Chomsky’s political essays aim to present both sides of the geopolitical struggle ‘fairly’. There is nothing remotely fair or ‘just’31 about American global imperialism—this is the only conclusion to be drawn from Stuff Happens , whether or not one is sympathetic to Hare’s underlying thesis. Syriana (Stephen Gaghan, U.S. 2005) Responding to the events of the early millennial years, without the factual, name-checking specificity of the two plays discussed above, Stephen Gaghan’s 2005 film Syriana offered a similar though fictional dissection of US interference in Middle Eastern countries. In particular, Syriana was concerned with showing the link specifically between American oil corporations and dictatorship, corruption and violence in the Middle East. Its complex skein of a plot conjoins four seemingly disparate narrative threads that interweave and ultimately converge in the movie’s explosive and violent resolution. A rare ensemble-based example of movie production, Gaghan’s film, featured a very strong cast, including Matt Damon 29 Hare, Ibid., 120. 30 Ibid., 57. 31 ‘Operation Infinite Justice’ was the name originally given to the American invasion of Afghanistan, before it was changed to ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’. The mordant irony of this name can be safely assumed to have been unintended.

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as a sharp but idealistic business analyst and George Clooney as an experienced, but increasingly isolated, CIA operative, a role for which he won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in 2006. Clooney’s role in what is probably the key plot strand of the four is derived from former CIA officer Robert Baer’s 2003 memoir See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War Against Terrorism. Baer was a consultant on the film set, and even made a cameo appearance as a CIA security man. Baer’s memoir, covering his experiences as an officer in the field of anti-terrorist intelligence from the Seventies onward until his retirement in the late Nineties, is highly critical of what he saw as the gradual degeneration of CIA practices supposedly aimed at saving lives. According to Baer’s memoir, this deliberate policy culminated in failures by intelligence services to forestall lethal terrorist attacks, with the September 11 strikes on New York and Washington as the ultimate example. Adding to the controversial nature of his memoir with regard to the U.S. government’s sweeping Espionage Act and its use to prevent public disclosure, in the latter part Baer delivers a powerful indictment of the oil industry. Based on his personal observation and insider knowledge, Baer deplores the oil industry’s stranglehold on politics in Washington and the prioritisation of its own agenda at all costs. Clooney’s remark in the DVD interview that, “it’s a film in design like films of the Seventies that were willing to discuss geopolitical issues without pointing fingers at a specific person”,32 is a subtle reference to Gaghan’s decision to fictionalise the real oligarchs and their henchman who pervert democracy, frequently with impunity. Whether or not the film was marketed as a political thriller out of motives of safety rather than for aesthetic reasons, its director and producers opted for a creative strategy, involving the use of parables and allusions to intimate the real-life situations described in Baer’s book. In consequence, the title Syriana is purely evocative, and does not refer to a specific Middle Eastern country. The film’s four distinct but converging plot elements are skilfully but satisfyingly fused in its closing part, requiring audiences to infer the relationships between its fragmentary, elliptical scenes and trust its narrative trajectory. The first narrative follows Baer’s fictional alter ego, journeyman CIA operative Bob Barnes, beginning with the story of a 32 George Clooney, cast interviews on Syriana DVD released by Warner Home Video, 2006.

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U.S. tactical missile that goes missing after his assignment in Tehran. We follow Barnes from Tehran to Washington, then Beirut, Washington again and finally an unnamed Middle Eastern emirate on a desperate mission to prevent an assassination, having learned too late he is only a pawn in the organisation’s devious games. The second follows Damon’s character Bryan Woodman, a shrewd derivatives analyst, who unexpectedly becomes special advisor to the Emir’s elder son Prince Nasir Al-Subaai. Seeing the latter’s potential as an economic and social reformer and critic of his country’s oil vassalage to the United States, Woodman gushingly compares him with Mohammad Mossadegh—Iran’s reformist post-World War II premier, who was removed in a coup orchestrated by the CIA and the U.K.’s MI6—and encourages him to insist on his birthright by succeeding his ill father. The U.S. oil lobbyists have other ideas, and plan to supplant him with his playboy younger brother, who is eminently corruptible. As Woodman presciently, but unwittingly, observes, the struggle between oil drilling and national autonomy is a literal ‘fight to the death’. The third strand concerns legal investigator Bennett Holiday, who is recommended by the head of the law firm for Connex Oil, Dean Whiting, to carry out a soft investigation into the prospective merger of the Texas oil giant with a smaller company Killen Oil. The latter company has acquired the rights to oil fields in Kazakhstan controlled by the family of real-life dictator Nursultan Nazarbaev. It transpires that the U.S. Department of Justice requires two major figures as token sacrificial offerings to satisfy the expectation that corporate fraud must appear to be punished. The smooth and increasingly compromised Bennett sells his soul to the most powerful executive of Connex, Leland Janus, and so betrays Sidney Hewitt, his own mentor in the law firm, on charges of corruption in order to give the U.S. government the illusion of a spurious due diligence. The other ‘body’ thrown to the Justice Department is Danny Dalton, a senior figure in the Killen Oil company and passionate advocate of business monopoly; confronted by Holiday, he spouts sentiments straight from the Hayek-Friedman neoliberal playbook: “Corruption! We have laws against it precisely so we can get away with it. Corruption is our protection, corruption keeps us safe and warm… Corruption is why we win”. With both token perpetrators of fraud offered up to oil the wheels of the Connex-Killen merger, it looks set to generate gargantuan profits for the merged company. The fourth narrative takes place in a tangential but different reality, but one which profoundly affects the movie’s denouement. Young Pakistani

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migrant worker Wasim Khan is one of many former employees now abruptly dismissed by the Connex refinery, who are thereby deprived of their meagre food and lodging provision. He and his father seek alternative employment in the emirate in order to be able to stay and bring their mother to join them. When the naturally upbeat and conscientious Wasim encounters job rejections on account of his poor Arabic, he is invited to join a madrasa to improve his competence through study of the Quran. However, he falls in with a persuasive Islamic fundamentalist who radicalises him in preparation for a suicide mission against a Connex-Killen tanker in the harbour. The missile to be used is the missing one that was taken at gunpoint from Bob Barnes in Tehran, which reached the fundamentalist group via Egypt. In the closing scenes the various plot-lines, rather like the two oil companies, successfully merge. Barnes, having evaded CIA superiors and arrived in the emirate, drives a car across the desert to intercept Prince Nasir’s convoy, as the latter is on his way to prevent his brother from assuming power at the oil companies’ instigation. However, at that point a drone missile is activated by satellite from CIA headquarters and kills the Prince and his family, as well as Barnes. Woodman limps away from the burnt-out wreckage to return eventually to his family. As Connex CEO Janus celebrates his Oilman of the Year award with the ever-compliant Holiday in attendance, Wasim and his partner in the small boat steer a direct course for the Connex-Killen super-tanker, with the screen fading to white. The shady Committee for the Liberation of Iran that appears briefly in the film, to which Janus, Whiting and others belong, is a fictional surrogate for the real-life lobby group known as the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, formed after the September 11 attacks at the behest of the Bush administration. However, the influential oil lobbyists of the film bore little resemblance to the latter ‘non-government organisation’ created predominantly with the aim of ‘selling’ the Iraq invasion to the general public and, more important, to legislators in Congress. In Gaghan’s representation the oil lobbyists are portrayed as more powerful and autonomous and more akin to the PNAC in the way they formulate their plot for regime change. By contrast, the real CLI was a short-lived public relations exercise that was discontinued once it achieved the desired effect. Much of the effect of Gaghan’s screenplay relies on the dramatic irony whereby the protagonists within the various plot strands are in a similar

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position to the film audience in their inability to see the bigger picture and foresee how their lives will intersect. Across the four main plot strands the major linking factor is oil, since all characters are affected by it and inexorably drawn together by it. The symmetry of the two murderous attacks in the movie’s final sequence may convey a sense of poetic justice to the viewer, but ultimately it invites us to reflect on where responsibility lies for the endless cycle of violence in the Middle East. The film’s strategy is to show how our actions are linked in ways that we cannot surmise and that overt and covert political interventions come at a heavy price for any opportunity for progress towards a more just world. Syriana was, admittedly, an oblique critique of Bush’s Iraq intervention, but it provided a salutary reminder to audiences that the country’s oil fields were undoubtedly germane to the decision to invade. Drunk Enough to Say I Love You (Caryl Churchill, U.K. 2006) Most reviews of Stuff Happens , both favourable and unfavourable, commented on the high quality of acting by the respective ensembles, as well as lauding a number of standout performances on either side of the Atlantic. Caryl Churchill’s Drunk Enough to Say I Love You, which premiered at The Royal Court in London in November 2006, featured only two actors, and both performers were necessarily virtuosic, as was the production concept. While reviewers were impressed by the staging of what initially appears to be the revival of an affair between male lovers Sam and Jack (the latter subsequently changed by Churchill to Guy for the U.S. performances)—both men sat on a sofa, surrounded by a warmly lit frame on an otherwise dark stage, with this mise-en-scène progressively elevating itself between blackouts—many took issue with the underlying thesis of Churchill’s 45-minute play. The apparently naturalistic homosexual relationship enacted in the play’s opening scene segues abruptly to an obviously symbolic, allegorical one, in which the special relationship between the U.S. and the U.K. is put under the dramatic microscope. As the sofa gets higher, so too does the sense of hyper-reality and the intoxicated hyperbole of the exchanges. It becomes clear to the audience that Sam (Uncle Sam) and Jack (Union Jack) are essentially semiotic devices signifying their respective countries, and that the mutually dependent private individuals depicted at the opening of the play were a deliberate theatrical deception. The levitating sofa on which the pair sit visually connotes the subject-matter

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of their heady conversation: it rises incrementally, with each blackout, defying gravity in the process, and ultimately embodies the surreal nature not only of their exchange, but of their entire interrelationship. Churchill’s aptitude for creating shapeshifting characters, as in The Skriker (1994), can be disorientating for audiences, and what may seem in the earlier scenes to be a caricature of the Blair-Bush relationship turns out to be yet another theatrical illusion. There are contemporary references to the U.S.-U.K. coalition at various points of the play for the audience to infer that the protagonists are intended to represent the high-profile partners of the ‘war on terror’ coalition. Sam’s gleeful reference to “the depleted uranium”33 in British-made shells dropped indiscriminately during the assault on Iraq— causing lung and bone cancer from radiation, as well as deformities in babies—is a clear allusion to the controversial use of these weapons. At the same time, the scope of geopolitical allusion is far too wide and the historical contexts too diverse and temporally disparate for such a specific encoding of the play’s referential framework. Put simply, the treasured ‘special relationship’ between American and British governments that has prevailed since World War II is under at times savage, at times satirical, attack in Drunk Enough by an inveterate critic of the long-term transatlantic alliance. As Vicky Angelaki has noted: “The play takes the term [the special relationship] at face value, exposing all it might stand for in the global political field, with references ranging from manipulating public opinion and covering up crimes to overthrowing governments and turning a blind eye to environmental catastrophe”.34 Embedded in the elliptical dialogue between the two men is nothing less than a post-World War II history of global American interference and violent coercion, from Korea, Iran, Vietnam and Indonesia to El Salvador Brazil, Guatemala and Chile, and latterly Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the super-power’s unconditional support for Israel’s relentless expansion of its borders. While the fragmented, disjointed and grammatically incomplete phrases uttered by the two figures create their own discordant poetics of a type familiar from the author’s work from Top Girls to Far Away and A Number, the key words form a sufficiently coherent narrative for audiences to fill in the gaps. The U.K.’s complicit, if at

33 Caryl Churchill, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You, Nick Hern Books, 2006, 28. 34 Vicky Angelaki, Social and Political Theatre in 21st Century Britain: Staging Crisis,

Bloomsbury, 2016, 27.

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times reluctant, role as former imperial power and now junior partner in this gruesome ‘pax Americana’ is reflected in Jack’s attempts to please his more dominant lover by responding positively to the latter’s selfglorifying sound-bites. Like the more submissive partner in an intimate but unequal relationship, blurting out whatever he thinks his controlling partner wants to hear, Jack/Guy ramps up the bullish rhetoric: SAM: would you believe six billion dollars in El Salvador? training thousands of JACK/GUY: and the schools, I’m trying to organise SAM: School of the Americas JACK: coup school SAM: chemical school JACK: enormous SAM: results in and we won in JACK: yay35

As the play progresses and the tenor of the triumphalist rhetoric, glorifying horrific abuse on a global scale, is heightened, it eventually becomes too much for the belatedly compunctious Jack/Guy. His role in facilitating a catalogue of abuses, involving blatant manipulation of world trade, simultaneously punishing and promoting the manufacture and export of illicit drugs, the development and use of chemical weapons, torture and extrajudicial killing of opponents, and so on, prompts twinges of conscience that offend his manipulative lover. In scenes four and six, respectively, he expresses tentative reservations, which come to a head in the lovers’ tiff at the end of the latter scene, when Sam tells him to “fuck off”. With presciently Trumpian narcissism and puerile reductionism, Sam calculatedly observes: “makes everyone love me because it’s only the evildoers who hate me, you don’t hate me”, to which his docile partner feebly replies “no of course”, but then adds, “but maybe I can’t live with you any more”.36 Having briefly returned to his family in the interim between scenes, Jack/Guy returns, like the stereotypical abused lover that comes crawling back, following Sam’s semi-coherent and psychotic rant itemising torture methods in sadistic, but factual, detail. The latter

35 Churchill, Ibid., 10. 36 Ibid., 32.

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monologue would have instantly rung bells among audiences in the light of widespread condemnation of the human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. Recalling the humiliating sexual abuses perpetrated by agents of ‘Uncle Sam’ at Abu Ghraib, we can appreciate the perceptiveness of Michael Billington’s aperçu on the relationship between sexuality and power in his review: “Having dealt in the past with the politics of sex, Churchill puts the sexuality of politics centre stage”.37 As the two private/public players become increasingly drunk on global ambitions, their exchanges degenerate into a naked pornography of power. Thus, by transforming the cliché of political power as an aphrodisiac into a vivid theatrical trope, Churchill invites audiences to think beyond the stale metaphors frequently employed in political journalism. In such context, the off-the-record sexual reference in the British government’s infamous “sexed-up” dossier,38 designed to make the case for the Iraq invasion more attractive and compelling, acquires fresh resonance. The theatricality of Churchill’s 2006 play hinges on the use of both dramatic and linguistic irony as well as visual and situational absurdity. At the same time, the rapid tempo-rhythm of the exchanges between the lovers/partners requires an audience to work at constructing meaning, with the aid of non-verbal information, from the play’s fragmented dialogue. As the dramatist shows in the final scene, once the formerly exciting sexual relationship turns toxic, the emotional world of the lovers implodes, and the relational endgame is near. Jack’s/Guy’s references to ecological Armageddon—“ice caps”, “floods”, “hurricanes”, “carbon”, “oil lobby”, “no water”, and “catastrophe”39 —are treated by Sam with the type of climate change denial increasingly associated with hard-right politics: “natural disasters”, “junk science”, “and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has many beneficial effects” and “can’t see it in the air”, “be ok”.40 This scene, consisting of breathlessly short exchanges, implies that the former lovers are not only becoming estranged, but also asphyxiated, and that the death of their special relationship is imminent. Similarly, there is no relief from the war of terror that this relationship has inflicted on 37 Billington, Review of Drunk Enough to Say I Love You, 23 November 2006. https:// www.theguardian.com/stage/2006/nov/23/theatre.artsreviews1. 38 See Kevin Marsh, Stumbling Over Truth: The Inside Story and the ‘Sexed Up’ Dossier, Hutton and the BBC, Biteback Publishing, 2012. 39 Churchill, Ibid., 38–39. 40 Ibid., 38–39.

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the planet, because the death of the couple can only occur with the kind of environmental apocalypse Churchill envisaged in Far Away and, in the following decade, in Escaped Alone. In Drunk Enough Churchill complements the very recent history depicted in Hare’s Stuff Happens with a longer history of American imperialism and British support for and participation in it; her history is also contemporary in its own way, since the overt atrocities and covert manipulations are discussed in the exchanges of Sam and Jack/Guy as if they are ongoing or recent geopolitical interventions. References to deleterious Anglo-American involvement in Latin America, Africa and East Asia are made recursively, with no sense of a chronology of these actions. However, whereas in Stuff Happens Bush and Blair are represented, on balance, reasonably authentically, Hare’s mimetic method is not germane to Churchill’s dramatic aim in Drunk Enough. Instead, her telescoped and allegorical representation of the special relationship invests the neoconservative designation ‘axis of evil’ with entirely fresh resonances. Elaine Aston and Elin Diamond have noted how it not only adroitly illustrates the axiom that the personal is political, but also exemplifies how theatre can reconcile allegories of fictional individual lives with collective experiences of political engagement: “As Drunk Enough, like so much of Churchill’s recent work, shows the risks inherent in not being able to see the implications of how personal lives are woven into a bigger, political fabric, it also interrogates what role theatre as a public art form and forum plays on the political stage”.41 Unlike the vast majority of plays concerning the ‘war on terror’, which inevitably lost their contemporary focus relatively quickly, Drunk Enough retains its relevance today; for one thing, the Authorisation for the Use of Military Force granted by the U.S. Congress in September 2001 to then President Bush (as so-called Commander-in-Chief) has yet to be rescinded by the U.S. Congress. Churchill’s premise was, unsurprisingly, regarded by many British and American theatre critics, with notable exceptions,42 as histrionic and unbalanced. It seemed as if ‘the special relationship’ was somehow too sacrosanct to travesty in the way that Churchill chose to critique it. 41 Elaine Aston and Elin Diamond, ‘Introduction on Caryl Churchill’ in The Cambridge Guide to Caryl Churchill, Cambridge University Press, 2009, 1. 42 For example, Michael Billington’s review of the play (see Note 130 above) is very positive, but also makes valid criticisms regarding its elliptical nature.

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However, former Washington Post investigative journalist Vincent Bevins in The Jakarta Method, his 2020 exposé of twentieth-century U.S. atrocities in the Third World based on declassified documents, archival research and eye-witness testimony collected across twelve countries, vindicates Churchill’s dramatic representations with his deeply shocking research and conclusions.43 Indeed, if the Churchill and Hare takes on ‘the war on terror’ are one-sided in their respective critiques of ‘the special relationship’, this can be explained by the fact that the special relationship itself is demonstrably one-sided; the difference is that the side that the writers of Stuff Happens and Drunk Enough are passionately opposed to is amply represented by the public mouthpieces of an all-powerful establishment. In the Loop (Armando Iannucci, U.K. 2009) Of all the films that dealt with the ‘war on terror’ and the invasion of Iraq explicitly or by implication, Armando Iannucci’s acerbically distanced satire, In the Loop, was one of the most popular, judging by its Rotten Tomatoes aggregate score of 94%. The film, which was also critically well received at its Sundance Festival premiere in January 2009, is a deadpan political comedy in the tradition of Barry Levinson’s Wag the Dog (1997) and Warren Beatty’s Bulworth (1998). Iannucci and his co-writers conceived it as a spin-off from the British television comedy series The Thick of It, which also featured one of the protagonists of the movie, the foul-mouthed Scottish spin-doctor Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi). While Capaldi, who played the character, averred there was no specific intention to portray Blair’s Director of Communications,44 Alastair Campbell, the parallels are fairly obvious to the British viewer, at least; Tucker’s role in the film adaptation is certainly suggestive of Campbell’s role in spinning the disingenuous dossier. Iannucci and his collaborators judiciously avoided any representation of the nameless British Prime Minister and U.S. President in their script. Instead, they hint at significant

43 Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World, Public Affairs Books, 2020. Bevins’ critically acclaimed and meticulously researched book investigates the involvement of the CIA in precisely the kind of murderous campaigns Churchill references in her play, but focusing on CIA-sponsored brutality in the Far East and Latin America. 44 Peter Capaldi, director and cast interviews on In the Loop DVD, Studiocanal, 2009.

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top-down influences at work and cannily depict the politics of obfuscation and public relations spin. In consequence, we see their subordinates, both Brits and Americans, caught in the loop of their respective political machines. In the Loop’s felicitous blend of bathos, irony and farce, reminiscent of other British pseudo-documentary comedies, such as Ricky Gervais’s The Office, casts a powerful spotlight on the cynical political manoeuvring and bad diplomacy that led to war. At the same time, its stinging satire is grimmer than either The Thick of It or The Office, corresponding more closely to the Juvenalian satirical tradition than the lighter Horatian mode. Its title is whimsically apt and appropriately ambiguous: not only are the British and American officials desperate to be kept ‘in the loop’ as regards the latest moves by the Future Planning Committee (a spoof reference to the real-life Office of Special Plans under Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz), many of them are also portrayed as being imbricated in a mad loop of events over which they have no real control. The creative strategy of Iannucci and colleagues involved retaining the witty one-liners, asides and expletive-laden rants of the script of The Thick of It, as well as the comedy series’ sense of spontaneity and improvisation, but providing the film with a more international arena of action. Aesthetically, the film conveys a similar feeling of naturalism to the television series, enhanced by the use of handheld digital camera. As the director explained in interview: “I wanted to give it that slightly documentary feel…so the audiences feel they’re eavesdropping on something”.45 This dynamic creates an effect of alienation from the principal characters, whereby any sense of identification with them is frustrated; even those initially opposed to war are shown as self-serving, and none of them elicits empathy from the viewer. For the most part, fresh characters were invented for the standalone film, including the well-meaning but ineffectual British Secretary of State for International Development, Simon Foster (Tom Hollander), the American pro-war Assistant Secretary of State for Policy, Linton Barwick (David Rasche), and anti-war allies Assistant Secretary of State Karen Clark (Mimi Kennedy) and Lieutenant General George Miller (James Gandolfini). Barwick and Miller come across as partial caricatures of Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell, respectively, especially in the case

45 Armando Iannucci, In the Loop DVD. See Note 137 above.

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of the former who bears a passing physical resemblance to the real figure, and is represented as an ultra-competitive squash player, an aspect of the real Rumsfeld that Hare highlights in his introductory section of Stuff Happens . Barwick’s glib maxim to his aide Adriano, “In the land of truth, my friend, the man with one fact is king”,46 is particularly revealing of the neocons’ monomania and dismissal of alternative views. When Simon makes a deliberately ambivalent remark to the media that war in the Middle East is ‘unforeseeable’, he and his advisors are berated by the inventively profane Tucker for being off-message. Asking the abusive director of communications what he ought to have said, he is told by Tucker that, if quizzed, he needs to say war is “neither unforeseeable nor foreseeable”.47 The farcical nature of this exchange is heightened by Simon echoing the line and trailing off lamely: “neither inevitable nor…”. Totally out of his depth by now, in a subsequent press ambush he attempts an unfortunate metaphor, suggesting that, for pilots, a mountain can be unforeseeable, but may lie just ahead in the mist. Therefore, he reasons, they shouldn’t interpret his previous remark about war being foreseeable as categorical. Realising that he is digging himself a deeper hole, he desperately blurts out that, in addition to promoting a peaceful solution, “the U.K. must be prepared to climb the mountain of conflict”; when Tucker takes Simon to task for his latest faux pas, he observes scathingly that the latter sounded “like a fucking Nazi Julie Andrews”.48 Simon and his ambitious new special advisor, Toby Wright (Chris Addison), are conceived as vaguely pacifist in inclination, but the Washington visit plays on their vanity and self-importance. The plot revolves around the risible idea of Simon as potential key influencer in Washington, where both pro- and anti-war lobbies are attempting to recruit him as their expert British spokesman. He appears to have been sent to represent the Prime Minister, because the U.K. government is vacillating over its stance for or against military intervention, and Foster’s careerist desire to please his masters makes him a useful tool for both ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’. In practice, he is a hapless pawn in the game, but the anti-war Americans wildly over-estimate his status and capacity for

46 In the Loop. Written by Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci and Tony Roche, 15. The Internet Movie Script Database (IMSDb), 33. 47 Ibid., 3. 48 Ibid., 29.

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independent thinking, while the hawks simply play him. Karen Clark thinks Simon could be useful as a figure to “internationalise the dissent”, whereas Barwick has the latter’s ‘climb the mountain of conflict’ quotation copied on his office-wall. Miller’s (Powell-like) initial opposition to war and his contempt for hardline ideologues like Barwick is based on his experience of conflict: “It’s the problem with civilians wanting to go to war. Once you’ve been there, once you’ve seen it, you never want to go again, unless you absolutely fuckin’ have to….it’s like France”. Typical of the film’s absurd style, the serious statement here is qualified by the use of ironic humour, France being the major European power blocking the U.N. resolution on military intervention. The other important plot strand relates to the doctoring of official documents to justify the case for invasion. A leaked paper entitled PostWar Planning, Parameters, Implications and Possibilities, or PWPPPIP in its farcical acronymic form, discursively opposed to war on strategic grounds, is leaked to the BBC by Toby’s girlfriend Suzy, who works in the Foreign Office. In response, Tucker and his equally profane and even more psychotic Press Office assistant Jamie McDonald (Paul Higgins) bully and blackmail all involved on both sides of the Atlantic—Simon and Toby in New York and Foreign Office Director of Diplomacy, Michael Rodgers, Suzy’s boss—to redact and edit the documents so that they now support military intervention, rather than opposing it. The spurious and unreliable single-source intelligence of a purported whistleblower known as ‘Iceman’ is presented by Barwick and his seniors as unimpeachable evidence of clear and present danger at the U.N. meeting, ensuring the vote goes the way of the pro-war parties. Audiences are naturally ‘in’ on the sick joke, as we see the dossier edits being dictated over the phone to London by the unscrupulous Tucker. Not only does this part of the film recall the real-life ‘dodgy dossier’, which was also featured in Stuff Happens, but when Simon finally decides to resign on principle and expose Tucker’s deceptions to the media, the latter threatens extreme violence: “I will use all the forces of darkness to hound you to an assisted suicide”.49 This chilling allusion to “assisted suicide” evokes the controversy that surrounded Dr David Kelly’s supposed death by his own hand, according to the official version of events. Ultimately, the British media lead with a trivial and concocted controversy over Simon’s

49 Ibid., 129.

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constituency office wall collapsing, and Tucker pre-empts any possible rebellion on Simon’s part by opportunistically firing him on behalf of the Prime Minister in response to the wall ‘scandal’. Incisive and derisive of all of the political figures involved, In the Loop reflects the mood of disenchantment that prevailed by 2008– 2009 towards the Bush and Blair governments and the Iraq invasion among increasing numbers of both British and U.S. populations. In some respects, its pseudo-documentary style is reminiscent of the often hilarious ‘mockumentary’ sub-genre of films such as This is Spinal Tap (1984), and yet its underlying implications are pessimistic in the extreme. While the series The Thick of It portrayed comically beleaguered civil servants trying to cope with everyday political crises, In the Loop’s conceit is much wider, as well as darker. At the same time, there is a cathartic pleasure to be had in some of the vitriolic in-fighting and preposterous office politics depicted in the film. We may also reflect that the malevolent Tucker is not such a humbug as to masquerade as a paragon of political honesty and integrity, unlike his real-life counterpart. Fittingly, in one of the brief closing vignettes during a war-planning meeting Barwick is seen railing about the proposal to include the movie I Heart Huckabees on the troops’ entertainment roster, while a truculent Miller defends the choice. The utter banality of this exchange, together with much else featured in the film, serves to deflate the pompous selfaggrandising rhetoric of ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’. If we read In the Loop as a merciless lampoon of the covert transatlantic negotiations leading to the Second Gulf War, Marx’s dictum of historic facts and persons appearing, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”50 is remarkably apposite. However, the film’s sardonic mockery of the process does not in any way demean the tragic impact of the invasion on many lives, civilian and military, or alter the fact that the only coalition war criminals to have been charged are miscreants from the ordinary ranks. This explains why Iannucci and his team deployed an essentially realist style of representation—without departing from the realm of credibility, as some satires and farces do—in order to highlight the cynical realpolitik that drove the decision to invade Iraq.

50 “Hegel says somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages recur twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”. Karl Marx, trans. D.D. L. Der Achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte), Mondial Books, 2005, 1. Reprint.

CHAPTER 5

Case-study Films and Plays from the First Decade Part Two: Corporate Malfeasance and Political Corruption

Preamble: Farce, Fundamentalism and Dystopias The first decade of the century saw a range of feature films related to political and corporate malfeasance, the majority of them from the U.S., which suggested that cinematic drama in the country was more vibrant and contentious than stage drama in challenging the pervasive propaganda of the Bush era. Some of these films related to earlier eras, but were topical in their reference to current events. Outstanding examples included Tony Gilroy’s award-winning 2007 corporate corruption thriller Michael Clayton, with George Clooney playing the eponymous protagonist and Tilda Swinton as his antagonist Karen Crowder of UNorth agricultural conglomerate; the latter attempts an unscrupulous cover-up of news about a potentially lucrative but carcinogenic agrochemical product, using hitmen to dispatch Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson) the company’s attorney before he can reveal the truth; she subsequently targets Edens’ suspicious friend, fixer lawyer Michael Clayton. The film’s promotional tagline: ‘the truth can be adjusted’ resonated powerfully with the increasing level of corporate crime that emerged during the eight years of the Bush administration. Alfonso Cuarón’s dystopian Children of Men (U.K./U.S. 2006) portraying a totalitarian United Kingdom in which war, disease and social anomie have caused almost total infertility in the population was a harrowing picture of the near future, being set in London in 2027. The acclaimed and award-winning political thriller, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Ingham, Anglo-American Stage and Screen Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45198-0_5

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based on P.D. James’s 1992 novel, was notable for employing the central theme of immigrants fighting against a hostile government and population that uses the army to suppress them. Despite its sombre theme and events, the cinematic parable conjures a sense of hope out of despair. Two strong films from 2009 also dealt with themes of corporate and political conspiracy, State of Play (Kevin Macdonald, U.K.) and The International (Tom Tykwer, Germany/U.S.). The former is a thriller, involving a fictive narrative about the privatisation of high-stakes defence contracts resulting in murder, while the latter also belongs to the thriller genre, but is grounded in fact. Its narrative encompasses the moneylaundering, drugs and arms sales scandals connected to the sleazy Bank of Credit and Commerce International and the mysterious death of Mafia banker Roberto Calvi, found hanged under Blackfriars bridge in 1982. The film’s title refers to the international nature of the conspiracy as well as to the various global locales for its action. The other stand-out political film was Ron Howard’s superbly acted 2008 character study Frost/ Nixon, based on the stage play by Peter Morgan, a film that was almost theatrical in its concentration on the verbal sparring-match between TV host David Frost (Michael Sheen) and the disgraced former President and instigator of the Watergate break-in, Richard Nixon (Frank Langella). The deep character flaws and shifty dishonesty of a U.S. President were a topical subject-matter for both play and film versions in 2008 with the equally untrustworthy George W. Bush coming to the end of his paradigm-shifting two-term presidency. Significant political stage dramas, in addition to Morgan’s 2006 source play for Frost/Nixon, included Alistair Beaton’s satirical comedy Feelgood (U.K. 2000) which wittily lampooned the era of New Labour spin under Blair and Campbell. The play is set in a seaside hotel, where the Prime Minister is preparing his party conference key speech with the aid of his press secretary and speechwriter. The equilibrium of the smooth party machine is thrown off kilter by loud anti-capitalist and environmentalist protestors outside. Part-farce and part-satire, the play’s, at this stage, amusing portrayal of the mechanics of spin and deception unwittingly presages the chicanery behind Blair’s drive to war only a few years later. In the U.K. the other outstanding political play of the millennial year, preceding the decade-changing events about to unfold, was Caryl Churchill’s grimly dystopian tale, Far Away (2000); Stephen Daldry’s acclaimed production was set in an unspecified futuristic locale,

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telling of an apocalyptic Hobbesian war of all against all. Retrospectively, Churchill’s play comes across as darkly prophetic. Many subsequent political plays in the U.K. were connected to the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions, and were discussed or referenced early in the previous chapter. An exception to this trend was young playwright James Graham whose insightful Tory Boyz (2008) and This House (2009) dissected Tory and Labour Party shenanigans, respectively, with great insight, establishing him as a major new talent. Tory Boyz laid bare the hypocrisy of the Tories’ policies and practices with regard to homosexuality, conflating two periods, the 1960s and ‘70s under Edward Heath’s leadership and a supposedly more progressive party, still tainted by bullying and prejudice, in opposition in the early 2000s. This House depicted a fragile Labour Party struggling to survive between 1974 and 1979 during economic crises and downturns, and riven by internal strife, much as in the twenty-first century. The latter play compellingly conveys a strong case for proportional representation as a more democratic solution to the two-party, first-past-the-post system. Similarly, Steve Waters’ 2004 play The Unthinkable explored the loss of idealism on the Left through the prism of a socially radical think-tank facing the reality that the Right has subverted the Party’s once-idealistic agenda. Across the Atlantic politically direct critiques of the Bush administration were few and far between, as both Karen Malpede and Marvin Carlson observed in comments cited in the previous chapter. Nevertheless, a number of strong plays dealt with other contentious topics, including Moisés Kaufman and others’ internationally acclaimed verbatim theatre piece The Laramie Project (2000). The latter represented a searing indictment of homophobia in the U.S., telling the true story of a vicious hate crime against a gay student in the Wyoming town of Laramie. Politically controversial among the nation’s homophobic religious right, who picketed performances, the play was otherwise lauded and has inspired campaigns against homophobic prejudice. Suzan-Lori Parks’ Pulitzer Prize-winning 2001 play Top Dog/Underdog, about two competing brothers whimsically named Lincoln and Booth, deals with the existential problems facing poverty-stricken African-American males in the U.S. and the psychological effects of their sociopolitical marginalisation. The play’s exploration of what it means to be white and male and correspondingly black and male in the United States resonated powerfully and continues to do so, as the Tony Award for its 2023 revival demonstrates.

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Another of the key political dramas of the decade was Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Ruined (U.S. 2008), a play set in a bar-cumwhorehouse in the war-devastated Republic of the Congo run by the Mother-Courage-like Mama Nadi where the ‘waitresses’ are ‘ruined women’. The state of being ‘ruined’ of the title refers to the genital mutilation the women have experienced at the hands of the brutal military on both sides of the war; the play makes it clear that they are the collateral damage of a conflict that has been fuelled by the international market for Congolese raw minerals, and is also the legacy of Belgian colonisation. Nottage’s work, originally planned to be set in Iraq and subsequently conceived as an updated Mother Courage,1 became a naturalistic drama based on the author’s interviews with victims of these atrocities who escaped across the border to Uganda. Fellow-American dramatist Christopher Shinn’s Now or Later, a concise one-act piece that debuted at London’s Royal Court Theatre in September 2008, coincided with the U.S. election ultimately won by Democrat candidate Barack Obama. Shinn’s debate play pits personal values and freedom of expression against the higher expectations, especially in the media, of political correctness for a Democrat candidate; in the short play’s agonistic framework, the President Elect and his political aides attempt to persuade his stubbornly principled homosexual son to recant for posting injudicious internet photos of himself and a male friend lampooning religious figures, both Christian and Islamic. The full meaning of First Amendment rights for American citizens comes under the microscope in Shinn’s tense and topical drama. With the sole exception of Lucy Prebble’s acclaimed 2009 play Enron, the case-study dramas to be discussed in this chapter, focusing on political corruption and corporate malpractice, are fiction films, namely Fernando Meirelles’ The Constant Gardener, John Sayles’ Silver City, Jonathan Demme’s The Manchurian Candidate and James McTeigue’s V for Vendetta. Whereas Prebble’s acute dissection of the staggering degree of corporate malpractice that the Texas company Enron was able to get away with until its ultimate collapse was based on factual events, all of the films are imaginative projections of contemporary geopolitical issues. What unifies these case studies, despite their widely disparate themes and 1 The author, interviewed by Monty Arnold, ‘Ruined’s Mother Congo—and Mother Courage’ in Playbill, 20 April 2009. https://www.playbill.com/article/ruineds-mothercongo-and-mother-courage-com-157836.

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styles, is that they subjected the workings of an interconnected corporate and political power elite to fierce critical scrutiny at a time when much mainstream theatre and cinema tended to treat serious political topics as box-office poison. Amid widespread societal panic and paranoia resulting from the September 2001 attacks, the economic fundamentalism of the far-right neoliberal agenda was speciously represented as intrinsic to a Western way of life now under attack by ‘freedom-hating terrorists’. The U.S. Patriot Act, with its restrictions on previously assured civil liberties, exemplified this phenomenon. Daring to challenge such pervasive rightwing ideology, most of the above-mentioned films benefited from being adaptations of known works of political print or cinematic fiction.

Case Studies Silver City (John Sayles, U.S. 2004) In stark contrast to the muted, cautious theatrical response in the United States to the country’s mounting political and financial scandals during the opening decade of the millennium, representations of the neocons and their values in independent cinema exhibited far more bite. Silver City, John Sayles’s thinly veiled portrait of the Bush-style dynastic politics in middle America, which fuelled the type of malfeasance that Prebble was later to target in Enron, was one of the first works to push back against the doctrinaire and anti-democratic ideology of the neocon power brokers. Sayles established his credentials for independent, politically progressive films with the 1920s-set miners’ strike drama Matewan (1987) as well as other films treating issues of corruption and social injustice, interrogating uncomfortable aspects of his country’s past and present, particularly the highly rated City of Hope (1991) and Lone Star (1996). He developed a reputation in the industry as scriptwriter and script doctor for more commercial productions, but became an accomplished screenwriter and movie director in his own right, in addition to publishing novels and short stories. Sayles’s forte has long been for making questioning films, in which issues of class, race and economic interests intersect. In the making of Silver City, he worked alongside famed progressive director and cinematographer, Haskell Wexler, whose vision for the authentic look of the Colorado-location cinematography contributed considerably to the

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quality of the work. Both a subtle political satire and a neo-noir investigative drama, the film divided critics, some of whom found its serpentine but skilfully linked sub-plots and detail distracting, while others such as Roger Ebert praised the film for its ambitious scope: “Liberals and conservatives, the alternative press and establishment dailies, environmentalists and despoilers, are all mixed up in a plot where it seems appropriate that the hero is a private detective. Even the good guys are compromised”.2 Certainly Silver City’s Chinatown-like storyline features many twists and turns, involving a number of initially unconnected characters, convincingly represented by an impressive ensemble cast. The core plot device revolves around a distressing incident that occurs in the movie’s opening sequence: GOP candidate for the governorship of Colorado, Dicky Pilager (Chris Cooper), scion of wealthy State Senator Jud Pilager, is being filmed angling in the Arapahoe River for a campaign commercial, aiming to portray him (speciously, as it turns out) as an environmental conservationist. The linguistically challenged Dicky (an approximation of Bush Junior in the film’s dissection of U.S. dynastic politics) accidentally hooks a dead human body, instead of a fish. Dicky’s capable but hard-nosed campaign manager Chuck Raven (Richard Dreyfuss) hires former journalist-turned-private investigator Danny O’Brien (Danny Huston) in the belief that the corpse was intended as an embarrassing plant by one of the Pilager family’s many enemies. His first job is to establish the identity of the dead man, but that proves much harder than is often the case in the generic whodunnit. The Karl Rove-like Raven provides a list of three people who might have set the candidate up—one of whom is his estranged sister—with the intention of intimidating them to keep quiet in the press about their antagonism towards Dicky. However, the more O’Brien investigates, the more he discovers about the candidate and his family, as well as his principal backer, Wes Benteen (Kris Kristofferson), a deceptively cowboy-ish, Rocky Mountains-loving, ‘good old boy’. The Silver City of the title is a reference to now-contaminated, former silver-mining land bought by Benteen from the Pilagers, on which an out-of-town housing development is planned, set to generate vast profits for Benteen and his associates. As O’Brien soon comes to realise, the seeming ‘cowboy’ is, in reality, 2 Roger Ebert, ‘Murder Mystery Meets Political Satire in ‘Silver City’’, RogerEbert.com, 17 September 2004. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/silver-city-2004.

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a ruthless venture capital magnate, whose business interests in environmentally degrading mining operations provide the force behind the aptly named Pilager’s campaign for gubernatorial office. In the course of his personal quest (after he is fired by his detective agency bosses on Raven’s instructions), he discovers the name of the dead man, Lázaro Huerta, an undocumented and exploited migrant labourer from Mexico, who had worked, indirectly, for Benteen. His enquiries into the circumstances of the man’s death ultimately yield grim fruit, while bringing danger to himself and also to the Mexican associates of Huerta. His former journalist colleague Mitch Paine (Tim Roth), who, like him, was sacked by the local newspaper they both worked for, now runs an underground news website reporting on public-interest information suppressed by the mainstream media. Gradually, O’Brien builds up a picture of the corruption and exploitation (both of unregistered migrant workers and of the designated conservation area) that lies beneath the surface of the mutually advantageous land deals, in which Benteen and development lobbyist Chandler Tyson (Billy Zane), as well as the husband of O’Brien’s boss, are implicated. In a pertinent comment to O’Brien, as the latter seeks further information on the background of those involved, Paine observes “somebody has to plant the seed, the seed of doubt”. This rationale for the character’s dogged fact-checking and online activism resonates beyond the film, and could easily function as a motto for Sayles’s filmmaking career. Another ‘helper’ figure in O’Brien’s search is one of the figures he is sent to ‘scare off’, the streetwise and cynical Maddy Pilager (Daryl Hannah), sister of the candidate. Hostile at first, and regarding him as a mere creature of Raven’s manipulative practices, she eventually perceives that the amiably disorganised but quietly tenacious private investigator has more disinterested reasons for quizzing her; eventually warming to him, she finds him sufficiently ‘cute’ to indulge him in a one-night stand. In the course of their intimate chat, expressing her absolute contempt both for Raven and her brother’s support base, she caustically remarks “They catch one President getting a BJ in the Oval Office. The next rigs the election, and gets away with it. People have lost the ability to be scandalised”.3 This not-so-veiled reference to real-life presidents Clinton and

3 See John Sayles’s, Silver City and Other Screenplays, Bold Type Books/Hachette Book Group, 2004.

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Bush Junior hints at the director’s motivation for making Silver City in an election year. The film’s lack of a ‘Hollywood ending’—together with Sayles’s refusal to supply the viewer with a satisfyingly simplistic sense of poetic justice—conveys a downbeat closing mood; at the same time, it is an alltoo-plausible real-world denouement. Ultimately, nothing has been fixed, and there is every indication that the corruption and hypocrisy at the heart of the system will remain unaffected by O’Brien’s quixotic attempts to get to the bottom of the Mexican’s unfortunate demise. O’Brien and his love interest, Nora (Maria Bello), who is also his former lover and who has just split up with smooth PR operator Tyson, watch as Huerta’s coffin is loaded into a car provided by the Mexican consulate for the man’s return to his family for burial. The jaded, but fundamentally decent, O’Brien has used his severance pay from the detective agency to pay all the transportation and burial costs and to send financial relief to the dead man’s family. In the end there may be no justice attainable, Sayles implies, but this single act is shown to be redemptive, both for O’Brien, personally, and for humanity. The closing sequence underlines the director’s barbed message with eloquent irony: Dicky Pilager, flanked by uniformed young men and cheerleaders, is concluding his now more articulate, if painfully clichéd, election speech; this is followed by a choral rendition of the patriotic hymn ‘America the Beautiful’ which segues into country rock singer Steve Earle’s sceptical and disillusioned inversion of this theme in his 2002 song, ‘Amerika V. 6.0 (The Best We Can Do)’, over the final credits. In pointed juxtaposition with Katharine Lee Bates’s patriotic paean, Earle’s 2002 song takes direct aim at the blatantly undemocratic “American Way” portrayed in the film. His lyric, notably the lines “Another satisfied customer/ In the front of the line for the/ American dream”, resonates powerfully with Sayles’s theme. Silver City, more authoritatively than most fiction films of the immediate post-911 and post-Iraq invasion period, in the interstices of its complex plot, targets the lobbyists, the environmental depredators and the pro-establishment media that aids and abets them, and does so with considerable aplomb. The Manchurian Candidate (Jonathan Demme, U.S. 2004) The late Jonathan Demme’s remake of the classic 1962 movie, The Manchurian Candidate, based on the late Fifties Korean War novel by

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Richard Condon, is in some respects a similar political allegory to Silver City, but one with a more concentrated plot-line. As in the abovediscussed film, politicians are portrayed as the frontmen for unscrupulous corporate interests, and, in similar fashion, then-current U.S. politics come under the artistic microscope. The major generic difference is that this free adaptation by Demme and screenwriters Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris is not so much a slow-burning, episodic noir drama in the mould of Polanski’s Chinatown but more of a political thriller in the tradition of Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor. Praising Condon’s source fiction in an interview for the special features part of the DVD package, Pyne refers to the novel as a mixed-genre piece, a thriller, a comedy, a sociopolitical satire and a kind of Greek tragedy combined. That said, the first highly acclaimed screen adaptation of Condon’s novel by screenwriter George Axelrod and director John Frankenheimer was a good example of a film adaptation that superseded the source fiction on which it was based, making it a hard act to follow. Given the constraints of producing a unified standard-length film in the process, the screenwriters and director of the 2004 remake focus principally on the source’s thriller and Greek tragedy modes, dropping the satirical element in order to make serious contemporary political allusions. Remakes are notoriously risky ventures, and are typically undertaken for principally commercial reasons, sometimes very successfully. This one, in stark contrast, retained the basic template of the narrative in favour of a radical makeover of the earlier film’s geopolitical content, with both an artistic and a political purpose. Mind control for political ends is the indispensable central theme of the original novel and the 1962 film, even if the source novel treated the McCarthyite red scare satirically. However, it was essential to identify a fresh context for it, according to Pyne: “It occurred to me that a kind of corporate totalitarianism was probably the new philosophy that was scariest. I think the movie’s a bit of a mirror…a Rorschach test- of who we are and what we’ve become”. Consequently, one of the significant variations on the predecessor movie was to shift the focus of the remake from an exterior threat to the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights to an internal one. The filmmakers’ intention in creating their updated cautionary version of the Cold War thriller was to reflect a post-9/11 paranoia that was being ruthlessly exploited by the neocons. As Demme argued: “Can any movie compete with the characters that are really in the White House in the position of power right now? All

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fiction pales by comparison”.4 Demme was referring, in part, to the ethically compromised relationships between Vice-President Dick Cheney and the multinational company Halliburton and Donald Rumsfeld and the biotech company Gilead, which lead to the backdoor privatisation of overseas wars and domestic policies in the Bush government’s eight years in power. Halliburton defence contracts arranged by Cheney via the so-called Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, effectively privatised and profiteered from the ‘war on terror’ and subsequent occupations of sovereign countries. As veteran film director and pundit performer in The Manchurian Candidate Sidney Lumet points out, with evident reference to Bush: “If the fundamentalist movement all over the world is growing, it’s growing in the United States too. We have, basically, a fundamentalist President”.5 The late Lumet goes on to warn, with remarkable prescience, about the dangers of the U.S. government being dominated by increasing populism, demagoguery and neo-fascism in the years ahead. The network of contemporary referentiality in the film relies on two key elements in its conceptualisation: the first one is the film’s continuo backdrop of media coverage, both of domestic events and U.S. military interventions in places as diverse as Indonesia and Guinea. There is also a palpably topical ticker reference to Manchurian’s contract for Guantánamo Bay, with a passing nod in the direction of Halliburton. Demme’s use of this device has the effect of connoting a social climate of fear as well as an ongoing state of emergency in the country. Such passing allusions to the military’s ‘shock and awe’ interventions come from the same playbook as Bevins has documented in The Jakarta Method, only two decades before that well-researched factual account was published. These media newsbites tend to impinge subliminally on the cinema viewer, while in DVD format it is possible to appreciate the cumulative effect of the coverage on the fragile psyche of the paranoid, dream-haunted Major Ben Marco (Denzel Washington) and perceive parallels with the, initially uncritical, ‘war on terror’ reportage. The screenwriters’ second coup in their creative adaptation was to turn the motif of the brainwashing of Korean War prisoners, using behaviour modification techniques, such as hypnosis, into something even more

4 Jonathan Demme, director and cast interviews on DVD The Manchurian Candidate. Paramount Home Entertainment, 2004. 5 Ibid.

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sinister. The CIA’s research into mind-altering states under an alarming covert programme known as MK-ULTRA became better known after U.S.-based victims of this brain- ‘de-patterning’ experimentation challenged it legally under the Freedom of Information Act in the 1980s. Nevertheless, CIA mind-control techniques developed in earlier decades after World War II under the aegis of the infamous Dr Ewen Cameron didn’t in fact stop; techniques such as ‘psychic driving’,6 designed for the purpose of behaviour modification, were subsequently employed to torture suspects, most notoriously in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Pyne and Georgaris’s script takes Condon’s fanciful concept of systemic brainwashing through hypnosis, and transposes it into the ethically contentious realms of genetic engineering. With the arrival of genome editing in the 1990s, it became possible to consider invasive procedures with the aim of treating trauma and psychosis, or stimulating brain activity in the case of dementia; this notion of a surgical method for implanting alternative memories, thoughts and behaviour patterns via genetic repatterning is more authentic than the thriller’s audacious plot-line might suggest. Wiping the mind of the subject via a procedure, so that it became a tabula rasa on which to work, was a goal of Cold War psychiatric research, prompted by the more extreme tenets of behaviourist theory. For the CIA and the Pentagon’s psychological operations units, influence was usually exerted through overt counter-information or covert disinformation, but so-called ‘black ops’ could go much further, especially in Operation Desert Storm in the early Nineties and Operation ‘Enduring Freedom’ in Iraq and Afghanistan the following decade. Thus, in the screenwriters’ adaptation, a so-called ‘lost patrol’ is abducted at the height of Desert Storm; betrayed by a British contractor guide, the soldiers come under heavy fire in a simulated ambush, following which they are taken to a remote island laboratory. Here, an unscrupulous mercenary scientist, Dr Atticus Noyle (Simon McBurney), carries out surgical procedures on patrol commander Marco and his sergeant, Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber), drilling into the brain and inserting implants under the skin to retain control over the men after they are released. Responding robotically to Noyle’s orders, each man kills a member of their patrol, and when the survivors are returned to their daily life in the U.S., they can only remember the narrative they 6 This consisted of alternate periods of sensory deprivation and sensory overload for the patient/victim.

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have been fed by Noyle and his team, to the effect that they suffered casualties, but thanks to the selfless heroism of Shaw, the majority of the patrol members manage to come out alive. Marco has been programmed to recommend Shaw for the Congressional Medal of Honour for ‘saving’ the other members of the patrol; gradually we learn that Shaw is being used by his psychotically obsessive mother, Eleanor Prentiss Shaw (Meryl Streep), a power broker in a political organisation that can be assumed to represent the Democratic Party. Raymond has been programmed to run for Vice-President, and ultimately President, so that he can function as a puppet for Manchurian Global’s broader globalist ambitions and act on the world stage as proxy for his mother’s ideological megalomania. She exercises a manipulatively incestuous control over him, evident from the close-up shots in which she fondles him and one in which she kisses him, but he is less sexually responsive in Demme’s film than in the source text, in which incestuous intercourse between the pair occurs. Eleanor is effectively the rival for his affections, competing against the daughter of more ethically motivated senator and political rival Tom Jordan (Jon Voight), but the steely and uncompromising Eleanor—whose look is uncomfortably reminiscent of Hilary Clinton in Streep’s interpretation of the role—prevails. Her unrelenting grip on her son, both psychologically and physically, appears to be irreversible. For Marco, the true narrative is reconstructed painfully and in fragments throughout the film; his personal mission follows an encounter with one of the men in his former patrol, the traumatised Al Melvin, who draws in a notebook simplistic but graphic images of the abuse experienced in his nightmares. Stimulated to do so by the horrors they depict, Marco begins to take his own dark dreams more seriously. Slowly but surely he begins to piece together the missing pieces of his memory and understand that he is still being controlled, eventually discovering and excavating Noyle’s tiny implant from his back. He conducts research into the activities of Manchurian Global, and explores the dubious profile of former Apartheid era South African bio-geneticist Noyle, who claims his work on modifying personality traits by “adjusting synaptic connections” is connected with the mitigation of dementia. The closer he gets to the heart of the conspiracy and to being able to engage directly with his former army subordinate Shaw, the more obstacles he encounters. Being portrayed by Eleanor Shaw as a deranged sufferer from Gulf War Syndrome and post-traumatic stress disorder, we observe Marco

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becoming increasingly marginalised, as well as being relieved of his post and placed under surveillance. One of the notable aspects of the film is precisely the way it draws attention to the plight of veterans suffering from the mysterious Gulf War Syndrome. Subsequent claims that exposure to Saddam Hussein’s stocks of sarin when his chemical weapons facilities were bombed was the cause of the mysteriously debilitating disease offer only a partial explanation; the U.S. military’s use of depleted uranium7 on soldiers and civilians both in the Gulf War and in the Iraq invasion exposed their own soldiers to its deleterious effects. The contrast between the wretchedly impoverished and acutely paranoid Melvin, living in a slum hotel, his life blighted by his terrible experiences, and Shaw, the scion of a politically powerful dynasty, couldn’t be starker. As the movie’s theme song, a Vietnam War protest number by John Fogerty—here chillingly rendered by rapper Wyclef Jean—puts it so well: “It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no senator’s son/ It ain’t me, it ain’t me; I ain’t no fortunate one, no”.8 Marco’s confidant Richard Delp (Bruno Ganz), a renegade scientific researcher formerly funded by Manchurian Global, tells him the idea of ‘brainwashing’ through the use of brain implants is “horseshit”. When Delp reluctantly agrees to revive his memory using risky electroconvulsive therapy, Marco sees vivid mental images of the mind-doctoring that was inflicted on him and others by rogue scientist, Noyle. As Delp explains after his patient recovers from the effects of the ECT, the genetic engineering technology developed by Manchurian Global is extremely secretive. He describes the private equity group as “not just a corporation, Marco, but a goddamn geopolitical extension of policy for every president since Nixon”.9 The technique of genomic reconstruction, implanting a behavioural modification device into the brain is only theoretical science, according to Delp. Marco now knows otherwise, and seeks to convince Shaw they have both been subject to horrific mind-control procedures. By this point Shaw has already murdered Jordan and his daughter, Jocelyn, 7 See the article ‘Depleted Uranium, Devastated Health: Military Operations and

Environmental Injustice in the Middle East’ by Sydney Young, Harvard International Review, 22 September 2021. https://hir.harvard.edu/depleted-uranium-devastated-hea lth-military-operations-and-environmental-injustice-in-the-middle-east/. 8 John Fogerty, ‘Fortunate Son’ lyrics © Jondora Music. 9 The Manchurian Candidate, script by Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris, http://www.

stockq.org/moviescript/M/manchurian-candidate-the.php.

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under his mother’s influence in order to avoid exposure of Manchurian Global’s secret programme of subversion. Marco manages to convince Rosie (Kimberly Elise), the FBI officer assigned to surveil him, of the imminent threat to the democratic process, and the latter engineers a covert meeting with Shaw in a schoolroom during the vice-presidential campaign; however, he falls under Eleanor Shaw’s mind-controlling influence when she calls her son, seemingly knowing that Marco is present. As in an earlier scene when Atticus Noyle summons Shaw by phone, the character’s faces are suddenly bathed in dazzling light; Demme’s visual metaphor perfectly conveys the reaction of euphoria induced by the implant-generated dopamine rush. Now programmed to assassinate the newly elected President so that Shaw can assume office as a Manchurian Global plant, Marco is set up as the ‘fall guy’ to carry out the shooting from a carefully chosen sniper’s nest at the party’s victory celebration event. In this detail, by having both Marco and Shaw implicated in the conspiracy under Eleanor Shaw’s control, Pyne and Georgaris’s screenplay deviates substantially from the source novel and its earlier adaptation, where Marco acts autonomously and Shaw is the lone gunman. In a neat twist, Shaw dances with his mother and engineers her into a position where both can be killed by Marco’s single shot. His meaningful look in the direction of the lighting booth where Marco is concealed breaks the spell; their belated comradeship and awareness of having been used as guinea pigs in a perverted experiment enable both to resist the conditioning they have undergone. Instead of killing himself as Laurence Harvey’s Shaw does, he wills Marco to kill both him and his mother. After he is spirited away for rehabilitation by Rosie, and a dead Manchurian employee identified as the assassin, Marco revisits the now-closed scientific facility on the island where ‘the lost patrol’ was taken; in an act of homage to the patrol and to Shaw for his self-sacrifice, he places their group photo and Shaw’s medal in the shallows, implying that the latter has earned his medal posthumously. Both items are gradually washed away by the waves in the film’s poignant closing shot. At an earlier point of the narrative when the paranoid Marco finally begins to trust Rosie, he ruefully reflects, “I thought I knew who the enemy was”. This allusion to ‘the enemy within’ is one of the most thought-provoking lines in Demme’s stylish and urgently relevant film. He underscores this point in an absorbing interview for the respected British Film Institute magazine Sight and Sound: “[O]ur anger isn’t a

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copycat, recycled anger from Richard Condon’s book or Frankenheimer’s movie: there’s a lot to be enraged and frightened about today, and our film has plugged into that. I think we’ve made a good time-capsule movie, in the same way as the earlier film was a time capsule of the 1960s”.10 Not just a trigger to stimulate emotions of fear and rage in audiences, but crucially to evoke the idea of resistance, Demme used the classic screen tale as a subliminal message that political and corporate corruption can be confronted, albeit at a terrible cost. The Constant Gardener (Fernando Meirelles, U.K. 2005) The critical and commercial success of the 2005 screen adaptation of John Le Carré’s novel The Constant Gardener, with Roger Ebert nominating it as one of the best films of the year,11 was hardly predictable. The novel, an intricate exploration of unethical practices in the corporate pharmaceutical industry combined with a retrospective love story, was not obvious raw material for a major-circuit movie, notwithstanding the popularity of Le Carré’s spy-story adaptations for the big screen. One of the reasons for the film’s broad appeal was its casting of stellar actor Ralph Fiennes in the titular role of dedicated gardener and junior diplomat Justin Quayle and Rachel Weisz as his beloved activist wife Tessa; Weisz’s interpretation of Le Carré’s idealistic and tenacious character won her the Academy Award for best supporting actor. Another was certainly its choice of director, Brazilian Fernando Meirelles, whose kaleidoscopic 2002 film City of God (Cidade de Deus ) set in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, earned him an Academy Award for best director, and is frequently cited as one of the outstanding films of the early twenty-first century. Marketed as a political thriller, The Constant Gardener emulated the book’s nonlinear, flashback construction to great effect; its location shooting in Kenya, the principal fictional setting, as well as London and Berlin, was suggestive of the typical Le Carré global narrative.

10 ‘Far From Iraq: Jonathan Demme on Remaking The Manchurian Candidate’. Interview with Jonathan Demme by David Thompson reprinted in BFI website, 9 May 2017. Originally published as ‘Mind Control’ in Sight & Sound, December 2004. See https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/interviews/jonathandemme-remaking-manchurian-candidate-iraq-first-gulf-war. 11 See Roger Ebert, ‘Gardener’ Digs for Answers’, 1 September 2005. https://www. rogerebert.com/reviews/the-constant-gardener-2005.

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Above all, however, it was the compelling theme of the novel and film that represented the greatest strength of both source and adaptation. Le Carré’s interest was triggered by a 1996 case concerning unsafe clinical trials conducted by the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer on a new meningitis antibiotic named Trovan in Kano, Nigeria. The company exploited the opportunity to trial the new drug without getting informed consent from the mainly Muslim families of the children involved, with deadly results from Trovan’s side effects. Exposure in The Washington Post in December 2000 led to lawsuits, but Pfizer successfully contested these until they finally settled out of court with the Kano regional administration in 2009, eight years after Le Carré’s novel appeared. This long struggle to determine the truth is reflected in the central metaphor of The Constant Gardener, that of a quiet and unassuming diplomat, whose determination to dig deep and eradicate the figurative weeds in the garden is hopelessly quixotic but utterly compelling. Le Carré, and subsequently screenwriter Jeffrey Caine, fictionalised the original corporate cover-up by calling the drug Dypraxa, switching the epidemic to tuberculosis and recasting the multinational pharmaceutical company as imaginary Swiss-Canadian corporation KDH. The setting is also shifted from Nigeria to the large slum district of Kibera on the outskirts of Nairobi in Kenya; nevertheless, the story’s frame of reference is factually predicated on the unethical nature of placebo-controlled meningitis and HIV medication trials in Nigeria and Zimbabwe, respectively. As in the source novel, Tessa Quayle dies at the start of the film, but the energy and tension of both works depend on her husband’s indefatigable search for the truth about how she died. After he is informed of her death by senior colleague Sandy Woodrow (Danny Huston) the film goes into flashback mode, as it continues to do at various junctures when Quayle’s emotions or reflections are triggered by events. The self-deprecating Quayle had met the young and idealistic Tessa when she posed challenging questions at a talk he was giving as stand-in for his Foreign Office boss, head of the Africa desk, Sir Bernard Pellegrin (Bill Nighy). Far from dismissing the Amnesty supporter’s comments on the Blair government’s participation with the United States in the Iraq invasion, Quayle treats her views with respect, and a close relationship develops, which he gently nurtures, as he does his plants. After they marry in order that she can accompany him to his new diplomatic posting in

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Kenya, they settle happily in Nairobi, and Tessa—rejecting the conventional role of diplomat’s wife—throws herself into relief work for the poor in the shanty-town of Kibera, assisting Belgian doctor Arnold Bluhm (Herbert Koundé). The viewer accompanies Justin in his reflections and ultimately in his discoveries about Tessa’s hidden life; like Justin we are initially led to assume that she took lovers, both Bluhm and Woodrow according to the apparent evidence. However, the more he digs the more he learns about Tessa’s real campaign to expose the dubious alliance of Kenya-based company Three Bees, whose CEO, Kenny Curtis, is British, and the multinational pharmaceutical company KDH. The company’s clinical trials on children from poor families in the shanty-town district were tracked by Tessa and Bluhm, who subsequently sent a highly critical report to Pellegrin at the Foreign Office, exposing the unethical nature of the trials and the lethal side effects of the supposedly safe Dypraxa drug. Unfortunately, Pellegrin is involved with KDH in the cover-up of the risks associated with Dypraxa, and, in working to expose the grievous risks associated with the drug, Tessa and Bluhm have threatened the key players’ business interests and thus put their own safety in jeopardy. He also discovers that Bluhm was homosexual, but disguised his sexual orientation because homosexuality is illegal in the country, and therefore could not have been Tessa’s lover, as the official story has it. Justin is sent back to the U.K. by the British Commission because he isn’t ready to accept the official story that Bluhm killed Tessa and then disappeared, with the result that his British superiors portray him as being disturbed and paranoid; after meeting Pellegrin and causing him embarrassment, he starts digging deeper and contacts Tessa’s lawyer cousin Ham, to aid his research. First, though, he needs Ham’s help to create aliases that enable him to travel after his passport is confiscated. By now he starts to receive anonymous threats and, in Berlin, physical intimidation to stop his investigations, but is undeterred. After verifying the risks associated with the drug, as well as the extent of the cover-up, with Tessa’s contact in Berlin, Justin manages to enter Kenya again. Slipping in incognito, he confronts his former superior Sandy Woodrow with the evidence of the latter’s part in the cover-up of Dypraxa’s harmful effects. His former colleagues are celebrating the increased value of their shares in KDH after the company’s specious announcement that the clinical trials have been concluded safely and successfully. In addition, he is approached by Tim Donohue (Donald Sumpter), a former senior colleague working

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in intelligence. The latter is a cancer sufferer who has only months to live, and wishes to get things off his conscience; he confirms that Tessa and Bluhm were murdered by Pellegrin and KDH through hired hitmen, and cautions Justin about the danger his enquiries have placed him in. The final piece in the constant gardener’s jigsaw is the evidence of the original inventor of Dypraxa, South African Dr Lorbeer (Pete Postlethwaite), who is now working with aid agencies to relieve orphan children in South Sudan in order to salve his bad conscience. Knowing he is now a ‘dead man walking’, Justin extracts a confession from Lorbeer and is presented with his copy of Tessa and Bluhm’s original report on Dypraxa’s side effects. He is able to mail the report and a copy of Pellegrin’s damning letter to Woodrow back to Tessa’s cousin in the U.K., following which he is dropped at Lake Turkana in Kenya, and calmly awaits the KDH hit squad in the place where Tessa met her death. The final scenes depict Justin watching the flight of native birds, all the while seeing Tessa in his mind’s eye sitting next to him on the rock, and then hitmen arriving in a pick-up truck; these are intercut proleptically with a church interior scene at the memorial service for Justin and Tessa. Ham, under the pretence of reading a non-canonical epistle as a eulogy, reads out the incriminating letter to the shock and embarrassment of Pellegrin and other U.K. government officials, who promptly get up and storm out, pursued by journalists. The letter implicates the British government, in general, as well as Pellegrin and KDH, in the cover-up, and Ham drives home the major point to listeners that it is people in the First World who reap the benefits of clinical trials carried out on unsuspecting guinea-pig patients in the Third World. While Caine’s script and Meirelles’ directing leave the ending somewhat open regarding prospects of retributive justice for the wrongdoers, Le Carré’s novel employs the device of a postscript to inform the reader of the outcome of these events. John Mullan, writing in The Guardian before the novel was adapted for the screen, discusses how the author makes effective use of this age-old convention of fiction-writing, not to ensure that a moral imperative for poetic justice is served, but, rather, to emphasise the stench of “poetic injustice”12 that concludes his tale of greed, deception and unscrupulousness. The film ending suggests that

12 John Mullan, ‘That’s Not All, Folks’, The Guardian, 28 February 2004. https:// www.theguardian.com/books/2004/feb/28/fiction.johnlecarre.

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there is likely to be a public scandal, but Le Carré’s original conception of the narrative sees all of those responsible for the deaths of the Dypraxa guinea pigs and the successful cover-up, as well as the murders of Tessa, Bluhm and Justin, not only unpunished, but rewarded for their misdeeds. “Three Bees, KDH, Dypraxa. What’s the story on that axis of evil?”, Quayle asks Woodrow when he surprises the latter at home. The story is as grim and treachery-rife as most other Le Carré novels, from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold to The Night Manager to Our Kind of Traitor; here the application of the Bush-coined phrase ‘axis of evil’—originally designating the purported alliance between Iraq, Iran and North Korea—to the pharmaceutical industry and Western government complicity is telling. When Justin finally catches up with Lorbeer, working under the pseudonym Brandt in South Sudan, he sees the latter burning the expired drugs that have been dropped by the aid agency plane. As he does so, Lorbeer observes to Justin, believing that he’s a journalist: “Its how they expiate their guilt. Pharmaceuticals, aid agencies, everyone. African guinea pigs. Cheap trials for unsound drugs. Uninformed consent extorted with threats against children”.13 His final comment expresses Le Carré’s moral outrage more clearly than any other line: “Big pharmaceuticals are right up there with the arms dealers”. In his highly positive review, Ebert notes of the film: “Its closing scenes are as cynical about international politics and commerce as I can imagine. I would like to believe they are an exaggeration, but I fear they are not”.14 As the morally compromised Woodrow lets slip to Justin, withdrawing the unsafe Dypraxa from the market would not be an option for the drug company: it would cost them millions of dollars and a competitor could produce an alternative antibiotic in the interim. “Look at the death rate”, he adds, ‘not that anybody is counting”. Le Carré, as always, indicts the profiteers, cynics and hypocrites in his novel; however, with its more expansive visual canvas and the aid of its infectious soundtrack that also features indigenous Kenyan music— notably Ayub Ogada’s exquisite and haunting song ‘Kothbiro’—the film

13 Jeffrey Caine script of the film of The Constant Gardener, based on the novel by John Le Carré, New York: Newmarket Press, 2006. See also http://www.stockq.org/mov iescript/C/constant-gardener-the.php. 14 Ebert, ‘Gardener’ Digs for Answers’, Ibid.

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reached a wide and apparently responsive audience.15 While the source novel was a fierce polemic against the unmitigated greed of ‘big pharma’, Meirelles’ astute direction and the film’s expressive and exciting camerawork transformed the work into something more than a conspiracy thriller; it is both an elegy for every life lost and a work of moving pictorial art that remains long in the memory as a tribute to African resilience and culture. Difficult as it is to assess the impact of a literary work or film to affect what happens in real life, The Constant Gardener changed lives to an extent: the charitable trust, formed after the movie shooting concluded, continues to work to protect and support people in Kibera and elsewhere. That said, in his book chapter ‘Health, Corruption and Contemporary Kenya in The Constant Gardener’ Daniel Branch remains sceptical about the influence of either film or novel to change things very much: “the film demonstrates the modest possible responses to these processes when socialism is discredited so widely”.16 Today we continue to see multinational pharmaceutical companies indicted by aid agencies such as Oxfam on several criteria: namely, their reluctance to introduce a tiered costing system for ethically tested drugs that reflects the capability of people to pay, their prioritisation of research that favours developed countries over less developed ones, and their use of ‘lawfare’ to attack poorer countries in international courts in order to protect themselves from legal action against any abuses of their disproportionate power.17 A further problem caused by rogue trials is the subsequent deep mistrust of any form of vaccine among poor African communities, even in cases where the vaccine is proven and beneficial. The inexorable rise of biotech, facilitated by the offices of the World Health Organisation, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the World Economic Forum and powerful governments, has resulted in a business that generates gargantuan profits for companies and shareholders, sometimes at a great risk to lives—“epidemics as a growth market”, as Naomi Klein aptly characterises it.18 Despite the obvious limitations, as argued 15 The film earned ratings of 83 and 82 out of 100 for critical and audience feedback respectively on the Rotten Tomatoes website. 16 Daniel Branch, ‘Pharma in Africa: Health Corruption and Contemporary Kenya in The Constant Gardener’ in Nigel Eltringham, ed. Framing Africa: Portrayals of a Continent in Contemporary Mainstream Cinema, Berghahn Books, 2013, 72–90, 84. 17 Oxfam report ‘Investing for Life’ 2007. http://www.oxfam.org.uk/. 18 Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, 291.

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above by Branch, any push-back ultimately has to come with greater public awareness and a moral fury that may be prompted by fictions with a firm foundation in fact; this is exemplified by a work like The Constant Gardener, which highlights the need for greater transparency, and thus helps to raise consciousness about the tireless work of watchdog organisations, bringing pressure to challenge existing exploitation and abuses. It remains a grossly uneven struggle, but one that needs to be fought. for Vendetta (James McTeigue, U.K. 2005) Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s serial graphic novel from 1980s Thatcherite Britain, V for Vendetta, was re-invented for a new era and, to an extent, a new audience in James McTeigue’s 2005 film of the same name; the Warner Brothers/DC Comics movie, based on a freely adapted script by The Matrix writers and directors, the Wachowskis, proved a commercial success. Following the serialised novel, it resuscitated the romantic outlaw associations of the Guy Fawkes persona that had flourished in Victorian-era novels and ‘penny dreadfuls’. The film was well received by a majority of critics, despite its evident deviations from Moore’s more diffuse plot-lines and more specifically anarchist message. Moore distanced himself from the adaptation, as he did with other screen versions of his graphic stories, although Lloyd was consulted and was credited for the inspiration drawn from his original illustrations. Nonetheless, V for Vendetta was that rare phenomenon, a politically engaged Hollywood movie that didn’t pull its punches in portraying dystopian state terrorism. It wasn’t difficult to read the film as an allegory of the neoconservative, corporatist United States, where civil liberties and democracy itself were under serious threat amid the climate of fear prevailing in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. At the same time, the U.S. is portrayed in the film as ravaged by war and plague, and now dependent on the United Kingdom, which has unexpectedly reasserted its power over the former colony. The dubious nature of Bush’s 2000 election victory is mirrored in the takeover of power by an ex-Conservative Party far-right cabal in the U.K. referenced in an early part of the narrative and at subsequent flashback points. Given that the film is based fundamentally on the comic-book fantasy of an heroic figure with extraordinary powers, V for Vendetta is a surprisingly serious political film on a number of levels; credit for this is due not only to original writer Moore and illustrator Lloyd, but also to the

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script, production, direction and acting team. It is a distillation of themes and narratives from the joint creators’ 1980s series of graphic stories; but, while the political targets of the adaptation continued to be authoritarian right-wing politicians and their supporters and benefactors, the context was changed to a twenty-first-century setting, indicated as being the close of the second decade and opening of the third. At the same time, V for Vendetta includes stark allusions to topical international events, especially in its use of flashback sequences and media reportage, as news of horrific human rights abuses and the bypassing of normal democratic consensual procedures by both U.S. and U.K. governments began to leak out between 2003 and 2005. A further echo of contemporary politics can be observed in the climate of fear fostered by the ruling (and only) party, the Wagnerian-sounding Norsefire, in its official responses to actual or perceived terrorism. As director McTeigue observes in the special features section of the DVD, V for Vendetta gave the creative team “the chance to say something about the political climate that we live in. It dared to ask the questions”.19 What it said appeared more targeted against the Bush and Blair governments’ subversion of the democratic process and civilised values than against more generic state coercion under pseudo-democratic forms of modern governance. Radical for Hollywood, with civil liberties themes embracing issues of racism, gender-and-identity-motivated discrimination and the oppression of religious minorities in society, V for Vendetta’s main shift of focus in its transfer to the screen is ideological; the screenwriters downplay Moore’s philosophical scepticism and critical anarchism in favour of the more conventional concept of democratically guaranteed civil liberties. For example, the author’s concept of an anarchist utopia, as expounded by protagonist V to his initially reluctant helpmate, Evey Hammond, is called ‘The Land of Do-As-You-Please’, perhaps akin in spirit to the core idea expressed in John Lennon’s song ‘Imagine’. This ideal, lucidly conveyed in the graphic fiction, is lost in its transposition to the screen. Moore’s deep reservations about latter-day screen adaptations of his stories reflect genuine doubt whether a major-circuit film of just over two hours could succeed in doing justice to his themes and sentiments. While his scepticism was understandable, as the following discussion will argue 19 James McTeigue, director and cast interviews on V for Vendetta, DVD, Warner Home Video, 2006.

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something else was achieved. Certainly, the movie’s script, acting, direction and visual components were more uncompromising than might have been anticipated for a Hollywood screen makeover of a cult comic-book series. In the characterisation of the titular hero a modicum of the source texts’ anarchic spirit is inevitably discernible: early in the film the viewer witnesses V’s destruction of the oppressive symbol of The Old Bailey, and the finale features a spectacular November 5th immolation of the Houses of Parliament in Westminster (altered from 10 Downing Street in the graphic novel). Although many advocates of anarchism have proposed the non-violent transformation of society, others, notably Russian exile Mikhail Bakunin, argued that targeted violence against an oppressive state was unavoidable, and the film succeeds in communicating this point of view persuasively. At an early point, following the first of his revenge killings, V argues in response to Evey’s protestations that he is “sick” and sees morality as “an equation”: “violence can be used for good”. As in The Constant Gardener and The Manchurian Candidate, the movie’s nonlinear structure depends on journeys of both discovery and memorial reconstruction. As per the novel, viewers share the perspectives of protagonists Evey (Natalie Portman) and Chief Inspector of Scotland Yard Eric Finch (Stephen Rea), as the dark secrets behind the country’s Mosleyite Fascist regime and the backstory and motivation of the mystery avenger gradually emerge. The filmic narrative is mediated initially in voiceover, as though recounted in Evey’s memoir of the uprising on 5 November 2020, starting with the traditional children’s rhyme, “remember, remember the 5th of November”. It also functions as a tribute to the man behind the mask to whom she became close. V himself (Hugo Weaving), a victim of human experimentation and exemplar of the axiom that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, appears at first a throwback to the revenge dramas of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean era, with his archaic mode of speech, virtuosically riffing on the letter ‘v’. Not only inspired by the Guy Fawkes legacy, the character is also drawn from other romantic literary figures, especially Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo and Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera. His secret underground hideout and cultural shrine The Shadow Gallery is reminiscent of the Phantom’s lair in the latter work. Similarly, both graphic novel and film adaptation project images that seem to consciously evoke George Orwell’s 1984 and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. As in the graphic novel, there are various cultural and intertextual references which enrich the characterisation of V, including

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pertinent Shakespeare quotations concerning vengeance, disguise and moral corruption. Like Frankenstein’s creature, V conducts a murderous vendetta of vengeance against those who wronged him and his fellow prisoners. These are people close to Party Leader and High Chancellor Adam Sutler, and are former authority figures at the abandoned Larkhill Detention Centre. This is where, in a previous incarnation, he was incarcerated and, together with other social ‘undesirables’, used for medical experimentation. The more an inquisitive Finch and his assistant Dominic Stone (Rupert Graves) investigate the background of Larkhill and uncover its gruesome past, the more they begin to be shocked by the activities of the regime they work for; the three supposed terrorist attacks, at St Mary’s school, Three Waters, a water-treatment plant, and an unnamed tube station, which constituted the worst biological attack in the country’s history and led to Norsefire’s coup d’etat, begin to look like an inside job orchestrated by Sutler and his associates. They also discover that senior party member, TV influencer and propagandist Lewis Prothero (Roger Allam) and V’s first victim, is the former Commander of Larkhill. Phenomenally wealthy, he is also a major shareholder in Viadoxic Pharmaceutical, which produced the vaccine to combat the plague brought on by biological warfare. V’s other revenge targets who were also shareholders and closely connected to Larkhill, include Delia Surridge (Sinead Cusack), the medical researcher at the facility. The fire that destroyed Larkhill appears to have set V free, literally and metaphorically, as is shown in a retrospective image that recalls Frankenstein’s monster. Despite his flamboyance and sang froid in the face of danger and a complete absence of fear—which he instils, likewise, in Evey using psychologically effective but ethically questionable means involving mental torture—V is an ambivalent and flawed hero, a monster even, as Evey comments at one stage. He cannot resemble his role model Dantès from The Count of Monte Cristo, whose courage and resilience he lauds, when he shows Evey scenes from the 1934 film starring Robert Donat. Dumas’s adventure tale has a simpler narrative arc and, as he regretfully observes to Evey, the two of them cannot simply climb a tree in the end, as Dantès and Mercédès, do, and remain happily aloft as the credits roll. In other words, V’s political idealism is vitiated by his violent campaign of retribution; his existence as a freedom terrorist, or “a vengeful

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angel”,20 as actor Weaving refers to him, presents a paradox. Depersonalised by his constant use of the mask, he becomes a symbol of resistance and the faceless representation of an abstract ‘idea’ of personal freedom. A later victim of the brutal regime, television variety host and Evey’s former boss Gordon Deitrich (Stephen Fry) observes to her before his own fatal act of rebellion, “You wear a mask for so long, you forget who you were beneath it”.21 Ironically, while V helps Evey and subsequently others, including Deitrich, Finch and ultimately the wider population, to conquer their fear and even rediscover their moral compass, his lethal acts of retribution mean that he can neither rediscover his, nor enjoy the fruits of the revolution he started. In mitigation, as Evey eventually learns, his revenge is partly vicarious, a reckoning on behalf of another prisoner who died in Larkhill, lesbian Valerie Page. The film’s network of contemporary echoes, an innovation with which Moore found fault, certainly made it more topical for younger audiences and more relatable in the context of ongoing political events. Retrospective footage and visualised recollections of the conditions at Larkhill Detention Centre are suggestive of media images of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo detainees, with abused prisoners clad in orange jump-suits and tops, some of them hooded. A political poster of the Norsefire Party features the slogan ‘Coalition of the willing’ against a Nazi emblem, exploiting that particular phrase’s close associations with the coalition of countries formed for the ‘war on terror’ led by the U.S. and the U.K. Furthermore, Evey mentions to V that her parents were interned at the notorious real-life Belmarsh Prison where the U.K. kept its political detainees during ‘the war on terror’, typically without charges being brought, and has continued to incarcerate political prisoners there. News images in the film of the claimed ‘terrorist’ attacks, which were actually engineered by the coup perpetrators, bring to mind conspiracy theories surrounding the 9/11 events, including the baffling disregard of prior intelligence alerts and various other inconsistencies in the official narrative. Flashback footage of street protests against the American War in the backstory to the central plot evokes the huge anti-war protest marches

20 Hugo Weaving, Ibid. 21 V for Vendetta script by Larry and Andy Wachowski, based on the graphic novel by

Alan Moore. http://www.stockq.org/moviescript/V/v-for-vendetta.php.

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in many cities in the early months of 2003 against the Iraq invasion. A further topical reference is made to Prothero’s war record in the Middle East, specifically Iraq, Syria, Sudan and Kurdistan, as discovered during Finch’s investigations. At another point of the film Deitrich remarks to Evey how words like ‘collateral damage’ and ‘rendition’ acquire frightening new connotations in a totalitarian society; in the latter case, a word often associated with the arts suddenly came to mean something more sinister, as the 2007 film Rendition directed by Gavin Hood would clarify with reference to the covert CIA operation. Perhaps one of the most resonant lines in the film is spoken by Evey, quoting her political activist father who was killed by the regime: “artists use lies to tell the truth, while politicians use them to cover the truth up”. The audience could easily interpret this as an allusion to the televised speeches of Bush and Blair and their respective acolytes, in contrast to the various anti-war stories, poems, songs, plays and films of the era. The main critical problem surrounding the film’s utopian finale is that it is merely uplifting and cathartic as spectacle, as feel-good fantasy. By portraying the Guy Fawkes-mask-wearing crowd watching the fireworks that accompany the obliteration of Parliament—here symbolising an abandoned representative form of government—the film conveys a striking image. It is one that was imitated in real-life mass protests worldwide during the following years, such as the Occupy protests in the United States, the Arab Spring in a number of Middle Eastern countries and pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in 2014 and 2019, signifying the anonymity and collective will of the activists. These examples of dynamic mutual action were generated by an individual agency that was also simultaneously collective; they did not depend on the special powers of an iconic romantic hero. Not so with the film; not only is the bombing meticulously planned and set in train by V and completed by his accomplice Evey, even the presence of the watching multitude has been orchestrated by him. In Bertolt Brecht’s acclaimed political-historical play Life of Galileo the distinctly unheroic Galileo Galilei responds to his disciple Andrea’s lament: “Unhappy the land that breeds no hero!” with a trenchant riposte: “No, unhappy the land that needs heroes”.22 Here Brecht’s dialectically drawn character neatly sums up the dilemma and paradoxes 22 Bertolt Brecht, trans. John Willett, Life of Galileo (Leben des Galilei), Eyre Methuen, 1986, 76.

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of a post-democratic world order: Do we need a Guy Fawkes or a V to begin a revolution to overthrow tyranny and state corruption? If we do, the Guy Fawkes figure may simply aspire to instituting a different form of tyranny in its place, as was the case with the historical Guy Fawkes, who aimed at the restoration of a Catholic absolute monarch in his country, rather than the emancipation of its denizens. In the final analysis, much as we may empathise with Moore’s libertarian political perspectives, we may be compelled to accept the wisdom of the old maxim that ‘democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others’. In a post-heroic Britain accountable and transparent government for the many and not the few—as the Shelley-inspired aphorism23 put it—appears to be a preferable outcome to the Land of Do-As-You-Please, human nature being what it is. Perhaps, like V, the filmmakers preferred to keep options open: the film’s ending suggests a velvet revolution, after V has single-handedly disposed of the key antagonists, but its closing credits are accompanied by The Rolling Stones’ ‘Street Fighting Man’ and Ethan Stoller’s ‘BKAB’, featuring extracts from speeches by both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Like both men, V knowingly sacrifices himself for a cause he adjudges to be greater than himself. His revenge is for Valerie Page, but his self-sacrifice is for a better future for Evey and countless others. Enron (Lucy Prebble U.K. 2009) In the case of Lucy Prebble’s excoriating drama Enron, the raw material for her play lay ready to hand in the real world of the markets and recent events. The dramatic collapse of companies during the global financial crisis that began in 2008—most spectacularly Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns in the U.S. and Northern Rock in the U.K., added to the sordid conclusion of the high-profile Madoff investment scandal—was the culmination of deregulatory political zeal combined with free-market fundamentalism. This ethos originated in the feel-good Clinton years, but was particularly championed by the Bush administration at the behest of their neoliberal influencers. It led to sharp falls in the stock market and a severe economic recession that affected countless people worldwide; economic meltdown was only averted by massive bailouts for selected

23 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, Ibid. See Note 1.

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companies, largely subsidised by taxpayers, and inflationary levels of quantitative easing. For Prebble the roots of this crisis could be traced to the spectacular demise of Texas-based energy giant Enron seven years earlier. The company built a stellar reputation for market innovation, thereby generating huge profits for their shareholders and becoming the seventh largest publicly traded company in the United States, before abruptly collapsing and filing for bankruptcy in December 2001. In addition to shareholders having billions of dollars wiped out overnight, approximately 20,000 workers lost their jobs, savings and pensions in the debacle. Between 2004 and 2011 the company was obliged to pay its creditors nearly twenty-two billion dollars. In The Shock Doctrine, her penetrating 2007 study of what she termed ‘disaster capitalism’, Naomi Klein describes “the perfect storm of financial shocks—debt shocks, price shocks and currency shocks—created by the increasingly volatile, deregulated global economy”.24 The Enron scandal, as Prebble’s play indicates in its epilogue, needs to be seen in this context, although as Klein observes, there was a strong reaction to the unintended domestic effects of the U.S.’s imperialistic disaster capitalism model after the fall of Enron: “The crisis contributed to a general plummeting of faith in private industry to perform essential services, especially when it came out that it was Enron’s manipulation of energy prices that led to the massive blackouts in California a few months earlier”.25 Prebble’s epilogue echoes Klein’s comments on Enron executives “cashing out”26 by awarding themselves ethically unjustified bonuses at the expense of employees and the taxpayer; the playwright likewise indicates, through the voice of an unnamed senator, how the company’s then deviant practices have become normalised in today’s business world. Prebble’s carefully researched play shows how the collapse of Enron— the proverbial castle built on sand—was both prophetic and emblematic of widespread fraudulent corporate practices based on speculation and misrepresentation that had by now become endemic. As is emphasised in her epilogue, the company’s deceitful business practices were systemic and merely the tip of an ever-growing iceberg rather than representing

24 Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, 160. 25 Klein, Ibid., 296. 26 Klein, Ibid., 296.

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an egregious case of massive fraud, as the similar fate of telecom corporation WorldCom, only a year after Enron, demonstrated. During a 2010 interview Prebble discussed the dramatic potential of the topic of financial derivatives: “What you’re dealing with is a metaphor, or […] a world of illusion. You’re quite well placed to represent that on stage because people come into a theatre expecting to be sold something that isn’t real. And that isn’t a million miles away from how commodities and stocks operate”.27 Enron was conceived as a theatrical morality tale about the U.S. energy-trading firm, whose greatly inflated share price did not reflect its genuine profits and assets or its ongoing financial viability. The play illustrated how the financial scandal surrounding the company’s demise was both tragic, for those who lost their livelihood and those whose hubris or disregard of business conventions led to its collapse, as well as darkly comic, for audiences. It has Shakespearean and Brechtian elements, being constructed in mostly short episodic scenes that recount the Enron story from an early juncture in 1992, as Enron’s fortunes were on the way up, and is a rare twenty-first-century Anglophone example of epic theatre. In addition to a well-crafted narrative, mixing direct address to the audience with character dialogue, Prebble’s play employs music, multimedia and video slides, as well as dance and visual effects, to communicate the main theme and messages of the drama. Its more naturalistic scenes of boardroom interaction are complemented by bursts of physical stylised theatre that punctuate the dialogue-based scenes, and disrupt any possibilities of engaging with the characters, either emotionally or intellectually, as in more naturalistic fourth-wall plays; equally, Enron’s whimsical musical interludes, sometimes satirising the company’s overblown advertising commercials, create both a powerful sense of distancing and an irrepressible mood of vaudeville. As is common in Brechtian epic theatre, each scene has its own ‘chapter’ surtitle, either designating the place or the occasion or summarising its action, often ironically; the play’s prologue and epilogue help to frame Enron as a narrative in the British epic theatre tradition of John Arden, John McGath, David Edgar and Caryl Churchill. More importantly, though, the play delivers an explicit moral lesson for audiences, and 27 ‘Musical Tribute to Corporate Enron Scandal Collapses on Broadway’. Lucy Prebble interview with Jeffrey Brown on PBS NewsHour, 6 May 2010. https://www.pbs.org/ newshour/show/musical-tribute-to-corporate-enron-scandal-collapses-on-broadway.

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in this respect functions allegorically, as the medieval morality play did: it implies that the hubristic overreach of its central character, company CEO Jeff Skilling, and the combination of arrogance, dishonesty, self-deception and greed that drove Skilling and his confederates, company chairman Kenneth Lay and chief financial officer Andy Fastow, are symptomatic of a more prevalent malaise in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century society. Using the morality play as a wider allegory of human conduct, as Brecht did, Prebble hints at the political corruption that enabled such conduct, both under Bill Clinton and under George W. Bush. Clinton is referred to directly by the Enron leadership in a negative context and mainly in relation to his refusal to thoroughly deregulate financial and industrial sectors, as had occurred during the freewheeling neoliberalism of ‘Reaganomics’. By contrast, their references to the incoming Republican President and Vice-President, following the dubious 2000 election, are more coded. Bush, who had seemed an unlikely contender for Republican Party candidate, is alluded to by Lay as simply ‘Junior’, whereas Cheney is referred to as ‘Dick’, hinting at Lay’s influential political allies and links to the Bush clan and their cohorts. From the prologue onward Prebble’s play probes the fundamental question of what happened by asking why it happened. Her opening device is to imitate Enron’s airily insubstantial ‘Ask Why’ commercial with its three-blind-mice imagery; the latter was designed to communicate the message that, until Enron showed the way forward, most businesses were risk-averse, hamstrung by conventional methods and blind to innovation. Enron, in contrast, projected itself as disruptive of the business establishment by fostering creativity and promoting a dynamic new corporate culture. Prebble’s ironic and inverted use of the trope is particularly effective, since the blind-mice image, which re-emerges at a much later and pertinent point of the play, symbolises the blindness of members of the board to the fake holdings and off-the-books accounting over which they ought to have exercised scrutiny and due diligence. Moreover, the diegetic style of the anonymous lawyer’s prologue—“There was a company”28 —sets the scene for the mimetic interaction of the play by providing key narrative information for the audience, as well as proposing an inverted moral; like a defence lawyer reasoning with us as jury, he twists the narrative to implicate the listener in a sense of shared responsibility for

28 Lucy Prebble, Enron, Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2009, 3.

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the failure of a great man who “tried to change the world”,29 as Skilling claims in the voiceover excerpt from the Enron commercial. In the same vein, Prebble’s representation of crooked multinational accounting firm Arthur Andersen as a ventriloquist and his dummy (Little Arthur) is a very apt stage effect to convey the duplicity of the management. The company that had been founded and originally run along strictly ethical lines folded after its senior figures were indicted on felony charges related to Enron, WorldCom and other cases of fraudulent auditing. But perhaps the most striking stage image in Prebble’s play is represented by Fastow’s creatures, the prehistoric-headed raptors that symbolise the special purpose entities (SPEs) scam invented by Skilling’s ambitious, ready-to-please junior colleague. The special purpose of these non-existent ‘entities’, not reflected in the company’s balance sheets, was to conceal Enron’s ever-mounting debts and toxic assets from their investors and creditors. Fastow’s creatures skulk in his subterranean lair, literally swallowing up the company’s vast losses: SKILLING: They’re consuming our debt FASTOW: Yes! And debt’s just money…All money is debt. It’s just how you present it.30

As the play shows, the fictive Skilling doesn’t need much persuasion to fall in with the fictive Fastow’s outrageously fraudulent proposal, having invited the latter into his confidence with his casuistic evocation of the “gap between the perception and the reality”.31 Nor does the fictive Lay wish to know what is really going on in the company, hence the exquisite irony of Enron’s blind mice metaphor being applied to the company chairman and old friend of the Bush family. The real-life Skilling, like the fictive version, was trained by Chicago School global management consultant group, McKinsey, whose vanguard role in the management of neoliberal ‘shock doctrine’ capitalism has been well documented by Klein and others. Skilling, in many ways the tragic protagonist of Enron, is portrayed as casting himself in the role of both Nietzschean ‘superman’ and ardent advocate of the ‘greed is good’ philosophy, proposed by the character Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street.

29 Ibid., 3. 30 Ibid., 62. 31 Ibid., 45.

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In a direct address monologue, he emphasises this perspective to us, having expressed his profound contempt for legislators, politicians and other government figures: “Who do you think is going to win in the end? The greedy, or the inept?”32 For all his iconoclastic ardour, however, Skilling, who vainly prizes his personal influence in keeping the stock price of the company sky-high, is sacrificed on the altar of the market gods when the price plummets following the investigative journalism triggered by his handling of the interview with Fortune magazine. When even Fastow acknowledges the game is up, “everything’s hedged against our own stock”,33 Skilling has nowhere to turn. Prebble’s powerful audiovisual imagery of the proverbial black box of company fraud, transformed into a minuscule throbbing red box kept in Fastow’s lair and the flashing stock price—constantly projecting not only the company’s falsely perceived worth but also Skilling’s self-worth—enable the play audience to see what the financial industry executives refused to, as long as it suited them, namely that the emperor had no clothes. In an evocative stage image late in the second act, Skilling crucifies himself before the glowing stock price index as a portent of the tragic fall of the company and of the real-life Skilling, whose release from gaol came as late as 2020. There is a modicum of wisdom, together with unsparing honesty, in his final speech during the play’s epilogue, echoing Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians—albeit with an unrepentant twist at the end: I’m not an unusual man. I just wanted to change the world…Everything I’ve ever done in my life worth anything has been done in a bubble; in a state of extreme hope and stupidity..he points to dips and spikes on the graph…All humanity is here. There’s Greed, there’s Fear, Joy, Faith, Hope…And the greatest of these… is Money.34

Commenting caustically on the refusal of American critics and audiences to recognise or accept the pertinent theatrical lesson offered by Enron following its popular and critical success in London—the Broadway production closed early having received some unfavourable reviews— Guardian critic Michael Billington picked up on Prebble’s own view of it, referenced above: “the play’s vaudevillian style is a visual embodiment 32 Ibid., 79. 33 Ibid., 87. 34 Ibid., 111.

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of the dream-like illusion to which the Texan energy giant, and similar corporations, surrendered.”35 In today’s very similar financial scenario, with the ongoing instability of crypto-currencies fuelled by under-regulated speculation and greed—the Enron-like 2023 collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX crypto-currency scheme comes immediately to mind, as well as the failure of a number of U.S. investment banks and the opportunistic asset-stripping of private equity companies—the time is surely ripe for a fresh run of Prebble’s acclaimed, multi-award-winning drama. Today’s flow of often unregulated capital into high-profit, environmentally baneful fossil-fuel energy, much of it taking place under the aegis of a murky shadow banking system, is in many respects the offspring of the then egregious Enron scam. So, while mimetic screen and stage dramas, generally favoured by U.S. audiences, enhance realism and dramatic tension related to real-life characters and events, such as the Enron scandal and its perpetrators, they risk promoting excessive empathy for ethically compromised figures, such as Skilling and Lay, who became the role models for today’s rogue operators. In terms of theatricality, non-Aristotelian epic theatre tends to be more thought-provoking than subtly cathartic naturalistic plays in engaging the moral compass of audiences. But, to be fair, the latter type doesn’t usually set out “to change the world”, to quote the highly successful Skilling.

35 Michael Billington, ‘Enron’s Failure Shows Broadway’s Flaws’, The Guardian, 5 May 2010.

CHAPTER 6

Case-study Films and Plays from the Second Decade Part One: The Politics of Race, Gender and Class

Preamble: Stage and Screen Drama and the Culture Wars The close of the second decade of the century offered a natural opportunity for critical retrospectives on standout sociopolitical plays and films, made all the more pertinent by the paralysing effects of the COVID-19 virus on live theatre performances and cinemas. Many arts organisations and performers were extremely hard hit by the enforced shutdown, and for theatre in particular it was by no means certain that the onceflourishing performing arts scene would recover fully from the debilitating longer-term effects of lockdown measures. At the end of the second decade there was an effective moratorium on the theatrical production of new plays as a result of social distancing measures; in consequence, theatre tended to move on line in the form of theatre broadcast of successful productions from the first two decades, most of which have featured the plays of more established and canonical dramatists. Theatre tends to prosper in more economically buoyant times, and, like other cultural institutions deemed non-essential by governments, is particularly susceptible to economic crises. At first it seemed the absence of new dramatic writing, often overtly or covertly critical of the powers-that-be, was a useful byproduct of the events of 2020 for autocratic regimes everywhere, even in presumptive or claimed democracies. Fortunately for theatre-goers and

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Ingham, Anglo-American Stage and Screen Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45198-0_6

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cinema-goers, the progressivist strain of stage and screen dramatic writing re-surfaced, as both institutions began slowly to recover. Looking back, theatre in general, and new drama in particular, nonetheless made its mark in the second decade of the century. As the decade’s widely touted ‘culture wars’, stoked up by demagogues, populist press organs and social media, exacerbated social polarisation, theatre responded in the way it does best: by offering alternative perspectives designed to foster shared audience experience and community values, even if the more controversial productions sometimes sought to do so indirectly through ‘in-yer-face’-style provocation. As in previous decades, the theatre’s contribution to critical public discourses was articulated via a catalogue of theatrical genres, styles and methodologies. While the exhilarating and exuberant elements of musical theatre remained important for the industry and for theatre-goers alike and mould-breaking productions such as Hamilton (a work with considerable political overtones for United States audiences in particular) and & Juliet proved innovative and liberating, the more momentous and urgent themes addressed by a largely new generation of playwrights affirmed the crucial and longstanding role of speech drama as a political forum and lightning-rod for progressive ideas. On the surface, the structures and forms of these speech dramas appears extremely diverse, spanning a gamut of theatrical approaches from the truly epic, as in Ella Hickson’s Oil , to the slice-of-life realist, as in Lynn Nottage’s Sweat , to the intimacy of solo direct address, as in Dael Orlandersmith’s Until the Flood. The ‘long revolution’, to borrow Raymond Williams’s critical term,1 in modern theatre styles and methods that has been in evidence across the twentieth century and into the 21st has encouraged diversity and pluralism, even in the face of institutional conservatism in some quarters. As Sarah Grochala argues in her recent study The Contemporary Political Play, there are “reasons why certain dramaturgical structures are commonly associated with the idea of a political play”.2 This is not to suggest that an overriding concept of form in these contemporary political plays determines their content in the tradition of formalist theatre, or Brechtian Didactic Plays (Lehrstücke) and Epic

1 Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution, Parthian Press, 2011 (reprint). 2 Sarah Grochala, The Contemporary Political Play, Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2017,

4.

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Theatre (Episches Theater) praxis. Brecht saw that in essence: “The cry for a new theatre is the cry for a new social order”.3 In his added epilogue to the 1943 play The Good Person of Sichuan (Der Gute Mensch von Sezuan) he called on the audience directly to respond to the many social and personal dilemmas raised in his plot and help bring about change on all levels of society. In our own equally challenged age, the forms selected by dramatic authors can cover a gamut of styles, from the more conventionally representational to the more experimental and theatrically iconoclastic, but have in common the task of revealing the shifting social and political structures of our contemporary world. It could also be argued that, in some respects, the dramas that have emerged towards the end of the first decade of the present century, and flourished in the second, have something in common with the so-called ‘problem play’ and ‘drama of ideas’ genres, which were pioneered over a century earlier by Ibsen, Shaw and their followers. Although politically engagé and didactic modes of theatre, such as Agitprop, always remain an option for dramatists, in practice the most stimulating and pivotal plays of the decade have exerted more of an effect of critical distance than of emotional identification on their audiences, while providing them much food for thought and no neat conclusions or solutions. Implicitly inviting them to go away and think about the theatre-world relationship, as Brecht had done rather more explicitly, has been a structural and thematic feature of much of the new writing and production. Unlike Brecht’s earlier orthodox Marxist Lehrstück solutions, however, there is no call for unquestioning conformism to a doctrinal belief-system; more evident in contemporary dramas are the more open and dialectical structures of Brecht’s later plays, such as Mutter Courage (Mother Courage) or Leben des Galilei (Life of Galileo). This intrinsic connection that has emerged between sociopolitical and theatrical forms and structures is of critical significance for Grochala’s readings of contemporary theatre: “For me, a political play is not necessarily a play that addresses a political issue: rather, it is a play that opens the audience’s

3 Bertolt Brecht, Über einer neuen Dramatik, Suhrkamp Verlag, 15, 172.

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eyes to how the world could be different.”4 It is this “dialectical relationship to social structures in the world outside the theatre doors”,5 as she puts it, that matters, and that has inspired the turn towards more politically engaged theatre, beginning in in the new century’s first decade and intensifying in the second. Reviewing the profusion of new playwriting and plays by dramatists many of whom only emerged during the 2000s, it is conspicuous how many female writers have come to the fore during the decade. These include major contemporary voices in theatre such as Nottage (Sweat; Mlima’s Tale), Hickson (Oil ; The Writer), Orlandersmith (Until the Flood), Lucy Prebble (A Very Expensive Poison—about the Litvinenko poisoning in London carried out by agents of the Russian FSB), Lucy Kirkwood (Chimerica; The Children), Rebecca Gilman (Luna Gale) and debbie tucker green (Ear for Eye). They complemented established female playwrights of the stature of Caryl Churchill (Love and Information; Ding Dong the Wicked, Pigs and Dogs; Beautiful Eyes ), Suzan-Lori Parks (Father Comes Home From the Wars; White Noise), Helen Edmundson (Small Island; Queen Anne) and Paula Vogel (Don Juan Comes Home from Iraq; Indecent ), all still productive in the new century. Other emergent Anglophone female voices included Jackie Sibblies Drury (Fairview), Jennifer Blackmer (Human Terrain), Beth Steel (Wonderland and Labyrinth), Kathy Soper (Wish List ), Jessica Swale (Blue Stockings ), Annie Baker (The Flick), Annie Washburn (Mr Burns, a PostElectric Play and Shipwreck, a study of corrosive power based on Trump’s ascent to power), Heidi Schreck (What the Constitution Means to Me) and the five co-authors of Joanne (for Clean Break, featured at the RSC’s Mischief Festival). Posh (2010) was young Royal Court playwright Laura Wade’s thinly fictionalised satire of the elitist Oxford University Bullingdon Club, which helps to explain the privileged world-view of Conservative premiers, such as David Cameron and Boris Johnson. Referred to in her play as ‘The Riot Club’, the club members who are depicted at what becomes a chaotic and abusive party bear considerable resemblance to media stories about the toxic masculinity displayed by embryonic Tories during their time at Oxford and after.

4 Grochala, Ibid., 22. 5 Ibid., 23.

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All of these dramatists expressed powerful female perspectives on key sociopolitical issues from the value of the constitution as social contract in Schreck’s solo play, to labour exploitation, austerity and social precarity. While the majority of these plays were predominantly serious in tone, a number of them introduced idiosyncratic comedy, and one or two— as in the case of the 2017 Ubu Trump, Rosanna Hildyard’s Trump riff on French playwright Alfred Jarry’s proto-absurdist play Ubu Roi—noholds-barred satire. Just as South African dramatist Jane Taylor showed with her Ubu and the Truth Commission (1997), Jarry’s character can become a valuable dramatic archetype for our own times. In many respects highly diverse, these plays feature a common underlying critique of traditional paternalist power-bases and draw attention both to the roles of women in a still-patriarchal society and to the need for prioritising the needs of the environment over insatiable corporate greed. Male playwrights have likewise made their mark during the decade, producing works that are sociopolitically challenging and critical, none more so than the prolific Mike Bartlett (Earthquakes in London, 13, King Charles III, Wild, Albion, Snowflake), who writes topically both for television and stage. Bartlett’s invigoratingly provocative work has shown him to be one of the great new talents emerging in the decade, having launched his playwriting career towards the end of the previous decade. His facility with language and characterisation and his gift for revealing the inevitable links between the personal and the political, in addition to his remarkable productivity, point to an exceptional presence on the contemporary playwriting scene. His 2014 future history play written in iambic pentameter, King Charles III , was also adapted into a critically lauded television movie, employing direct address to camera in line with the West End and Broadway production’s convention. Neither play nor film pulled their punches in portraying a believable constitutional crisis during which politicians of both sides of the house force the new king to abdicate in favour of his elder son. Across the Atlantic one of the notable plays of the decade was Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park (2010), a multi-award-winning drama inspired by Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 masterpiece A Raisin in the Sun. Norris’s play not only proved both a critical success, but also had a good run on Broadway. Its plot spanned two periods of American interracial history, the first act being set in 1959 and the second in the play’s present, namely 2009. The author’s idea was to contrast the cruder and more overt, systemic racism of the late Fifties with the more subtle racial tensions

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of today, usually concealed beneath a veneer of political correctness, but laid bare by strong personal motives. Hansberry’s original Washington Park residence had attracted upwardly mobile black families such as her own, which became the fictional Clybourne Park, the Younger family’s contentious new home in her play. The first act of the intertextual drama picks up the story where Hansberry’s play left off, with the frustrated neighbourhood representative Karl Lindner attempting to persuade the white owners not to sell. However the latter have made up their minds to get away from the house, the scene of a family suicide, as quickly as possible, and are deaf to his pleas. In the second act we meet black housing board representatives Kevin and Lena (the latter related to Younger family matriarch Lena) who are discussing housing regulations connected with the renovation plans of the new owners, a white couple called Steve and Lindsey, who have applied to substantially alter the residence, changing most of its original character. Lena in particular has a personal and emotional affinity with the building, knowing of the struggle against racial prejudice that the Younger family experienced in order to move there. The discussion between them and another couple descends into bickering and verbal abuse, but a poignant and skilful coda brings hypocritical American values and attitudes of both then and now sharply into focus. Other political dramas of the decade by established male playwrights, such as Howard Brenton (Drawing the Line; The Arrest of Ai Weiwei) and James Graham (Ink; Labour of Love), deployed factual-historical material more than pure imagination. Brenton’s play on the 1947 partition of colonised India probed still-raw geopolitical sensitivities, while Graham’s partly humorous studies, of the Murdoch press phenomenon and Labour Party values and relationships across changing leaderships, respectively, despite being topical, had greater resonance in the British domestic context. Brenton’s The Arrest of Ai Weiwei dealt with more recent Asian history in the form of the artist and critic of the Chinese Communist Party and appeared in the same year as Kirkwood’s Chimerica. Robert Schenkkan ‘s diptych charting Lyndon Baines Johnson’s period of office following the Kennedy assassination, All the Way and The Great Society, exemplified the bio-drama mode that had achieved prominence in the previous decade with British writer Peter Morgan’s 2006 play Frost/Nixon. Not to be outdone, Morgan produced his own commercially successful political bio-drama, The Audience, in 2013, based on the widely differing relationships between the British Queen and her

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successive prime ministers. Simon Woods’ 2019 debut drama Hansard (with its title name-checking the record-book of democratic parliamentary debates), which premiered at the U.K.’s flagship National Theatre, portrayed the deep divisions and emotional scars concealed within the privacy of a Thatcherite MP’s family home. One of the play’s core disputes between Robin Hesketh and his wife Diana relates to the introduction of the government’s homophobic Section 28 law which the fictional MP strongly supports but his wife opposes. The play’s witty, but ultimately vicious, sparring between husband and wife is reminiscent of Albee’s classic Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf , except that the conflict between the couple stems from their political-philosophical, as much as their emotional, antagonism. Some playwrights such as Steven Levenson have sought to portray past history as a window on our own conflicted times. His 2018 play Days of Rage is set in a similarly polarised 1969, and, like much of his work, focuses on the group interactions among young people against a background of U.S. government atrocities in Vietnam and the trial of the Chicago Eight that year. By contrast, new dramas such as Samuel D. Hunter’s Greater Clements and Christopher Demos-Brown’s American Son, which met with considerable success on Broadway, are set very firmly in the present day. The former depicts the disenchantment and disenfranchisement of blue-collar workers, ex-miners and their families in a recently disincorporated fictional town in the playwright’s native Idaho; in that respect, it shares some common ground with Nottage’s Sweat . Demos-Brown’s American Son ambitiously probed interracial and intergenerational issues, as well as depicting a failed mix-raced marriage and a missing son of that marriage. Whether or not it was written as a direct response to the extrajudicial killing of young black men and women by law enforcement officers that so blighted the decade is uncertain, but these real-life events are invoked in the play’s subtext. Orlandersmith’s direct address play Until the Flood, which appeared in the same year, made explicit references to the Michael Brown killing in Ferguson Missouri in 2014; in a very different style, Demos-Brown’s and director Kenny Leon’s more conventional ‘fourth wall’ theatricality relied upon the audience’s extra-diegetic shared knowledge of recent events. Rather than noting differences of emphasis, or of historical versus contemporary or futuristic writing, it is appropriate to recognise that female and non-white dramatic authors have made a much greater impact in the past decade than at any time previously. Dramatists such as Nottage,

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Drury, Orlandersmith, tucker green, Roy Williams and Clint Dyer (Death of England), Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (An Octoroon; Gloria), May Sumbwanyambe (After Independence), Jeremy O. Harris (Slave Play), Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig (The World of Extreme Happiness ) and Lauren Yee (King of the Yees; The Great Leap) have demonstrated that playwriting in the twenty-first century is no longer a white male preserve, with token acceptance of exceptional female and non-white authors. This paradigm shift has facilitated the emergence of a more inclusive and diverse type of theatre that can challenge received notions of what stage drama is, or can be. Much of the work of the black American dramatists of the second decade feeds directly or indirectly into the powerful Black Lives Matter sociopolitical movement, and, in doing so, reprises more forcefully the civil rights themes expressed by their great predecessors, including Lorraine Hansberry, August Wilson and Adrienne Kennedy. The success of today’s Hansberrys and Wilsons in the U.S. or Winsome Pinnocks in the U.K. is arguably less remarkable than it was in the twentieth century, despite the social inequalities that persist today and remain a factor in the ability of an aspiring non-white dramatist to develop latent talent. For one thing, there is a far more inclusive, multiethnic ethos in contemporary theatre in relation to new creative writing, as well to casting, and so on, than was evident in the late twentieth century. Moreover, as the award-winning work of dramatists, such as Nottage and Kirkwood, has shown, playwriting is increasingly focusing on issues that extend beyond uniquely ethnic or gender-related horizons, be they intersectional or quite simply of universal import. In many respects, the concern of much of the new political playwriting has been to challenge the lack of accountability and transparency on the part of governments worldwide, as well as explore urgent issues of social justice and responsibility. As governmental authority in many supposedly democratic countries mutated alarmingly over the course of the decade into downright authoritarianism, sometimes bolstered by electoral interference and fraud, playwrights of all backgrounds have offered insightful dissection and powerful critique of their reactionary populist agendas. Bastions of experimental and independent creative work, such as the Royal Court Theatre and Hampstead Theatre (both in London), the Steppenwolf and Goodman Theatres of Chicago, and Woolly Mammoth Theatre and Mosaic Theatre in Washington D.C., have maintained a vital role in nurturing fresh talent and providing a venue for non-status quo, and, in some cases, edgy and uncomfortable playwriting. Another

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strength of such venues, especially the Royal Court, is to provide a platform for translated dramatic work from overseas. For example, the 2017 production of Liwaa Yazjii’s hard-hitting absurdist play Goats set in a government-controlled Syrian village in Katharine Halls’ Englishlanguage rendition was a high-point of their collaboration with Syrian writers under the auspices of a bold and affirmative cultural exchange scheme. The play highlighted the manic absurdity and paranoia of the Syrian conflict and its lethal effects on daily life in a small village caught up in an insidious propagandist campaign for military recruitment. With each family’s sons seen as potential cannon fodder (or glorious ‘martyrs’ to the cause, according to the government’s political machine), and the formerly respected village teacher now regarded as a troublesome dissident who questions ‘the official version’ of events, the play’s conflict brings the totalitarian and totalising nature of the Syrian conflict into sharp relief. In doing so, the drama educates its audiences about the human costs of one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes of the decade. New plays, such as Goats, written by non-Anglophone writers, underline the importance of maintaining world drama perspectives. Brecht, Boal, Václav Havel, Yukio Ninagawa, Jerzy Grotowski and many other influential twentieth-century figures have surely taught us that the English language has no monopoly on dramatic invention and innovation. Many of the plays referred to in this chapter, and all of the casestudy plays that follow, exemplify political drama in the broadest sense discussed above; they may or may not be set in a specific local context or relate to real people and places, but they have all shed light in various ways on the sociopolitical events and developments that have marked the decade. The rationale for selecting these case-study plays is not only a function of the awards they may have won, or the positive critical reception they enjoyed. Rather, their diversity of subject-matter and styles tends to disguise their common mastery of theatrical form and content in addressing fundamental sociopolitical issues of the times in which we live. A number of films of the decade dealt with political issues, some more whimsically, such as the scathing satire on the corrupting influence of corporate money and macho rivalry Campaign (Jay Roach, U.S. 2012); as well as sending up the histrionics of political campaigning, the film cleverly lampooned the Koch Brothers, right-wing corporate donors whose father was a founder of the racist, sexist, anti-democratic and ultimately

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paranoid John Birch Society. Matthew Warchus’s humorous but pointed U.K film Pride (2014) dealt with a factual event in Margaret Thatcher’s bitter campaign against the miners during their 1984 strike; the movie depicts the development of an unexpected degree of solidarity between miners and U.K. gay and lesbian activists, who raised money to help the striking workers’ struggle. Tom McCarthy’s Academy Award-winning Spotlight (U.S. 2015) dealt with the serious issue of sexual abuse of young people by Catholic priests in the Boston area and the subsequent coverup ending in 2002. The film shows how the Boston Globe’s investigative ‘spotlight’ team reported on the abuse, despite pressure from the Catholic hierarchy and influential local politicians to drop their investigation. As a much wider pattern of clerical abuse against young parishioners is uncovered by the newspaper team, the Globe’s chief editor holds back on publication until they have an overwhelmingly damning story. Featuring a strong cast and a powerful true-life narrative, Spotlight stresses the value of fearless investigative journalism in revealing power abuses. Like Philomena (Stephen Frears, U.K. 2013), with its quietly political subtext, Spotlight leaves the viewer in no doubt where the moral responsibility for abuse and cover-ups lies—with the hypocritical Catholic Church hierarchy worldwide and the political establishment who are all too ready to whitewash their misdemeanours. While some U.S. critics complained of what they saw as anti-Catholic bias, the truth of these factual events and the accuracy of representation in both films clearly vindicated the filmmakers. A slew of political films later in the decade in the U.K. and in the U.S. suggests that Trump’s surprise presidency was as much a factor in motivating filmmakers as it was in motivating dramatists. Given its political antecedents in extremist organisations such as The John Birch Society, this different kind of ‘red scare’ posed by a latter-day Republican Party in thrall to its hyperbolic demagogues prompted a number of critical screen dramas, some contemporary and others historical but resonant of contemporary politics. Trumbo (U.S. 2015), Jay Roach’s biopic of Dalton Trumbo, a Hollywood screenwriter with left-wing views blacklisted by the HUAC for refusing to testify, made its political stance on right-wing politics crystal clear by means of historical allegory. Portraying the gifted screenwriter of such acclaimed Academy Award-winning movies as Roman Holiday, Spartacus and Exodus, Bryan Cranston gave a strong performance in the titular role. After being jailed and blacklisted, Trumbo worked pseudonymously from his home in Mexico for a B movie

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company, farming out work to other blacklisted screenwriters until Hollywood brought him back as ghostwriter. However, when Kirk Douglas (Spartacus ) and Otto Preminger (Exodus ) not only invite him to script the respective films, but also credit him openly for his work, defying the congressional Republicans, the ban on Trumbo and others becomes ineffectual. To add insult to injury for the House Republicans, newly elected President John F. Kennedy ended the blacklist assault on the livelihoods of many working in the arts fields, by enthusiastically endorsing Spartacus. Roach’s biopic provoked controversy, with a number of right-wing critics seemingly conflating the communist parties of the U.S. in the Thirties and the Soviet Union under Stalin. The Report (Scott Z. Burns, U.S. 2019) is, likewise, a fact-based narrative and one set in the first decade, dealing with the topic of the CIA’s defence of the use of torture to interrogate suspects, or potential informants, in relation to the September 11 attacks. Its plot revolves around a Senate report commissioned by the incoming Democrat government to investigate the agency’s claims that torture methods provide valuable information for saving lives. Senate staffer Daniel Jones, appointed by Senator Dianne Feinstein to produce a report into human rights abuses, is thwarted at every turn by the intelligence services, who destroy tapes of interviews, break into his computer and threaten him with prosecution in order to undermine the government investigation. The Amazon-streamed film, which earned flattering comparisons to Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men, ends with a heavily redacted report being pushed through before Republicans can use their mid-term majority to make it disappear. George Tenet, CIA director during the Bush administration, and members of his team are portrayed as unscrupulous in their efforts to hamper a report that would certainly indict their unlawful actions. The one Republican who does support them is Senator John McCain, a former prisoner of war subjected to torture in Vietnam, as is made clear in the final sequence when Feinstein glosses the implications of the report with graphic footage. As we learn in the film’s epilogue, the indefatigable Jones ultimately resigns over the issue of impunity for miscreant CIA officers and the lack of accountability for the organisation. The film won an award in 2020 for best cinematic portrayal of Washington DC. By contrast to dramatised factual narratives, John Madden’s Miss Sloane (U.S. 2016) was a timely fictional thriller, treating the pertinent topic of political lobbying with considerable acumen. The plot tells how a feisty gun-control lobbyist deftly turns the tables on a corrupt Republican

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senator during the course of a congressional hearing which is designed to disgrace her and ensure that the gun-control bill she is lobbying for fails to garner sufficient votes to pass. Having illegally wire-tapped the senator and her similarly venal ex-boss in a set-up, Miss Sloane faces a short spell in prison for her illegal methods, but she is ultimately vindicated by the senator’s disgrace and the success of the bill, mandating modest gun controls in the country. After her profession as a lobbyist is hypocritically trashed by the senator during the hearing, she plays back the proof of his corruption and says, “Make no mistake—these rats are the real parasites on American democracy.” The statement resounds as a denunciation of the anti-democratic goals of the contemporary American right. Other notable films with explicit political references released in the latter part of the decade in the U.S. and the U.K. included Vice (Adam McKay, 2018), a satirical but factually accurate biopic of Bush’s hardline Vice-President and The Front Runner (Jason Reitman, U.S. 2018), another biopic, but a more sympathetic one, of highly regarded Democrat candidate Gary Hart, whose promising 1988 campaign was destroyed by right-wing gossip about an extra-marital affair. In the realms of fantasy fiction, Jordan Peele’s 2017 film debut Get Out was a horror movie portraying a wealthy white liberal East Coast family as secret predators on healthy black men. The engaging narrative allowed the film’s deliberately provocative subtext about token white liberalism to register with audiences, avoiding heavy-handed didacticism. Several politically nuanced U.K. films garnered critical commendation between 2017 and 2019. These included Sally Potter’s monochrome drawing-room farce The Party (U.K. 2017), exploring the intersection of the personal with the political at a house party celebrating a political promotion in the U.K.’s opposition party (implicitly, the Labour Party). The idealistic Janet, who has just become Shadow Health Minister, is struggling to cope with management of the house party at the start of the film, implying that the wider challenge of managing an ideologically conflicted political party will also cause big problems. Her friend April pithily observes to her on arrival, “You’re a star, Janet, even though I think democracy is finished”, and later comments to the mixed assortment of guests with caustic irony, “Janet actually believes change is possible through parliamentary politics.” Mike Leigh’s Peterloo (U.K. 2018) was a meticulously realistic reconstruction of the events surrounding the infamous massacre of peaceful protestors that took place 200 years earlier at

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St Peter’s Field, Manchester. Moving to contemporary times, The Flood (Anthony Woodley, U.K. 2019) was a topical true-life account of the remarkable story of an Ethiopian refugee, who miraculously survives a tortuous journey to reach the U.K. where his next challenge is to avoid deportation back to his war-torn country. Ken Loach and Paul Laverty’s Sorry We Missed You (U.K. 2019) likewise remained firmly in the present, depicting the struggle of a self-employed delivery driver trying to make ends meet for his family’s sake in the cynical Tory gig economy. At the other end of the scale, Michael Winterbottom’s Greed (U.K./U.S. 2019) lampooned the self-indulgent celebrity billionaire lifestyle, as exemplified by the Musks and Bransons of this world. This darkly farcical spoof featured Steve Coogan in the role of cynically exploitative fashion mogul Sir Richard ‘Greedy’ McCreadie, whose narcissism ultimately leads to his demise. As can be gleaned from the overview of politically oriented stage and screen dramas of the decade referenced above, there is an embarrassment of riches in terms of potential choices of case studies; this made the selection challenging, but not arbitrary. The five case studies in this chapter, consisting of three plays and two films, are chosen not only for their theatrical and cinematic inventiveness and quality of writing, but also for the way they illuminate the possibility of seeing and thinking about things differently from the way they are presented in popular and social media in the relentless flow of the decade’s overwhelmingly bad news, calculated disinformation and ubiquitous celebrity gossip. The one non-contemporary work, Ava DuVernay’s Selma, illustrates perfectly what can be achieved politically through immense courage and persistence in the face of adversity and, above all, steadfast solidarity.

Case Studies Selma (Ava DuVernay, U.S. 2014) Before the release of Ava DuVernay’s biopic Selma there were few dramatic depictions of Martin Luther King, although a number of filmmakers, including Spike Lee, had made illuminating documentaries about the American civil rights icon. His young life had been the subject of a 1986 television movie entitled The Boy King and his involvement in the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott was depicted in Clark Johnson’s madefor-television drama Boycott, in which Jeffrey Wright interpreted the role.

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The challenge of portraying the adult King in a historical drama may have deterred many filmmakers and especially actors, given his iconic status. British screenwriter Paul Webb produced a script based on the events of 1965 leading up to the Selma-to-Montgomery protest march that was originally intended for producer-director Lee Daniels, but the latter was too busy with another project, so female indie director DuVernay stepped in to direct. Scheduled for general release shortly before the 50th anniversary of the march, the film inevitably created a buzz of speculation, but also generated controversy. While there was some disagreement about screenwriting credits, after DuVernay rewrote and reorganised parts of Webb’s original script, the film was both a critical and box-office success. It featured outstanding performances by the four British actors playing the key figures at the heart of the drama—King (David Oyelowo), Coretta Scott King (Carmen Ejogo), President Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) and Governor of Alabama George Wallace (Tim Roth). These actors’ cultural and geographical distance from the historical persons they represented was likely a factor in the film’s overall eschewal of melodrama, sentimentality and hero-worship. Oyelowo’s nuanced portrayal of King—both his public steadfastness and his private doubts—earned him several awards and multiple nominations; in a very strong 2015 field, Selma received an Oscar nomination for best movie and garnered an award for best original song, namely “Glory” by John Legend, sung in the movie by Legend and rapper Common, who also acted in the film. Most remarkably, the filmmakers were unable to use King’s original speeches, and his inspiring sermon-like addresses had to be entirely recreated from scratch. Webb’s initial draft of the script pre-dated the King estate’s 2009 decision to sell the exclusive film rights to all of his speeches to Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks for use in an, as yet, unrealised biopic. DuVernay’s fictionalised or, at various points, paraphrased substitute speeches made a virtue out of necessity, capturing the cadences of his rhetoric to perfection. Moreover, Oyelowo’s delivery of her reworked addresses is impeccable in its tones and rhythms. A much bigger controversy surrounded the production’s historical truth values, with some arguing that its depiction of the Selma-toMontgomery voting rights march was inaccurately depicted, or that its interpretation of the relationship between King and Johnson was not a true representation of the generally constructive real-life relationship

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between the two men. As the present discussion will propose, these criticisms are not very relevant to an assessment of the film’s achievements; this is principally because Selma is a drama rather than a documentary, but also because it is difficult to characterise consistently the interpersonal dynamics between such high-profile figures during such a tense period in the country’s political life. In retrospective analysis, the uncertain outcome of the sociopolitical changes that both King and Johnson sought can easily become reified by the knowledge of what their unlikely partnership ultimately achieved. Certainly, the passing of groundbreaking civil rights legislation was widely seen as the greatest legacy of Johnson’s checkered one-term presidency, and the film represents the relationship between him and King as a respectful one, albeit one with differing political priorities. One particular scene in which Johnson discusses King with ultraconservative FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (Dylan Baker) has been open to misinterpretation. The Bureau’s wiretap logs on King that are superimposed on the screen at key points, thereby ratcheting up the dramatic tension, may suggest that he is under investigation by Johnson’s order, but this was not the case. During the previous administration then Attorney General Robert Kennedy had signed off on the surveillance of King, and Hoover had long regarded the iconic black leader as “a political and moral degenerate”6 and a probable communist. In the single scene of their interaction in Selma the beleaguered Johnson is shown playing cat and mouse with Hoover but agreeing to let the surveillance and harassment continue for his own reasons. Tom Wilkinson’s ambivalent portrayal of Johnson in this scene and others accords with what recently disclosed archive material7 has indicated, namely that Johnson wanted to have as much information on King’s plans and movements in order to control the pace of events. DuVernay’s dramatised version of these interrelationships gets it right, or at least as right as a compressed dramatic representation of real-life events can.

6 Dylan Baker as J. Edgar Hoover in Selma. Script by Paul Webb and Ava DuVernay, 33. https://assets.scriptslug.com/live/pdf/scripts/selma-2014.pdf. 7 See for example Jonathan Eig and Jeanne Theoharis, ‘The Man Who Knew Exactly What the F.B.I. was Doing to Martin Luther King Jr.’ Op-ed. essay in The New York Times, 12 April 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/12/opinion/lyndon-joh nson-martin-luther-king-jr.html.

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Perhaps the most important point, however, relates to the assumption, in some quarters, that Selma was a biopic in the same mould as Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, released the previous year, or Spike Lee’s 1992 Malcolm X . Odie Henderson’s review for the RogerEbert website took issue with this view: There’s a reason Ava DuVernay’s film is called “Selma” and not “King”. Like Spielberg’s Lincoln, it is as much about the procedures of political manoeuvring, in-fighting and bargaining as it is about the chief orchestrator of the resulting deals…It inspires by suggesting that the reverence for Dr King was bestowed on a person no different than any of us.8

In addition, the title of the film emphasises the significance of the city of Selma itself: it became a focal point for civil rights activism prior to King’s visit from Atlanta, following his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize award. In response to the hobbled Civil Rights Act eventually passed the previous year by Johnson’s government only a token minimum of 2% of its substantial black population had been allowed to register to vote by the city’s whites supremacist administration. Selma had, therefore, become a test case for pushback against disenfranchisement and voter intimidation in the Southern states. In order to represent the high-stakes political drama that reached boiling point in Selma in March 1965, DuVernay needed to avoid the temptation to make a hagiographic biopic purely on the iconic leader of the movement and instead to place the focus on the strategies and struggles of the people of Selma on both sides of the racial divide. This is why the large ensemble cast in Selma is so important to the dramatic film’s effectiveness—especially local organisers such as James Bevel (Common) and Amelia Boynton (Lorraine Toussaint) and ordinary inhabitants denied the vote such as Annie Lee Cooper (Oprah Winfrey). It was also pertinent to focus on the contributions of other key figures, including future Congressmen John Lewis (Stephan James) and Andrew Young (André Holland), who marched with King and were influential in helping him to plot the next course of action after the murder by police of young activist Jimmie Lee Jackson (LaKeith Stanfield), as well as the Bloody Sunday outrage (the first attempted march). 8 Odie Henderson Selma review. 24 December 2014, RogerEbert.com https://www. rogerebert.com/reviews/selma-2014.

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DuVernay’s cinematographer Bradford Young used perspective shots extremely effectively to convey both the pent-up hostility of local whites and police officers to the non-violent protestors and the apprehensive, but courageously resolute, marchers. The film’s dramatic confrontations took some liberties with factual events on the ground out of an aesthetic need to conflate disparate elements for reasons of narrative economy, but, in the essentials, it was an accurate portrait of the stand-off. Difficult negotiations between King and Johnson, and then between Johnson and Wallace, suggest that Johnson adopted a middleman position in order to prevent things spiralling out of control, but Wallace refused to budge in his decision to ban the march, and continued to turn a blind eye to blatant disenfranchisement under his watch as Governor. King’s initially understanding response to Johnson’s dilemma, thanks to the benign influence of the latter’s policy advisor Lee C. White (Giovanni Ribisi), gives way to a much less compromising attitude concerning the march, although White is shown as a quietly effective counterweight against Hoover’s machinations. Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Doar (Alessando Nivola), a lawyer and strong supporter of Civil Rights working on behalf of the Federal Government, is also positively portrayed in a key scene prior to the second aborted march and again consulting with King about the final march. Doar came to Selma hoping to mitigate the situation there and also to inform King of the President’s decision to introduce new and more potent legislation. In the end, the real-life Doar not only walked into Montgomery ahead of the protestors, he also successfully prosecuted one of the murderers of white activist Viola Liuzzo (Tara Ochs), who appears briefly in the film and was killed by local Klansmen for assisting marchers. Another key figure in backing the legality of the march was Alabama Federal Judge Frank Minis Johnson, who had found in favour of Rosa Parks in the famous Montgomery bus protest ten years previously. Martin Sheen, as Johnson, is seen in a courtroom cameo rejecting Wallace’s lawyers’ appeal to maintain the Governor’s prohibition on public safety grounds. In fact, any perception that DuVernay’s film downplayed the solidarity of sympathetic non-blacks fails to take into account the wider apathy that existed in a country where public opinion was manipulated to oppose the goals of King and his colleagues. This was a tactic that largely worked to ensure white liberal support was strictly limited to the most principled and committed citizens, who, like Frank Minis Johnson, faced death threats similar to those issued to black activists.

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King’s strategy to nudge President Johnson into trying to enact more robust legislation was designed to take advantage of the growing presence of the media. Most of the real-life reporters, photographers and media teams came from outside the state; thus we see the ‘Bloody Sunday’ march, through the eyes of a fairly inexperienced news reporter, Harvardeducated Roy Reed, who is covering the event for the New York Times. We see Reed dictating in real time from a pay-phone what he observes taking place on the Edmund Pettus Bridge (named after a Confederate general in the Civil War and subsequent Ku Klux Klan leader). The dramatic confrontation between marchers and state troopers on the bridge was virtuosically filmed by Young, with the result that, when the real-life Reed was invited to a special screening of the movie, he thought that the recreated scenes of brutal beatings of peaceful protestors were taken from genuine archival news footage.9 The footage and still photos taken at the ‘Bloody Sunday’ march—led by John Lewis and another activist Reverend Hosea Williams, without King who was still home in Atlanta with his family—bear an uncanny resemblance to DuVernay and Young’s reconstruction of events. Given that the Selma marchers planned a dramatic confrontation in order to attract media attention, dramatising these scenes, as opposed to using archival footage to enhance documentary realism, was an apt creative choice. Available documentary footage is used effectively at a much later stage of the film during the triumphant final march, and features the real-life King and colleagues, plus familiar activists, including Harry Belafonte and Sammy Davis Jr. and other celebrity figures. Young’s cinematography achieves an astute blend of fictive and documentary shots, skilfully intercutting monochrome and colour photography so that the boundaries between archival footage and dramatised shots are sometimes blurred. The composite sequences and archival footage portraying this third successful march are preceded by Johnson’s powerful televised speech on March 15 to Congress, with intercut viewer-reaction shots, in support of the proposed Voting Rights Bill. In this speech he famously co-opted the refrain of the Civil Rights anthem ‘We Shall Overcome’ and expressed his determination to end the arbitrary disenfranchisement of black voters in the South once and for all. Wilkinson’s delivery of extracts from Johnson’s speech, itself rather King-like in its oratory, captures the essence of a 9 Bill Bowden, “Arkansan gets call’. Interview with Roy Reed for the Arkansas Democrat Gazette eEdition, 2 January 2015.

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definitive moment in U.S. history. This special address proved a watershed moment in its recognition of the protestors’ right to march and its resolve to provide Federal protection for them; it paved the way for milestone equal rights legislation that was passed without amendment in August of that year. Unlike the embargo on King’s speeches, DuVernay found no restriction on introducing verbatim extracts from Johnson’s special address, for the sake of enhancing authenticity. Following the 25,000-strong march, King’s speech in front of the Alabama State Capitol Building, as delivered in Oleyowo’s rich and rousing tones, provides a fitting conclusion to the dramatic journey. DuVernay skilfully paraphrases King’s moving rhetoric for the occasion and ends authentically, by quoting from the first verse of the abolitionist anthem ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’. While the movie undoubtedly constitutes a glowing tribute to the life of Martin Luther King, it is, equally importantly, a commemoration of collective courage and resilience. It serves as a testament to all those at Selma, no matter their colour or creed or social class, who endured violence and hardship, and in some cases gave their lives to help bring about change. It was this emphasis on collective direct action that endowed Selma with its striking synchronicity. At the same time as the film was in post-production in mid-2014, bitter protests against the police killing of unarmed teenager Michael Brown—and against institutionalised racism in the city—erupted in Ferguson, Missouri. They were a stark reminder of the legacy of Selma that past lessons on social justice should be heeded, if the darker chapters of interracial history in the country were not to be repeated. However, without influential leaders like King to coordinate non-violent civil disobedience, the actions of the heavily militarised local police force and the subsequent Grand Jury exoneration of Brown’s ex-policeman killer provoked a mix of violent and non-violent responses. As was the case at Selma, the Ferguson protests were a flashpoint emblematic of wider and persistent social injustices in other cities of the United States, especially in the South. Having suffered similar inequality in living standards to their counterparts in Selma, as well as infringements of their voting rights, protestors at Ferguson refused to be cowed; exactly as occurred fifty years earlier, the stand-off attracted considerable media attention, most of it critical of local officials’ handling of valid grievances. The film’s unfortunate topicality meant that it functioned as much as an allegory as it did a celebration of the life of a great figure from the past. Certainly, parallels between Selma and Ferguson during the emergence of

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the overwhelmingly non-violent Black Lives Matter movement, calling for criminal justice reform, are inescapable. In his final lines of the film King quotes ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’, referring to the divine inspiration that drives the cause: “Glory, hallelujah!/His truth is marching on”.10 For many Black Lives Matter protestors, it is perhaps King’s exemplary truth that is “marching on”, arguably more so than any deity’s. Sweat (Lynn Nottage, U.S. 2015) Sweat is the unerringly authentic portrait of Pennsylvania steel-workers being pushed towards the poverty-line in the opening years of the new century. Its first performances were at the 2015 Oregon Shakespeare Festival, whose organisers had commissioned Nottage to research and write it. The given theme was ‘revolution in America’, and Nottage cannily opted to write about the ‘de-industrial revolution’ taking place in her country. Subsequently, her new play enjoyed a very successful run in New York, off-Broadway in 2016 and on-Broadway the following year. So popular did the play prove with audiences and critics alike, it was considered an instant classic and won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, as well as the Obie Prize for Playwriting that year. This was Nottage’s second Pulitzer award, having already achieved one with Ruined, her 2009 play set in the Democratic Republic of Congo. One of the obvious reasons for Sweat ’ s success was its topicality and the way in which the dramatist seamlessly interwove the theme of industrial and economic decline with motifs of social class and race that spoke directly to audiences on contemporary issues. The working-class characters in the play, black, white and Hispanic are all about to be affected by de-industrialisation and recession; they live in one of the most deprived cities of its size in the United States, according to a 2011 census,11 namely Reading, Pennsylvania in the so-called ‘Rust Belt’. In addition to the city’s unwelcome national distinction, a salient aspect of Reading’s demographic

10 Julia Ward Howe, ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’, lyrics set to the tune of ‘John Brown’s Body’ based on an anonymous revivalist folk hymn. Published 1862 in The Atlantic Monthly. 11 According to the 2011 census Reading’s extremely high unemployment rate and poverty rate of 41.3 ranked it, together with Flint, Michigan, as the two poorest cities in the country. See https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/27/us/reading-pa-tops-list-pov erty-list-census-shows.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all&.

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profile that was of particular interest to Columbia professor and playwright, Nottage, as she conducted her background research for the play in the city itself, was the correlation between the blight of urban poverty and levels of education that were far lower than the national average. It is worth bearing in mind that Nottage wrote the play in the aftermath of the financial crisis brought about in part by the reckless and cynical mismanagement of the economy during the two Bush administrations. Thus, the framing action of the play begins in 2008, with a news-flash reporting the record Dow Jones Industrial Average fall in September that prefigured the financial crash. However, the play’s main action is set in a working-class bar patronised by steel-workers in Reading, eight years earlier, as indicated by the news reports on the bar’s TV. The backdrop to the events of the play is the lead-up to the extremely tight and subsequently disputed U.S. election of November 2000. Significantly, one of the news items refers to both the booming stock market, and the widening income gap between the poorest and richest U.S. families. Some theatre critics have also observed that Sweat presciently evoked the ethos of working-class anger that later paved the way for Donald Trump’s populist victory in 2016.12 The play’s representation of cuttingedge issues in the U.S., particularly blue-collar resentment towards the country’s elites, ingrained racist attitudes by the white working-class towards blacks, and the social ‘invisibility’ of low-waged Hispanics, benefits from the production’s down-to-earth stage naturalism. One of the most striking and poignant qualities of Sweat is the profound dramatic irony created by the play: it is easy with hindsight for us, the audience, to know what happened next, but the characters have no real understanding that they are powerless pawns in the much bigger game of global capitalism. The simple title of Nottage’s play tends to reflect the social gulf between those who sweat in tough, poorly paid manual jobs and those with the power to influence their lives, for better or worse, at managerial levels and above. Based on her formative interviews with workers in the steel tubing factories in Reading, and informed by her own memories of growing up as a poor black girl in Brooklyn, her play also exposes the glass ceiling that severely limits the social mobility of the working 12 See, for example, Charles McNulty, ‘Who are these Trump voters? For a Thoughtful Portrait, Turn to Lynn Nottage’s ‘Sweat’, Los Angeles Times, 9 November 2016. https:// www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-lynn-nottage-sweat-20161109-story.html.

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class, of women, and especially women of colour, in the neoliberal age. Bartender Stan, who, we learn, retired from the local steel factory after an industrial accident, comments thus on the managerial types with their “Wharton13 MBAs”, who are in charge of today’s factories but avoid the factory floor: “the problem is they don’t wanna get their feet dirty, their diplomas soiled with sweat…or understand the real cost, the human cost, of making their shitty product.”14 Stan, more than any other character, perceives what is happening to local industries as a result of globalisation in general and the North American Free Trade Agreement in particular, as he observes to regular customers Tracey (white) and Cynthia (black), “You could wake up tomorrow and all your jobs are in Mexico, whatever, it’s this NAFTA…”15 The response by Tracey and Cynthia is to turn it into a joke about laxatives, revealing their ignorance of the impact of politics on their daily existence. Ironically, while Nottage’s characters discuss the everyday details of their lives and their simple future aspirations—a holiday cruise down the Panama Canal in Cynthia’s case, one that she will never get to go on—the background news-feed functions as a surrogate Greek chorus, as a harbinger of bad news. Even the comments by Stan and Cynthia’s estranged husband, Brucie, on the Republican Party Primary candidates are facile, revealing a general acceptance of the received wisdom of conservative politics by blue-collar voters, despite the city’s economic upswing in the Clinton years. Quite simply, they have no inkling how much worse things are going to get: the developments at the local steel mill, Olstead’s, which is now the only major employer, are filtered through casual conversations and rumours that circulate, as the characters drink to forget the numbing tiredness of the day’s shift and the problems they face in their domestic lives. While their current lives revolve around work at the steel plant and alcoholic respite from it in the bar, their ultimate goal is comfortable retirement from Olstead’s, afforded by the healthy pension that has hitherto been the norm for unionised workers. However, it soon becomes clear from the conversations that the company is proposing job cuts; Stan’s insight is vindicated, as his general

13 Wharton Business School is attached to the University of Pennsylvania, and is a prestigious Ivy League institution. 14 Lynn Nottage Sweat , New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2017, 26. 15 Ibid., 20.

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factotum in the bar, the Colombian Oscar, gets hold of a flyer showing that the company is recruiting non-union Latino workers on lower wages and shows interest in the opportunity. The fragile network of community relationships built on common employment conditions and experiences— seemingly transcending barriers of ethnicity—between close friends and drinking buddies Tracey and Cynthia and their respective sons Jason and Chris becomes the collateral damage of the resulting industrial strife: Cynthia applies successfully for a middle management position in the office, having challenged the promotional norms of the company under the stimulus of a boozy chat with Tracey, consequently unleashing the latter’s deep resentment and latent racial prejudices. As the strike begins, and Cynthia is deliberately and cynically selected by the senior management at Olstead’s to enforce a lockout on unionised employees that refuse the wage-cut deal, Nottage adroitly portrays how personal and communal relationships are fractured by economic decline. In her depiction of the tensions and schism between Cynthia and Tracey, and between Chris and Jason, she also shows the toxic relevance of economic hardship and employment disputes to race relations. Similarly, Oscar’s acceptance of employment at the steelworks as part of the company’s restructuring plan prompts racially motivated hostility that goes far beyond the normal accusations of scab status. The corollary of this, as the play makes clear, is that the entrepreneurial and managerial classes have a vested interest in destroying communal, unionised solidarity. Ultimately the tensions spill over into violence, which, as Nottage demonstrates, is inflicted by the community on itself and often on the most innocent. Chris and Jason, the latter already dismissive and resentful of his buddy’s plan to study for a part-time degree, express divergent reactions to Oscar’s return to the bar to pick up his things. Although the two friends are united by the strike, even if their parents are divided by it, and believe in defending the picket line, Tracey incites her son to violence against Oscar which Chris attempts to stop. In the process, as Chris is reluctantly and spontaneously drawn into the bitter fight between the fired-up Jason and the cornered Oscar, he puts the latter in a headlock. Jason swings a baseball bat that misses Oscar, but strikes the unfortunate Stan—who is attempting to mediate—on the head, rendering him unconscious. The prologue set in 2008, showing black social worker Evan’s interview with an antagonistic Jason and, separately, a chastened Chris, both now released from prison on parole, retrospectively makes perfect sense to the viewer. Jason’s white-supremacist tattoos, an authentic detail that

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Nottage picked up from her Reading-based research, are coolly noted by the professional and unflappable Evan in the prologue. By the time we reach the epilogue, the theatricality of recounting the story seems to have purged Jason’s more negative responses; thus, his poignant account of his emotional meeting with Chris on the street is a profoundly cathartic moment. The closing scene in the bar, now managed by Oscar, suggests that there are no neat harmonious endings, and that redemption has to be earned the hard way. This surprise scene, coming after the preceding ‘false’ epilogue, is intrinsic to the author’s gritty realist mode, as well as being affectively compelling. Chris and Oscar are comfortable with each other, but Jason’s sudden arrival renews tensions. As Jason vacillates about whether to respond positively to Chris’s invitation to stay and join him for a beer, the crippled and brain-damaged Stan, who is now only capable of wiping down the tables, appears. For a moment Chris and Jason stand awkwardly, transfixed by their unspoken feelings of guilt, but in Jason’s simple act of picking up the cleaning-cloth dropped by Stan, the potential for eventual healing is subtly suggested. “It’s nice that you take care of him”, says Jason clumsily, to which Oscar replies, “That’s how it ought to be.”16 While Sweat has all the features of well-made realistic drama, with a dramatic trajectory of calm exposition, rising action, conflict and crisis, and finally resolution (if a sober and subdued one), its non-chronological structure and framing make it more reminiscent of Arthur Miller’s freeform American naturalism in Death of a Salesman than it is of, say, Ibsen and Shaw. As the Mother Courage-like Ruined showed, Nottage adopts different theatrical genres and methods to suit her specific dramatic purpose. With Sweat , by contrast, she also gives a nod in the direction of the working-class naturalism of the 1930s, particularly of Clifford Odets17 and the Group Theatre aims and aesthetics. Then, as now, the dramatic arts were caught between their own financial necessities and audience expectations of entertainment—escapist in some ways that are akin to the bar setting of Sweat —and the implicit moral responsibilities of serious theatre to reflect the state of the nation. In Sweat Nottage managed to reconcile these two seemingly antithetical objectives. 16 Sweat , 112. 17 See Michael Schulman’s review, ‘The First Theatrical Landmark of the Trump Era’,

The New Yorker, 20 March 2017. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/ the-first-theatrical-landmark-of-the-trump-era.

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The play’s underlying concern with social issues and people’s livelihoods at a time of crippling recession is never preached to audiences. Nor is the topic of disempowerment and disenfranchisement among the working classes that transcends the colour spectrum directly stated. Instead, the actions and dialogue of her characters speak for themselves, and arise out of the situations in which the characters are placed. Behind their bar chat and personal interactions a different discourse can be discerned and intuited in the relentless flow of TV news. The resulting counterpoint between the local and the national/global is one of the simple but effective devices that authenticate her play. Nottage’s genuine concern for the people she interviewed, and on whose lives she shaped her play, was demonstrated by her commitment to the city in recognition for the first-hand research she did and the critical success of her play. In 2017 she conceived and co-developed a multimedia onsite installation in the city entitled This is Reading as an urban regeneration project, using the iconic former location of the once-thriving Reading railroad station. I, Daniel Blake; (Ken Loach, U.K. 2016) In an April 2023 festival event at Leeds Playhouse entitled ‘In Conversation with Ken Loach’ veteran British filmmaker Loach spoke to actor and stand-up comedian Dave Johns, his former lead actor in the awardwinning I, Daniel Blake, about social-realist cinema and about the sociopolitical critiques inherent in his work. The 87-year old Loach also responded frankly and warmly to audience questions. Two years earlier, the controversial but combative filmmaker was purged from and subsequently smeared by the revisionist, post-socialist Labour Party after a lifetime’s engagement with left-wing politics, for having dared to criticise a leadership increasingly intolerant of divergent views. Typically, however, he affirmed his the sense of solidarity with ordinary people that comes across in his works. He also emphasised that, for him, movies were simply a form of storytelling: “Film is just a medium…you see the humanity…you see it in people’s daily lives…you put them in the centre…you hope when people leave the cinema there will be some question in their minds.” As far back as his second feature Kes (U.K. 1969), often rated his masterpiece, as well as the early television dramas for the BBC, his filmmaking exemplified this creative doctrine. Among other topics, he and Johns discussed the latter’s stage adaptation of I, Daniel Blake, a film work that had struck a chord with film

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audiences worldwide and had won both the Palme D’or at the 2016 Cannes Festival and the 2017 BAFTA award for best British film. In view of the U.K. cost of living crisis—in many respects the result of post-COVID-19 ‘greedflation’, as it has been dubbed—Johns explained that the themes of the 2016 film, referencing the problems of accessing welfare benefits, the growing dependence on food banks and the country’s poverty-stricken underclass, made the theatricalisation of his film extremely topical. Loach was articulate in his indictment of the everwidening wealth gap and corruption underlying these social ills. As he pointed out, the Conservative government’s austerity policies under five successive prime ministers brought more and more people into poverty and in some cases absolute penury, while dishonest practices by politicians have become almost everyday media stories. I, Daniel Blake deals precisely with this phenomenon. At the beginning of the film the titular character is attempting to apply for disability benefit at the Job Centre in his native Newcastle upon Tyne. Despite having certification from his doctor and the hospital that he has suffered a cardiac arrest, and is in no state to continue working until he has completed the prescribed rehabilitation period, he sees his application rejected by staff of the Department for Work and Pensions. Since 1998 the DWP has outsourced its disability benefits assessments, and essentially its decision-making, to the private market, including Atos Healthcare, a branch of multinational IT giant based in France, and the U.K. private healthcare company Capita. They have continued to submit successful bids to the government, despite major contractual and systemic anomalies, particularly in the former case.18 The perfunctory and uncaring work capability assessment that we see Daniel undertake is suggestive of the type of real-life testing in the U.K. that has been severely criticised by disability support groups for its inadequacies. As a frustrated Daniel soon realises, it is more or less designed to prevent him accessing benefits for his heart condition, pushing him instead into claiming benefits under the Jobseeker’s Allowance scheme for unemployed people. Daniel’s 18 In 2015, statistical evidence from the DWP revealed that 2,380 people had died between 2011 and 2014 soon after being found fit for work through disability benefit assessments. See The Guardian 27 August 2015, ‘Thousands have died after being found fit for work, DWP figures show’. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/aug/27/ thousands-died-after-fit-for-work-assessment-dwp-figures See also ‘Fit-to-work tests: Atos contract to end’, BBC News, 27 March 2014. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-267 66345.

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dilemma is that he finds himself in a Catch-22 situation—forced to seek employment, but forbidden by his doctor from accepting a job until his health improves. The other significant challenge he faces is that, as an experienced and accomplished joiner-carpenter, he has never needed to be computer-literate and finds himself at an immediate disadvantage. Daniel’s plight as a digitally marginalised person in society, one of several million who find themselves excluded from basic practical functions in society, is exacerbated by the user-unfriendly forms and the difficulty of acquiring training in online skills. Kind individuals assist him, but as becomes clear, the Conservative government’s widely publicised ‘digital inclusion strategy’ didn’t actually include ordinary middle-aged people like Daniel. As in many of their other social justice films, including Sorry We Missed You (2019) and The Old Oak (2023, supposedly their final film), Loach and long-time scriptwriter Paul Laverty ensure that their broadsides are well supported by accurate research, especially since they have long conveyed an anti-establishment agenda in their work. In this respect, when making I, Daniel Blake they were fortunate to have access not only to reports from less government-friendly media organs, but also to inside information from the Commercial and Public Service Union and other workers at the DWP regarding the scandals that beset the department’s outsourcing scheme. These sources provided verified inside information to the filmmakers on conditions of anonymity, giving them considerable insight into the reliability, or otherwise, of these ‘fit-for-work’ assessments. It is self-evident that Loach and Laverty’s films are driven by a warm regard for ordinary people involved in the daily struggle to survive and improve the quality of their lives. This celebration of common humanity is also true of Loach’s political-historical works, such as Land and Freedom (1995), The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006) and Jimmy’s Hall (2014). One observation by Loach in his Leeds Playhouse talk very much epitomises his filmic philosophy of focusing on common people impelled to do uncommon things by circumstances, “You find wisdom among the most humble people.” In I, Daniel Blake perhaps the greatest wisdom we see is that of a child, Daisy (Briana Shann), daughter of female protagonist Katie (Hayley Squires). The film’s key plot device depends on a chance meeting at the Job Centre between Daniel, a native of Newcastle, and harassed mother-of-two Katie, recently arrived from London and very much out of place among the local Geordies. Having arrived late for her

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benefits assessment and complained about her unsympathetic reception by Job Centre staff, she becomes agitated, but Daniel, already irked by the treatment meted out at the Centre, comes to her aid. Despite his own frustrations with the mandatory, but futile, job-seeking process, Daniel helps the single-parent family to settle in and takes them to the busy local food bank. He also communicates extremely well with Katie’s two children, the behaviourally challenged Dylan and his intelligent and mature older sister, Daisy. He manages to engage Dylan by teaching him handcraft, in spite of the latter’s attention deficit disorder, and for a while it looks as if they have formed an unlikely and alternative social unit. The widowed Daniel, who has no children of his own, thrives on the interaction, and Daisy and Dylan forge an important bond with him. Telling them of his deceased and greatly missed wife Molly, he says she was kind and had a big heart, and quotes her favourite saying, inspired by a muchloved piece of music: “We all need the wind at our back every now and then.”19 For Daniel, it is an opportunity to focus on concerns other than his own, but sheer impoverishment undermines the stability of this reciprocal domestic arrangement. After Daisy is ridiculed by classmates because her shoes are old and patched up, Katie becomes desperate to earn money. Having denied herself food in order to feed and clothe her children and being unable to find cleaning work, she is caught shoplifting. The kindly store manager quietly pays for the shoplifted items himself and places them in her bag, telling her not to commit the same mistake again. Even this minor plot detail exemplifies Loach and Laverty’s faith in the potential kindness and solidarity to be found in ordinary people when times are hard. As she exits the supermarket, the security guard passes her a phone number for a job that turns out to be for an escort agency. Katie’s decision to persist with the escort work and her anger when Daniel finds out her secret and sincerely, but naively, tries to talk her out of it, leads to a rift in their mutual-help arrangement. The film narrative emphasises Daniel’s good-natured approach to getting on well with people in his community, as indicated by his relationship with his young black neighbour ‘China’ (Kema Sikazwe) who lives in the adjoining flat. Precisely because Daniel’s life has been that of a

19 I Daniel Blake, screenplay by Paul Laverty, Route, 40.

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modest, hard-working carpenter, he is unaware of the workings of twentyfirst-century capitalism in an era of increasing globalisation. Through a mystified Daniel learning about his entrepreneurial neighbour’s blackmarket sports shoe business—selling shoes sent from a friend in China at a mark-up price in the local community—Loach and Laverty draw attention to the impact of neoliberal globalisation on working-class people. By setting up his own undeclared import business, ‘China’ is smart enough to grab a piece of the mark-up action that brand name companies enjoy. While this is one aspect of globalisation that Daniel can smile about, since it enables his helpful neighbour to make enough to live on, he doesn’t at first see the connection between the global market in sports shoes and the outsourced work capability assessments run by profiteering multinationals that are reducing him to penury. ‘China’ advises him to be sceptical of everything they tell him at the Job Centre: “Dan, they’ll fuck you around. I’m warning you. They make it as miserable as possible. No accident. That’s the plan”.20 After this realisation fully dawns on him, he begins to see his situation for what is is. When the only sympathetic staff member in the Job Centre urges him to carry on pretending to look for work and not quit the scheme, he responds: “[I’m] a sick man looking for non-existent jobs that I can’t take, anyway…and all it does is humiliate me, grind me down. Or is that the point? To get my name off those computers? Thank you, but if you lose your self-respect, you’re done for.”21 Daniel registers his own individual protest against the system that has humiliated him; out in the street he spray-paints on the Job Centre wall, “I Daniel Blake, demand my appeal date before I starve. And change the shite music on your phone!” An admiring crowd gathers and applauds him before the Job Centre staff call the police and he is taken to the police station. As he is led away, a sympathetic bystander with a strong Scottish accent delivers a scathing piece of invective at the two policemen, attacking the privatisation of public services and especially lambasting Ian Duncan Smith, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions between 2010 and 2016 and all the “fucking posh Eton twats” in the Conservative Party. Undeterred by threats to arrest him too, he hails Daniel as a hero: “Sir Daniel Blake, there should be a statue made for you,

20 Ibid., 23. 21 Ibid., 44–45.

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pal.”22 The searing critique in this scene—entirely plausible in view of broad anti-government sentiment in Newcastle and Scotland concerning the carrying-on at Westminster—expresses the full force of Laverty and Loach’s polemic against institutionalised poverty and the privatisation of public services. Daniel’s jibe at the bland music playing on the DWP’s phone line, while welfare benefits enquirers are put on interminable hold, is a good example of the reliance on caustic humour as a weapon of resistance against oppressive authority figures in the North of England and Scotland. Daniel’s refusal to play the benefits game according to the system’s patently unjust rules, preferring instead to retain his self-respect, leads him to sell his furniture in order to pay his overdue fuel bills. Now he has become a virtual hermit, existing on scraps of food and huddled in a blanket to keep warm, but a glimmer of hope comes from an unlikely quarter: Daisy calls round with some couscous she has prepared for him, because she and Dylan have missed him and she wants to have Daniel back in their lives again. His initial reluctance to open the door to Daisy is overcome by her insistence and by the touching emotional intelligence she displays in engaging with him through the letter-box: “Can I just ask you one question, Dan? Did you help us? So why can’t I help you?”.23 Her heartfelt hug when he finally opens the door to her is one of the film’s crucial moments. Daisy and Dylan represent the future; if a better future is to be envisioned and affirmative action to improve the lives of local ethnically diverse communities achieved (Katie’s children have different West Indian fathers), critical and intelligent young people at the heart of those communities will be needed. This is the implication of Laverty’s script in this powerful and moving scene. Reconciled with Katie and her children, Daniel finds his spectacular one-man protest has gained him recognition and legal help to appeal against the DWP assessment. He is finally given an appeal date and is accompanied to it by Katie. Just as he seems set to win his case, as predicted by his legal advisor, with tragic irony Daniel suffers his second and fatal heart-attack. After he goes to the washroom to spruce himself up in readiness for the interview, he fails to reappear, and the alarm is sounded. Katie finds him lying motionless on the floor and is devastated

22 Ibid., 46. 23 Ibid., 47.

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by his lack of response to attempted resuscitation. In the closing scene we see her delivering a eulogy for Daniel, reading from his own type-written appeal letter, a poignant indication that he eventually became computerliterate. She cites a dignity-affirming sentence from the letter: “My name is Daniel Blake. I am a man, not a dog. As such I demand my rights. I Daniel Blake am a citizen, nothing more and nothing less.”24 At the memorial service for Daniel we see his ‘family’ and friends gathered to mourn his passing, including the sympathetic DWP staff member, who evidently recognises how badly the system failed him. In her own words, the now-radicalised Katie observes that Daniel—“this lovely man”—was driven to an early grave and that his death is directly attributable to the government’s hardline benefits policy. Loach and Laverty’s award-winning and critically acclaimed film about Daniel’s one-man protest was recognised as being in itself a form of protest about the sociopolitical system in the U.K. caused by the dehumanising Tory economic policies. Indeed, an extract from the protagonist’s powerful appeal to the DWP was projected onto the wall of The House of Commons and other buildings as part of a Daily Mirror campaign. Then Work and Pensions Secretary Damian Green, despite not having seen the film, dismissed it as “a monstrously unfair work of fiction.”25 It was a fiction, however, that articulated the fact far more persuasively than any massaged government statistics. The major takeaway from I Daniel Blake is, not so much that the U.K. is a failed state, as it is a state that is being failed by neoconservative dogma for the sake of privatisation, resulting in easy pickings for corporate asset-strippers. As Loach noted when discussing the film’s message with Johns in 2023, “If you’re poor it must be your fault, because they can’t accept that the system’s to blame. Everything moves to the market and away from the collective.” The 87-year old director has lived long enough to see the damage caused by this process of creeping privatisation of once-prized public assets, including domestic utilities, the postal services and the railways. At the same time, Tory plans for privatisation and outsourcing of

24 Ibid., 50. 25 ‘Damian Green has never seen I, Daniel Blake - but branded it ‘monstrously unfair’

anyway’ by Mike Smith and Dan Bloom, The Daily Mirror, 31 October 2016. https:// www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/damian-green-never-seen-i-9166462.

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health services, intended to leave behind a shell of the nation’s onceenviable National Health Service, have continued apace, ignoring public protest. I Daniel Blake remains as relevant to audiences today as it was in 2016. Johns’s stage adaptation26 has cannily employed screen projections of social media posts by government figures on the subject of poverty and austerity, challenging the audience to decide for themselves which version of the truth is more believable. While the play ultimately carries a very similar message to that of the film, Loach and Laverty’s controversystirring original was a cogent work of film art, justly garnering awards both at home and overseas for the quality of the filmmaking and the interpretations of the key roles by newcomer actors Johns and Squires. Loach’s flair for social-realist storytelling, seen through the naturalistic camera-eye, and stripped of the emotive use of extreme close-ups or other special aesthetic effects, was intrinsic to that success. So too was the director’s customary use of first-timer actors. Strong preference for a direct, unadorned style of representation enabled the filmmakers to catch the truth behind the eyes of their very credible characters, by placing actors in very plausible dramatic situations. In both I Daniel Blake and Sorry We Missed You—the filmmakers’ similarly lauded follow-up critiquing the gig economy—it seems that cast and crew ‘had the wind at their backs.’ Until the Flood (Dael Orlandersmith, U.S. 2018) Unlike other dramatists in this book’s case studies, Dael Orlandersmith’s work is rooted in a solo performance tradition that has often featured her as interpreter of her own material. A number of her plays, including the early Beauty’s Daughter (1995) and the more recent Forever (2014), are either monologues for single female voice or for different voices interpreted by a single performer, and Until the Flood falls into this latter category. Many of her earlier works, such as the critically acclaimed Yellowman (2002)—a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize that year— had addressed issues of race and colour, as well as feminist consciousness. Until the Flood brought these threads together in the wider, more controversial sociopolitical context of the shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown by white officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri in August 26 The stage adaptation of I Daniel Blake, scripted by Dave Johns and directed by Mark Calvert, toured the U.K between May and November 2023.

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2014. Brown, then 18, was shot six times by Wilson, who was responding to reports that a black youth had stolen a box of cigarillos. Wilson subsequently resigned from the force, but was not prosecuted, and the incident provoked protest and civil unrest in Ferguson, as well as non-violent demonstrations coordinated through the then newly founded Black Lives Matter movement. Having gained a wide audience in 2018 and 2019, the play connects with the anger and divisions that fuelled widespread BLM street protests in 2020. These were sparked off by the cumulative effect of homicides by neighbourhood vigilante white men of Ahmaud Arbery in February in Brunswick, Georgia, and by white policemen of Breonna Taylor in March in Louisville, Kentucky and George Floyd in May in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Originally devised as a form of community theatre for local audiences in Missouri, on tour the play has rapidly acquired nationwide, and even international, resonance. Orlandersmith (a compound of her given and family names) took her title, aptly as we shall see, from a New Testament biblical passage comparing the coming of the Messiah to the Great Flood narrative in Genesis: Matthew 24:39 “and they did not know until the flood came, and took them all away, so shall also the coming of the Son of Man be”. Following its commission and initial performances by The Repertory Theatre of St Louis, Missouri in 2016 in tribute to Michael Brown and to the community in which he lived, the play has assumed a significant afterlife. There have been major productions in 2018 in New York, Chicago and Seattle and a European tour in 2019 including Ireland, at the Galway International Festival, Edinburgh and London. In the original production in St Louis there were memorial candles and flowers laid at the periphery of the stage. While its author would doubtless have preferred her work to be less relevant to contemporary realities, Until the Flood is equally topical in the third decade, and arguably more so now than when it was written. The wave of protests that occurred after the George Floyd killing, especially, can perhaps be regarded as a precursor of the ‘flood’ that Orlandersmith’s title invokes. Just as Nottage interviewed residents and held focus groups in Reading before writing Sweat , Orlandersmith went to Missouri in 2015, specifically to St Louis and Ferguson, to interview a range of residents before she transformed the raw material of these interviews into her play-text. As with Sweat , what emerged from this research was not a documentary piece, and, like Nottage the author scrupulously avoids patronising or stereotyping her fictionalised subjects; rather, she seeks to understand

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what ‘makes them tick’ and, as far as possible, to empathise with their perspectives. Speaking of the various anonymous sources of the play that she interviewed about their experiences with race, Orlandersmith explains, “I just wanted to get their story. It’s dramatic no matter what; the fact that people sit down with you to talk about their lives, there is a form of drama within that. I really wanted to hear the individual stories[…] Having the people respond to the event was the thing that was interesting to me. I was saying, just let them talk, and stuff would come out with that.”27 In consequence, she constructed her drama as a series of monologues, rounded off with a personal poem she composed specifically for the work. Her aim was to provide an insight into the individual human frailties and insecurities underlying the events of 9 August 2014, and implicitly attempt to heal wounds, rather than to indict those responsible. While it has no partisan political agenda, the play is intensely political in representing a spectrum of sociopolitical views on race. All of the monologues are spoken by composites or types based loosely on citizens interviewed. They were developed from Orlandersmith’s rough notes and impressions, rather than utilising the interview material verbatim, and cover a cross-section of genuine views and attitudes encountered in the research process. Her play as a structural whole can best be described as a monopolylogue, a form of theatre in which one actor impersonates many characters. The genre was invented in the nineteenth century by English actor Charles Mathews and popularised by Charles Dickens in dramatic public readings from his novels. The solo dramatist William Luce specialised in this kind of drama, notably his 1976 play The Belle of Amherst in which Julie Harris played a total of 14 characters, including Emily Dickinson, and won a Tony for her virtuosity. Another noted exponent of the art, Anna Deveare Smith, relies on verbatim accounts in her primarily documentary-theatre mode, but Orlandersmith has been at pains to differentiate the spirit of her work from that of Deveare Smith.28 Arguably, she was more influenced and inspired by the multi-talented Whoopi Goldberg’s monopolylogues in the late twentieth century. Although there have been acclaimed and successful monopolylogue productions in recent theatre, including Doug Wright’s 27 Dael Orlandersmith, interview with Victoria Myers in the online theatre journal The Interval, 1 February 2018 https://www.theintervalny.com/interviews/2018/02/dael-orl andersmith-on-until-the-flood/. 28 Ibid.

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I Am My Own Wife (2003), Orlandersmith is a rare case of a contemporary dramatist who performs all the roles of her own play. In Until the Flood she has kept her own persona out of the play as much as possible. However her author’s poem, which constitutes the play’s coda, is a signature feature that adds to its poignancy. Orlandersmith’s impersonation of a cross-section of eight Missouri residents in her play relies as much on mimetic as on diegetic dramatic art; having said that, all of the monologues comprise narratives of personal experience, inflected with attitudinal comments. Her uncanny ability to convey the person, young or old, black or white, well educated or poorly educated, enables her to inhabit and project credible fleshed-out characters through a series of vocal and gestural traits that never falter in their consistency. Rather than represent ethnocultural stereotypes along a received spectrum from strident white supremacist to energised and angry BLM activist, Orlandersmith opts for a sequence of character vignettes, all of whom are peripheral to the fatal events, but all of whose lives are touched by it. Contextualising and opening the piece is a brief image and voiceover sequence comprising recordings of police two-way radio exchanges in the moments that lead up to the shooting. Following neutral voiceover introductions in blackout of each character’s name, age and occupation, the actor appears immersed in the consciousness of that particular character, with the assistance of accessories (e.g. shawl, flakjacket, hoodie) or stage props/furniture (e.g. a barber’s chair) to support the character transitions. The most impressive aspect of these multiple subjectivities is the remarkable combination of verbal and non-verbal features that makes each character compelling and empathic in her/his representation. These characters’ stories are basically non-linear and seemingly spontaneous, and the transmission of their lightly-sketched autobiographies makes some use of stream of consciousness and free association techniques. Orlandersmith’s method-acting style facilitates the sense we have that, while better educated speakers are quite eloquent on racial topics, others are digging deep to find the words they need to express themselves. Her judicious use of pause and repetition helps to accentuate this social class distinction, and her wide range of intonation and verbal inflection likewise promotes the authenticity of her more challenging male impersonations. In all of her role-playing scenes she manifests an acute ear for the rhythms and cadences of authentic vernacular speech that finds certain echoes in her closing poetic tribute to Michael Brown and invocation of racial

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harmony. Her quasi-confessional direct-address delivery out towards the audience (but never acknowledging their presence) conveys honesty in all cases, even where the character is socially alienated, confrontational or pessimistic about prospects for a better future. In each monologue there is an embedded and illustrative personal narrative of race-related conflict experienced through the prism of that character’s consciousness, which helps to make the sequence cohere into a unified dramatic whole. Orlandersmith’s opening and closing persona is Louisa Hemphill, a retired black teacher who has just attended Michael Brown’s funeral, and was impressed by the preacher’s ‘old-school’ eulogy. Having referred to the racial tension arising out of the case, she reminisces about the racist, so-called ‘sundown’ laws she remembers from her childhood, prohibiting black people from staying in predominantly white communities after sundown. She also confides how she got away from Missouri to study in New York and found the passive “understood” racism back home unpalatable on returning at term break. Her core story reflects an inverted racism whereby uneducated blacks resented those who were fortunate enough to get away from the south to study in the north and didn’t know how to ‘keep their place’. It also involves a family conflict that left a deep scar. She closes the monologue by musing aloud on what drove Michael Brown to steal a box of cigarillos and by expressing the general anger she feels. When she returns for the closing monologue, she is more reflective about her own faith and the possibility of forgiveness for Michael Brown’s killer; she tells us she overheard Mrs Brown, Michael’s stepmother who regarded Michael as her own son, express sentiments of forgiveness for Darren Wilson, and hopes he can forgive himself. Louisa observes “That young girl—Mrs Brown— has more God in her than I ever could.”29 Her regret that Michael “could have gotten out”30 by ‘getting past the river’ not only recalls her own experience of getting away to build a better future for herself, but is also an evocation of slaves escaping across the river into Indiana and eventually reaching safety in Chicago. The key word she reprises in this monologue from the earlier one is “legacy— all the things we can’t stop knowing in our bones.”31 As Orlandersmith

29 Dael Orlandersmith, Until the Flood, Oberon Modern Plays, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020, 112. 30 Ibid., 113. 31 Ibid., 115.

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implies, the legacy of slavery in centuries past is always present in these characters’ psyche. Her other monologues are inhabited by equally convincing and credible personae: the bisexual universalist minister, Edna Lewis, whose monologue recounts the moment she managed to defuse tension at the angry local rally for Michael Brown by offering up prayers for on-duty National Guardsmen, one white and one black; the nervous young black student Paul Thompson who just wants to get away from his dangerous district alive so he can study art history (Orlandersmith makes his fear of being shot palpable in the sublime physicality of her restless representation of the 17-year old); white retired policeman, Rusty, whose soul-searching monologue reveals a troubled feelings regarding his acquiescence with institutionalised racism but also his awkwardly sincere compassion for both Michael Brown and Darren Wilson; barbershop owner Reuben who recounts with wry humour his dignified response to patronisingly naive and stereotyping questions by would-be investigative reporter students, one white and one black—but both, as he points out, very green! Certain monologues make it clear that healing is not a simple process and the road to forgiveness and mutual respect is a long and winding one: street kid Hassan, despite protesting that he doesn’t care and is “fluid” like the Mississippi about everything, conveys an underlying insecurity that belies his bravado, and, like the conflicted Louisa, cannot simply forgive. He speaks of his desire to confront Darren Wilson when his friends drove to Crestwood, where the latter lived, but also of his deeper aspiration to be part of a normal nuclear family with better life prospects. One character’s monologue, in particular, reveals the deep layers of bigotry and prejudice that continue to divide the community along racial lines: Orlandersmith’s portrayal of white electrician Dougray Smith, complete with camouflage military jacket, is a composite of interviewed and observed locals who prefer to keep white and black communities effectively segregated. Dougray’s wretched early life, born into a brutal “white trash” family from which he escaped, has clearly scarred him, as his narrative informs us. He is proud of having ‘made it’ and achieved a comfortable married life in St Louis with two children and has cultivated his early love of reading fiction, but his background and his racist views are intertwined; Orlandersmith’s skilful portrayal invites us to empathise with the character, until he discusses his aversion to the local black community, despite renting out two properties in Ferguson to black families. While he expresses some appreciation for quiet, hard-working blacks who

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‘know their place’, his sympathy is reserved for Darren Wilson, and not Michael Brown. His chilling final narrative, referencing a scene from Schindler’s List (ironically, a Spielberg movie), reveals ingrained racial prejudice towards not only blacks but also Jews, and his monologue builds to a crescendo, invoking a similar blood-lust to that depicted in the film intended to make Ferguson “clean, white, purified”.32 Orlandersmith’s harrowing portrait of this vicious racist streak in her subject is all the more powerful for its allusion to Dougray’s timid son whom the father incites to violence; she implies that history is likely to repeat itself, and the son’s generation will perpetuate the endless cycle of racial hatred. As Until the Flood suggests in its biblical title, the flood of protest and reaction, and indeed further violence, is inevitable if, as her coda poem puts it, the wake-up call has been “answered and deleted.”33 The closing words of the poem “Not yet, but soon, soon, very soon”34 are prophetic of change, but, while the flood reference in itself suggests apocalyptic change, its context in the Gospel of Matthew in relation to the advent of the Son of Man, implicitly balances past despair with future hope. This dialectic between black and white, old and young, female and male, nonviolence and violence, cooperation and antagonism, the future and the past and ultimately between hope and despair at the heart of the play is what imbues Until the Flood with its theatrical life force, and explains its power to move audiences to feel and reflect. Sorry to Bother You (Raymond ‘Boots’ Riley, U.S. 2018) Raymond ‘Boots’ Riley’s acerbic sociopolitical satire, Sorry to Bother You, which he both wrote and directed, was at least six years in development. What was eventually to become a film started out as a 2012 musical concept album with his band, The Coup, a politically orientated hip-hop group with wide appeal and a flair for protest lyrics and controversy. Riley, a veteran activist for socialist causes, including the Occupy Oakland Movement, saw a way to channel his own experiences as a telemarketing worker into a farcical and surrealistic comedy that ridiculed received ‘American values’ and advocated working-class solidarity. His concept of portraying

32 Ibid., 81. 33 Ibid., 123. 34 Ibid., 123–124.

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protagonist Cassius ‘Cash’ Green (LaKeith Stanfield) as a sucker for a specifically white capitalist exploitation in the service economy, while being a fundamentally sympathetic, if conflicted, human being, represents a key strategy in the film version of the tale: Stanfield delivers a convincing comedic performance as an Everyman figure trying to make something of his life, while being seduced into betraying his fellow workers for personal gain. The delightfully ambivalent title of Sorry to Bother You was both an ironic reference to the clichéd opening gambit in telemarketing and a nod to Riley’s own experience of political activism, trying to persuade apathetic or hostile members of the public to think more critically about the status quo. From the film’s opening shots of an obsequious Green being interviewed for the telemarketing job by the white supervisor at RegalView Telemarketing, we grasp the underlying critique of power dynamics that are all-too-familiar in the land where, according to the Declaration of Independence, buttressed by the Fourteenth Amendment, all are created equal, but, self-evidently, are not. Despite having clumsily falsified his necessary employment credentials, Green is awarded the job on account of his initiative and audacity. A senior colleague, Langston (Danny Glover)—whose name echoes that of iconic black poet and dramatist Langston Hughes—advises Cassius that in order to achieve success as a telemarketer; he needs to adopt ‘a white voice’. Langston assures a demurring Cassius that “we all have a white voice”, a sly indirect allusion by Riley to black politicians and other public figures who curry favour with mainly white neoconservatives; instead of using Stanfield’s and Glover’s own voices to represent their ‘white voices’, the director whimsically overdubbed all such examples of quasi-white speech, using a European-American or a British voice. Following the formation of a trade union to defend the telemarketers’ rights to better working conditions and remuneration initiated by his organiser colleague Squeeze (Steven Yuen), Cassius initially participates in strike action together with his girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson), who has also started working part-time for RegalView. However, he is susceptible to the lure of a vastly improved salary by the management, and soon becomes a company scab, crossing picket lines with the help of police officers. As a Power Caller, he quickly learns he isn’t employed to sell encyclopaedias any more, but rather weapons on the international market produced by RegalView’s parent company, the sinister WorryFree Corporation. Discovering more about the operations of WorryFree and

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their exploitative and demeaning, but deceptively attractive, employment practice, he dissuades his heavily indebted uncle Sergio from his plan to sign up with them, generously paying off his debts in recognition of his uncle’s previous kindness as his landlord. Cassius’s ‘white voice’ proves extremely successful in securing sales of encyclopaedias, to the extent that he is eventually promoted to the supposed Power Caller position and takes the golden elevator to work on the top floor. The transformation in his personality traits, mode of speech, dress sense and overall self-esteem is stark: from the slouching, mumbling, plainly dressed character we observe in the early shots to the slickly confident go-getter, cutting vastly profitable deals for the company, we witness the rapid transition of Cassius. His new-found ‘white voice’ opens doors, and this is aptly conveyed in the humorous visual metaphor whereby his cold calls land him in the respondents’ homes, opposite them. His initially disastrous ‘face-to-face’ calls give way to wildly successful ones, the most daring of which is an absurdly intimate business chat with a Japanese businessman, as the latter is using his bidet-style, hi-tech toilet. While the Japanese client is not only unfazed but very responsive to the call, Cassius flushes his toilet for him, emphasising his salesman’s blend of deference and chutzpah. Gradually, by aping the style of his white co-workers at the elevated level, he comes to the attention of CEO Steve Lift (Armie Hammer), based on a deliberately caricatured composite of celebrated white market gurus, such as Steve Jobs and Richard Branson. Cassius’s decision to join the top-floor strike-breakers at RegalView causes a rift with the previously loyal Detroit, who promptly breaks up with him. The sassy character of the free-spirited Detroit is emblematic of artist-activists with whom Riley was familiar in Oakland and elsewhere; unbeknownst to Cassius she is a member of the political activist group, the Left Eye Faction, actively opposed to WorryFree’s exploitative unethical practices. Her whole persona exudes a life of activism and dissidence; thus, for example, her earrings express culturally or politically engaged slogans; on one side they say “tell homeland security” and on the other, “we are the bomb”. Her radical consciousness can be seen as either diametrically opposed to Cassius’s easy-going pragmatism or as complementary to it, depending on the viewer’s perspective. As for Cassius, the more he is beguiled by the blandishments of RegalView and WorryFree (effectively one and the same company) the more he becomes estranged from Detroit, who briefly enters into a temporary relationship with the eligible Squeeze. Feeling out of place at her performance-art party, which

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critiques social, political and cultural oppression through an ironically scathing commentary on the aggression of capitalism, Cassius leaves and goes to the lavish party thrown by his boss, Lift. There he is initially humiliated by being compelled to perform a solo rap for the guests, in spite of his professed lack of ability; after a hesitant start, he parodies a gangsta rap-sounding cliché by chanting “Nigga shit” over accompanying beats, a simplistic phrase that his white audience parrot enthusiastically like a mantra. The scene, like many others in the movie, casts the protagonist—in spite of his presence of mind—as the fall guy, in order to convey the director’s satirically exaggerated commentary on the continued stereotyping of black people in a racialised and unequal society. While Cassius is not exactly the literary Candide figure through whom the harsh ways of the world are depicted, nonetheless Riley emphasises his self-deception and naïveté in order to critique what might be described as his ‘bad faith’. The personal is political, as civil rights worker and feminist Carol Hanisch argued in the late Sixties, and the emancipated Detroit embodies this notion, while the more gullible Cassius has fallen into the American Dream trap, just as an earlier salesman figure, Willy Loman, once did. Claiming it is a reward for Cassius’s smart work, Lift offers him a new position within WorryFree as manager of its mysterious and innovative new work force, and tempts him with an outrageously off-the-scale financial offer. At this point Riley’s narrative drifts away from its realistic moorings and reveals its concept album genesis, where whatever can be imagined can be sung or rapped; in a fresh and surreal plot twist, Lift’s workforce of the future are shown to be hybrid horse-humans called ‘equisapiens’, the outcome of the perverted genetic experiments he has funded. The shock and disgust of this discovery provide a needed wake-up call for Cassius’s ethical sensibilities, and he rejoins his former comrades and reunites with Detroit. While he briefly becomes a media celebrity for revealing Lift’s genetic mutation project, the fickle media revert to type and rehabilitate the lionised CEO’s reputation after news breaks of a stock-market surge in response to WorryFree’s so-called ‘genetic advancements’. House and senate leaders from both political parties (all white) are represented on the spoof DNN news item, cosying up to Lift. We also see another newspaper headline stating: ‘Senate committee clears WorryFree of Slavery Charges’, an allusion to both the history of slavery and its modern-day manifestations in exploitative sweatshop practices and zero-hour contracts.

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In response, Cassius and his comrades attempt to make the public aware of WorryFree’s human and animal rights violations, and Detroit creates a larger-than-life installation showing Lift literally screwing a horse-human hybrid. However, the public’s ability to be ethically outraged is mitigated by the ubiquitous and unprincipled U.S. massmarket media, which Riley portrays as complicit in the dumbing-down process that facilitates public capitulation to oppressive capitalist practices. Cassius attempts to sound the alarm to a wider audience by broadcasting the video he took in Lift’s secret pens of suffering ‘equisapiens’ by appearing on a reality TV junk-culture show entitled ‘I Got the Shit Kicked Out of Me’. The spoof satirical show parodies the way frivolous television culture mocks and abuses ordinary people for entertainment, and ultimately degrades human dignity. The irony is that, by employing sensationalist tropes common to populist media in the film to highlight examples of capitalist despotism and virtual slave labour across the world, Riley makes the film more entertaining than if it were more grounded in social realism. While the strikers’ sense of solidarity is boosted by the high-profile Cassius rejoining their cause, they appear incapable of prevailing against overwhelming and brutal police reinforcements; however, just as they appear to be broken by the riot police, the tide turns in their favour. Their ultimate victory is predicated on the deus ex machina device of a break-out from their incarceration and a timely intervention against the oppressors by the ‘equisapiens’, who turn out to resemble Jonathan Swift’s Houyhnhnms in their resourcefulness and bravery. Given that they were destined to be future slaves in Lift’s brave new business world, it is fitting they should use their superhuman strength to revolt against their masters and come to the aid of Cassius and his friends. Restored to their telemarketing jobs with greatly improved pay and working conditions, things appear to have returned to normal for the striking workers, until Cassius begins to metamorphose into an equisapiens. In the surreal closing sequence we see him break into Steve Lift’s mansion in order to force the washed-up entrepreneur to provide him with the antidote. As itinerant trade union organiser, Squeeze comments to a reformed Cassius regarding the effect on public opinion of his television appearances, “Most people that saw you on that screen knew calling their Congressman wasn’t gonna do shit”. His sceptical remark reflects a level of cynicism with the conventional political avenues of redress in the United States that connects with Riley’s own experience of street activism

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and ideological struggle through non-violence, music and art. The director’s debut film encapsulates this personal aesthetics of resistance against capitalism’s dehumanisation of individuals; indeed, his use of art works to communicate the possibilities of activism and dissidence throughout the film is meta-referential, showcasing his belief in the role of alternative and progressive art forms in challenging the status quo in American society. Given its blend of a serious, if downplayed, ideological theme and an absurdist plot-line vaguely reminiscent of Ionesco’s famous play Rhinoceros, the film is itself as much a hybrid as Riley’s fanciful creation of the half-horse-half-human ‘equisapiens’ characters in its surreal subplot. The director’s Swiftian satire draws attention to injustices and gross abuses of power in the way that the author of Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal did through the application of ironic exaggeration to pertinent political issues in society. Judging by Sorry to Bother You’s urbanite wit and brisk tempo used to convey his biting social commentary, Riley is likely to have been inspired by Spike Lee’s idiosyncratic genre-bending approach to filmmaking. The latter’s observations on race relations in the United States, especially in his early masterpiece, Do the Right Thing, are echoed in Sorry to Bother You’s take on both race and labour relations. As in Lee’s cinematic oeuvre, Riley’s approach subverts the cruder stereotypes of the Hollywood blaxploitation genre; at the same time, the committed socialist artist places his likeable protagonists in a social milieu that emphasises not only racial solidarity, but also alliances among ordinary people oppressed by the existing political system.

CHAPTER 7

Case-study Films and Plays from the Second Decade Part Two: The International Politics of Surveillance, Control and Resources

Preamble: Depictions of ‘Collateral Damage’ In a period during which the various forms of democracy worldwide came increasingly under threat from authoritarian forces, and executive power and privilege eroded more representative and participatory forms of democracy across the globe, it is no surprise to find contemporary playwriting and filmmaking reflecting a broad range of crucial sociopolitical concerns. These ranged from themes of ecological awareness and social justice to governmental surveillance and repression. The partisan new populism emerging in many countries, with its predilection for the would-be ‘strongman’ leader, and the enthusiasm with which such typically ‘rogue male’ zealots have attacked social institutions, principally for the benefit of the wealthiest sectors of the population, sparked a robust reaction among dramatists, screenwriters and directors. In many respects, these developments characterised the tenor of the new playwriting and screenwriting. The exponential rise of ‘big tech’ and social media corporations throughout the decade—self-evidently a valuable tool for theatre promotion and even, to an extent, theatrical participation— has also greatly benefited calculated campaigns of public disinformation and facilitated data harvesting, in many cases carried out illicitly. While the 2016 Cambridge Analytica scandal in the U.K. was represented as an egregious example, subsequent fraudulent ‘big data’ manipulations by

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political parties and figures across the globe indicated it was merely the tip of a very dangerous iceberg. Unsurprisingly, climate concerns came to the fore in high-profile disaster movies such as Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, U.K./U.S., 2014), Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho, South Korea, 2013) and Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin, U.S., 2012) as well as in some thought-provoking, less widely known stage plays. Ella Hickson’s U.K. National Theatre production Oil (2016) and Lydia Adetunji’s Fixer (2011) both dealt with oil geopolitics and the price put on human lives, Hickson’s play epically and historically and Adetunji’s play contemporaneously in the setting of Nigeria’s problematic oil industry and its impact on individuals. Fusing the personal with the political in signature style, Mike Bartlett’s epic Earthquakes in London (2010) addressed the theme of future environmental chaos against a backdrop of social hedonism, entropy and political irresponsibility. Likewise, Steve Cosson (The Great Immensity, 2012), Charles Mee (Global Warming, 2013), Duncan Macmillan (Lungs, 2011) and Macmillan and Chris Rapley (2071, 2014) and Chantal Bilodeau (Sila – The Arctic Cycle, 2014) have all engaged in their respective ways with ecological crisis and climate change, making these issues central to Anglophone sociopolitical theatre. Caryl Churchill’s socialist-feminist ideology, always intrinsic to her work, continued to divide critics along party-political lines, none of her plays more so than 2016’s Escaped Alone, which depicts four elderly women having tea in a suburban garden, discussing mundane and personal matters, while the direct-address interludes voiced by the outsider among them narrates an apocalyptic breakdown in the world order and environmental Armageddon. Contrastingly, Richard Bean’s black comedy The Heretic (2011) explored the less covered themes of climate change scepticism and academic conformism and data manipulation. Another notable play of the decade, and one that was broadcast live in cinemas as part of the National Theatre’s NT Live series, was The Lehman Trilogy (Stefano Massini, 2013), a past-to-present account of the U.S. global investment bank, whose precipitous collapse signalled the beginning of the financial crisis, and caused distress for millions worldwide. Turning to films dealing with domestic and international politics of control and surveillance, the decade saw the release of some significant contributions; Doug Liman’s Fair Game (U.S. 2010) engaged with the Bush administration’s unprecedented ‘outing’ of CIA agent Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts) whose diplomat husband Joseph C. Wilson (Sean Penn)

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had challenged the veracity of U.S. government-sponsored misinformation that Niger was supplying Saddam Hussein with enriched uranium to build an atomic weapon. Having been sent to Niger on a secret mission to establish the truth, Wilson is categorical in his assertion that the Bush government has no basis for the claim used to justify invasion and expresses this view in an op-ed piece, to which the government responds by leaking his wife’s CIA role to the media, resulting in death threats to her. Wilson’s fight to save his marriage and refute government lies ultimately ends in vindication, with Plame testifying before a congressional committee and Bush’s National Security Adviser Scooter Libby going to prison for his unlawful attempts to smear the couple on the President’s behalf. Liman’s updated director’s cut, shown on Netflix in 2018, was designed to relate the ‘war on terror’ narrative of the film to subsequent administrations and ongoing misinformation on the part of government. Two other intelligent, fact-based political films stood out mid-decade, one from the U.S. and one from the U.K. Stephen Spielberg’s The Post (U.S. 2017) was critically lauded for its portrayal of the Washington Post’s editorial dilemma related to publication of the Vietnam War-related Pentagon Papers leaked by State Department analyst, Daniel Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys). It featured convincing performances by Meryl Streep as Katharine Graham, the socialite owner and publisher, and Tom Hanks as tough-minded editor Ben Bradlee, who both put their careers and the future of the newspaper in jeopardy by taking the momentous decision to publish against the will of their board. Threatened with court action under the Espionage Act, they prevail in court, thereby transforming the fortunes of the struggling newspaper. Trevor Nunn’s 2018 fictionalised biopic Red Joan focuses on the disgrace and ultimate vindication of British civil servant Joan Stanley (Judi Dench). ‘Red Joan’, as she is dubbed by the tabloids when the story breaks in 2000 and a charge of treason hangs over her head, is based on the real-life figure of Melita Norwood, who supplied nuclear secrets to the Soviets, enabling them to develop their own nuclear defence in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Appalled by the terrible devastation caused by the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Melita/Joan allows herself to be recruited by Soviet sympathisers. Nunn’s film employs flashback explaining the actions of the young Joan Smith (Sophie Cookson) and the octogenarian Joan, who endeavours to persuade her lawyer son to defend her because what she did seemed to her morally right even though it was technically treasonous. The film invokes the higher moral authority of conscience,

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a theme that resonates with other political films appearing during the decade. By contrast with the above fictionalised true narratives, Gavin Hood’s Eye in the Sky (U.K. 2015) is a purely fictional thriller but one that deals with the ethics of the decade’s very real ‘collateral damage’ drone attacks against non-combatants; the intended targets in the drama are not located in Pakistan or Afghanistan, where such attacks had proliferated under the Obama administration, but in non-aligned, presumed-friendly nation Kenya, in an area controlled by terror organisation Al Shabab. Crisis of conscience is, likewise, at the heart of Hood’s film and writer Guy Hibbert’s script, as protagonist Colonel Katharine Powell (Helen Mirren) desperately attempts to balance her mission to kill the terrorist commanders through the use of drone strikes, with the imperative to save lives of innocent civilians in the strike zone. While most of the above films would be viable choices as case studies for the current chapter, I have selected two other fact-based works, Oliver Stone ‘s Snowden (U.S. 2016) and Hood’s Official Secrets (U.K. 2019) for in-depth discussion. The films deal, respectively, with the highly germane topics of governments’ dragnet spying on law-abiding citizens and their vindictive ‘lawfare’ against sociopolitical dissenters acting in the public interest. They reveal the extent of both U.S. and U.K. governments’ surveillance methods and related media ‘massage’, as well as their abuse of the powers invested in them in the context of democratically accountable social systems. Both political issues affect the lives and civil liberties of large numbers of citizens in the U.S. and the U.K. as well as elsewhere. The three selected plays Chimerica (Lucy Kirkwood, 2013), Oil (Ella Hickson, 2016) and Wild (Mike Bartlett, also 2016) cover international relations and the imagery of personal heroism (Chimerica), the past and future of a world addicted to petroleum (Oil ) and the sense of vulnerability and exposure triggered by the whistleblower’s act of heroism/treason, exacerbated by the realpolitik of countries’ and organisations’ self-interest (Wild). Again, a premise for selection is that these dramas concern the choice between listening to our conscience and our inner ethical voice or subscribing to collective acceptance of sociopolitical realities and a future history written by power elites. The plays and films invite us to reflect on how we want to live our lives, as well as the relationship between individual and collective responsibility.

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Case Studies Chimerica (Lucy Kirkwood, U.K. 2013) Chimerica, which won the Olivier award for best new play in 2014 and was adapted into a Channel 4 television miniseries in 2019, concerns an imaginary mission by an American photojournalist to find the legendary ‘Tank Man’ of Tiananmen Square. The play, originally staged at the Almeida Theatre, London under the direction of Lyndsey Turner, derives its title from a portmanteau term to describe the de facto interrelationship between the two modern super-powers’ economies; the neologism was coined by former Harvard ‘revisionist’ historian Niall Ferguson and economist Moritz Schularick and employed by Ferguson in his 2008 monograph The Ascent of Money. In many respects, Ferguson’s anticipation of a financial crisis resulting from this originally mutually advantageous symbiosis is proving prescient today, as a bitter trade war between the two powers rages, and a potential new Cold War looms, with Communist China moving away from soft power policies into a more aggressive international stance. As the play makes clear, especially through the character of businesswoman Tess, China’s post-Tiananmen economic miracle and statecontrolled capitalism have locked China and America—in addition to other nations such as the U.K where Kirkwood lives—into an ever-closer economic embrace, dominated increasingly by the former. Moreover, China’s vast amounts of U.S. debt assets underlines this economic reciprocity, given that a major depreciation of the U.S. dollar would seriously undermine the value of their holdings. The Huawei saga, the border aggression against India and the repressive intervention in Hong Kong’s separate jurisdiction, all in 2020, were indications of the Chinese Communist Party’s increased assertiveness on the world stage. Likewise, having airbrushed the Tiananmen Massacre in general, and ‘Tank Man’, in particular, out of history within their own borders,1 the CCP is attempting to do so extraterritorially through their increasing worldwide influence. Their lack of transparency over the source of the COVID-19 outbreak and the fatal internal delay in acknowledging and addressing the outbreak have illustrated the lethal repercussions for the world at large.

1 With the honourable exception of Hong Kong, where June 4th used to be commemorated every year without fail from 1990 to 2019.

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In a similar way to the Tiananmen crackdown, this political airbrushing has been the order of the day, but the difference is that after Tiananmen relations between China and the U.S. mended relatively quickly as a result of growing reciprocal economic interests. While Kirkwood’s use of the term ‘Chimerica’ for her play functions as an ironic reference, it also invites us to explore the symbiotic aspects of personal human relationships in extraordinary circumstances, particularly in the relationship between Joe, the American photojournalist, and the play’s other protagonist, Zhang Lin, who lives in Beijing. Another perhaps overlooked connotation of the play’s title lies in its close resemblance to the Greekderived word chimaera, meaning a mythological hybrid monster, with the secondary meaning of something illusory or impossible to achieve. All of these resonances become apparent in a critical reading of Chimerica, which is an intelligently layered and sophisticated play. On one level, the play addresses stereotypes of American individualism against Chinese collectivism and critically investigates notions of iconic heroism and newsworthiness. However, as Kirkwood digs deeper, we discern that the relationship between past history and present events and the characters’ inability to escape their shared past and divided present are at the heart of the drama. The action shuttles back and forth spatially between New York and Beijing and between the events of June 1989 and 2012 temporally. Kirkwood is at pains to acknowledge in her author’s preface that “the image of the Tank Man we are familiar with in fact exists in a number of forms in common currency.”2 She refers to probably the most famous image of all of them by Jeff Widener, which is used for the cover of the published play-script, but also to five other known images of the same moment. Joe Schofield, her protagonist (renamed Lee Berger in the television miniseries), represents not so much a composite version of these six real-life photographers but an imaginary seventh, according to the dramatist. Equally, her Beijing-based brothers Zhang Lin and Zhang Wei, whose association with Joe continues throughout the play’s timespan, are fictional constructs like Joe and the other characters, even if they are perfectly plausible. Following her preface to the play, Kirkwood quotes a memorable Susan Sontag axiom from On Photography, her 1977 study that was highly ambivalent with regard to the supposed graphic truths conveyed by the art

2 Lucy Kirkwood, Chimerica, Nick Hern Books, 2013, 7.

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form and its power to prompt moral indignation and change the world: “Images transfix. Images anaesthetise.” In many ways, this cryptic observation serves the play-reader, if not the play-goer, as a clue to the author’s treatment of the subject-matter. At the core of the play is Joe’s obsession with knowledge and certainty about the identity of the man in the iconic photo, which leads him to co-opt his seasoned colleague Mel, his newfound lady-friend Tess, plus various other characters he meets along the way, into assisting him, whether willingly or unwillingly. He also tests the indulgence of his current boss and former editor Frank, whose efforts to protect him from imminent danger when he takes the picture from his hotel room in the opening scene betoken a sense of solicitude and esteem for his maverick protégé that is stretched to the very limits by the play’s end. Kirkwood’s theme of responsibility connects with Sontag’s thesis in On Photography regarding the moral vacuum in which war photos and images of real human horror are often disseminated. In her article discussion of Sontag concerning images of violence, Sue Sorensen points out that the world-famous 1972 photo of the then nine-year-old Vietnamese girl Kim Phue running to escape a napalm attack by American warplanes is one we can look at instructively and without moral scruple. This, she argues, is because we know that the girl was rescued by the photojournalist, and is alive and living in the United States, and still campaigning for peace.3 Kirkwood’s play doesn’t leave us with this moral equivocation, however, not just because in real life we have no way of knowing the fate of the desperately courageous and defiant individual who confronted the tanks. We, as readers or as audience, share Joe’s burning desire to know what happened to him, but the truth is revealed to the audience alone at the end of the play in one of the most poignant pieces of dramatic irony one could possibly experience in the theatre. Perhaps one reason that Joe is for so long denied the certainty that he desperately seeks is partly because it is right under his nose in the person of Zhang Lin, whom he befriended, together with the latter’s beloved partner Liuli, when working as a young photographer in 1989 in Beijing. It becomes clear in the scenes set in Zhang Lin’s flat that the latter sees visions of Liuli—who, we learn, died in the Tiananmen crackdown and 3 Sue Sorensen, ‘Against Photography: Susan Sontag and the Violent Image’. After Image, Vol 16, May/June 2004. 16–18. http://halliejones.com/wp-content/uploads/ 2014/11/Against-Photography-Sontag-and-the-Violent-Image.pdf.

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was pregnant with their child at the time of her death—whenever he reaches into his fridge for a cold beer; this is a poignant image, since the young couple had imagined owning a fridge as part of their optimistic aspirations for a democratic China. Zhang Lin’s cryptic irony which he tends to employ in his relations both with his brother Zhang Wei and with Joe when the latter revisits Beijing, has so far kept him safe from the authorities. Zhang Wei’s genuine concern for saving his brother in the present day of the play, as well as, unbeknownst to Joe, in the square on 5 June 1989, adds another layer of irony. Kirkwood ratchets up this dramatic irony further with Joe’s desperate and seemingly unprincipled hunt for a man named Wang Pengfei that Joe believes to be the Tank Man. He eventually learns from the man’s sister that he was the alternative hero of the square, the driver of the tank who refused to kill Tank Man, and ended up being executed for his heroism. The surreptitious advertisement that was posted in the Chinese press, providing Joe with his clue, leads him to a hero, but not the hero he seeks, and his ungracious response signalling his disappointment is extremely telling. Moreover, it is Joe’s driven mission to discover the face of the man with his back to the camera that ultimately endangers his friend. Seemingly, the ‘crime’ for which Zhang Lin is arrested is that of publishing an article challenging the official smog narrative and government-issued metrics after the death of Ming Xiaoli, his chronically ill neighbour; nonetheless, Joe’s lack of discretion in his international calls and messages is evident. At the end of the play, Zhang Lin’s arrest is intercut with a scene at a New York Gallery, in which his Tank Man image and other celebrated photographs are on display in a special exhibition of Joe’s work. When Zhang Wei and his ex-Harvard son Benny meet him there, and Benny accidentally reveals Zhang Lin’s role after his father has left, the truth finally dawns on Joe. He can only listen to Zhang Lin’s voice on the iPod he has received from his brother and begin to take in its impact, but ironically he cannot see it, as we can. Joe has never really seen what is in front of him, and his photos, whether of Tiananmen, Gaza or Colombia, have been those of a voyeur who has only photographed but never intervened, not even this time to save his Beijing friend, so egocentric is his mission. We, the viewing audience, in contrast see the action rewind to 1989 and its aftermath, as a numbed Zhang Lin is given Liuli’s scant possessions contained in two carrier bags by a sympathetic nurse, who also replaces his bloody shirt with a clean white one. He steps into Joe’s photographic

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image projected on the screen in a remarkable coup de théâtre recreation, and looks towards Joe who can hear, but not see. In a world in which Western democracies see fit to cover-up inconvenient truths and restrict freedom of expression and information on a daily basis, Kirkwood’s play ironically reveals an unpalatable reality: far from their supposedly transparent and accountable sociopolitical and socioeconomic systems gradually ‘converting’ autocratic China to democracy, the reverse is actually what is happening. As Benny jokingly but ominously puts it: “It’s an investment, right? Enjoy your greenbacks while you can. All gonna be yuan soon.”4 The central chimaera, or illusion, of the play is, therefore, not just that of Joe, who fails to see and whose scopic obsession and consumption of images is mirrored by the self-delusion of other characters, especially Tess and Frank. It is, equally, the self-delusion of Western countries convincing themselves that a murderous autocratic regime would inevitably liberalise in time under ‘the benign influence’ of Western liberal capitalist democracy. Now that Hong Kong people’s courageous annual commemoration of the 4 June 1989 victims has been prohibited under the provisions of the draconian, catch-all National Security Law imposed by China and implemented by its puppet local government, with records being systematically purged from libraries and universities, there are not many places where the flame of truth continues to burn. At least Kirkwood’s play and its television adaptation have played their part in preserving the memory of the fallen of Tiananmen in the collective consciousness. Oil (Ella Hickson, U.K. 2016) Ella Hickson’s Oil is an epic drama that explores the close relationship between imperial power and natural resources, as well as the price paid by both humans and the environment in the relentless pursuit of ‘the black gold’. In August 2020 the world was reminded of this price when a Panamanian-registered cargo ship ran aground on the coral reefs of

4 Kirkwood, Ibid., 132.

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Mauritius, resulting in a major oil spill that caused serious ecological damage, simply one of the latest in a long line of such avoidable disasters.5 The play which treats the implications of modern society’s great dependency on petroleum from both global and personal perspectives was first performed at the Almeida Theatre, London, in October 2016. Its action covers a period of 150 years, with the opening part set on a farm in Cornwall in 1889, and the subsequent four segments set in Tehran in 1908, Hampstead in 1970, Baghdad in 2021 and finally Cornwall again in the year 2051. Hickson’s choice of subject-matter proved topical for the theatre in particular, and arts and culture in general, in view of the decade’s robust activism against sponsorship of arts groups and events by oil companies, such as BP, with their high-profile patronage of prestigious arts institutions. Some theatres such as the Royal Court refused to be tempted, while others, notably The Royal Shakespeare Company, arranged major sponsorship deals. The latter prematurely ended the contactual sponsorship agreement, bowing to strong pressure from campaigners who included theatre professionals, as well as anti-fossil fuel activists. Appropriately, the Oil Sponsorship-free pledge by a coalition of arts groups and venues appeared in 2016, the same year as Hickson’s timely play. The play’s epic timescale has much in common with that of Massini’s critically acclaimed Lehman Trilogy (2013), with its story of the three founding brothers, from the inception of their U.S. business in 1844 until the company’s notorious bankruptcy in 2008. The Almeida production of Oil was directed by Carrie Cracknell, and featured an ensemble group of ten actors, two of whom played the central roles of mother and daughter, May and Amy. Hickson might have been influenced in her choice of names for these protagonists by Samuel Beckett’s late dramaticule Footfalls, which employs the same anagrammatic device for the two interdependent female characters. This recursive naming device hints at the cyclical concept of the play itself. One of Hickson’s prefacing quotations for script and house

5 In this particular case, it was heartening to see that environmental activists, ignoring an order from the dilatory Mauritian government to leave the clean-up to their agencies, took it into their own hands to protect their beaches, flora and fauna. https://www.bbc. com/news/world-africa-53713391. For the top ten worst oil spills in history see https:// www.livescience.com/6363-top-10-worst-oil-spills.html.

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programme gives an indication of what she had in mind: ‘My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son flies a jet airplane. His son will ride a camel.’6 When we meet May Singer in the opening segment she is the wife of a late nineteenth-century Cornish farmer, and is heavily pregnant with a daughter who turns out to be Amy in Part Two, set in Tehran. An enigmatic visitor arrives unexpectedly at the Singer family’s isolated subsistence-agriculture farm, where, as we see, they eke out a harsh existence dependent on log-fires and candles for heat and light, respectively. William Whitcomb, their American businessman visitor, demonstrates the workings of the recently invented kerosene lamp, to the wonder of the family, especially May. He then offers to buy their farmland for storage and distribution of imported oil, which provokes a fierce family quarrel. Before he hastily takes his leave, he notes how taken May is with the smell and properties of kerosene and observes of her, “there’s something about you.”7 His comment is indeed prescient, and, as May steps out into the cold Cornish night for a breath of air and to see the sky, she walks across time and space into first decade of the next century. We are transported with her and her small child Amy to Persia, where she is now a servant at a colonial residence near an oil-field. May is working as an emergency waitress for a party held by the British entrepreneur who has been exploiting the adolescent Shah’s land for its oil reserves. This transitional device is dubbed ‘interscene’ in Hickson’s script and is repeated after each segment; each ‘interscene’ is simply but effectively executed, linking the closing actions of each segment with the opening actions of the following one. They involve no spoken lines, but the stage directions call for a sequence of fleeting video images, conveying a feeling of acceleration of time and motion, while also hinting at a succession of related historical events. The epic sweep and scope afforded by the device is facilitated, as in Brechtian theatre, by an economy of resources and style well suited to the small Almeida Theatre. As in many of Brecht’s plays, the production’s economical, ensemble-based dynamic promotes the mobility and flow of the dramatic narrative, traversing time and space at will. In a similar spirit to plays such as Der Kaukasische Kreidekreis (The Caucasian Chalk Circle), the two protagonists tend to travel with us, while the fluid

6 Oil, Nick Hern Books, 2016, ix. 7 Ibid. 21. This line is repeated at the end of the play in Whitcomb’s surreal

reappearance.

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ensemble acting enables the support cast to metamorphose and blend into the different locales in which the mother and daughter appear. The conventions of epic theatre, particularly, and the stylistic range of twentyfirst-century theatre generally, help us to suspend our disbelief, even if the extended life-span of the protagonists defies the norms of human existence—very much in the tradition of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando character, but without the gender metamorphosis. The slightly surreal quality of the closing moments of each of the first four parts tends to herald these transitional teleporting interludes and authenticate the freewheeling conventions of time and space that Hickson employs. A sharp exchange between two characters in the second scene, the butler Thomas and British army officer Samuel, subtly foreshadows the British-U.S. coup of 1953 against the democratically elected government of Iran in order to manipulate the Shah for control of the country’s oil resources.8 Having introduced the theme of oil imperialism into this segment through the character of Samuel, who drives May and Amy away into the desert at the end of the scene, Hickson takes a bigger leap forward in time in the third part into 1970. This is the year that the West’s oil crisis and stand-off with OPEC began, and also the era when the U.S. switched its currency link from the gold standard to petrodollars, propelling the dollar to the status of world reserve currency, and thereby affecting foreign exchange rates. This correlation between crude petroleum and world currencies had the effect of increasing liquidity but, equally, deepened the dependency of the global economy on oil. By this time May has morphed into a senior oil executive working for an unnamed international oil company, now in jeopardy as a result of the Libyan Revolution that brought Colonel Gaddafi to power. The latter’s representative Farouk makes a surprise visit to May’s home, echoing the unexpected visit of Whitcomb in the opening segment, and explains to May that Libya will nationalise its assets, and therefore May’s company has no choice but to comply with the new government’s “contractual modifications”. However, her attention at this critical juncture is divided between her business responsibilities and her parental ones. Whereas in the previous part Amy had been a tractable child, here she is a rebellious, highly opinionated and precocious teenager with a sexually active boyfriend. 8 For elaboration of British connivance in the coup see https://www.aljazeera.com/ news/2020/08/uk-lead-role-1953-iran-coup-exposed-200818072007050.html.

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May’s conflicts with her daughter increasingly dominate the remainder of the plot, with the play’s petro-politics and international-relations themes skilfully interwoven into the substance of their altercations. Part Four, set in the desert of Kurdistan, northern Iraq, in our own times (2021) brings this dialectical device into sharp relief, as mother (now a political figure in the U.K.) and daughter (now an environmental activist fluent in Arabic) clash over differences of belief that epitomise the fundamental clashes of cultures, generations and civilisations. It may be a cliché to observe that the personal is also political, but Hickson’s drama deftly illustrates this interrelationship: the conflict of values between May’s neoliberal, neo-imperialist, pro-oil instincts (“the world is no longer in a position to leave one of its biggest oilfields untapped, no matter who happens to be occupying it”9 ) and Amy’s eco-activist, anti-authoritarian, pacifist position (“you have devastated this country over and over and over again and you still don’t have what you want”).10 Thus, the conflicts over fossil fuel extraction and market control that have defined the past half-century are conveyed eloquently to the audience in personal, as well as feminist, terms. Rather than fall back on the more familiar dramatic scenario of stereotypical male executives stoking the furnace of fossil fuel capitalism, Hickson prefers to explore the issue more dialectically, through the microcosm of the inherently fractious mother-daughter interaction. Where Caryl Churchill had demonstrated the complex relationship between what she saw as a toxic and aggressive late capitalism and contemporary feminist consciousness in the character of Marlene in Top Girls, Hickson reformulates this theoretical and practical dilemma by exploring its implications for the mother-daughter relationship. While Marlene has opted out of her maternal responsibilities in order to pursue professional success with relentless single-mindedness, May is torn between her competing roles of mother and businesswoman icon. She claims to have done everything in her career for her daughter’s benefit and in her name, telling her to stop complaining about the people in power, and instead “become the generation in power.”11 Amy ruthlessly reveals the extent of her mother’s personal responsibility, as she sees it, for the cycle of violence and incursions into sovereign

9 Oil, 93. 10 Ibid., 93. 11 Ibid., 97.

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territory that have characterised petro-capitalism and neo-imperialism. Reviewer Kimberley Skye Richards noted how “the performance also offered commentary on the limitations of women’s independence, as Hickson crafted the codependency of May and her daughter Amy’s relationship into a metaphor for the codependency of the British Empire and its colonies.”12 At this point of the play the motif of oil exhaustion is introduced in an ironic way by Amy’s friend and driver Aminah, who looks forward to a time when his war-ravaged country will have had its resources utterly depleted and can hope to be left in peace. Inevitably, Amy returns with her mother, and we are transported forward thirty years for the backto-the-future closing scene in Cornwall that Hickson cryptically dubs ‘yestermorrow’ in her interscene directions. Their present energy supply problem is evident from their argument over whether they can afford to charge the car or run a hot bath. May’s surreal interactions with her husband/partner/lover Joss, putatively the father of Amy, have continued throughout the play, and he appears briefly here as a neighbour looking to buy old motors to build a power generator. In an echo of the Part One demonstration of the magical properties of kerosene, Joss creates a feeble light from a very small motor connected to a light-bulb, but, clearly, mechanical devices are in short supply. It is obvious that energy sources are now extremely limited in the post-oil age, and we have come full circle. So when another visitor appears out of nowhere, reminiscent of the arrival of the American, Whitcomb, it is less of a surprise than her actual identity and the vision of the future she brings with her. Wang Fan is a sales executive for Chinese company called Nangto, offering them a self-generating, off-grid device called the Toroid that supplies heating and lighting based on cold fusion nuclear reactions generated by material harvested from the Moon. By the end of the play the positions of May and Amy are reversed, as Amy’s enthusiasm for the Toroid prompts environmental concerns and objections about brutally exploitative labour conditions related to the device’s production from May. After Fan’s offer appears to have been rejected, like that of Whitcomb in the opening segment, Amy steps out into the night, as May did before her, implicitly to join the side of future progress and continue the cycle. In the epilogue 12 Richards, Kimberly Skye. Review of Oil , by Ella Hickson, Theatre Journal, 2017, 69(4): 582–583. Project MUSE. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/682797/pdf.

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interscene that ends the play we hear an exhibit recording that links the end of the oil age with the decline of the West, while Amy reflects on the loss of May’s infinite love, which has now, like oil, run dry, and is irredeemably gone. In these closing moments we are acutely conscious that play’s dialectical structure is predicated on the thematic concepts of codependency and exploitation in an epic yet intimate theatrical fusion. Wild (Mike Bartlett, U.K. 2016) Wild is a fictionalised version of Edward Snowden’s 2013 disclosure of NSA data abuse and unlawful surveillance of the U.S. population and those of many allies and their heads of state. The astonishing scale of the U.S. intelligence community’s invasion of personal privacy was publicised by breaking stories in The Guardian and The Washington Post , based on the copious leaks provided to these and other media institutions. In the previous decade NSA whistleblowers William Binney and Thomas Drake had chosen not to publicise their criticisms of the Bush administration’s post-9/11 data-harvesting surveillance programmes, and instead opted to engage the government through the designated internal mechanisms. In view of the bullying and repressive treatment they received as a result of their legitimately raised concerns, Snowden made the decision to go public. After his revelations and initial legal challenges by civil liberties groups to the U.S. and U.K. governments, the daily soap opera of the Trump administration’s first term in office served to obfuscate the criminality of a government engaged in indiscriminate spying on its entire population, as well as those of supposedly allied democracies. Opinion was sharply divided in the U.S. regarding Snowden’s deed between those who hailed it as a public service provided at great personal sacrifice and those who saw it as an act of national betrayal. At the time, the controversy prompted considerable debate vis à vis the claims of national security against individual privacy and the uses of digital technology by corporate operators in concert with clandestine, democratically unaccountable government intelligence units. Criticism of the Obama administration’s use of the programme to surveil public metadata at will was bipartisan, especially in Congress. Snowden’s harshest critics tended to be senior figures in the Obama administration and members of the intelligence community, but his action was vindicated by influential Democrats who broke ranks, including Senator Bernie Sanders and exPresident Jimmy Carter, as well as by the UN Commissioner for Human

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Rights.13 In various European polls, by contrast with U.S. ones, more than 80% of those familiar with Snowden’s actions approved of them.14 In the cultural sphere the story also provoked a powerful response, with Laura Poitras’s 2014 Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour, and Oliver Stone’s biopic simply entitled Snowden, as well as Mike Bartlett’s Wild, appearing the following year. Bartlett’s play was first performed during the U.S. election campaign in April 2016 at the Hampstead Theatre London, preceding the September release of Stone’s more widely seen biopic. The stage production was directed by James Macdonald and featured a remarkable stage-set effect by designer Miriam Buether in accordance with Bartlett’s script directions, which became a talking-point for critics. In some respects, Wild resembles the concept of Chimerica in portraying an act of great altruistic heroism, or alternatively of calculated state subversion, depending on which view one espoused, and Bartlett maintains a strong sense of ambiguity and ambivalence throughout. The author has professed himself leery of the designation of political playwright and prefers to eschew “didactic opinion-based drama that forces politics on the audience”,15 in favour of a more dialectical method. In many ways, Wild exemplifies this approach. In his play the whistleblower figure is represented as a Snowden avatar, despite the change of the protagonist’s name to Andrew. Certain factual references linking the play closely to the real-life events are evident, including the apparent affiliation of the other two characters that appear— identified simply as Woman and Man by Bartlett—to Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks organisation. However, the play moves uncomfortably for the viewer between critically important issues of human rights and the sometimes paranoid world of espionage and manipulation. It reflects the fact that, following the revocation of his passport by the U.S. Government, Snowden was prevented from travelling beyond Moscow to countries willing to grant him political asylum. Like the central figure in the play,

13 Human rights groups in the U.S. pressed for a pardon in 2017 before Obama left office. See https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/15/us/politics/trump-sno wden-esper.html. 14 See ‘Edward Snowden Unpopular at Home, A Hero Abroad, Poll Finds’, U.S. News, 21 April 2015. 15 Bartlett, interviewed by Arifa Akbar, The Guardian, Tuesday 11 August, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/aug/11/mike-bartlett-albion-play-int erview-brexit-covid-bbc.

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therefore, he was stateless and at the mercy of the Putin government and also subject to its conditions. Felicitously, Bartlett only alludes in passing to known facts and evidence about the sensational case, and opts to eschew the serious docudrama mode, with its associated hazard of sermonising, in favour of a psychological study in uncertainty and disorientation. In the dramatist’s capable hands the plot is transformed into a Kafkaesque dramatic scenario with nightmarish undertones of the latter’s novels, particularly The Trial. The play’s claustrophobic, drab hotel room setting and interval-free structure accentuate this oppressive dramatic ambiance. Another apt comparison would be with Pinter’s comedy of menace, especially in plays such as The Birthday Party, or his later short drama of interrogation, One for the Road. This realistic/surrealistic ethos is evident from the opening of the drama, as Andrew verbally spars with the woman who suddenly appears in his hotel room, which he imagines to be located in Moscow. The tension and disorientation generated by the gradual undermining of Andrew’s and the audience’s sensory perception of what is real and what is not reaches a crescendo in the fourth and final scene. In terms of its theatricality, the play’s powerful coup de théâtre ending would be no more than a bizarre gimmick, if the seeming authenticity of the dialogue and the dramatist’s use of the audience’s background knowledge of the Snowden ‘story’ were not so astute. Together with Andrew, we are lulled into a false sense of security, as we follow his attempt to establish credentials and credibility for the woman visitor and a sense of where he is and what might happen next. Starting in medias res with the words “Miss Prism” after the woman’s entry into Andrew’s ‘hotel room’, the opening moments serve to explain one of the possible interpretations of the play’s title: ‘Prism’ appears to refer to Cecily’s governess with the troubled past in Oscar Wilde’s satirical romantic comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest—in which a number of the characters employ falsehoods and false identities to pursue their ends. However, it is also a subtle allusion to the code-name of the covert surveillance programme run by the U.S. National Security Agency begun in 2007 under the Bush administration, with the complicity of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and other ‘big tech’ corporations. Andrew’s response to this volunteered information is to ask “Is that a joke?” For the knowing audience member or reader it is, but, fortunately, sufficient Snowden backstory detail comes out in the interaction between Andrew

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and ‘Prism’ to provide the uninitiated viewer or reader with enough information to follow what is happening and build up suspense. There is also an indication that the woman, who Andrew assumes to be working for Julian Assange,—“trapped in an embassy in the middle of London”16 — is ‘playing with Andrew’s head’, following her allusions to playing party games and Andrew’s insistence on the need for him to keep a clear head by refusing the proffered drink. The woman’s multiple deliberate mispronunciations of Andrew’s girlfriend’s name comes across as a ploy designed to undermine the small sense of comfort he can derive from reminiscing on his nearest and dearest. When Andrew speculates about the authorities questioning his family and girlfriend and asks whether they are likely to be physically hurt, she responds with a series of noncommittal statements and questions designed to disquiet him further. Her reference to “a slow breaking-down of self-esteem”17 is related to the questioning of his girlfriend and family. Subsequently, however, as with much else the woman says, it appears intended to undermine Andrew’s resistance to the idea of becoming a spokesperson for the organisation as a pre-condition for helping him in his isolated and vulnerable state. Flirtatious at some points of the conversation, coquettish and verbose at others, the woman character studiously avoids giving any straight answers to Andrew’s simple questions such as “Who are you?” and “Why are you here?” In sharp contrast, ‘Prism’ knows “pretty much everything”18 about Andrew, ironically underlining Bartlett’s, and indeed Snowden’s, point about the surrender of personal privacy in the context of the contemporary ‘surveillance society’. In the face of her self-assurance and evasions Andrew is finally stung into going on the offensive regarding the ethics of her organisation and his own position, but her hedging strategies continue to frustrate him. In the final scene much of what Andrew and the audience manage to find out about ‘Prism’ is abruptly punctured (quite literally). Before that, his second-scene encounter with Man, another representative of the shadowy organisation, proves equally frustrating, even if the tone of their interaction is rather different. Man, who introduces himself as George,— the same first name used by ‘Miss Prism’ in the opening scene—is more

16 Mike Bartlett, Wild, Nick Hern Books, 2016, 10. 17 Ibid., 17. 18 Wild, 32.

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direct in his approach, but equally inscrutable and equivocal. He also accentuates Andrew’s insecurities by pointing out, quite plausibly, that he could be an assassin charged with disposing of Andrew, after he has given him a bar of chocolate to eat to boost his low blood sugar. His assertion that the woman has no connection with the organisation is designed to break down Andrew’s defences, as is his ‘devil’s advocate’ argument that Andrew’s actions were prejudicial to the safety and the interests of society, an assertion that is subsequently reiterated by the woman. This dialectical dramaturgical device enables Bartlett to engage with the wider media and social media debates on unauthorised government surveillance of presumed private data, which, more than the Snowden affair per se, is the crux of his ‘play of ideas’. When the woman appears again in his room later at night, she denies knowing, or having any relation to, the man, and brushes off Andrew’s questions about the matter before the debate starts up again. While for some critics the debate may have slowed down the tempo of the drama, for others, it was timely and stimulating; nonetheless, one or two respected and experienced reviewers made the mistake of confusing the dialectical process that lies at the epicentre of the drama with Bartlett’s personal opinions, thinly disguised as drama, as they saw it. Thus, for example, Michael Billington referred to the author’s “exaggerated, conspiracy-theory view of a world in which government agencies, big companies and terrorist organisations are all intimately connected.”19 In practice, a critical discourse analysis approach to the script suggests that, in each one of the debates that emerge naturally out of the dramatic dialogue, the author is constantly deconstructing and undermining the positions espoused by characters, whether expressed sincerely, as on Andrew’s part, or equivocally, as in the case of the other two characters. In consequence, it becomes impossible to articulate clear perspectives on anything. When ‘Prism’ argues that tremendous progress has been made in improving social conditions—“We’ve never had WiFi before…Violence across the world is down. Poverty is down. Education is up. Emancipation of women is up. We’re not doing as badly as you think”.20 —Andrew counters with a grimly realistic dystopian description of a world on the 19 Michael Billington, review 22 June 2016, The Guardian: https://www.theguardian. com/stage/2016/jun/22/wild-review-mike-bartlett-hampstead-theatre-london-whistlebl ower-edward-snowden. 20 Wild, 58–59.

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brink of collapse as a result of human excesses. The point is that we aren’t entitled to know Bartlett’s personal view on these things, partly because it’s a private matter, and partly because, had he really imposed it on us, the dramatic impact of the drama would be greatly reduced. Any certainties or ethical positives that are glimpsed in the outcome of these dialectical exchanges are dissipated in the final act, in which all three figures are on stage together. ‘Prism’ brazenly dismisses their joint dissemblance as a necessary ‘security’ measure, as Andrew, who has finally capitulated, seeing that he has no other choice, presses them for further information about the ‘organisation’. Rebutting Andrew’s argument that people want to know ‘the truth’ about being spied on, ‘Prism’ avers that “[P]eople don’t care. They like it. It makes them feel safer” and that, in fact, the tech companies and governments are pleasantly surprised by “how much of this the people are prepared to take”.21 Then, deconstructing all of the arguments presented, she observes that the whole world is “tilting at the moment. Just rocking on the edge”, admitting that they’ve been playing with him to get him the point where he doesn’t know “which way is up”.22 While Andrew still thinks they are talking figuratively, his interlocutors proceed to strip away any remaining veneer of normality, first by pressing a button to dismantle the fake hotel room walls and dispose of its furniture, and then by tilting the empty space in which Andrew is left standing. Andrew’s enquiry about the mechanism of this gravity trick is greeted with the response that it’s “all about perception”.23 The ups and downs of the earlier arguments and the idea of the world teetering on the brink—or indeed the relativity of our planet’s place in an arbitrary universe—are all thrown into relief by the production’s arresting visual metaphor, which literally removes the ground from under Andrew’s feet and skews everything as though in a psychotropic experience. Implicit in this demonstration of power is a corresponding denial of the possibility of individual agency. ‘Prism’s’ pièce de résistance is reserved for the final moment: having revealed that her ‘sincerity guarantee’ needle-wound of the earlier scene was a confidence trick, she takes out a pin and pops

21 Ibid., 74–75. 22 Ibid., 76. 23 Ibid., 76.

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herself, “like a balloon”,24 hinting at the robotic human substitutes that are already part of the technological armoury of advanced nations. In a disorientating ‘wild world’ of power without accountability or limits, and in which artificial intelligence is already showing signs of eroding our rights to privacy and individuality further, Bartlett’s play requires us to face the ethical dilemma concerning competing claims of personal privacy and national security. In so doing, it challenges us to think as citizens in a participatory democracy, as opposed to peddling conspiracy theories. After all, the time for theories is long gone. Snowden (Oliver Stone. U.S. 2016) The biopic movie genre, in general, has much in common with Truman Capote’s whimsical portmanteau term ‘faction’ to designate the synthesis of fact and fiction that went into his 1966 documentary novel In Cold Blood. How much of the narrative is strictly factual and how much is fictitious tends to be a moot question for critics, if not audiences. However, as controversial American filmmaker Oliver Stone demonstrated in his award-winning biopic of Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July (its screenplay co-written with Kovic himself based on his memoir), films that show a character transition from uncritical ‘patriot’ to political dissident can be fascinating and insightful. In view of Stone’s own armed-forces background, we may intuit that his interest in this character development is not entirely impersonal. Tracing the narrative arc of this self-transformation inevitably involves compression and modification of real-life events to fit the typical feature-film format. While Stone’s much later biopic of Edward Snowden didn’t achieve quite the same high level of filmmaking quality as Born on the Fourth of July, it was nonetheless a valuable addition to the crude binary discourse around Snowden that posited him as either traitor or hero amid the inflamed rhetoric surrounding the 2013 cause célèbre. Despite minor flaws and inconsistencies in the film’s narrative, in addition to a degree of creative licence, Snowden not only gave an accurate broad-brush picture of the ex-National Security Agency employee’s backstory, it did so with Snowden’s blessing and, briefly, his screen presence in a closing cameo appearance.

24 Ibid., 78.

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In preparation for the project, Stone decided to meet Snowden in exile in Moscow and was able to discuss the screenplay with him; he also sought to verify details that had been published in Luke Harding’s 2014 book The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man, which formed the factual basis of his and Kieran Fitzgerald’s screenplay. Another source for the script’s more imaginative constituents was a novel, based loosely on the Snowden case, by his legal representative in Russia, Anatoly Kucherena. The journey, both physical and mental, that the protagonist undertakes in the film involves exactly the kind of radical shift of perspective that Stone traced so memorably in relation to Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July. Stone invites us to reflect on what prompts an unmitigated right-wing patriot to undergo a 180-degree transformation of outlook. From a philosophical perspective, the director asks us to consider whose deception is more morally reprehensible—that of the United States Government or that of Edward Snowden. By implication, the film also calls into question the idea of patriotism: is it necessarily associated only with those in power and their definition of the abstract concept? Certain aspects of the film can be compared to Steven Spielberg’s highly regarded feature film The Post released the following year, detailing the Washington Post’s revelations stemming from Daniel Ellsberg’s leak of the Pentagon Papers in 1971; at the same time, in Snowden it is quite clear that the protagonist has much more to lose than Guardian journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, who helped him to expose the NSA scandal worldwide, or indeed Katharine Graham, owner of The Washington Post , who made the decision to publish the Pentagon Papers leaks. Edward Snowden’s liberty and, quite possibly, his life were on the line, and still may be, bearing in mind the vindictiveness of the U.K. government’s treatment of Julian Assange and the latter’s likely fate if/when extradited to the U.S. In a story focused on the ethics of information-gathering, Snowden, like Stone’s earlier biopic based on Kovic and Spielberg’s The Post, shows just how important it is for us as individuals to have access to crucial information about what governments claim to do in the name of the people. For Stone, who served in Vietnam and subsequently realised the extent to which The Pentagon Papers revealed the web of government deceit surrounding the war, critical challenge to orthodoxy has been an intrinsic part of his filmmaking. Even his 1995 biopic Nixon was a study of its

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subject’s compulsion for control of the narrative and an attempt to understand how the 37th President thought he could evade the harsh light of truth. His 2012 documentary miniseries Untold History of the United States proposed a postwar history of domestic and international politics dominated by the secretive imperatives of the military-industrial complex, which, according to his thesis, undermined the people’s aspirations for open democracy. Shot on location in Hong Kong, Washington DC, Germany and Hawaii, Snowden is conceived as a frame narrative with flashbacks that elucidate why Edward Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), independent documentarian Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) and political journalist Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) are holed up together in a nondescript room at the Mira Hotel in Kowloon’s busy Tsim Sha Tsui district. This frame narrative represents filmic real time, and its dramatic tension and suspense is predicated on the fact that agents of the state, whether the U.S. or the U.K. operating clandestinely, or Hong Kong police, acting in response to an Interpol warrant, could have burst into the room at any point and arrested the occupants. The time-setting, as indicated on the screen, is early June 2013, by which time Snowden had already made contact with various reputed progressive journalists who might be in a position to help him to publicise the story. Snowden is initially shown meeting Poitras and Greenwald in the lobby of the Mira Hotel, after exterior establishing shots in the title sequence convey the impression of a typically bustling Hong Kong day. A mood of suspense is created by Poitras and Greenwald’s uncertainty over the fugitive contractor’s appearance, accentuated by the close-up on his Rubik’s Cube, before we see his features for the first time. The Rubik’s Cube, far from functioning as a Hitchcock-style ‘MacGuffin’, turns out to be a crucial motif in the film’s backstory and was authentic up to a point: the real-life Snowden is an aficionado of the brain-teasing puzzle and suggested it to Oliver Stone as a fictional method of smuggling out the classified files contained in a micro-SD card concealed inside the cube.25 The actual means he employed has not been divulged, presumably to protect those who might have been targeted as being complicit in the leaks. At a later point inside the room the three are joined by Guardian U.S. defence and intelligence correspondent Ewen MacAskill 25 See ‘Snowden’s NSA Secret: Rubik’s Cube Storage Holder’, Spyscape website, 2023. https://spyscape.com/article/snowdens-secret-rubiks-cube-storage-holder.

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(Tom Wilkinson), who acts as a trusted point of contact with the newspaper’s then U.S. editor Janine Gibson (Joely Richardson). Stone and Fitzgerald’s diegetic structure is linear in the sense that this frame narrative works in counterpoint to the life story that Snowden relates by way of explanation of his actions, depicted in periodic, chronologically arranged flashbacks. These flashbacks of the various stages of his journey, bringing him to the critical juncture at which he finds himself, intersect not only with the fictive Poitras’s shooting of material used in the acclaimed Snowden documentary Citizenfour, but also with Greenwald and MacAskill’s delicate and often strained negotiations over potential publication of the bombshell story. Much of the present-tense drama of the frame narrative derives meta-cinematically from the notion that Poitras is capturing and portraying the tension and anxiety in real time on screen for what turned out to be her Academy Award-winning documentary. Overall, this proves a highly effective narrative device for relating how Snowden’s past and present decisions and actions converge. Coming from a conservative patriotic family background, we see the protagonist’s attempt to join the Special Forces of the U.S. Army for active service in Iraq—prompted by the 9/11 attacks and terrorism concerns—frustrated by the double stress fractures in his legs. As an IT wizard, he successfully applies to join the CIA where his instructor and mentor figure Corbin O’Brian (Rhys Ifans) sees his potential value to the organisation’s cybersecurity, as well as its cyber-aggression programmes, incorporating the use of malware. The screenwriters’ choice of name hints unsubtly at the nemesis figure in Orwell’s 1984, and O’Brian’s character, like that of his near-namesake, is entirely invented; similarly, the more benign ‘old pro’ computer expert Hank Forrester (Nicholas Cage), who functions as a dramatic foil to O’Brian’s controlling screen presence, is a fictional creation. Two-dimensional and superficial as these representations appear to be, it is nonetheless clear that Stone and Fitzgerald were trying to distil in their respective characterisations dramatic antitheses: namely, megalomaniac hawks, contemptuous of the transparency and ethical accountability expected in a genuine democracy, and more sceptical law-abiding figures in the NSA or CIA who try, in vain, to change things from within. Another key motif in the film is suggested by Snowden’s natural aversion to being filmed and photographed: “I spent too much time looking at other people through cameras”, he remarks at one point. Invasion of privacy and intrusion into the private lives of citizens is an issue that is,

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likewise, raised by Bartlett’s play, if more theatrically and obliquely. Here, Snowden’s camera-shy behaviour underlines the point and then proceeds to bold it, to ensure the visual metaphor is not lost on the viewer. In his early courting of girlfriend Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley), who subsequently joined Snowden in Moscow, married him and has had two children with him, the juxtaposition of his defensive conservatism and her open-hearted liberalism is simplistic but dramatically effective. Thus, much of the film’s imagery and symbolism, while grounded in more prosaic fact, strikes the viewer as conforming to the familiar dramatic and affective tropes of cinematic and literary illusion. These retrospective episodes punctuate the realistic and accurate frame story at intervals, in which showing the protagonist’s backstory is substituted for telling it. Stone and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle were faced with the practical challenge of transposing a narrative that, in essence, revolves around private cerebral online activity into a credible but engaging dramatically enacted scenario. In order to accentuate the drama and synthesise the more extended timelines and events of everyday life, archival media footage of relevant interviews and breaking news, expanded computer-screen imagery and heightened visual effects are employed in the composition and post-production, so that the film simulates fictive political thrillers, such as the Jason Bourne franchise or Le Carré screen adaptations. This method of cinematic compression and amplification does not, however, distort the truthful representation of the frame narrative, since the flashback sequences are plausibly intimated as a jumble of kaleidoscopic images in Snowden’s memory. While he attempts to clarify his thoughts and memories for the sake of Poitras’s crucially important documentary film and to gain the necessary trust of the Guardian journalists, his heightened mental reconstruction of the relevant facts and events is understandably affected by anxiety and stress. As we know from Citizenfour and the impressions given by his online communications, the real-life Snowden proved remarkably composed and articulate when presenting his damning case against the NSA, seemingly conflicting with Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s interpretation of him as reticent, even introverted. The latter’s dramatic portrait was, nonetheless, convincing in the context of a film dramatisation, and in any case we have no way of knowing how closely it corresponded with his real-life personality. It is during Snowden’s time as a CIA cybersecurity employee, working in signals intelligence in Geneva and subsequently as a contractor for the

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NSA in Tokyo, Maryland and Hawaii, that, as he recounts to Poitras, the scales fall from his eyes, and disillusionment with the neoconservative grand narrative sets in. This process is represented as the dramatic enactment of an interior cognitive dissonance: increasingly, his patriotic conservative beliefs and values are challenged by his empirical knowledge of the mass surveillance dragnet of both international and domestic communications that lives up to its name, ‘Boundless Informant’, a worldwide spy network on citizens and democratically elected figures. His computer-nerd colleagues take it for granted that, having agreed to the confidentiality pledge, he has no ethical issues with the bulk surveillance system, and enlighten him accordingly: “Three hops from anyone with say 40 contacts, you’re looking at a list of 2.5 million people. There’s that moment when you’re sitting there and the scale of it hits you”, he reflects to Poitras. “The NSA is really tracking every cell phone in the world. No matter who you are, every day of your life, you’re sitting in a database just ready to be looked at. And not just terrorists, or countries or corporations, but you.” Just to ensure that the enormity of this assault on individual privacy is not lost on us, the film at this point shows us images of ordinary people blissfully unaware of the intrusions into their private lives. We also learn, as Snowden himself does, that the sweeping and unfiltered PRISM programme siphons data from major telecommunications and internet companies, with their compliance, and compensates them with taxpayer money for their costs involved in providing subscriber data. Despite its somewhat clichéd good-versus-bad agonistic depiction in the flashback episodes of the film, Snowden does an excellent job of conveying to viewers—empathising with its protagonist and seeing what he sees—the loss of innocence and belief in putative Western democratic values in the way that cyber-intelligence has been weaponised. The seeds of doubt are initially planted by a cynical remark made by the friendly Forrester, who admires his protégé’s abilities but not his naïveté, caustically referring to intelligence technology as ‘Military Industrial Happiness Management.’ Explaining why his targeted and filtered surveillance system was rejected in favour of a vastly more expensive unfiltered model, Forrester pinpoints the cynicism beneath the veneer of patriotic ideology in a line that might have come from Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States: “Keep coffers open in Congress, money flowing to the contractors; efficiency, results, they go out the window.” Later, in his initiation on a hunting trip into the ways of the

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conservative establishment, the protagonist engages in a debate with the hawkish O’Brian, who closes the debate with the chilling apothegm, “secrecy is security and security is victory”. This parody of Stone’s adversaries’ arguments may sound like a line from Orwell’s final dystopian novel, but the protagonist’s acceptance of the need for covert intelligencegathering in response to global threats resonates with the perceptions of many ordinary Americans. Conversely, what might be termed epiphanic moments are created by Snowden’s response to media interviews, of which two or three are especially significant for his learning arc. The clip in which presidential candidate Barack Obama pledges, “no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens and no more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient—that is not who we are”, as Snowden and Mills watch the 2008 election results on TV, is a trigger for the protagonist’s change of perception. Their optimism about the incoming Democrat President proves to be sadly misplaced, as Obama showed that was very much who they were, and indeed still are,26 despite a number of court rulings and temporary restrictions on the NSA in the wake of the scandal. Similarly, Stone inserts a non-fictional extract from a televised Congressional interview under oath with James Clapper, then Director of National Intelligence. Clapper is responding to a question from Democratic Senator Ron Wyden regarding the mass surveillance of ordinary Americans via tech company data and phone lines. Knowing full well that billions of emails and domestic calls are snooped on, far more than in other countries, Snowden observes Clapper’s evasions and lies in the interview. As he remarked in interview27 following the disclosures, this was a breaking-point for him, meaning that there was no going back on his decision to expose the truth. When in Hawaii he sees the Epic Shelter programme that he proposed and developed as a backup security programme being used for drone attacks in foreign countries, he is sickened by its casual use for the remote attacks in Pakistan that, in part, blighted Obama’s presidency. For him, an

26 See Alex Tudoran, ‘How the NSA is keeping tabs on you in 2021’, Privacy Hub (promoting Cyberghost VPN). According to the article actual figures remain classified, the amount of data reviewed daily by the NSA is in the billions of gigabytes. https://www. cyberghostvpn.com/en_US/privacyhub/how-the-nsa-is-keeping-tabs-on-you-in-2021/. 27 See ‘Snowden Interview Transcript’, NDR.de website, 26 January 2014. https:// web.archive.org/web/20140128224438/http://www.ndr.de/ratgeber/netzwelt/snowde n277_page-2.html

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ethical line has been crossed, and the cyber-defence work that he signed up for and believed he was doing has evolved into video-games-style hits in regions that don’t subscribe to global American hegemony. In this scene we see Snowden rebut his superior Trevor’s argument that ordinary people working in government jobs can’t be held accountable for criminal acts, by citing the Nuremberg principles of the U.N. charter based on the 1946 Nuremberg trials, thereby emphasising his independent critical thinking and attitude toward responsible citizenship. Stone implies that his witnessing of these extrajudicial killings proves decisive in the protagonist’s decision to smuggle out compromising data on a portable device. Discussing the reason for his actions before the news is broken by Greenwald’s explosive Guardian stories on June 6th and June 9th, Snowden makes a salient and simple point in his videotaped interview with Poitras in an attempt to convince the viewer that his whistleblowing has no ulterior motives: “There is no hidden agenda. I wanted to get this data to established journalists like yourself, so you can present it to the world. And the people can decide, either I’m wrong or there’s something going on inside the government that’s really wrong.” In this final part of the film the fictional doppelgänger and the man himself start to converge. Gordon-Levitt’s portrayal in these closing scenes is carefully modulated to make him approximate more closely to the real-life Snowden in speech and appearance. A split screen facilitates the segue from dramatic representation to real-life reconstruction, as the living Snowden is shot in his Moscow flat, re-enacting a 2014 web interview. Stone’s aesthetic strategy to blur the lines between the semi-real and the dramatic and between the real Snowden and his avatar is an effective ploy. It enables the film to vindicate the whistleblower and to critique the U.S. Government’s knee-jerk policy of ‘shoot the messenger’. As ‘the messenger’ points out in his response to the intense hostility provoked by the leaks, he has no choice but to stay in Moscow, since his passport was revoked by the U.S. government and he is unable to take an onward flight to South America as originally planned. The actual Snowden’s intervention inevitably adds weight to the film’s ideological argument, particularly when he observes: “This is not about terrorism; terrorism is the excuse. This is about economic and social control, and the only thing you’re

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really protecting is the supremacy of your government.”28 While Stone’s political sympathies come across loud and clear in his and Fitzgerald’s choice of Snowden quotations for their screenplay, at the same time, we glean factual knowledge from the film pertinent to the debate and controversy surrounding government whistleblowers such as Snowden. For example, audiences are made aware that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was, in practice, employed not only to monitor foreign intelligence, but also to circumvent the Fourth Amendment rights of U.S. citizens. In this respect, for all the creative licence it takes, the film succeeds in mediating Snowden’s measured, fact-based argumentation, just as Born on the Fourth of July transcoded and reflected Kovic’s own political positions. Considering the film’s original fictional roots in Kucherena’s thriller novel, Stone’s contemporary biopic proved a surprisingly coherent intervention in what emerged as an intense ethical–political debate about unconstitutional government espionage worldwide. The film’s financing was a major headache, with no U.S.-based producer willing to brave the wrath of a vengeful government. Apart from a few scenes shot in D.C. it was mostly shot in France and Germany, and, following release delays, flopped at the box-office. Nevertheless, it received acclaim when shown at various international festivals, including Cannes. The film’s fidelity to facts was bound to be challenged in the light of Poitras’s earlier documentary on the same subject, but it really needs to be seen as complementary to the latter work, creating empathy with a largely unknown and demonised figure through biographical dramatisation. The real-life Greenwald made a persuasive case for investigative independent journalism and filmmaking in relation to the Snowden leaks in a U.K. Channel Four television interview. He concluded that the mass surveillance of citizens’ electronic communications by democratically elected governments, in collusion with multinational tech companies, would likely lead to “the elimination of individual privacy worldwide.”29 In the film’s non-fiction coda extracted from Snowden’s video-streamed interview with then Guardian editor Alan Rushbridger, the real Snowden sums up the core values that he and Stone share: “The people being able 28 Ibid. 29 ‘Greenwald: UK poses ‘primary threat’ to EU citizens’ privacy’. Channel Four News

website, 18 Dec 2013. https://www.channel4.com/news/uk-threaten-eu-privacy-internetgchq-video.

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to question and hold accountable our government, that’s the principle that the U.S.A. was founded on. If we want to be protecting our security, we should be protecting that principle…We will call them out. We won’t be intimidated and we will not be silenced…Without the information to start a public debate we’re lost.” Stone’s defiant biopic and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s relatable impersonation of him did Snowden the service of calling precisely for this public debate on the abuse of technology for the purposes of mass surveillance, one that most governments would rather not have. Official Secrets (Gavin Hood U.K. 2019) Gavin Hood’s film presents a similarly controversial espionage case to Snowden, telling how another humble intelligence services employee took a self-sacrificing ethical stand, this time on the other side of ‘the pond’. Marcia and Thomas Mitchell published their non-fiction study of the Katharine Gun case, following the latter’s aborted February 2004 trial, only four years after the events in 2008, but it took another eleven years before her remarkable story made it to the big screen. The Mitchells’ book, entitled The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War: Katharine Gun and the Secret Plot to Sanction the Iraq Invasion, recounted how the leak of a single memo to the press by a government officer with the British national intelligence agency GCHQ made waves within the British establishment. Gun was attempting to prevent what she saw as the U.K. government’s illegal plan to ally with the United States in the invasion of Iraq, ignoring the U.N. requirement for a second resolution. American whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers three decades earlier, described her action as, “The most important and courageous leak I’ve ever seen. No one else has ever done what she did: tell secret truths at personal risks before an imminent war, in time possibly to avert it.”30 In the event, the Crown Prosecution Service dropped the case by which time the invasion had already gone ahead in spite of mass opposition to it in the U.K. and elsewhere. Katharine Gun’s brief cause célèbre soon disappeared off the radar of public consciousness. Although Sara and Gregory Bernstein had quickly adapted a movie script based on the Mitchells’ book, it remained on the drawing-board 30 Daniel Ellsberg speaking about the Katharine Gun case, February 2018 Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/257307270.

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until British film and music producer Ged Doherty and South African director Gavin Hood teamed up to bring it to the screen in 2019, with script rewrites by Hood. The real reason it took so long is a mystery, but one that is likely to have been related to the sensitivity of the subject-matter. Three years previously a film with the same title had been announced in the industry press, featuring an almost entirely different production-and-direction-team, in addition to a very different cast that included Anthony Hopkins, Gillian Anderson and Harrison Ford. Why this earlier iteration never came to fruition is a matter for speculation, all the more so considering the fact that the key political players, as well as journalists and legal representatives, were very much alive at the time and still are at the time of writing. Unlike the antagonists of Snowden who had been fictionalised and/or generalised by the script, Official Secrets did not shy away from naming names, in order to present as accurate a picture of the Katharine Gun affair as possible. Unsurprisingly, the film drew criticism from former Director of Public Prosecutions Ken Macdonald, who was portrayed unflatteringly in the fact-based drama. The latter repudiated Hood’s thesis that the decision to effectively withdraw the case—even though the trial had already begun— was prompted by the need to prevent the public knowing the truth about discrepancies between the two instances of Lord Goldsmith’s legal advice to Tony Blair on the Iraq invasion.31 Macdonald argued that proceeding with the trial would have compromised national security, since classified material could not be provided to the defence, and the case was dropped, supposedly to protect Gun’s right to a fair trial. In reply, Hood and former Observer journalist Martin Bright both expressed scepticism regarding this rather unconvincing explanation.32 Referring to the attempt to whitewash the government’s actions as “obfuscatory”, Hood issued a challenge to the ever-secretive British establishment: “Macdonald now suggests that the case was not dropped because Goldsmith did not want his advice revealed. Rather, he says there were other ‘national security’ reasons for doing so. If that is true, then one is compelled to ask when this material might be declassified and the real reasons for dropping the case made

31 See ‘Iraq war whistleblower’s trial “was halted due to national security threat”’ by Mark Townsend, The Guardian, 1 September 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/uknews/2019/sep/01/iraq-war-whistleblower-katharine-gun-national-security. 32 Ibid.

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known to the public.”33 As might have been expected, his call met with a deafening silence. Although the film dramatises the facts of the Katharine Gun case, as with Snowden the director had the blessing of Gun herself,34 who now resides in Turkey together with her Kurdish husband Yasar and their daughter. In its closing shot, it features television footage of the exonerated Gun addressing reporters outside the Old Bailey, just as Stone’s film had closed with shots of the real-life Snowden. Hood’s strategy was to depict events and personas as accurately as possible, even if his dramatic interest was weighted in favour of the whistleblower and The Observer’s investigative journalists. Relevant names, places and dates are superimposed on the screen to inform the viewer of the timeline and key players, adding a sense of authenticity. However, his dramatised version of recent history certainly did not meet with the approval of Macdonald, who disputed the accuracy of meetings between himself and former colleague and member of Gun’s defence team, Ben Emmerson.35 As was the case with Snowden and other dramatisations of real-life events, if there were any minor misrepresentations involved, these wouldn’t necessarily invalidate the film’s themes and core thesis. Discussing what he derived from his in-depth interviews with Gun prior to filming, Hood summed it up thus: “The idea behind the film is what would you do at your work if you discover something that is illegal and immoral. When do you speak up? We’re living through it in a way, many industries, including our own industry. At the risk of losing your job, and in her case, at the risk of losing your freedom…It’s a story of conscience. Is she a traitor? Is she a patriot?”.36 Official Secrets is one of the hardest-hitting Anglophone political films of the twenty-first century to date, because it presents the picture of a government that is not representative of the people, not acting for the people and that does not welcome interventions by the people. Praising the narrative structure of the film in an online review, Peter Hanson noted, “Official Secrets isn’t even only about secrets—it is about lies.

33 Ibid. 34 Director and cast interviews on Official Secrets DVD. Paramount Pictures Home

Entertainment, 2020. 35 Townsend, The Guardian, Ibid. 36 Official Secrets DVD, interview with Gavin Hood.

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On the most fundamental level, this film explores what happens when a government sells a fabrication to the public in order to achieve a political goal.”37 To that extent, it resembles the majority of the companion case studies in the present overview of political film and theatre this century. However, the drama of the film is subordinate to its close adherence to factual detail, particularly in relation to the legitimacy of the invasion of Iraq and the scope of the Official Secrets Act. Whereas in the U.S. there is no Official Secrets Act but there is a codified written constitution, in the U.K. there is no codified written constitution but an Official Secrets Act, one that was reinforced in the late twentieth century, as we learn in the film’s legal deliberations. As her defence team ponders options for her plea, the idea of her intervention being in the public interest is ruled out. Following civil servant Clive Ponting’s successful defence in a leak case concerning the decision to sink the Argentinian troop carrier The Belgrano during the Falklands War, the Thatcher government changed the Act in 1989 to preclude this line of defence. Essentially, therefore, the law says the public interest is whatever the government declares it is. This critical challenge to an unbalanced law is intrinsic to the film’s purpose as a work reflecting Gun’s conscience-based argument that “the truth always matters”.38 It is important to emphasise in this connection that Official Secrets is not a Snowden-style biopic focusing primarily on Katharine’s perspective. Even in the Snowden scenes shot in the Mira Hotel in Hong Kong, the protagonist is always the primary focus. By contrast, in Official Secrets the focus and point of view alternate between Katharine herself, journalist Martin Bright and his Observer colleagues and the legal staff at the Liberty Human Rights organisation. This tripartite story structure enables Hood to place the spotlight on the key issue of official secrets in the U.K. as well as on the lack of democratic accountability for the actions of the Blair government. The Chilcot Report, which scrutinised the legal basis for the invasion, was eventually published in 2016, and its findings vindicated the film’s critique of the extremely

37 ‘All the Write Moves: Official Secrets ’ by Peter Hanson, Final Draft website, 3 September 2019. https://blog.finaldraft.com/all-the-write-moves-official-secrets. 38 Tim Adams, The Guardian. Interview with Katharine Gun. 22 September 2019 https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/sep/22/katharine-gun-whistleblower-iraq-off icial-secrets-film-keira-knightley.

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shaky basis for going to war.39 But by the time it appeared in the century’s second decade it was little more than a footnote to the events, and made no substantial difference. On the real-life Liberty’s website today the tagline reads: “There is a democratic crisis in the UK. The Government are shutting accountability in Parliament, through the courts, on the streets and in civil society.”40 This tells us all we need to know regarding the effectiveness of the conclusions and recommendations contained in the report. Official Secrets opens near the end of the narrative with a proleptic scene extract that features Katharine (Keira Knightly) ascending the steps to the dock at the start of her Old Bailey trial in February 2004. The film immediately flashes back to late January 2003 focusing on Yasar (Adam Bakri) and Katharine’s simple domestic life in Cheltenham and their respective work lives, Katharine’s as a GCHQ translator and Yasar’s as a café manager. Archival television footage of Blair and Bush making the case for war, to which Katharine responds angrily, provides significant temporal context. We also see Yasar signing in at the local police station as required, while he waits for his U.K. citizenship based on marital status with Katharine to come through. Later, in her office, Katharine reads a top-secret email memo sent to all GCHQ staff from a Mr Frank Koza, Head of Regional Targets at the NSA, requesting material designed to persuade U.N. member nations to support a second resolution legitimising Bush’s invasion plan. Or, as Ellsberg described it, “Coerce their vote…for the pursuit of an illegal war by illegal means”.41 The reason behind this request was that the Americans wanted their biddable Five Eyes partner to ‘dig the dirt’ on non-compliant U.N. delegates from less powerful ‘swing-nations’; given that the U.N. headquarters are situated in New York, the potential embarrassment resulting from direct U.S. involvement was a risk they preferred to avoid. Katharine’s reaction of disgust is no different from that of her close colleagues, but, whereas the others are able to put it out of their minds, Katharine is unable to do the same; she prints a copy of the memo and 39 The Chilcot Report examined the U.K.’s involvement in Iraq from 2001 to 2009 and was published on 6 July 2016 by the Cabinet Office. https://www.gov.uk/govern ment/publications/the-report-of-the-iraq-inquiry. 40 Liberty Human Rights Organisation webpage. https://www.libertyhumanrights.org. uk/about-us/liberty-team/. 41 Ellsberg, Ibid. See Note 242.

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smuggles it out of GCHQ, and after much soul-searching passes it to a retired former colleague with contacts in the anti-war movement. We see Katharine watching an excerpt from Blair’s television interview with David Frost, in which the Prime Minister claims Saddam has, or is developing, weapons of mass destruction, despite the complete lack of reliable evidence to support his claim. In another interview extract a shiftylooking Bush’s claims of Saddam’s links to Al Queda draws an irritable response from Katharine: “There are no credible links. It doesn’t make any sense”. Her obsession with news reports about the impending war begins to create tension with her husband, who reminds her of Saddam’s atrocities against Kurds. Televised footage of the massive Stop the War protest march in London on 15th February—which the real-life Katharine Gun attended—is featured in the film, although her presence is not indicated to viewers. Another important televised clip that produces a strong reaction from Katharine is Powell’s supposed ‘honest-broker’ address to the U.N. She is only too well aware that the solid intelligence the Americans claim to possess is mendacious, and her facial expressions and body language betray increasing tension and agitation. The narrative focus then switches to The Observer in London where award-winning U.S. correspondent Ed Vulliamy (Rhys Ifans) is at odds with the newspaper’s chief editor Roger Alton (Conleth Hill) and political editor Kamal Ahmed (Ray Panthaki) over what he regards as their inappropriately close relationship with Downing Street and consequent support for the invasion. When the newspaper’s up-and-coming journalist Martin Bright (Matt Smith) receives the leaked memo passed to him by an anti-war campaigner, he gets the support of Foreign Editor colleague Peter Beaumont (Matthew Goode) in pressing the pro-war senior editors to agree to publication. The heated debate between Alton and Ahmed on one side and Beaumont and Bright on the other is riveting, since it gets to the heart of relevant issues about much of the mainstream media’s reluctance to rock the political boat. A major concern for the senior staff is that the memo might prove a forgery, akin to the bogus ‘Hitler Diaries’ published by The Sunday Times twenty years earlier. Ahmed, therefore, proposes spiking the story. Bright aptly rejoins: “since when did this paper prioritise political access over investigative reporting?”. Beaumont is able to find out from his MI6 source that Powell’s claim of evidence is based on an unreliable report from an Iraqi dissident, unacknowledged by the intelligence services and therefore not a credible source. Bright consults Rear-Admiral Nick Wilkinson (Clive Francis)

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of the Defence, Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee who gives an even more categorical, if oblique, response: “I believe all information collected in the name of the public should be made public. The only question is when…Censorship, when called for, should be based on security questions alone, not on whether a news report might embarrass a government.” When the persistent Vulliamy, now back in New York, tricks his way into speaking to the NSA’s Koza, who unwittingly confirms his identity on the phone, the case for publication becomes much stronger. Unexpectedly, and ignoring Ahmed’s opposition, Alton agrees, acknowledging that it’s “a fucking good story”. At the same time, the Observer colleagues realise they are taking a big risk with the story: even if a ‘D’ notice banning the article were not to be issued by the government, the Special Branch could raid the newspaper—as occurred at The Guardian in connection with the Snowden material—if The Observer goes ahead and publishes. Bright is surrounded by congratulatory colleagues when the scoop finally appears on March 2nd. The Observer scenes are intercut with a scene in Katharine’s local shop in which she catches sight of Bright’s lead article with its headline: ‘Revealed: US Dirty Tricks to win vote on Iraq war’. Her reaction to the story is mixed, as she tells Yasar when she shows him the front-page story; several weeks having elapsed without any upshot, she has begun to assume the memo is considered a fake. Back in The Observer headquarters, there is a dramatic twist that imitates the real-life turn of events. The deflated journalists at first believe they have been deceived into printing a fake news story when the conservative American website ‘The Drudge Report’ repudiates it, pointing out that the spelling convention used in the memo is British English, not American. Checking the text against the leaked memo, the relieved Bright notes that American conventions are used in the original locked in his desk; the memo text was changed after a junior staffer ran the article through a standard automatic spellcheck process. Unfortunately the damage is done; having cast doubt on the veracity of The Observer’s reporting, the right-wing media continue to follow the government’s line and push the case for war, despite polls showing fewer than 1 in 10 people in the U.K. support it. At this point, the focus resumes on Katherine, who is now experiencing serious pressure at work. At first she hopes to evade detection, which she does successfully, but she feels a moral imperative to confess the leak in view of suspicion falling on various colleagues during GCHQ’s stringent security interviews. Retribution is swift, and Katharine is detained

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overnight at a police station and informed she may be charged under the Official Secrets Act. She stands her ground in the face of tough interrogation by the detective inspector. When the latter reprimands her, saying that she works for the government and is bound to secrecy, she responds defiantly: “No. I don’t work for the government. Governments change. I work for the British people. I gather intelligence so that the government can protect the British people. I do not gather intelligence so that the government can lie to the British people…What I object to is gathering intelligence to fix a vote at the U.N. and deceive a world into going to war.” As she leaves the police station accompanied by Yasar, the duty lawyer who is assigned to her recommends a lawyers’ cooperative organisation named Liberty, specialising in human rights and political cases. Nevertheless, she doesn’t at first follow up, feeling constrained by her professional commitment to secrecy. Inevitably, Katharine’s life is turned upside down, and she is now followed by security agents whenever she leaves home. Having summoned up the determination to approach Liberty, Katharine says to their legal team in justification of her position: “I watched Blair with his smug smile and his sterile speeches that tell us nothing of what it must be like to be a child in Iraq now.” Media footage of the devastating ‘shock and awe’ bombing of Baghdad on the night of 19 March 2003, watched on television in real time by Observer staff, graphically illustrates the rationale for Katharine’s decision to leak the memo. Another dramatic plot component is the real-life harassment and attempted deportation of Yasar Gun by the Home Office, most likely deployed as a vindictive form of psychological warfare to make Katharine capitulate. Liberty lawyer James Welch (John Heffernan) contacts her MP Nigel Jones (Chris Larkin) who calls the Home Office, complaining of “state bullying”. After Katharine makes a frantic dash to Heathrow, the reprieve comes through just as Yasar is about to board the plane. Creative licence can be assumed in this portrayal of a last-minute rescue, but the scene heightens the film’s dramatic tension, and Bakri and Knightly play it compellingly. It also puts the spotlight on the U.K.’s deportation policies under successive hawkish Home Secretaries, as well as on the then Home Secretary’s role in extraordinary rendition practices, designated illegal under international law. In the second half of the film the three plot strands converge around the preparation for Katharine’s trial, although it took eight months

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before the Crown Prosecution Service under Macdonald decided to prosecute. Since the trial was abandoned for want of prosecution evidence, it couldn’t be used by the filmmakers as a dramatic centrepiece in the time-honoured tradition of courtroom dramas about sociopolitical injustices. Instead, what the film dramatises is the debate itself, both in respect of the legitimacy of the war, as pursued by the journalists involved, and of Katharine’s actions, given her stubborn refusal to plead guilty in order to mitigate her sentence. These strands run effectively in counterpoint, necessitating considerable cross-cutting to maintain dramatic tension, as we observe Bright, Vulliamy and Beaumont working in close collaboration to show the hollowness of the pro-war arguments. In a scene, supposedly filmed from a possible weapons site in Iraq, Beaumont is shown reporting to his colleagues that weapons inspectors have found no trace of the chemical and biological weaponry that Blair and his head of MI6 Richard Dearlove claimed could be deployed to attack London within forty-five minutes. In fact, as reports have proved, these bogus claims had already been withdrawn by MI6 in July 2003 before the decision was made to charge Katharine.42 The sleuth-like Vulliamy shares his discovery of a newly created U.S. Office of Special Plans, under the auspices of the hardline Donald Rumsfeld and run by fellow-hawk Paul Wolfowitz, to work independently of the acknowledged intelligence services, with the aim of feeding raw, unvetted intelligence to the Bush government’s intended allies and to the media. This furtive shadow operation expressly set up to spread disinformation recalls the mysterious Future Planning Department amusingly satirised by Armando Iannucci in the previous decade’s In the Loop. As Vulliamy informs Bright, this is where Blair and his colleagues are getting their ‘intelligence’ from. By representing not only the debate surrounding possible angles of defence between legal strategist Ben Emmerson (Ralph Fiennes) and colleagues Shami Chakrabati (Indira Varma) and Welch, but also between Emmerson and Director of Crown Prosecutions Macdonald (Jeremy Northam), Hood keeps the drama’s core arguments centre stage. In a powerful scene that may have been fictional in part but is convincing, Macdonald visits Emmerson in his holiday cottage, and attempts to persuade him that it is not in the public interest to defend Katharine Gun because the government needs to make an example of her. The dialogue 42 See ‘MI6 stood by bogus intelligence until after Iraq invasion’, Ewen MacAskill, The Guardian, 6 July 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jul/06/mi6stood-by-bogus-intelligence-until-after-iraq-invasion.

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is tense, and belies the collegiality and friendship that exists between the two: EMMERSON: Following orders is not a defence to a war crime.” MACDONALD: Who is she to undermine the strategic objectives of a democratically elected Prime Minister? EMMERSON: She exposed an illegal attempt to secure a UN resolution for war, which would have given Blair perfect cover for the bloody mess that we are in now…So then you would never question authority, even if you knew it was breaking the law? I’ll make my position perfectly clear: if you charge her, then I will defend her to the best of my ability.43

As Emmerson points out, the former colleagues are not on the same side any more, effectively ending their friendship. That political fallout can also be personal is evident from the film’s coda, in which the human rights lawyer tells his former friend to move his fishing line further up the beach, since he no longer wishes to associate with him. Emmerson’s debate with Macdonald simply hardens his resolve to defend Katharine, comparing her selfless and principled stand to his former friend’s ruthless expediency. His strategy is to “put the war on trial”, as Chakrabati quizzically describes it, contending that Katharine tried to stop an illegal war in order to save the lives of countless Iraqi citizens and British and American troops. What clinches the case for the defence is Emmerson’s meeting with the former Deputy Attorney General Elizabeth Wilmshurst (Tamsin Greig), who resigned on principle when Goldsmith changed his advice on the legality of the war. Without violating the Official Secrets Act, Wilmshurst is able to confirm what Vulliamy has uncovered, namely that Goldsmith supported a second resolution and agreed that the war would be illegal at the time Katharine Gun printed the Koza memo on 3 February 2003. What appears likely to have changed his mind was his Washington trip on 11 February where he was invited to meet with the attorneys of Bush, Powell, Rumsfeld and Condoleeza Rice. Katharine’s legal team decide to offer the argument of necessity as a legitimate reason for breaching the Act. In the event, Liberty’s request for fair disclosure of all legal advice provided to the U.K. Government prior to the decision to invade puts 43 Official Secrets script by Gregory Bernstein, Sara Bernstein and Gavin Hood. Transcript at https://subslikescript.com/movie/Official_Secrets-5431890.

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the government in an extremely embarrassing position; it gives the prosecution no option but to go ahead with the trial, to avoid any accusations of a climb-down, but to present no evidence against the accused. As Emmerson (in fact, Alex Bailin KC represented Katharine in the curtailed trial) points out to the judge, the documents he has called for would show that the government took the country to war illegally and could thus be exposed to prosecution for war crimes. Ultimately, Blair, Goldsmith and others were castigated in Sir John Chilcot’s report,44 and the vindicated Katharine Gun, no longer able to find work in a country that some thought she had betrayed, left to live outside the U.K. After the real-life Katharine is shown talking to reporters, figures of the war-dead, Iraqi, British and American, are displayed on the screen, underlining the film’s sober indictment of government actions and decisions. While Official Secrets is enough of a docudrama to convince a fair-minded audience that exposing the truth when governments lie is a moral duty not a crime, Hood’s film is also sufficiently exciting as a dramatic feature to immerse viewers in Katharine Gun’s extraordinary act of courage and resistance.

44 See Tom Moore, ‘Far from satisfactory’: Chilcot highly critical of Lord Goldsmith over Iraq War’ Legal Business, 6 July 2016. https://www.legalbusiness.co.uk/blogs/farfrom-satisfactory-chilcot-highly-critical-of-lord-goldsmith-over-iraq-war/.

CHAPTER 8

Conclusion: Progressive Drama and its Potentialities

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it. —Oscar Wilde1

This brief closing chapter will sum up key arguments and insights arising from the discussion in the foregoing chapters. It will summarise how my selected film and stage dramas reflect sociopolitical concerns in today’s world, as well as responding to the key questions raised in the opening part of the book. It will evaluate more literal and more allegorical approaches to dramatic material, as well as the interrelationship between factual and fictional elements, in conveying ideas and truth values to audiences. It will also indicate how these focus areas can influence further scholarship in the field of contemporary political drama. My selected case study texts cover a cross-section of genres, styles and dramatic conceits, as well as thematic concerns, related to social and political injustice. Inevitably, they reflect an idiosyncratic and intuitive choice, which supports the key arguments of my study. They span U.S. and U.K., as well as more broadly international, contexts, employing an amalgam of factual and fictional settings and characters. Other film and play dramas referred to in my study could easily have qualified for

1 Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist. Green Integer Books, 1997, 50. I think we can safely assume Wilde wasn’t referring to high-school or university history textbooks.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Ingham, Anglo-American Stage and Screen Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45198-0_8

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selection as case studies, as I have pointed out above; any of the wellcrafted British political dramas of James Graham, or the American political satires of Adam McKay, for example, would have been apt choices, but my rationale was to cover as representative and diverse a range of politically inspired works as possible, and some potential texts did not make my final cut. Where a play or film by one author, such as Mike Bartlett’s Wild, was selected, I did not choose an eligible alternative by the same author, for example Bartlett’s Charles III , with its nods to the future as well as the past (i.e. Shaw’s 1929 play The Apple Cart: A Political Extravaganza) in its monarch-versus-Parliament clash. I also opted for Caryl Churchill’s most pointedly political play of the two decades, even though I could have selected other outstanding and relevant works, such as Far Away (2000), A Number (2002) or Escaped Alone (2016). The same is true of other dramatists represented, particularly David Hare and Lynn Nottage. Films such as Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton (2007), Doug Liman’s Fair Game (2010), Adam McKay’s Vice (2018), Anthony Woodley’s The Flood (2019) or Scott Z. Burns’ The Report (2019) would have been valid choices as case studies, but I also sought to find a judicious balance between female and male playwrights and filmmakers, as well as between ethnically diverse dramatists and directors as far as was feasible. What these markedly diverse texts share is a reflection of the major issues of our times. Unlike more escapist entertainment genres of theatre and cinema, such as jukebox musicals, franchise action movies or others designed, reasonably enough, to divert and distract from the harsher realities of life, these works offer critique and commentary on a number of key challenges facing us. In the introductory section I posed the question whether film and stage fictions and dramatised non-fictions can interact meaningfully with today’s political arena in the notional context of a forum for progressive ideas and values. The case studies discussed in detail and other plays and films referenced in passing in Chapters Four to Seven provide ample evidence of the power of film and theatre to speak eloquently to today’s crises, whether they are genuine or manufactured by political and corporate elites. Filmgoers and theatre-goers are invited by all of the texts to consider and react to the injustice, corruption and absurdity of the twenty-first century. If there is a perception that progressive dramatists, directors and performers are preaching to the converted, it is important to bear in mind that all of the case-study plays and films achieved public recognition,

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though some more than others. Their critical success as touring productions or at film festivals was also instrumental in raising awareness of the critical and/or progressive issues they raised. We should also acknowledge that critical and audience reception of any art work is collective at the level of a shared aesthetic experience, but individual and, felicitously, diverse upon personal reflection and evaluation. All that can be accomplished is to stimulate a response. While theatrical and cinematic works don’t usually prompt riots, as they did, say, in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, some responses involve extreme forms of rejection, or even prohibition. Today, censorship of adversarial or antipathetic ideas and subject-matter on spurious grounds of causing offence is a tendency that is ominously proliferating in more doctrinaire contexts of supposed democratic governance. In the coming years and decades, continuous resistance to the pernicious social effects of arts censorship appears to be increasingly necessary. In response to my follow-up question concerning methods of representation, I have explored differences and commonalities between the respective stage and screen works in my case studies. While they share the common goal of making a progressive sociopolitical intervention and targeting injustice and abuse of power, there are substantial differences of approach across the two media. To begin with, their approaches to realism vary considerably as a result of coming from markedly different performance conventions and different contexts of reception, the one in which performers are present and the other in which they are not. Today, most modern dramatists and theatre directors are less concerned with illusionistic staging than with conveying themes and ideas in a pragmatic style that serves the purpose of the drama. Contemporary narrative film, by contrast, in its cinematography does not usually stray too far from an illusionistic dramatic representation of the world, and all of the case-study films, with the partial exception of Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, conform to this type. While direct address is employed in most, although not all, of the casestudy plays, thereby breaking the imaginary fourth wall, the case-study movies convey their ideas more visually than verbally, in accordance with the film medium’s propensity for showing rather than telling. Thus, all of the film case studies engage audiences with their ideology more indirectly, permitting the narratives to speak for themselves. Both techniques of mediating the material, indirect narrative and direct address, affect audience reception differently, but it is important to distinguish between the

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goals of fiction film and those of theatrical narration. Whereas contemporary stage drama, as we have seen in a number of case studies, includes documentary-theatre styles such as testimonial theatre, cinematic documentary belongs in a separate category of its own, and none of the case studies breaks the cinematic ‘fourth wall’ of illusionistic drama. A three-way stylistic division between the case studies can be noted between the fact-based topics of Stuff Happens , Guantanamo, Enron, Selma, Snowden and Official Secrets , the partly fact-based themes and partly fictive personae of Drunk Enough to Say I Love You, Until the Flood, and Chimerica and the fictive allegories of contemporary political matters in The Manchurian Candidate, Silver City, Syriana, The Constant Gardener, V for Vendetta In the Loop, Wild, Oil, Sweat , I Daniel Blake and Sorry to Bother You. However each individual case-study mediates fact and truth, or their opposites, in different ways. Even where a case-study play and film share a common theme, for example Bartlett’s play Wild and Stone’s film Snowden, the methods of representation are distinct: the film recounts a conventional but fairly realistic ‘unlikely hero’ narrative about how and why the protagonist shared his sensational story with the world, employing a narrative film-fiction mode, together with occasional use of documentary-style screen captions; in complete contrast, the play eschews the how and why of what happened before Snowden’s shocking revelations, to give us a glimpse of what might have happened to the whistleblower afterwards in his lonely limbo of statelessness and at the mercy of actors with their own political agenda; we see him at his most vulnerable, where he begins to doubt the evidence of his own senses and where his world can at any moment be turned upside down. Both stage dramatist and film director could theoretically have adopted each other’s approach to the material, had they so wished, such is the flexibility of contemporary theatricality and movie technology. The fact that they didn’t tells us something about the differing proclivities of cinematic and theatrical storytelling for mediating dramatic material. When spoken language is replaced by visual coding in stage-to-film transfers, much of the dramatic rhetoric is usually sacrificed. For political stage dramas that sacrifice may not be justifiable. As public performances or filmed performances, the case studies involved a shared aesthetic experience for audiences that offered insights about some of the major sociopolitical scandals of the opening decades of the century committed by the Anglo-American power elite: the opportunistic war on terror and its widespread human rights abuses, the

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viciousness of economic austerity policies, the brazen and unlawful spying on law-abiding citizens, the use of human guinea pigs by multinational pharmaceutical companies and the dire casino capitalism that led directly to the financial crash of 2008. All of these scandals, and others, were unerringly portrayed in damning stage and screen representations. As in the mirror metaphor discussed in the introduction to this book, stage and screen drama can only reflect social mores, not change them. The latter is a task for real-life actors. All of the films and plays discussed in earlier chapters raise thoughtprovoking questions, and critics’ and audiences’ responses to them have generally proved positive. Most of the case-study works achieved a high degree of recognition, both nationally and internationally, and some of them received awards for acting, directing or authorship. Individually, they provide a snapshot of key sociopolitical issues of the first two decades, while collectively attesting to a deteriorating outlook for democratic rights, civil liberties and social justice. The various blights promoted by neoliberal ‘disaster’ capitalism—notably, increasing poverty and precarity, political disenfranchisement, government-licensed employment malpractices, elitist autocracy, ethnic and gender bigotry, international conflict and environmental degradation—have been exacerbated by escalating geopolitical tension throughout the first two decades. Not only has the previously unthinkable been thought, it has also been proposed and, in some cases, implemented: the crude scramble for control of resources in the polar regions as a corollary of the loss of permafrost and the melting ice has distracted attention from the fate of indigenous wildlife and the dangers of widespread climate disruption.2 In many respects, powerful countries are returning to the rhetoric and practices of nationalist imperialism and totalitarian hegemony to ensure the compliance, and even approval, of the populace for their freewheeling sociopolitical Darwinism. It seems as if the toxic legacy of a relentlessly exploitative British imperialism has provided an expansionist template for newer world powers, such as China and India. In Western countries postwar mobility and improvements in life and education expectations for younger generations have declined sharply since the millennium, as has investment in social welfare and services. None of this is accidental or 2 See for example ‘Scenes from the new Cold War unfolding at the top of the world’, National Geographic, 8 May 2019. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/ 2018/10/new-cold-war-brews-as-arctic-ice-melts/.

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inevitable. It is almost always a matter of choice, but the choices are made by the wealthy and powerful, manipulating or bypassing the checks and balances hard won by the democratic advancements of twentieth century universal suffrage. It is also important to emphasise that my frame of reference in this study does not incorporate non-Anglo-American dramas on stage or screen; their omission from the book’s scope of discussion does not imply unreasonable bias against the Anglo-American axis of power or approval of any other autocratic regime or claimed democracy. Whenever consensus is achieved across borders and political divides, it is rarely motivated by concern for general populations, but by powerful, unaccountable and often unelected figures, such as tech oligarchs and multinational corporations. The ongoing economic crisis caused by the international COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions, on top of the greedinspired financial crisis at the end of the first decade, has wrought havoc on ordinary people’s living standards on every continent. The major ‘winners’ have been monopolistic corporations, especially ‘big pharma’ companies, as well as unelected bodies seeking to expand their powers of control. In today’s world the previous political polarities of wealth redistribution appear to have been reversed; crony capitalism is increasingly introducing policies that reflect the ironic meme ‘socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor’, rolling back the more egalitarian legislation and progressive economic policies of the postwar period. Countries controlled by despotic regimes are, predictably, those where crony capitalism is more extreme; nevertheless, governments in putatively democratic countries have also taken full advantage of the opportunities offered by the COVID-19-related ‘reset’ to benefit their influencers and patrons with increasing impunity and lack of accountability. In response to this steady erosion of democratic aspirations, not only in autocracies but also in democracies, and the threats posed by humanitarian and ecological issues, mass popular resistance movements, such as the Occupy Movement, the Climate Movement and the Anti-Capitalist Resistance movement, have been mobilised on an increasingly international scale in the past two decades. Laws that restrict free speech and movement, as well as labour rights, have been pushed through to counter these resistance organisations in ways that are more reminiscent of totalitarian regimes than open democracies. ‘Lawfare’, as it is dubbed, is increasingly being used by governments, corporations and extremely rich individuals to suppress legitimate grievances and inconvenient dissenting views. State-sponsored religious propaganda and extremist intolerance

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towards other social groups have increased exponentially in a number of professedly democratic countries and are affecting the lives of citizens individually and collectively. In the United States the weaponisation of the Supreme Court by the far right has had a profound effect on women’s rights to abortion, for example, effectively bypassing democratic procedures. Today’s systemic binary opposition not only reflects an ideological division between autocracies/plutocracies and democratic government, but also between hard-right populist and democratic adversaries within democracies. Technological advancement in automation and artificial intelligence increasingly threatens the autonomy of individuals, despite the claimed goal of improving life quality. Profligate use of natural resources by rich countries and bloated corporations, in defiance of the United Nations’ calls for more responsible efforts to conserve them, poses a catastrophic threat to future generations. Not only is the tippingpoint for irreversible environmental disaster approaching—with the added spectre of proxy wars mutating into global conflicts—democracy as a sociopolitical system is on a collision course with a rapidly growing neo-fascist plutocracy. New writing for theatre and cinema will play a significant role in representing and debating many of the twenty-first-century’s urgent issues from a critical cognitive and aesthetic distance. Progressive theatre and cinema must continue as long as is possible to complement more direct action in support of democratic accountability, transparency and sociopolitical reforms and counter populist autocracy. As my selected contemporary case studies have demonstrated, filmmakers and dramatists are more than capable of making a significant contribution to any society that considers itself civilised and enlightened by prompting our social consciences to take action. More than simply a vehicle for entertainment, these works provide a window on the world and on the lives of others, and encourage us to imagine alternative perspectives, as the Foucauldian idea of heterotopias suggests. Thus, for example, the sceptical investigative approaches adopted by Lucy Prebble in Enron and Fernando Meirelles in The Constant Gardener would be eminently suitable for dramatic treatments of the COVID-19 crisis. Pertinent questions about both the causes and the deleterious effects of the crisis have not been satisfactorily addressed by any of the obfuscatory official enquiries to date. In retrospect, the economic repercussions and the widespread climate of fear attached to financial and public health crises have inordinately benefited pharmaceutical multinationals and the super-rich generally. Rampant

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corruption and stealth resetting of national economies on a supra-national level by individuals and organisations are appropriate subjects for keen dramatic scrutiny. Independent political dramas by their very natures represent an antidote to Chomsky’s sociopolitical state of manufactured consent, by working to manufacture dissent in the viewer.3 Most important, the types of films and plays explored in this study place a premium on reflecting social and political realities and concepts of justice for ordinary people, rather than the often perverted truth values of the status quo. Constructs of truth and untruth, as well as post-truth, are illustrated in various ways in the case study texts across a spectrum of possibilities, from the inventive and fanciful, as in say, V for Vendetta to the fact-based and verisimilitudinous, as in say, Stuff Happens. The rise of testimonial and verbatim theatre has altered the paradigm whereby dramatic theatre is considered less apt to treat realistic and/or factual subjects than cinematic representation; as discussed above, their differences of representation relate more to style than subject-matter. As Joe Kelleher has argued, theatrical representation in its very modus operandi offers audiences a ‘what-if’ perspective that belies its ephemerality and apparent ‘fragility’. Its value for creating perceptive insights into the fraught questions raised by national and global politics may easily be under-estimated: Much of the theatre’s value for political thinking may derive—paradoxically perhaps—from ‘its seeming fragility and tendency to untruth’ rather than from the strength of its representations and the justice of its political ‘messages’. It may be, now, that the spectacle of manipulative rhetorical speeches being delivered on stage by seemingly fragile performers who draw our attention more to the machinery of representation and amplification than to the words they are actually saying raises some very particular questions about the structures of trust, communication, and political representation that are supposed to govern our lives more generally.4

As my blend of theatrical and cinematic drama texts in this study indicates, I believe much of Kelleher’s argument can be applied equally

3 Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Pantheon Books,1988 and Noam Chomsky, ‘Manufacturing Dissent’, Ibid. 4 Joe Kelleher, Theatre and Politics, Springer, 2009, 43.

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to cinematic representation. Admittedly the rhetorical methods vary: cinematic texts with political overtones convey subtext more subtly to audiences via our conscious and/or subconscious in the form of eloquent imagery that supplements character dialogue, and its narrative sequences and dialogues are typically more elliptical than those of stage texts. Brief epitaphs on screen, often preceding the closing titles of a film, as used in a number of the examples presented in the foregoing chapters, may evoke an elegiac or cathartic mood initially. However, the alchemy of text and image is also capable of inspiring a Brechtian, anti-Aristotelian response as we reflect on the themes and events of the film; this, in turn, influences our longer-term critical thinking in relation to the sociopolitical topics under consideration. As Kelleher’s argument indicates, theatrical and cinematic representations are valuable, therefore, not for showing a singular simplistic or absolute truth, but for provoking our scepticism as to the credibility of the absolute rhetorical ‘truths’ peddled by powerful political forces and the more reactionary media. In so doing, they facilitate more profound understanding of the issues represented in their narratives. Resistance to orthodox ideologies and arguments is thereby stimulated and even nurtured. Despite the current threats to the cultural industries and the cynically manipulated so-called ‘culture wars’, there remains a strong correlation between the dramatic arts and social responsibility. Theatre today, as a social forum and as a catalyst of change, has evolved into a more heterogeneous entity that engages in multiple dramatic styles with global events and movements, as well as with local events of wider significance. Speaking of her own communal work, one of Dael Orlandersmith’s remarks in interview is particularly pertinent in defining the role of contemporary forum theatre in promoting both ideological contestation of reactionary subjugating agendas and social co-dependancy based on mutual respect and empathy: “We need work that will create conversation, understanding…some sort of unity.”5 Thus, instead of experiencing Aristotelian catharsis, the viewer of the agon in a political film or play may respond with a different Aristotelian concept, namely the philosophical idea of entelechy, which concerns the realisation of human potential. Put simply, drama has the power to project individual and collective potentiality, even if it fails to be actualised. Not 5 Dael Orlandersmith, interview with Victoria Myers, ibid. https://www.theintervalny. com/interviews/2018/02/dael-orlandersmith-on-until-the-flood/

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all political dramas can end on the redemptive high of V for Vendetta, and it is dubious whether films and plays with darker conclusions, such as Wild or Silver City or Drunk Enough to Say I Love You, have the capacity to prompt a cathartic experience. Rather, such dramatic works are capable of communicating via a sense of Keatsian negative capability—somewhat akin to Kelleher’s notion of fragility cited above—the strong desire for things to be different. In this way, political theatre and independent political film help to stimulate the potential for change. While not usually in themselves a form of direct action, they promote greater awareness and engage in implicit social debate, which can complement other forms of sociopolitical action, tantamount to Habermas’s theory of communicative action. Science-fiction doyenne Ursula Le Guin made an apposite observation about the capacity for change through the arts: “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”6 Although Le Guin might have been thinking more of the novel when she made this comment, film and theatre arts are conducive to stimulating potentiality through social discourse. As was the case with stage dramas such as Guantanamo, Enron, Oil and Until the Flood and films such as Official Secrets , I , Daniel Blake and Sorry to Bother You, dramatic representations of specific issues can become talking-points, prompting lively and sometimes antagonistic online and print media publicity and debate. This is also because in creating dramatic fictions or ‘factions’, drama offers us the heterotopian space of the dramatic forum to imagine and discuss alternatives, and to envision human potentiality, or in rarer cases, such as V for Vendetta, to see it actualised. While dystopian (or false utopian) films as a genre are part of the heterotopian world of drama and can likewise generate constructive debate, they blur the boundary between science-fiction and politics; I have not included any of them, although the futuristic 2014 film Snowpiercer directed by Korean director Bong Joon-ho was astute in its representation of a post-apocalyptic residual class politics.

6 Ursula Le Guin, Speech in Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, November 19 2014. https://www.urs ulakleguin.com/nbf-medal.

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To follow up from the present study of the first two decades, an analysis of contemporary dystopian and political films and plays would focus more intensively than has been possible in my study on ecological subjectmatter, as well as the effects of religious fundamentalist politics on human rights. A number of third-decade films and plays have already broached some of these topics, albeit allegorically in some cases. For example, Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up (U.S., 2021) is ingenious in its satirical representation of a crass populist politics that encourages people to simply avoid thinking about Armageddon, depicted here as a comet that is rapidly approaching our planet. Even though the U.S. Government has the technology to deflect the comet from its course, the mission is aborted, and a coterie of senior politicians under the influence of a corporate guru figure abandon humanity to its fate by escaping to another planet in a state of suspended animation, arriving in the distant future. Their self-congratulatory mood is short-lived, as indeed are the survivors themselves, when poetic justice catches up with them. The motif of the comet in McKay’s film is a plausible narrative device and a valid topic in its own right; nonetheless, the principal targets of his allegorical satire are politicians, corporate industrialists, compliant media and gullible members of the public, who dismiss the reality of climate change in the face of scientific evidence. Another important political film released in 2021 during the COVID19 period was Kevin Macdonald’s The Mauritanian, a work that complements Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo’s verbatim drama GuantanamoDuty Bound to Defend Honour in its outright rejection of any shred of legitimacy for the still-operational internment camp. Based on Mahamedou Ould Slahi’s 2015 best-selling Guantánamo memoir, the film is an indictment of both the Bush and Obama administrations for perverting the course of justice; the former administration imprisoned Slahi without charge following extraordinary rendition and authorised sustained physical and psychological torture to coerce a false confession, while the latter cynically and successfully appealed against his 2010 acquittal verdict. In the film his U.S. lawyer Nancy Hollander (Jodie Foster) cuts through the swathes of heavily redacted files to discover the extent of the torture methods used against Slahi (Tahar Rahim) and the conspiracy by U.S. intelligence services to manufacture evidence against him and pin the blame on him for organising the September 11 attacks. In The Mauritanian’s closing credits we are informed that of the 799 prisoners interned at Guantánamo, only eight have been tried and

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convicted by the U.S. government and that three of those convictions were overturned on appeal. Turning to examples of third-decade political theatre, Slovo’s 2023 verbatim play Grenfell: in the words of survivors, which employs testimony from survivors of the June 2017 deadly Grenfell Tower fire in North Kensington, London, is a community-based production, designed to enhance the lives of the Grenfell residents who survived and engage them through this National Theatre project. It is also intended to remind us of the economic and political realities of Conservative Government austerity and the disastrous cost-cutting use of cheap flammable cladding on the tower block by the landlord, Kensington and Chelsea Council. The play’s activist approach to actual events, not only with the fire itself, but also with the inordinately delayed police enquiry into its causes and those responsible, offers a template of how dramas engaging with specific ongoing political issues can challenge the authority and narrative of the status quo. The cynical and, at best, cosmetic political response to the avoidable Grenfell tragedy of 2017 means that Slovo and The National Theatre’s dramatic project has been the most effective method to date of keeping the event in the public consciousness as a reminder of the hazards and difficulties faced by other residents in social housing. Slovo’s work is not the only piece of verbatim theatre treating this topic which reflects the rottenness at the heart of the British social class system: veteran tribunal theatre writers-directors Richard Norton-Taylor and Nicholas Kent also staged two tribunal plays in 2021 and 2023 related to the Grenfell tragedy at the Tabernacle Theatre, situated very close to the site of the fire. Their second tribunal play Grenfell: System Failure also incorporates verbatim testimony from survivors, and is designed to commemorate the victims. In their respective re-enactments and witness accounts the separate Grenfellfocused theatre works epitomise activist theatre at its most incisive; they function as a dramatic actualisation of a truth and justice process yet to be achieved in the real world. At the same time, by preempting justice, they apply pressure to ensure justice is served—an exemplum of communicative action in action. Writer Matt Woodhead and choreographer Alexzandra Sarmiento’s play Woodhill, featured at the Edinburgh Festival in August 2023, is another example of verbatim drama, and, like the Grenfell plays referenced above, a good example of campaigning theatre. This physical/ verbal theatre piece constitutes a form of direct action on behalf of those

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fighting for an official investigation into the deaths of three prisoners suffering from mental health problems in their cells at Woodhill Prison located outside Milton Keynes in the U.K. Each performance of the play represents a challenge, both to the specific cases in which the prisoners’ relatives have campaigned tirelessly for truthful answers and more generally to the U.K.’s unnecessarily politicised prisons policy and the criminalisation of the nation’s underclass. Future studies of drama as a form of sociopolitical action and/or intervention will do well to observe the qualitative distinctions between literal and specific dramas and more allegorical strategies of representation. Drama, as a form, is essentially metaphorical of the wider world, but we should differentiate between more literal and more metaphorical methods of representation. The specificity of plays like Guantanamo, Grenfell: in the words of survivors and Stuff Happens and biopic films like Snowden, Official Secrets or The Mauritanian precludes an implicit transferred interpretation of their frame of reference. By contrast, predominantly fictive plays and films, such as Wild, Sweat , Syriana, I Daniel Blake and V for Vendetta are metonymical texts whose frame of reference and interpretative scope is more extensive than their surface narrative. The protagonist of I Daniel Blake, for example, can clearly stand for any British citizen abused by the U.K.’s outsourced disability benefits systems, and arguably for all hard-working people in the country living in a state of precarity resulting from the Conservative Government’s austerity policies. As for dramatic works that can sit comfortably in both categories— Enron, for example, can be interpreted both as an indictment of specific corporate malpractice in the 1990s and early 2000s and a more general cautionary tale about collusion and impropriety between government and the finance industry—much depends on what lies in the eyes and ears of the beholder. Nevertheless, this type of drama is familiar to us from the pantheon of regularly staged and screened works of the past. Thus, for example, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, or Shakespeare plays, such as Julius Caesar and Richard II (as discussed in Chapter One), are often performed in such a way that they connote present-day political dignitaries and issues. Classic films such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane convey potential new meanings to modern-day audiences and create resonances with contemporary figures and situations. Above all, we should be conscious of synergies and synchronicity across sociopolitical texts that have much to say to us, if we engage actively with

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them, as Shaw, Brecht and other drama theorists and practitioners would have us do. For example, Christopher Nolan’s topical 2023 biopic Oppenheimer about the political vicissitudes of the titular wartime director of the Manhattan Project will be followed in 2024 by Armando Iannucci’s stage version, co-written with Sean Foley, of Stanley Kubrick’s apocalyptic parable Dr Strangelove. Coincidence perhaps, or is it a reflection of the anxiety of our times about mutually assured destruction triggered by today’s reheated Cold War and yet another instance of the geopolitical brinkmanship and entropy that threaten not only our future, but, worse, that of the young and of future generations? Iannucci’s uncanny ability to realise projects that touch on core political issues, using allegory and ironic humour to engage audiences, promises a topical updating of Kubrick’s darkly farcical cautionary tale. As Iannucci shrewdly observed in a BBC radio interview: “I think a lot of our art is less about the past and more about the future.”7 Drama on stage and on screen, as I have argued throughout my study, has much to teach us about ourselves and our ethically dubious way of life. To reprise filmmaker Costa Gavras’s comment on his idea of cinema, but extend it to all forms of drama, sociopolitically progressive plays and films are all about “seducing an audience to have them go away and think.”8 Conversely, authoritarian and populist right-wing governments and their influencers are in the business of seducing us to do the opposite. As a form of education and entertainment (‘edutainment’, to employ the popular portmanteau expression), the stage and screen dramas I have discussed in the foregoing case studies exemplify Gavras’s maxim, as do the latest political plays and films. In conclusion, sociopolitical dramas of the current decade offer a rich field of research, one that requires further in-depth exegesis and interpretation to collocate with existing diachronic and synchronic studies of political theatre and cinema. In the pursuit of this aim, I hope the present study will offer readers useful insights, whether or not they agree with all, or any, of my arguments and perspectives.

7 Armando Iannucci, BBC radio 4 interview, cited in Dahaba Ali Hussen, ‘Armando Iannucci to adapt Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr Strangelove for stage’ The Guardian, 15 July 2023. 8 Costa Gavras, Ibid. See Note 92 (p.62).

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Shepardson, David. ‘Trump Praises Chinese President Extending Tenure ‘For Life’. Reuters, 4 March 2018. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-trumpchina-idUSKCN1GG015 Sierz, Aleks. In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today. London: Faber and Faber, 2001. Smith, Mike and Dan Bloom. ‘Damian Green has never seen I, Daniel Blake but branded it ‘monstrously unfair’ anyway’. The Daily Mirror, 31 October 2016. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/damian-green-never-seen-i9166462 Sloan, Kay. ‘Sexual Warfare in the Silent Cinema: Comedies and Melodramas of Woman Suffragism’. American Quarterly 33(4) (Autumn, 1981): 412– 436. Johns Hopkins University Press. https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bit stream/handle/2152/31143/SexualWarfareSilentCinemas.pdf?sequence=1 Solanas, Fernando and Octavio Getino. ‘Toward a Third Cinema’ (Originally published in 1969 as ‘Hacia un tercer cine’) in Bill Nichols, ed. Movies and Methods: An Anthology. Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1976, 44–64. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. London: Picador, 2001. Sorensen, Sue. ‘Against Photography: Susan Sontag and the Violent Image’. After Image, May/June 2004, 16: 16–18. http://halliejones.com/wpcontent/uploads/2014/11/Against-Photography-Sontag-and-the-ViolentImage.pdf Thompson, David. ‘Far From Iraq: Jonathan Demme on Remaking The Manchurian Candidate’. Interview with Jonathan Demme, reprinted in BFI website, 9 May 2017. Originally published as ‘Mind Control’ in Sight & Sound, December 2004. See https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opi nion/sight-sound-magazine/interviews/jonathan-demme-remaking-manchu rian-candidate-iraq-first-gulf-war Townsend, Mark. ‘Iraq war whistleblower’s trial “was halted due to national security threat”’. The Guardian, 1 September 2019. https://www.thegua rdian.com/uk-news/2019/sep/01/iraq-war-whistleblower-katharine-gun-nat ional-security Tudoran, Alex. ‘How the NSA is Keeping Tabs on You in 2021’. Privacy Hub (promoting Cyberghost VPN). https://www.cyberghostvpn.com/en_US/pri vacyhub/how-the-nsa-is-keeping-tabs-on-you-in-2021/ Tzioumakis, Yannis and Claire Malloy. The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Politics. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. Whitlock, Craig. ‘Courted as Spies, Held as Combatants’. The Washington Post, 2 April 2006. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/ 2006/04/01/AR2006040101465_pf.html Wilde, Oscar. The Critic as Artist. Los Angeles: Green Integer Books, 1997.

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Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana Press, 1976. Williams, Raymond. ‘Film and the Dramatic Tradition’ in Raymond Williams and Michael Orrom, ‘Preface to Film’, 1954, Ch. 2 in John Higgins, ed. The Raymond Williams Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001. Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. Cardigan: Parthian Press, 2011 (reprint). Young, Sydney. ‘Depleted Uranium, Devastated Health: Military Operations and Environmental Injustice in the Middle East’ by Sydney Young. Harvard International Review, 22 September, 2021. https://hir.harvard.edu/dep leted-uranium-devastated-health-military-operations-and-environmental-injust ice-in-the-middle-east/

Case Study Plays Bartlett, Mike. Wild. London: Nick Hern Books, 2016. Brittain, Victoria and Gillian Slovo. Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom. London: Oberon Books, 2004. Churchill, Caryl. Drunk Enough to Say I Love You. London: Nick Hern Books, 2006. Hare, David. Stuff Happens. London and New York: Faber and Faber Limited, 2004. Hickson, Ella. Oil. London: Nick Hern Books, 2016. Kirkwood, Lucy. Chimerica. London: Nick Hern Books, 2013. Nottage, Lynn. Sweat. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2017. Orlandersmith, Dael. Until the Flood. London: Oberon Books/Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020. Prebble, Lucy. Enron. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2009.

Case Study Films I Daniel Blake (Ken Loach, U.K./France 2016). In the Loop (Armando Ianucci, U.K. 2009). Official Secrets (Gavin Hood, U.K./U.S. 2019). Selma (Ava DuVernay, U.S. 2014). Silver City (John Sayles, U.S. 2004). Snowden (Oliver Stone, U.S./France/Germany, 2016). Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley, U.S. 2018) Syriana (Stephen Gaghan, U.S. 2005). The Constant Gardener (Fernando Meirelles, U.K./Germany, 2005). The Manchurian Candidate (Jonathan Demme, U.S. 2004).

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V for Vendetta (James McTeigue, U.K. 2005).

Postmillennial Stage Drama References Adetunji, Lydia. Fixer (2011). Allen, Richard and Taran Grey. Freedom Riders—the Civil Rights Musical (2017). Baker, Annie. The Flick (2013). Bartlett, Mike. Earthquakes in London (2012); 13. (2011); King Charles III (2014); Albion (2017). Bean, Richard. On the Side of the Angels (2008); The Heretic (2011). Beaton, Alistair. Feelgood (2000). Bilodeau, Chantal. Sila: The Arctic Cycle (2014). Blackmer, Jennifer. Human Terrain (2014). Brenton, Howard. Never So Good (2008); Drawing the Line (2013); The Arrest of Ai Weiwei (2013). Burke, Gregory. Black Watch (2006). Churchill, Caryl. Far Away (2000); A Number (2002); Ding Dong the Wicked (2013); Escaped Alone (2016); Pigs and Dogs (2016). Cleage, Pearl. The Nacirema Society Requests (2013). Cosson, Steve. The Great Immensity (2012). Cowhig, Frances Ya-Chu. The World of Extreme Happiness (2016). Demos-Brown, Christopher. American Son (2016). Dyer, Clint and Roy Williams. Death of England (2020). Edmundson, Helen. Small Island (2019). Frayn, Michael. Democracy (2003). Gilman, Rebecca. Luna Gale (2014). Graham, James. Tory Boyz (2008); This House (2009); Ink (2017); Labour of Love (2017). Hall, Lee and Elton John. Billy Elliot, the Musical (2005). Harris, Jeremy O. Slave Play (2018). Hildyard, Rosanna. Ubu Trump (2017). Based on the play Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry (1888). Holmes, Jonathan. Fallujah (2007). Holson, Nancy. Me, the People—The Trump America Musical (2017). Hudes, Quiara Alegría. Elliot Trilogy - Elliot, a Soldier’s Fugue (2006); Water by the Spoonful (2012); The Happiest Song Plays Last (2012). Hunter, Samuel D. Greater Clements (2019). Jacobs-Jenkins, Branden. An Octoroon (2014); Gloria (2015). Johns, Dave. (Adapted from the film written by Paul Laverty). I Daniel Blake (2023). Kaufman, Moisés et al. The Laramie Project (2000). Kelly, Dennis. Osama the Hero (2005).

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Kirkwood, Lucy. It Felt Empty When the Heart Went at First But It Is Alright Now (2009); The Children (2016). Levenson, Steven. Days of Rage (2018). Macmillan, Duncan. Lungs (2011). Malpede, Karen. Prophecy and Acts of War: Iraq and Afghanistan in Seven Plays (2011). Massini, Stefanie. The Lehman Trilogy (2013). McDonagh, Martin. The Pillowman (2003). Mee, Charles. Global Warming (2013). Miranda, Lin-Manuel. Hamilton (2015). Morgan, Abi. The Night is Darkest Before the Dawn (2009). Morgan, Peter. Frost/Nixon (2006); The Audience (2013). Morris, Peter. The Guardians (2005). Mouawad, Wajdi, trans. Linda Gaboriau. Incendies /Scorched (2003). Norris, Bruce. Clybourne Park (2010). Norton Taylor, Richard and Nicholas Kent. Justifying War - Scenes from the Hutton Inquiry (2003); Called to Account - The Indictment of Tony Blair for the Crime of Aggression against Iraq: A Hearing (2007); Grenfell: Value Engineering (2021); Grenfell: System Failure (2023). Nottage, Lynn. Ruined (2009); Mlima’s Tale (2018). Orlandersmith, Dael. Forever (2014). Parks, Suzan-Lori. Top Dog/Underdog (2001); Father Comes Home from the Wars (2015); White Noise (2021). Prebble, Lucy. A Very Expensive Poison (2019). Rapley, Chris and Duncan Macmillan. 2071 (2014). Ravenhill, Mark. Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat (2008). Schenkkan, Robert. All the Way (2012); The Great Society (2013). Schreck, Heidi. What the Constitution Means to Me (2017). Shinn, Christopher. Now or Later (2008). Sibblies Drury, Jackie. Fairview (2018). Slovo, Gillian. Grenfell: in the words of survivors (2023). Soans, Robin. Talking to Terrorists (2004). Soper, Kathy. Wish List (2015). Sumbwanyambe, May. After Independence (2016). Swale, Jessica. Blue Stockings (2013). Steel Beth. Wonderland (2014); Labyrinth (2016). Stephens, Simon. Motortown (2006); Canopy of Stars (2008). Thompson, Judith. Palace of the End (2007). tucker green, debbie. Ear for Eye (2018). Wade, Laura. Posh (2010). Wallace, Naomi. No Such Cold Thing (2009). Washburn, Anne. Mr Burns, a Post-electric Play (2012); Shipwreck. (2019).

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273

Waters, Steve. The Unthinkable (2004); Contingency Plan (2009). Woods, Simon. Hansard (2019). Woodhead, Matt and Alexzandra Sarmiento. Woodhill. (2023). Vogel, Paula. Don Juan Comes Home from Iraq (2014); Indecent (2015). Yazji, Liwaa. trans. Katharine Halls. Goats (2017). Yee, Lauren. The Great Leap (2019).

Postmillennial Film and Director References Broomfield, Nick. Battle for Haditha (U.K. 2007). Caro, Niki. Whale Rider (New Zealand-Germany, 2002). Chadwick, Justin. Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom (U.K./South Africa, 2013). Charles, Larry. Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (U.K./U.S. 2006). Clooney George. Good Night and Good Luck (U.S. France, U.K. Japan, 2005); The Ides of March (U.S. 2011). Coogler Ryan. Fruitvale Station (U.S. 2013). Cuarón, Alfonso. Children of Men (U.K./U.S. 2006). Daldry, Stephen. Billy Elliot (U.K. 2002). De Palma, Brian. Redacted (U.S./Canada, 2007). Frears, Stephen. Philomena (U.K, 2013). Gavras, Costa. Éden à l’Ouest/Eden is West (France/Greece, 2009). Gibney, Alex. Taxi to the Dark Side (U.S. 2007). Documentary. Gilroy, Tony. Michael Clayton (U.S. 2007). Greengrass, Paul. The Green Zone (U.S. 2010). Greenwald, Robert. Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War (U.S. 2004). Documentary. Heslov, Grant. The Men Who Stare at Goats (U.S./U.K. 2009). Hooper, Tom. The Danish Girl (U.K./U.S. 2015). Howard, Ron. Frost/Nixon (U.S. 2008). Jarecki, Eugene. Why We Fight (Canada/France/U.K./U.S. 2005). Documentary. Lee, Spike. BlacKkKlansman (U.S. 2018). Leigh, Mike. Peterloo (U.K. 2018). Liman, Doug. Fair Game (U.S. U.A.E. 2010). Loach, Ken. The Wind that Shakes the Barley (Ireland/U.K./Italy/Germany/ France/Spain/Switzerland, 2006); Jimmy’s Hall (U.K./Ireland/France, 2014); Sorry We Missed You (U.K. France, Belgium, 2018); The Old Oak (U.K./France/Belgium, 2023). Macdonald, Kevin. State of Play (U.K./U.S. 2009); The Mauritanian. (U.K./ U.S. 2021). Madden, John. Miss Sloane (U.S. 2016). McDonagh, Martin. Three Billboards in Ebbing Missouri (U.K./U.S. 2017). McKay, Adam. Vice (U.S. 2018); Don’t Look Up (U.S. 2021).

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Meirelles, Fernando. City of God (Brazil/France/Germany/U.S. 2002). Melfi, Theodore. Hidden Figures (U.S. 2016). Nichols, Mike. Charlie Wilson’s War (U.S. 2007). Nolan, Christopher. Oppenheimer (U.K./U.S. 2023). Nunn, Trevor. Red Joan (U.K. 2018). Peele, Jordan. Get Out (U.S. 2017). Peirce, Kimberly. Stop-Loss (U.S. 2008). Pilger, John. Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror. (Carlton Television, U.K. 2003). Documentary. Poitras, Laura. Citizenfour (U.S./Germany, 2014). Documentary. Potter, Sally. The Party (U.K. 2017). Redford, Robert. Lions for Lambs. (U.S. 2008). Reitman, Jason. The Front Runner (U.S. 2018). Roach, Jay. The Campaign ( U.S. 2008); Trumbo (U.S. 2015). Scott, Ridley. Body of Lies (U.S. 2008). Spielberg, Stephen. The Post (U.S. 2017). Taymor, Julie. Frida (U.S. 2002). Tykwer, Tom. The International (Germany/U.S. 2009). Warchus, Matthew. Pride (U.K. 2014). Winterbottom, Michael. In this World (U.K. 2002); The Road to Guantánamo (U.K. 2006); Greed (U.K./U.S. 2019).

Premillennial Stage Drama References Aeschylus. The Persians (ca. 472 BCE); The Suppliant Women (ca. 465-‘60 BCE?). Anouilh, Jean. trans. Lewis Galantière. Antigone. New York: Samuel French, 2010. Arden, John. Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance (1958). Aristophanes. The Babylonians (ca. 426 BCE); The Clouds (ca. 423 BCE); The Birds (ca. 414 BCE); Lysistrata (ca. 411 BCE); The Frogs (ca. 405 BCE). Barnes, Peter. The Ruling Class (1968). Beck, Julian and Judith Malina/The Living Theatre. Mysteries and Smaller Pieces (1964); Frankenstein (1965); Paradise Now (1968); Seven Meditations on Political Sado-Masochism (1973). Berkoff, Steven. Greek (1980); Sink the Belgrano (1986). Bond, Edward. Saved (1964). Brecht, Bertolt. The Good Person of Sichuan/Der Gute Mensch von Sezuan (1943); The Caucasian Chalk Circle/Der Kaukasische Kreidekreis (1944). Brecht, Bertolt and Margarete Steffin. Life of Galileo (Leben des Galilei, 1938); Mother Courage (Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder, 1939). Brecht, Bertolt and Charles Laughton. Life of Galileo (2nd version, 1947).

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275

Brenton, Howard. The Churchill Play (1974); Weapons of Happiness (1976); The Romans in Britain (1980); Short Sharp Shock (1980). Brook, Peter and the Royal Shakespeare Company. US (1966). Calbari, Marianna. Medea - the Barbarity of Love (2017). Churchill, Caryl. Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (1976); Cloud Nine (1979); Fen (1980); Top Girls (1982). Ensler, Eve. The Vagina Monologues (1996). Euripides. Medea (ca. 431 BCE); The Trojan Women (ca. 415 BCE). Fo, Dario. Accidental Death of an Anarchist (Morte Accidentale di un Anarchico, 1970). Friel, Brian. The Freedom of the City (1973); Translations (1980). Fugard, Athol. Boesman and Lena (1969); Sizwe Bansi is Dead (1972); The Island (1973); Master Harold and the Boys (1982); Blood Knot (1987). Galsworthy, John. Strife (1909). Glaspell, Susan. Trifles (1916). Gogol, Nikolai. The Government Inspector (Revizor, 1836). Granville Barker, Harley. Waste (1907). Hamilton, Cicely and Christopher St John. How the Vote was Won (1910). Hansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun (1959). Hare, David and Howard Brenton. Pravda (1985). Hare, David. Racing Demon (1990); Murmuring Judges (1991); The Absence of War (1993); Skylight (1995). Harrison, Tony. Prometheus (1998). Ibsen, Henrik. An Enemy of the People (1882). Ionesco, Eugène. Rhinoceros /Rhinocéros (1959). Jonson, Ben. Sejanus, His Fall (1603); Volpone (1605); The Alchemist (1610). Kane, Sarah. Blasted (1995). Kumalo, Duma and Bobby Rodwell. The Story I am About to Tell (1997). Kushner, Tony. Angels in America - Millennium Approaches (1991) and Perestroika (1992). Lawrence, Jerome and Robert E. Lee. Inherit the Wind (1955). Lewis, Sinclair. It Can’t Happen Here (1936). Lindsay, David. Ane Pleasant Satire of the Thrie Estaits (1540). Littlewood, Joan and Charles Chilton. Oh, What a Lovely War! (1963). Marlowe, Christopher. The Jew of Malta (ca. 1590); Edward II (ca. 1593). McGrath, John. The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black Black Oil. (1973). Middleton, Thomas. A Game at Chess (1624). Miller, Arthur. All My Sons 1947); Death of a Salesman (1949); The Crucible (1953). Molière (Jean-Baptistery Poquelin). Tartuffe (1664). Norton-Taylor, Richard and Nicolas Kent. The Colour of Justice (1999).

276

BIBLIOGRAPHY

O’Casey, Sean. The Plough and the Stars (1926); The Shadow or a Gunman (1923) Juno and the Paycock (1924). Odets, Clifford. Waiting for Lefty (1935). Osborne, John. Look Back in Anger (1956). Pinter, Harold. One for the Road (1984); Mountain Language (1988); The New World Order (1993). Priestley, John Boynton. An Inspector Calls (1946). Ravenhill, Mark. Shopping and Fucking (1996). Shange, Ntozake. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf (1975). Shakespeare, William. Richard II (ca. 1595); Hamlet (ca. 1600); The Tempest (ca. 1610). Shaw, George Bernard. Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893); Man and Superman (1905); Pygmalion (1912); The Apple Cart (1929). Sophocles. Oedipus Rex (ca. 430 BCE?); Antigone (ca. 440 BCE?). Soyinka, Wole. The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite (1973). Taylor, Jane. Ubu and the Truth Commission (1997). Treadwell, Sophie. Machinal (Sophie Treadwell, 1928). Webster, John. The White Devil (1612); The Duchess of Malfi (1613). Wesker, Arnold. The Wesker Trilogy: Chicken Soup with Barley (1958); Roots (1959); I’m Talking About Jerusalem 1960). Wilde, Oscar. The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Wilson, August. Fences (1985); The Piano Lesson (1987).

Premillennial Film and Director References Altman, Robert. The Player (U.S. 1992). Anderson, Lindsay. This Sporting Life (U.K. 1963); If (U.K. 1968). Angelopoulos, Theo. The Travelling Players/O Thiassos (Greece, 1975). Ashby, Hal. Being There (U.S. 1979). Attenborough, Richard. Cry Freedom (U.K./Zimbabwe, 1987). Beatty, Warren. Reds (U.S. 1981); Bulworth (U.S. 1998). Biberman, Herbert J. and Michael Wilson. Salt of the Earth (U.S. 1954). Boulting, Roy. Fame is the Spur (U.K. 1947). Capra, Frank. Mr Deeds Goes to Town (U.S. 1936); Mr Smith goes to Washington (U.S. 1939); State of the Union (1948). Chaplin, Charles. The Floorwalker (U.S. 1916). The Immigrant (U.S. 1917); A Dog’s Life (U.S. 1918); The Kid (U.S. 1921); The Idle Class (U.S. 1921); City Lights (U.S. 1931); Modern Times (U.S. 1936); The Great Dictator (U.S. 1940); Monsieur Verdoux (U.S. 1947); A King in New York (U.K. 1957).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

277

Clair, René. The Last Multimillionaire/Le Dernier Milliardaire. (France, 1934). Crosland, Alan. Massacre. (U.S. 1934). Dassin, Jules. Cri de Femmes /Medea, A Dream of Passion (Greece/Switzerland, 1978). De Santis, Giuseppe. Bitter Rice-Smile/Riso Amaro (Italy, 1948). De Sica, Vittorio. Miracle in Milan/Miracolo a Milano (Italy, 1951); Umberto D. (Italy, 1952). Drury, David. Defence of the Realm (U.K. 1986). Eisenstein, Sergei. Strike (Soviet Union, 1925); Battleship Potemkin (Soviet Union, 1925); October: Ten Days that Shook the World (Soviet Union, 1928). Epstein, Jean. The Faithful Heart /Coeur Fidèle (France, 1923). Eyre, Richard. The Ploughman’s Lunch (U.K. 1983). Fassbinder, Rainer Werner. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul /Angst Essen Seele Auf (West Germany 1971). Ford, John. The Grapes of Wrath (U.S. 1940). Fleming, Victor. The Wet Parade (U.S. 1932). Frankenheimer, John. The Manchurian Candidate (U.S. 1962). Frears, Stephen. My Beautiful Laundrette (U.K. 1985). Gance, Abel. J’accuse/I Accuse (France, 1919). Gavras, Costa. Z (France/Algeria, 1969); The Confession/L’Aveu (France, 1970); State of Siege/État de Siège (France, 1972); Section Spéciale (France, 1975); Missing (U.S. 1982); Hanna K. (France-Israel, 1983). George, Terry. Some Mother’s Son (Ireland/U.S. 1996). Godard, Jean-Luc. Weekend (France, 1967). Griffith, D. W. Birth of a Nation (U.S. 1915); Intolerance (U.S. 1916). Jewison, Norman. In the Heat of the Night (U.S. 1967). Jordan, Neil. Michael Collins (Ireland/U.K. 1996). Kazan, Elia. A Streetcar Named Desire (U.S. 1951); On the Waterfront (U.S. 1954). Kramer, Stanley. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (U.S. 1968). Kubrick, Stanley. Spartacus (U.S. 1960); Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. (U.K./U.S. 1964). Kurosawa, Akira. Donzoko/The Lower Depths (Japan, 1957); The Bad Sleep Well (Japan 1960). Lang, Fritz. Doctor Mabuse - The Gambler (Germany 1922); Metropolis (U.S. 1927). Lee, Rowland V. The Count of Monte Cristo. (U.S. 1934). Lee, Spike. Do the Right Thing (U.S. 1989); Malcolm X (U.S. 1992); Get on the Bus (U.S. 1996). LeRoy, Mervyn, I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (U.S. 1932). Levinson, Barry. Wag the Dog (U.S. 1997).

278

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Loach, Ken. Poor Cow (U.K. 1967); Kes (U.K. 1969); Hidden Agenda (U.K. 1990); Land and Freedom (U.K./Spain/Germany/Italy/France, 1995). Louis, Willard. What 80 Million Women Want (U.S. 1913). Lubitsch, Ernst. To Be or Not to Be (U.S. 1942). McCarey, Leo. Duck Soup (U.S. 1933). Menges, Chris. A World Apart (U.K./Zimbabwe, 1988). Nichols, Mike. Silkwood (U.S. 1983). Pakula, Alan J. The Parallax View (U.S. 1974); All the President’s Men (U.S. 1976). Payne, Alexander. Election (U.S. 1999). Polanski, Roman. Chinatown (U.S. 1994). Pollack, Sydney. Three Days of the Condor (U.S. 1975). Pasolini, Pier Paulo. Edipo Re/Oedipus Rex (Italy, 1967). Petri, Elio. The Working Class Goes to Heaven/La Classe Operaia Va in Paradiso (Italy, 1970); Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion/Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (Italy, 1971). Pontecorvo, Gillo. The Battle of Algiers/La Bataille d’Alger/La Battaglia d’Algeri (Italy-Algeria, 1965); Burn/Queimada (1969). Pudovkin, Vsevolod. Mother (Soviet Union, 1926); The End of Saint Petersburg (Soviet Union, 1927); Storm over Asia (Soviet Union, 1928). Ray, Nicholas. They Live by Night (U.S. 1948). Ray, Satyajit. The Apu Trilogy - Pather Panchali (India, 1955); Aparajito (India, 1956); The World of Apu (India, 1959). Reed, Carol. The Stars Look Down (U.K. 1940). Renoir, Jean. Grand Illusion/La Grande Illusion (France, 1937); Rules of the Game/La Règle du Jeu (France 1939). Richardson. Tony. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (U.K. 1962). Ritt, Martin. The Front (U.S. 1976). Robbins, Tim. Bob Roberts (U.S. 1992). Roodt, Darrell. Sarafina (U.S./South Africa/U.K./France, 1992); Cry the Beloved Country (South Africa/USA, 1995). Rossellini, Roberto. Roma, Città Aperta/Rome Open City (Italy, 1945). Rossen, Robert. All the King’s Men (U.S. 1949). Sayles, John. Matewan (U.S. 1987); City of Hope (U.S. 1991); Lone Star (U.S. 1996). Schlesinger, John. Billy Liar (U.K. 1963). Schlöndorff, Volker and Margarethe Von Trotta. The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum/Die Verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (West Germany, 1975). Sellers, Ollie. The New Disciple (U.S. 1921). Sheridan, Jim. In the Name of the Father (Ireland, U.K. 1993). Stone, Oliver. Salvador (U.S. 1986); Wall Street (Oliver Stone, U.S. 1987); Born on the Fourth of July (U.S. 1989); JFK (U.S. 1991).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

279

Straub, Jean Marie and Danièle Huillet. Antigone (Germany/France, 1992). Based on Brecht’s stage version of Sophocles’ original Antigone. Thomas, Augustus and George Irving. The Jungle (U.S. 1914). Vidor, King. Our Daily Bread (U.S. 1934); Co-directed with George W. Hill.The Big Parade (U.S. 1925). Visconti, Luchino. The Earth Trembles /La Terra Trema (Italy, 1948). Von Trotta, Margarethe. Rosa Luxemburg (Germany, 1986). Weber, Lois. The People versus John Doe (1916); Where are My Children? (1916); The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (1917). Weiss, Joseph Leon. What is to be Done? (U.S. 1914). Wellman, William. Heroes for Sale (U.S. 1933); Wild Boys of the Road (U.S. 1933). Welles, Orson. Citizen Kane (U.S. 1941); The Lady from Shanghai (U.S. 1947); Touch of Evil (U.S. 1958). Wiene, Robert. The Cabinet of Dr Caligari/Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (Germany, 1920). Wolfe, Frank E. From Dusk till Dawn/aka. Capital Versus Labor (U.S. 1913). Wood, Sam. A Night at the Opera (U.S. 1935); A Day at the Races (U.S. 1937).

Index

A Abu Ghraib, 102, 104, 106, 124, 141, 155 Academy Award, 47, 71, 83, 88, 89, 145 Adorno, Theodor, 79 aesthetics of resistance, 55, 207 Afghanistan, 94, 96–98, 102, 103, 105, 109, 111, 117, 133, 212 agon, 30, 31, 33, 34, 36, 257 agonistic, 46, 134, 234 agora, 16, 17, 30, 31 Al-Azraki, Amir, 100 allegory/allegorical, 24, 39, 42, 67, 75, 81, 91, 111, 121, 125, 139, 151, 160, 174, 183, 249, 252, 259, 261, 262 anarchism, 152, 153 Angelaki, Vicky, 22, 24, 122 Anglo-American, 100, 125, 252, 254 Anouilh, Jean, 49, 115 anti-Aristotelian, 53, 257 anti-capitalist, 77, 84, 132, 254 Aristophanes, 4, 30–34

Aristotelian, 32, 53, 257 Artaud, Antonin, 3, 35 Assange, Julian, 111, 224, 226, 230

B Bartlett, Mike, 169, 210, 212, 223–229, 233, 250, 252 Bazin, André, 78 Belmarsh Prison, 107, 111, 155 Benjamin, Walter, 79 Berkoff, Steven, 35, 45, 46 Bevins, Vincent, 126, 140 Biberman, Herbert J., 75 ‘big pharma’, 150, 254 Billington, Michael, 2, 124, 125, 162, 163, 227 Bill of Rights, the, 139 blacklist, the, 61, 73, 175 Black Lives Matter, 172, 184, 197 Blair, Tony, 104, 112, 239 Boal, August, 19, 24, 35, 43, 49, 55, 173

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Ingham, Anglo-American Stage and Screen Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45198-0

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282

INDEX

Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, 99 Brecht, Bertolt, 4, 5, 35, 40, 42, 44, 52, 53, 156, 160, 167, 173, 219, 262 Brechtian, 16, 37, 39, 42, 113, 159, 166, 219, 257 Brenton, Howard, 44, 45, 170 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 99, 129, 190, 262 Brittain, Victoria, 104, 106–111, 259 Broadway, 42, 50, 74, 86, 162, 169, 171 Brook, Peter, 43 Brown, Michael, 49, 171, 183, 196, 197, 199–201 Bush, George W., 94, 132, 160 C Cahiers du Cinéma, 78, 84 Campbell, Alastair, 99, 113, 126, 132 Capaldi, Peter, 126 Capra, Frank, 60, 70 Carlson, Marvin, 95, 96, 133 Caryl Churchill’s, 95 catharsis (katharsis ), 32, 53, 257 censorship, 5, 34, 38, 43, 47, 49, 54, 66, 78, 81, 251 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 82, 86, 89, 98, 109, 118, 120, 126, 141, 175, 211, 232, 233 Chaplin, Charles, 4, 60, 72 Cheney, Dick, 11, 95, 112, 140, 160 Chimerica (Kirkwood), 168, 170, 212–214, 252 Chomsky, Noam, 3, 9, 27, 96, 112, 117, 256 chorus, 31, 103, 115, 186 Churchill, Caryl, 2, 5, 22, 43, 49, 111, 121–126, 133, 168, 221, 250

civil rights, 2, 10, 18, 42, 172, 177, 179–181, 205 Clooney, George, 2, 60, 98, 99, 118, 131 coalition, 97, 98, 104, 113, 122, 130, 155, 218 Cold War, 61, 73, 76, 85, 262 communicative action, 16, 20, 21, 26, 28, 258, 260 Conservative Party, The, 193 Constant Gardener, The, 134, 145, 146, 149–151, 252, 255 Constitution, the, 65, 169 Covid/COVID-19, 165, 213 Crouch, Colin, 8, 10 culture wars, 2, 101, 166, 257

D Daldry, Stephen, 15, 22, 53, 132 Damon, Matt, 98, 117, 119 Debord, Guy, 79 de-industrialisation, 184 Demme, Jonathan, 134, 138–140, 142, 144, 145 democracy, 7–9, 12, 20, 35, 62, 72, 82, 87, 90, 94, 103, 118, 151, 157, 165, 176, 209, 217, 223, 229, 231, 254, 255 Democrat/democratic, 7, 8, 12, 24, 27, 30, 31, 33, 40, 41, 70, 82, 91, 103, 133, 134, 142, 152, 171, 172, 175, 176, 182, 216, 223, 234, 235, 241, 242, 251, 253–255 depleted uranium, 122, 143 De Waal, Ariane, 99, 100, 105, 106 dialectical/dialectics, 20, 23, 30–32, 34, 46, 101, 113, 167, 168, 202, 221, 223, 227, 228 diegetic, 160, 199, 232 Dionysia/Dionysian, 32, 33

INDEX

direct address, 44, 48, 111, 112, 115, 162, 169, 251 ‘disaster capitalism’, 25, 158 docudrama, 248 documentary film, 233 Drunk Enough to Say I Love You, 95, 99, 111, 121, 122, 124, 252, 258 DuVernay, Ava, 177–183 dystopia/dystopian, 27, 67, 131, 132, 151, 227, 235, 258, 259 E Ebert (Roger), 136, 145 Eisenstein, Sergei, 5, 52, 59, 67, 68, 70 Ellsberg, Daniel, 211, 230, 238, 242 ‘Enduring Freedom’, 104 Enron (Prebble), 134, 135, 157–163, 252, 258, 261 epic theatre, 42, 159, 163, 167, 220 F ‘fake’ news, 5, 61 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 73, 144, 179 feminist/feminism, 6, 18, 35, 40, 43, 44, 48, 75, 85, 196, 205, 221 Fiennes, Ralph, 145, 246 Floyd, George, 197 forum, 3, 13, 14, 16, 20, 21, 24, 26–29, 31, 33, 35, 36, 50, 55, 91, 113, 125, 166, 250, 257, 258 Forum Theatre, 5, 19, 24, 35, 49, 93, 257 Foucault, Michel, 16, 17, 26 ‘fourth wall’, 171, 252 Frankenheimer, John, 85–87, 139, 145 Fugard, Athol, 5, 36, 47

283

future history, 169, 212

G Gaghan, Stephen, 95, 117, 118, 120 Gavras, Costa, 4, 82, 83, 88, 262 genetic engineering, 141, 143 Gilroy, Tony, 131, 250 globalised/globalisation, 7, 24, 53, 60, 186, 193 Godard, Jean-Luc, 53, 78, 79, 82 Gogol, Nikolai, 10, 11 Good Night and Good Luck (Clooney), 2, 99 Graham, James, 133, 170, 250 ‘greedflation’, 190 Greenwald, Glenn, 230, 231 Grenfell tragedy, the, 260 Griffith, D.W., 63–66, 68 Grochala, Sarah, 23, 101, 166–168 Guantanamo—Honor Bound to Defend Freedom (Brittain/Slovo), 104, 106–110 Guantánamo Bay, 108, 140 Gun, Katharine, 238–241, 243, 246–248

H Habermas, Jürgen, 16, 20, 26, 28, 258 Hansberry, Lorraine, 42, 86, 169, 170, 172 Hare, David, 44, 46, 95, 100, 101, 111–117, 125, 126, 250 heterotopia, 17, 255. See also Foucault, Michel Hickson, Ella, 49, 51, 52, 166, 168, 210, 212, 217–222 Hollywood Code/Hays ‘moral code’, 66, 68, 75 Hong Kong, 156, 213, 217, 231, 241

284

INDEX

Hood, Gavin, 47, 98, 156, 212, 238–241, 247 Hoover, J. Edgar, 61, 68, 73, 179, 181 Houses of Parliament, the, 153 House Un-American Activities Committee, 61, 74, 75 Hughes, Jenny, 22, 23 Hussein, Saddam, 95, 97, 113, 143, 211 Hutton, Dan, 10, 20, 55 Hutton Inquiry, the, 104

I Iannucci, Armando, 126–128, 130, 246, 262 Ibsen, Henrik, 40, 41, 54, 167, 188, 261 I, Daniel Blake (Loach), 189–191, 195, 258 illusionistic drama, 252 interscene, 219, 222, 223 intersectionality/intersectional, 16, 18–20, 25, 26, 28, 50–52, 55, 172 In the Loop, 95, 99, 126–128, 130, 252 Iraq, 36, 94–100, 102, 103, 105, 106, 111, 115, 116, 120–122, 126, 130, 133, 134, 141, 146, 156, 221, 238, 241, 242, 244, 246

J Jarry, Alfred, 47, 169 Johns, Dave, 189 Johnson, Lyndon B., 89, 170, 178 Jonson, Ben/Jonsonian, 39, 45 Julius Caesar controversy, 50, 51, 261 Juvenalian satire, 46

K Kane, Sarah, 48, 54 Kazan, Elia, 74, 75 Kelleher, Joe, 53, 54, 256–258 Kelly, Dr David, 99, 102, 105, 106, 129 Kennedy, John F., 175 Kennedy, Robert, 179 Kent, Nicholas, 54, 103, 260 Keyes, Ralph, 10 King, Martin Luther, 86, 157, 177, 179, 183 Kirkwood, Lucy, 168, 212–214 ‘kitchen sink’ drama, 42 Klein, Naomi, 25, 150, 158, 161 Knightly, Keira, 242, 245 Kubrick, Stanley, 60, 85, 262 Kurds/Kurdish, 240, 243 Kushner, Tony, 48 L Labour Party, the, 101, 176 Lang, Fritz, 67, 261 Laverty, Paul, 90, 177, 191–196 ‘lawfare’, 150, 212, 254 Le Carré, John, 145, 146, 148, 149, 233 Lee, Spike, 60, 86, 91, 177, 180, 207 Le Guin, Ursula, 258 Liman, Doug, 210, 211, 250 Lindsay, David, 38 Littlewood, Joan, 4, 42–44 Loach, Ken, 19, 89–91, 177, 189–192, 194–196 Lumet, Sidney, 140 M Macdonald, Kevin, 132, 259 Malpede, Karen, 49, 50, 96, 105, 133 Manchurian Candidate, The (Demme), 134, 138, 140, 145

INDEX

Manchurian Candidate, The (Frankenheimer), 85 Marlowe, Christopher, 38 Marx Brothers, the, 69, 70 Marx, Karl, 4, 130 Mayer, Louis B., 60–62, 64, 66, 68, 69 McCarthyism/McCarthy, Senator Joseph, 41, 42, 61, 85 McDonagh, Martin, 15, 91, 106 McGrath, John, 38, 44, 52, 54 McKay, Adam, 11, 176, 250, 259 McTeigue, James, 134, 151, 152 Meirelles, Fernando, 134, 145, 148, 150, 255 metaphor, 2, 17, 32, 39, 52, 124, 128, 144, 146, 159, 161, 204, 222, 228, 233 MI6, 119, 243, 246 military-industrial complex, 8, 85, 94, 98, 231 Miller, Arthur, 4, 41, 42, 188, 261 mimetic, 4, 17, 125, 160, 163, 199 mirror metaphor, 30, 253 Miss Sloane (John Madden), 175, 176 Moore, Alan, 151 Morgan, Peter, 101, 132, 170 multimedia, 22, 47, 159, 189

N National Theatre (U.K.), 22, 48, 54, 103, 111, 171, 210, 260 neoconservative/neocon, 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, 25, 45, 88, 93, 111, 112, 125, 135, 139, 151, 195, 203 neo-fascist, 255 neo-imperialism, 103, 222 neoliberalism, 160 neo-noir, 136 network society theory, 18 New Wave cinema, 78–80

285

Nichols, Mike, 87, 98 Nixon, Richard, 87, 101, 132 Nobel Prize, 25, 26 noir, 72, 74, 76, 139 Nolan, Christopher, 262 Norris, Bruce, 49, 169 Northern Ireland, 44 Norton-Taylor, Richard, 103, 107, 260 Nottage, Lynn, 49, 50, 52, 134, 166, 168, 171, 172, 184–188, 197, 250 Nunn, Trevor, 211 O Obama, Barack, 134, 224, 235, 259 Occupy movement, 49, 254 Odets, Clifford, 41, 188 Oedipus/Oedipal, 35, 37 Official Secrets Act, 241, 245, 247 Official Secrets (Hood), 212, 238–241, 247, 248, 252, 258, 261 Oil (Hickson), 49, 51, 52, 166, 168, 210, 212, 217, 222 Oleyowo, David, 183 Operation ‘Enduring Freedom’, 104, 117, 130, 141 Operation‘Infinite Justice’, 117 Orlandersmith, Dael, 49, 166, 168, 171, 172, 196–202, 257 P Pakula, Alan J., 87, 175 petro-capitalism, 222 petro-politics, 221 Piketty, Thomas, 12, 13 Pinter, Harold, 5, 25, 26, 46, 47, 225 Poitras, Laura, 224, 230–234, 236, 237 Politique des auteurs , 78

286

INDEX

Pontecorvo, Gillo, 83, 84 populism/populist, 2, 8, 9, 11, 20, 33, 42, 63, 93, 140, 166, 185, 206, 209, 255, 259, 262 post-democratic, 6, 8, 10, 24, 25, 94, 157 post-socialist, 8, 10–12, 21, 25 post-truth, 9, 10, 25, 256 Powell, Colin, 101, 112, 114–116, 212, 243, 247 Prebble, Lucy, 134, 157–162 Priestly, J.B., 41 Putin, Vladimir, 89

R Ravenhill, Mark, 48, 103 Reagan, Ronald, 60, 61, 87, 88 rendition, 108, 138, 156, 173, 259 Report, The (Scott Z. Burns), 175, 250 Republican Party, the, 61, 160, 174, 186 Riley, Raymond ‘Boots’, 202–207 Ross, Steven J., 60, 61, 63 Royal Court, the, 22, 43, 102, 121, 172, 173, 218 Rumsfeld, Donald, 95, 107, 112, 116, 127, 128, 140, 246, 247 ‘Rust Belt, the’, 184

Slovo, Gillian, 54, 95, 104, 106–111, 260 Snowden, Edward, 223–227, 229–238, 240, 244, 252 Snowden (Stone), 212, 224, 229–231, 234, 238–241, 252, 261 social justice, 8, 12, 18, 19, 21, 26, 28, 50, 72, 78, 172, 191, 209, 253 Sontag, Susan, 214, 215 Sorry to Bother You (Riley), 202, 203, 207, 252, 258 South Africa/n, 47, 90, 148, 169, 239 Soyinka, Wole, 5, 36 Stendhal, Henry Beyle, 1 Steppenwolf (Theatre Company), 172 Steyn, Lord Justice Johan, 107–109 Stone, Oliver, 60, 88, 212, 224, 229, 234 Streep, Meryl, 60, 98, 142, 211 Stuff Happens (Hare), 95, 99, 101, 111–114, 117, 121, 125, 128, 252, 261 suffrage/suffragettes, 40, 65, 254 Sweat , 49, 50, 166, 171, 184–186, 188, 197, 252, 261 Swiftian satire, 207 Syriana (Gaghan), 95, 117, 118, 121, 252, 261

S Sadam Hussein’s prison, 106 Sayles, John, 88, 134, 135, 137, 138 Selma (DuVernay), 177–180, 182, 183, 252 Shakespeare, William, 4, 27, 33, 38, 39, 54, 78, 154 Shaw, George Bernard, 8, 40 ‘silent’ era, 65, 66, 68 Silver City, 134–138, 252, 258

T testimonial theatre, 46, 47, 252 Thatcher, Margaret, 45, 46, 87, 174 theatre of cruelty, 35. See also Artaud, Antonin Third Cinema (Tercer Cine), 53, 81 Tiananmen Square/Massacre, 213 Tory, 45, 89, 133, 177, 195 tribunal theatre, 112, 260 Trumbo, Dalton, 5, 61, 174, 175

INDEX

Trump, Donald, 9, 50, 51, 61, 174, 185 Twain, Mark, 15 U Until the Flood (Orlandersmith), 49, 166, 168, 171, 196, 197, 199, 200, 202, 252, 258 V verbatim theatre, 102, 133, 256, 260 V for Vendetta (McTeigue), 134, 151, 152, 155, 252, 256, 258, 261 W Wade, Laura, 168 ‘war on terror, the’, 96–98, 100, 102, 106, 122, 125, 126, 140, 155

287

Washington, Denzel, 90, 140 Washington Post, The, 109, 146, 223, 230 Welles, Orson, 60, 68, 71–74, 76, 261 Wertenbaker, Timberlake, 35, 36 West End, the, 104, 107, 169 Wild (Bartlett), 212, 223, 224, 226, 250, 252 Wilde, Oscar, 6, 225, 249 Williams, Raymond, 8, 57, 58, 166 Williams, Tennessee, 42, 74 Wilson, August, 47, 172 Woods, Simon, 171 World Economic Forum, The, 94, 150

Y Yazjii, Liwaa, 173