Political theatre as an elective topic, including its history, central techniques, and key practitioners (Brecht, Piscator, Joan Littlewood, Boal, contemporary Australian companies)

What this dot point is asking

NESA expects you to know political theatre as a movement: its history, its central techniques, and its major practitioners. Strong answers identify specific practitioners and productions, name techniques, and analyse how form serves political intervention.

The answer

What political theatre is

Political theatre is theatre that takes political intervention as part of its aim. The distinction is not absolute; most theatre carries political implications, and political theatre is not always overtly partisan. The term marks work that explicitly engages with political and social conflict and that seeks to do more than entertain.

Political theatre as a self-conscious tradition develops in the early twentieth century out of socialist and anarchist movements. Earlier forms (medieval mystery plays, Restoration political satire, Aristophanes's Athenian comedies) have political content but are not part of the modern political theatre lineage.

Erwin Piscator and documentary theatre

Erwin Piscator (1893 to 1966) is the founding figure of modern political theatre. A German director, Piscator developed documentary theatre at the Berlin Volksbuhne (1924 to 1927) and at his own Piscator-Buhne (1927 to 1931).

Piscator's innovations:

• Film projection on stage. News footage, historical film, and animated diagrams projected behind live action. Hoppla, We're Alive (1927) used film projection to show the contemporary politics into which the protagonist returned after prison.
• Mechanical stage. Rotating platforms, conveyor belts, lifts. The stage became a machine.
• Documentary material. News headlines, statistics, government documents. The play was constructed from material the audience could verify.
• Mass scenes. Large casts representing crowds, soldiers, workers.

Piscator influenced Brecht directly; Brecht acknowledged Piscator as a teacher of documentary technique. After 1933 Piscator was exiled by the Nazis; he ran the Dramatic Workshop in New York (1939 to 1951) where he taught Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Marlon Brando, before returning to West Germany in 1951.

Brecht

Bertolt Brecht's epic theatre (covered in detail in the brecht-and-epic-theatre dot point) remains the canonical reference for political theatre. Verfremdungseffekt, gestus, narrative structure and songs that interrupt the action have been adopted by virtually every subsequent political theatre tradition.

Joan Littlewood and the Theatre Workshop

Joan Littlewood (1914 to 2002) ran the Theatre Workshop at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, London, from 1953 to 1979. The Workshop was a co-operative committed to popular theatre for working-class audiences.

Major productions:

• Oh, What a Lovely War! (1963). A musical that dramatised the First World War as a chronicle of class betrayal. Used Brechtian techniques (projected captions, songs, direct address) within a music-hall framework. Adapted for film by Richard Attenborough (1969).
• The Quare Fellow (Brendan Behan, 1954) and A Taste of Honey (Shelagh Delaney, 1958) brought working-class Irish and English voices into the British theatre.

Littlewood's workshops trained the generation of British political performers who built the alternative theatre scene of the 1960s and 1970s.

Augusto Boal and Theatre of the Oppressed

Augusto Boal (1931 to 2009), Brazilian director and theorist, developed Theatre of the Oppressed from the late 1960s. The work emerged out of his direction of the Arena Theatre of Sao Paulo and his political organising during the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964 to 1985).

Central techniques:

• Image Theatre. Participants use their bodies to sculpt scenes that embody social relations. The image is then analysed and modified.
• Forum Theatre. A play is performed showing a social conflict. The audience can stop the play at any point, take over a character's role, and try a different course of action. The audience-as-spect-actors (Boal's term) becomes participants.
• Invisible Theatre. Politically engaged performances staged in public spaces (a bus, a market) without the audience knowing they are watching theatre. The technique seeks to provoke discussion of social issues among unsuspecting bystanders. Now ethically controversial.

Boal was tortured and exiled by the Brazilian regime in 1971. He developed Theatre of the Oppressed in Argentina, Peru, France, and on return to Brazil in 1986. His major theoretical text is Theatre of the Oppressed (1974).

Contemporary political theatre

The political theatre tradition continues in many directions.

United Kingdom

David Hare (Stuff Happens, 2004, on the Iraq War), Caryl Churchill (Top Girls, 1982; A Number, 2002; Seven Jewish Children, 2009), debbie tucker green (random, 2008), James Graham (This House, 2012). The Tricycle Theatre's tribunal plays of the 1990s and 2000s (verbatim courtroom drama) were a major political theatre vehicle.

United States

Tony Kushner (Angels in America, 1991; Caroline, or Change, 2003), Anna Deavere Smith (Fires in the Mirror, 1992; Twilight: Los Angeles, 1993), Larry Kramer (The Normal Heart, 1985).

Australia

Melbourne Workers Theatre (1987 to 2012) was the most institutionally committed political theatre company. Patricia Cornelius's plays on working-class women, sexual violence and contemporary class politics. Stephen Sewell's larger-canvas political plays. Tom Wright's Black Diggers (Sydney Festival, 2014), on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander First World War soldiers. Belvoir's regular political programming. The Black Lung Theatre (active 2005 to 2018) brought a younger generation of political work to Melbourne.

Verbatim theatre as political theatre

Anna Deavere Smith, the Tricycle tribunal plays, Roslyn Oades and Alana Valentine in Australia (covered in the verbatim-theatre dot point).

Techniques across the tradition

Direct address

Speaking past the action to the audience. Standard since Brecht.

Documentary material

Real interviews, news footage, court transcripts. Piscator's invention; verbatim theatre's central method.

Audience participation

Boal's Forum Theatre is the developed example. Less radical forms include solicited audience response in Joan Littlewood's productions.

Episodic structure

Refusal of Aristotelian rising tension. Scenes that present arguments rather than building emotional climax.

Songs and music

Brecht and Weill, Joan Littlewood, contemporary works that interrupt the action with commentary.

Stylised acting

Refusal of psychological realism in favour of presentational performance.

Site-specific staging

Performing in workplaces, union halls, public spaces, community venues rather than only proscenium theatres.

Why political theatre matters for HSC

If your Studies in Drama and Theatre elective is Political Theatre, you will study the tradition from Piscator and Brecht through Littlewood and Boal into contemporary practitioners. Strong essays move past description of techniques into analysis of how form serves political aim, and engage with at least one specific production in detail.