Published in the same year and sharing a partisan approach to history, Catherin Itzin’s Stages in the Revolution and Sandy Craig’s Dreams and Deconstructions are often lumped together in discussions of the historiography of alternative theatre. The differences between the two books, however, are telling. While both survey similar territory, Stages in the Revolution focuses more narrowly on political theatre. As well, Itzin’s view is comparatively retrospective, demonstrating more concern to establish a long legacy of oppositional theatre. Dreams and Deconstructions addresses the panoply of alternative theatre, including community- and children’s theatre along with performance art (although, significantly, it still privileges socialist political theatre). Craig’s work, in its anthology structure and characterization of the field, looks forward to developments in the discourse of alternative theatre in the 1980s.
This essay provides an analysis of Itzin and Craig’s books, examining their taxonomies (particularly their definitions of “political” theatre) and historiographical approaches to alternative theatre. I will situate these books within and against the discourse of alternative theatre in the 1970s, in works such as Peter Ansorge’s Disrupting the Spectacle and Theatre Quarterly, noting how Itzin and Craig modify earlier categorizations. I will then trace how their agendas impact subsequent framings of alternative theatre during the 1980s in the work of writers such as Baz Kershaw, Simon Trussler, Colin Chambers, Steve Gooch, John Bull and others.
1 comment:
Thank you for this contribution. I found it immensely valuable. I appreciated the fact that you included Time Out as part of the historiographical project that maps the categorisations of alternative theatre practice (albeit in a footnote). Would you also say that underground rags like IT should fall under this consideration? On a similar note, where does Jeff Nuttall’s Bomb Culture fit into this historicizing project and the categorizations of the fringe? I have tended to find his 1968 account largely absent in this type of discourse.
I am in the middle of a house move and all my books are boxed up, but I tend to remember Nuttall making strong distinctions between political and avant garde work (I think he even uses the words ‘moralist’ and ‘antimoralist’). It also, of course, chronicles his journey from a CND protester to cofounder of the ‘apolitical’ People Show. This is an area of work I have recently become interested (Nuttall’s transition/transformation from 1965-1968) and how it might speak to artistic/cultural movements of the time.
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