Pageantry and the Popular Front: Ideological Production in the 'Thirties

Mick Wallis Pageantry and the Popular Front: Ideological Production in the 'Thirties The British working-class pageants of the nineteen-thirties were curiously cross-bred between, on the one hand, the resolutely bourgeois civic pageants which had become popular around the turn of the century and remained so still, and, on the other, the new Soviet style of mass-declamations with agit-prop intent. Often ignored even by left-wing theatre historians, these pageants drew on other influences varying from endemic communal forms of creation such as choirs and processions to the work of contemporary, left-leaning 'high art' poets and musicians. Here, Mick Wallis looks in detail at one such pageant, Music and the People, mounted in London in April 1939, and at the tripartite five- day festival of which it formed a part. He goes on to explore the politics, aesthetics, and logistics of this long-neglected form of popular performance. Mick Wallis, who teaches drama at Loughborough University, has recently published on using Raymond Williams's work in the integration of practical and academic approaches to teaching. His one-man act, Sir John Feelgood and Marjorie, was an experiment in popular form for the sake of left-wing benefits. A PLAYING-FIELD in South Wales, 1 May The veteran is a real veteran, living proof of 1939. A paying audience on tiered scaffolds struggle brought up to date and into have watched 2,000 other local people enact immediate presence. Locally lived history is a history of the Welsh working class, an seen in its genuine continuity with events episodic account of its strengths and its on a global scale. A narrative gives coher- struggles. Some perform as members of ence and perspective to history. Both the choirs, others have become involved indivi- sturdy might and the protective strength of dually. The Pageant of South Wales now nears a community are imaged - once by that nar- its end. There is a fanfare, and a group of rative, and again by the shape of an event uniformed men march into the arena to the performed by a community to and for itself, music of the Spanish Republican Hymn. and present in mass. One steps forward and speaks: The programme helps the spectator to follow the events in the arena. The simul- I am one of the little band that went out from South Wales to fight in the International Brigade taneous speaking and reading of words, the in Spain. I am going to ask you to rise, all of you, utterance of clearly selected and scripted and swear with me this oath of victory. phrases, producing the sense of a litany, In the name of Wales and its people, in the enhance the felt value of the oath. But the name of our high-wrought past, in the name of programme also importantly acts as a our traditions, in the name of all our battles in the fight for freedom, on this day 1st May 1939, souvenir, a trace to be carried away of that we solemnly swear not to relax until freedom, sensation of special presence, of bearing and the prosperity that can only be brought by witness. The same event was staged simul- the power of the people, bring back the sunshine taneously in three separate locations. It to our land. All those in favour shout 'Aye'. rained, and fewer turned up than expected. You, who are reading this programme, and all around you, shout the answer, and the Bands To many in the mid-1930s, the march of play - THE INTERNATIONAL.1 fascism across Europe looked as if it might be unstoppable. Faced with this crisis and The words are given in the programme, so this perception, Communist policy changed. that all might sing the Communist anthem. The assumption had been that capitalism 132 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Swansea University Libraries, on 11 Mar 2019 at 15:00:10, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X00000300 was in final crisis. As the legitimate embodi- received version of the narrative recounts ment of the organized international working how the vigorous, urgent, and defiantly class, the Party should have no truck with working-class politics and aesthetics of the the parties of social democracy or reformist late 'twenties and early 'thirties gave way to trade unions, since these had already demon- class compromise and a retreat to bourgeois strated their complicity with capital. theatrical values and 'amdram' institutions. But by the time of the Spanish Civil War The movement was misled. Stalin's pact in 1936, the old strategy of Class against with Hitler demonstrated the Comintern's Class had given way completely to a new abandonment of international Communism logic: the need for a United or Popular Front in favour of socialism in one country, state against fascism. The Communist Party of capitalist nationalism. The leaderships of the Great Britain and its satellite political, educa- British and other Communist parties obedi- tional, and cultural organizations were now ently sold out their members and their class. seeking both the co-operation of other orga- In such an account, the supposed theat- nizations and the membership of individu- rical retreat either reflects or is a typifying als from a very broad 'progressive' political instance of an overall political retreat. A spectrum. counter argument is that agit-prop merely The advent of the Popular Front in Britain hectored its auditors and typically gave was also marked by changes in Communist them neither practical nor theoretical per- theatrical repertoire and organization. A spectives - that, in short, it failed both as short spate of publications in the 1980s has agitation and as propaganda. And this helped identify this as a shift away from the claimed failure is linked to the failure of mobile agit-prop practice of the Workers' Communism to stem the tide of reaction Theatre Movement to the work of the Unity during its sectarian phase. That tide is seen Theatres in London, Liverpool, Bristol, and as being stemmed at least temporarily by Sheffield. In this and a subsequent article, the united fight against fascism, the transla- I aim to extend the available picture of tion of an imperialist war into a people's war. theatre-related Popular Front cultural acti- Four interrelating questions arise here. vity in Britain by describing and analyzing One is the actual nature of the cultural some of the pageants mounted by the Party practice in concrete terms. A second is the and its workers after 1936. relationship of this to an overall political practice, its role in relation to other organi- zational and rhetorical activities. A third is A Popular or Unpopular Front? the politics of historical interpretation - Popular Front theatrical product was not as what value we place on the choices taken. uniform as some commentators have im- And a fourth is a more general and abstract plied. Chambers (1989), for instance, provides political question of form - how it constructs ample evidence of the variety of forms and a relationship to reality, situates the spec- performance situations employed by the tator in relation to others, and offers or Unity theatres. These were by no means withholds the sense of agency, or of unified confined to naturalism on the 'curtain stage': or decentered subjectivity. performances of the mass declamation On We need to interpret the past to make Guard for Spain at Trafalgar Square or at choices in the present, and those choices public meetings are an obvious case in include attention to forms of cultural pro- point. The pageants, mounted outside the duction and product. These two articles are remit of the political theatre clubs, are intended to contribute towards such choices, further witness to this variety.2 but not to arbitrate them. The material Simplified claims about Popular Front presented here might be mobilized in the theatrical initiatives make the job of criti- making of such choices, but can only use- cizing the general political turn in European fully serve this purpose if the four questions Communism all too easy. For example, one are not collapsed into one another. They 133 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Swansea University Libraries, on 11 Mar 2019 at 15:00:10, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X00000300 are importantly related but are not inter- religion, which would both deeply engage changeable.3 the spectator and also deliver a secular, These articles will briefly describe, situate, materialist message. and analyze a number of pageants. How- Yet form and content are not so separ- ever various in its forms, most Popular able. To what extent does the form merely Front cultural product bears the clear marks deliver faith, offer the spectator immersion of the changed political project. Thus, there into a process which promises sublimity is plenty of evidence here of materialist while actually delivering oppression and Marxism having recourse to idealist images, objectification? For some, the narrative from of middle-class artists writing for working- Bolshevism to Stalinism has the shape of an class performers, of women seen as the re- inevitability, the juxtaposition of a Commu- positories of peace and human feeling, of nist rally with one at Nuremberg a shape the construction of heroic narratives. There is something like a mirror. also evidence of the powerful popularization But the totalizing emphatics of an agit- of Marxist theory, of the galvanizing of a prop sketch are not the same as a totalizing community, of a sober self-reflexivity.

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