City Research Online City, University of London Institutional Repository Citation: Saville, I. (1990). Ideas, forms and development in the British workers' theatre, 1925-1935. (Unpublished Doctoral thesis, City University London) This is the accepted version of the paper. This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link: https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/7533/ Link to published version: Copyright: City Research Online aims to make research outputs of City, University of London available to a wider audience. Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the author(s) and/or copyright holders. URLs from City Research Online may be freely distributed and linked to. Reuse: Copies of full items can be used for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge. Provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. City Research Online: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/ [email protected] Ideas I orii and developments in the theatre., 1925-1935. Ian Saville. Submitted for Ph.D. The City University, Department of Arts Policy and Management. January 1990. -Page 1- CONTENTS INTRODUCTION. Page 4. CHAPTER ON 1925-1926: The Groundwork for the first Workers' Theatre Movement. Page 11. CHAPTER TWO. The Hackney Group: The Workers' Theatre Movement's new nucleus. Page 57. CHAPTER THREE. The Workers' Theatre Movement and the Communist Party: Politics and Theatrical Form. Page 90. CHAPTER FOUR. From Hackney Group to National Organisation. Page 127. CHAPTER FIVE Development of Ideology and Organisation, 1932-1933. Page 180. CHAPTER SIX. 1933-1935. The end of the Workers' Theatre Movement. Page 208. CONCLUSION. Page 226. NOTES, Page 236. B I BL I OGRAPHL Page 268. APPEND I X.. Page 278. -Page 2- Acknowledgements. I would like to acknowledge the help and guidance I have received from a number of sources. First, Dr. Michael Hammet, who has supervised the progress of my research and writing. In addition, I have received help from Peter Stark, who supervised the early stages of my research, and Professor John Pick, whose lectures and discussions have been illuminating. Others who have contributed hugely to my understanding include those who participated in the work I have attempted to describe and analyse, and I am immensely grateful to John Allen, Roy Battcock, the late Brain Bootnian, Herbert Marshall, Sam Serter, Celia Sevltt and Joe and Trudy Stern for the time they gave me and the memories they uncovered. Other researchers and academics have also been generous in their help, and I must mention the late Jerry Dawson, who helped me track down some obscure references, and Clive Barker, who allowed me access to his extremely important collection of material, and to a very comprehensive taped interview with the late Tom Thomas. I am also grateful to Dr. Leonard Jones for the information about sources which he passed on to me. Richard Stourac and Kathleen McCreery, my former colleagues In the theatre group Broadside, gave me my first glimpse of the existence of the Workers' Theatre Movement, without which I would never have embarked on any of this research. Finally, above all else, I am indebted to Pam Laurance, who has encouraged me at home, and dealt in a most understanding way with the difficulties of living with somebody who is writing up. I grant powers of discretion to the University Librarian to allow this thesis to be copied in whole or In part without further reference to me. This permission covers only single copies made for study purposes, subject to normal conditions of acknowledgement. -Page 3- Abstract of thesis. This thesis traces the development of British workers' theatre in the period 1925 - 1935, focussing on the institution which eventually constituted itself as the Workers' Theatre Movement, and relating the particular character of this organisation to the nature of British theatre as a whole. Whereas previous studies have ascribed the weakness of this movement, to its political immaturity, or to its failure to make use of highly developed literary forms, the failings of the Workers' Theatre Movement are here related to the division within British theatre between "legitimate" and "variety" forms. The leaders of the Workers' Theatre Movement rejected the styles and subjects of the contemporary West End stage, but found themselves in a problematic relationship to popular theatre or variety forms, which they could not associate with the serious messages which they were trying to deliver. For this reason they looked to the workers' theatres of other countries for a formula by which they could make political theatre, but failed to take advantage of truly popular forms which would be more accessible to British workers. In addition, the Workers' Theatre Movement received little support, whether material or ideological, from the British Communist Party, which had not developed any conception of the importance of cultural issues in its political struggle. However, despite these disadvantages, the Workers' Theatre Movement did manage to produce work of some lasting value, and can be seen to have influenced later positive developments in British theatre. Introduction The following study is of an area which has received little attention in the books on theatre history, though this is beginning to be remedied. The reasons for the lack of attention are manifold, and deserve some mention in themselves, The workers' theatre which emerged in the period between the two world wars did not consider itself part of the mainstream of theatre in this country. Indeed, for the central period with which this study deals, in the early 1930s, it hardly considered itself a branch of the theatre at all, preferring to think of itself as a special wing of a. political movement. It is not surprising therefore, that it has hardly been noticed in the surveys of theatre history. Add to this the fact that it was primarily an amateur movement, without a permanent base (until the late thirties, and the founding of Unity Theatre), and its invisibility becomes even more understandable. Further, it was part of working-class culture; the part of history that is usually hidden from view, when the text-books come to be written by the representatives of the middle or upper classes. The few studies of this movement that have been undertaken have given valuable, though only partial, insights into its importance. The first systematic study, Dr. L.A.Jones's -Page 4- 1964 thesis The British Workers' Theatre, 1917-193, is commendable in that it drew attention to a movement which had not been noticed previously by any academic enterprise, and provided a basic outline of the development of the Workers 1 Theatre Movement. But Dr. Jones overlays his account of this development with a conception of theatre which cannot admit to many of the positive achievements of the Workers' Theatre Movement, and tries to locate this movement within a literary tradition of world drama which is alien to its actual aims, as we will see when some attention is devoted to the question of repertoire. Dr. Jones's study also suffers from being the first in the field, in that documents and information which were not available to Dr. Jones have appeared since his thesis was written, and have thrown light on the development of the Workers' Theatre Movement, especially the early years of the movement. This study has therefore been able to correct some of the mistakes of Dr. Jones's thesis, though no doubt errors can be found in this, as in almost any historical account. Another, less detailed, account of the Workers' Theatre Movement is contained in the chapter devoted to the British theatre in Richard Stourac's I'LA. thesis, Revolutionary Workers' Theatre in the Soviet Union, Germany and Britain, (1918-1936], written for the University of Bristol in 19781. This was written without reference to Dr. Jones's work, and it is unfortunate that some of the material which was available to Dr. Jones was not known about for Richard Stourac's study. However, the new material available to Richard Stourac, particularly in the form of interviews with Workers' Theatre Movement veterans, gives some valuable -Page 5- insights, despite the fact that it does not always tie in neatly with the documentary evidence which informs much of the present study. Richard Stourac's analysis leans in a different direction from that of Dr. Jones, and consequently adds its own distortions to the movement which it describes. In particular, it begins from a rather mechanical conception of the functions of theatre, and an over-simple set of expectations of what a political theatre movement should be setting out to achieve. The model which it projects of theatre instituting a "learning process" in its audience tends not to differentiate theatre from other forms of discourse, and does not take into account the special relationship which actors and audiences can strike up. Moreover, Richard Stourac fails to take into account the particular nature of the British theatre, and its relationship to popular culture, which the present study sees as crucial to the understanding of the development of the Worker& Theatre Movement. Other accounts of the Workers' Theatre Movement have been either personal reminiscences, such as those of Ewan MacCoil, Tom Thomas and Philip Poole quoted in the following pages, or broad outlines within a larger study, such as Raphael Samuel's essay on "Theatre and Socialism in Britain (l88O1935)". Both of these approaches are valuable, and without the accounts of those who were involved it would be impossible to get any genuine understanding of how the movement operated, but they do not preclude the need for & closer look at the Issues and the forces which shaped this theatrical phenomenon.