THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

given the generally imperturbable quality of London audiences in the period, it was only minimally disrupted. Much
of the political drama of the 1970s and 1980s was founded on the assumptions that rotten capitalist society was on the
brink of collapse and that there was a widening division between ‘them’ (the surprisingly elastic ruling class which
hung on to its inherited power with increasing cynicism) and ‘us’ (the ruled, for whom proper enlightenment
preceded liberation). This perception of a deeply divided society was accentuated in the spring of 1979 by the
Conservative victory in the General Election and by the twelve-year Prime Ministerial regime of Margaret Thatcher.
The early Thatcher years were remarkable for the uniformity of theatrical protest against Government policies,
philosophies, and philistinism (albeit a protest often voiced in state subsidised theatres). As Hare’s The Great
Exhibition (1972) and Griffiths’s The Party (1973) had already suggested, resistance to ‘Thatcherism’ went hand in
hand with a sense of disillusion with the earlier compromises of the Labour Party and with the tendency to bickering
and in-fighting amongst the British political Left.
Generally, the political drama of the period worked from a basis of Marxist theory informed by the example of
1968, but it rarely addressed problems beyond those of the local difficulties which beset post-imperial little-England.
Much of it now seems distinctly time-locked. References to Ireland and to the troubles of Ulster were legion, but
neither subtle nor especially direct (Brenton’s The Romans in Britain of 1980 is a case in point). The world at large,
and Europe in particular, tended to be glimpsed through carefully angled binoculars (as the somewhat conventional
assumptions about the nature of Soviet influence in Eastern Europe in plays such as Edgar’s Maydays of 1983
suggest). The implicit parallel between the manipulation of information in the Soviet Union and the corrupt control of
the British press by an ambitious and
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unscrupulous newspaper tycoon in Hare and Brenton’s collaborative play Pravda: A Fleet Street Comedy (produced at
the National Theatre in 1985) is ultimately as slick as its criticism of capitalism is melodramatic. Hare’s subtlety as a
dramatist and a political analyst is more evident in Plenty (also produced at the National Theatre in 1978). Plenty
(which was filmed in 1985) is a study of an intelligent and corrupted woman, a former undercover agent in wartime
France who has pursued a career in advertising in post-war Britain (‘In France ... I told such glittering lies. But
where’s the fun in lying for a living? ... Sold out. Is that the phrase?’). His interest in character, and in how characters
shape and are shaped by the institutions to which they give their loyalty, also determined the often elusive texture of
Racing Demon, an amused, almost Trollopian, study of how power is manipulated by the smug hierarchy of the
Church of England. Trevor Griffiths, always adept at articulating debate, if rarely given to comedy, made one
supremely successful and ambitious stab at exploring the political nature of humour in the play Comedians (1975).
Although the play ingeniously outlines a socio-political thesis, it also allows for a singular variety of demonstration
and exemplification. The retired comic, who has taught a class of aspiring comedians at a Manchester night school,
devoutly insists that a true joke ‘has more to do than release tension, it has to liberate the will and the desire, it has to
change the situation’, but his tuition is effectively subverted by the theatrical agent who favours those who support the
status quo by retaining old racial and sexual stereotypes. The strength of Griffiths’s play lies in its creative tensions
and in its representation of a battle of wits in which no holds are barred.
Caryl Churchill's work has been equally rooted in opposition to a social system based on exploitation. Unlike her
male counterparts, however, Churchill (b. 1938) has recognized an equation between the traditional power exercised
by capitalists and the universal subjection of women. Her woman characters emerge as the victims of a culture which
has regarded them merely as commodities or which has conditioned them to submit to masculine social rules. Her
plays have systematically thrown down challenges either by reversing conventional representations of male and
female behaviour (as in the Ortonian Owners of 1972) or by drawing disconcerting parallels between colonial and
sexual oppression (as in Cloud Nine of 1979, with its ostensibly farcical shifts of gender and racial roles). In the
multilayered Top Girls (1982) Churchill explores the superficial ‘liberation’ of women in the Thatcherite 1980s by
contrasting the lifestyle of Marlene, a pushy, urban, woman executive, with that of her articulate, rural, stay-at-home
sister. More pointedly, the first act of the play puts Marlene’s supposed success in the context of the careers of other
‘top girls’, historical women who either became famous by usurping male roles (Pope Joan, and the Victorian
explorer, Isabella Bird) or remained obedient to male-imposed stereotypes (the Japanese courtesan, Lady Nijo, and
Patient Griselda). All except Dull Gret, a figure taken from a painting by Brueghel whom Brecht had apotheosized as
the representative of peasant
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rebellion, have ultimately submitted and been sacrificed. The women rarely seem to understand how much their
circumstances and experience overlap, though Gret, the uneducated rebel who later reappears as Marlene’s rejected
daughter, seems to offer an angrier, vaguer, but more genuinely radical kind of liberation. Churchill’s cultivated