Part farce, part anger and often served with a large dose of dark humour, Theatre Uncut brings protest to the stage. The seven short plays that make up Theatre Uncut were written by Lucy Kirkwood, Dennis Kelly, Laura Lomas, Anders Lustgarten, Mark Ravenhill, Jack Thorne and Clara Brennan. All seven scripts are a response to the coalition’s spending cuts. The flagship production was staged at Southwark Theatre on 19 March and on the same night the plays were also performed in community centres, youth theatres and sitting rooms across the county. More than 45 performances took place, from Brixton market to Edinburgh University.

The scripts are as diverse as the breadth of the cuts. They take the audience on an angry journey that questions the necessity of the public service cuts and forcibly demonstrates the scale of the attack. They give voice to those who fear losing the benefits they rely on and paint allegorical pictures of the absurdity of an austerity drive that offers no growth plan.

Those behind the event hope it will bear witness to and provide a record of how the cuts are affecting people in the UK. Hannah Price, artistic director of Reclaim Productions, the company behind Theatre Uncut, wants the performances to be the start of a national theatrical uprising, setting in motion a continued dialogue. And with so many readings and performances already taking place, the project has surely provided a space for creative discussions.

Price was surprised at how easy it was to get people involved in the project: ‘I had no idea how many cross people there were out there. From ex-pats in the US to people in Berlin, people just approached us. It was easier than you would have thought.’

Count me in

When Price first shared her idea, it was an automatic ‘count me in’ from renowned playwright Mark Ravenhill: ‘It is refreshing to see how political this generation has become. I wanted to work on something that could involve people from across the country. These plays are a starting point for bringing a group of people together for a discussion, and drama is a good way of imagining other worlds and other ways of thinking.’

Ravenhill’s script took the student protests in 2010 as a point of departure to explore the dreams of a past generation. Apparitions from the 1950s, Marge and Fred, celebrate the birth of the NHS and debate the next steps required for more equality: gradual change or revolution? Softly, softly or the blood and terror of an uprising?

Ravenhill leaves these questions for a new generation of students to ponder. ‘The play doesn’t wrap that up,’ he says. ‘Gradualism may be very well intentioned but, when under attack, is it strong enough to protect what we’ve gained?’

Last century we gained a welfare state and a health system that are the envy of many around the world. It is the prospect of this being slowly dismantled that Price wants people to discuss. ‘I want to inspire people to look at it in more detail,’ she says.

It is the details that many of the plays are preoccupied with. Several focus on a subject that doesn’t often get discussed on the stage: economic literacy. In particular, they describe the pressing need to understand the numbers so we can fight back informed.

‘The numbers are so complicated that we need an entirely new language,’ claims Bill’s accountant in Lucy Kirkwood’s short piece. By making Bill feel that his economic situation is far too difficult for him to understand the accountant persuades Bill to sell his gran for ‘a good price’. Physically too weak to defend the sovereignty of her body, gran at least has the mental capacity left to assess the accountant as she’s dragged from her home: ‘You’re a cunt.’ No wool over her eyes, then.

Lustgarten’s piece is more of a speech than a traditional piece of theatre, but again the same themes emerge. For Lustgarten the world of economics is purposefully being made ‘opaque and complex’.

The impact of the austerity drive on people’s lives is another key theme threading the seven scripts together. Linda the Glow Clown’s monologue by Clara Brennan is an evocative tale of a mother who, in the absence of the disability mobility allowance, can no longer take her disabled daughter on excursions from the care home. Aware of her daughter’s anger at this loss of freedom, Linda feels able only to visit her in disguise. As a clown she attempts to give her daughter in laughter and pleasure what she cannot with a trip to the forest or the sea.

The death of the enabling state is metaphorically depicted in Jack Thorne’s play. Nigel and Julie create a world where their pets and children perish in the purposeful absence of love and basic care. Survival of the fittest marks the sadistic actions of parents who believe that mobility – physical, political, economic – is nothing if it’s not achieved alone. ‘Real mobility is being mobile without support,’ proclaims Julie.

Arts under the cuts

Theatre Uncut paints a vivid picture of the many impacts of austerity, but the scripts are also a comment on cuts to the arts. Written, directed and performed for free, these plays provide their own protest against the cuts and serve as a powerful reminder of the talent of UK script writers – talent which, alongside musicians, actors and artists now, faces an uncertain future. The Arts Council is losing 29.6 per cent from its budget on top of 100 per cent cuts to humanities teaching in universities. There can be no disputing that these cuts will harm our cultural industries.

Lack of funding for the arts is nothing new. The executive director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Vikki Heywood, has already made the comparison with the last Tory administration, when many arts organisations were left in tremendous debt. This doesn’t make the effects any less serious though. Arts are central to how we learn to relate to each other, to experience one another’s lives and to share our own. The arts offer us a commentary on how to make sense of the world and even how to change it.
Already there are many people in the UK excluded from participation in the arts; with less funding this number is set to increase. We could be left with an unbridgeable divide as arts become the preserve only of those who can afford to keep them as a hobby. Richard Eyre, former artistic director of the National Theatre, claims the result of the Arts Council cuts could be ‘a cultural apartheid’, which it may not be possible to reverse.

As Lisa, the anxious fiancée, watches her partner struggle to survive, she decries the ease of destruction: ‘It’s not the tearing up that’s hard … It’s the putting back together.’ When hearts are removed, they do not re-grow.

Theatre Uncut is produced by Reclaim Productions, in association with Meeting Point Productions. www.theatreuncut.co.uk

Half a century later it’s hard to imagine the impact made by the visit of the Berliner Ensemble to London’s Palace Theatre in August 1956, a fortnight after the death of its founder Bertolt Brecht. Performing only in German with no surtitles (‘We shall be offering most of the audience a pure pantomime, a kind of silent film on the stage,’ said Brecht in his last message to the company), the Ensemble’s short season of three Brecht plays (Mother Courage, The Caucasian Chalk Circle and Trumpets and Drums) took the English stage by storm.

For the veteran theatre critic Michael Billington, recalling the visit in his epic State of the Nation: British theatre since 1945 (Faber and Faber, 2007), it was one of two events in the ‘pivotal year of 1956′ that ‘in the short term exposed [Britain's] cultural divisions and in the long term genuinely changed the British theatre’. The other was the establishment of the English Stage Company (ESC) at the Royal Court, whose first productions that year included Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and, most famously, John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger.

Billington notes how the ESC’s director-designate George Devine had seen the Berliner Ensemble at work in Germany the previous year and ‘ended up bowled over by Brecht’s achievement of a “poetic reality”‘. For Devine, as with those who were similarly ‘bowled over’ by the Ensemble in London in 1956, Brecht’s medium was more important than his Marxist message (which the Foreign Office had tried to suppress by way of an unsuccessful bid to deny the East German company entry visas). ‘British theatre practitioners,’ Billington writes, ‘seized avidly on the acting, the decor, the lighting and the austere purity of the productions.

‘For a generation raised on star casting, short rehearsal periods, the encrustations of naturalism and the frayed maintenance of theatrical illusion, the visit of the Berliner Ensemble provided a profound stylistic shock: one that was to permeate the British theatre, and even rival media, over the coming decades.’

Pervasive techniques

‘Brechtian’ theatre techniques have become so pervasive – in film and television as well as on the stage – that we have to imagine ourselves back in the 1950s to recognise just how revolutionary they appeared at the time.

Consider, for example, Brecht’s key objective of stripping away the artifice of traditional bourgeois theatre. He wanted, he said, to ‘drop the assumption that there is a fourth wall cutting the audience off from the stage and the consequent illusion that the stage action is taking place in reality and without an audience’.

We are accustomed today to minimalist stage sets, undisguised staging techniques, open stage wings, exposed stage machinery, visible lighting rigs and all the rest. We are familiar, too, with the use of non-naturalistic, discordant, sometimes non-chronological or seemingly disconnected scenes and storytelling methods.

We are even, despite this age of celebrity, unfazed by casts of actors who, as the critic Kenneth Tynan described those appearing in the Berliner Ensemble’s Mother Courage, ‘look shockingly like people, real, potato-faced people such as one might meet in a bus queue’. No one bats an eyelid when the National’s current production of Mother Courage dispenses with certain stage-set artifices altogether and simply drops down white sheets with ‘A thatched cottage’, ‘A general’s tent’ or ‘An army canteen’ painted roughly on them. In 1956, this sort of thing was still strikingly avant garde, challenging and fresh.

So too was the Brechtian approach to acting. This involved, above all, his famous notion of verfremdungseffekt – the ‘alienation’ or ‘estrangement effect’ (see box, right). Brecht was scathing about the kind of theatre that required ‘the spectator to leave his reasoning powers with his hat and coat [and] to simply engage in a trancelike orgy of feeling’. He sought to get his audiences to engage their ‘critical faculties in assessing what was being enacted, and gain insights’.

In Kenneth Tynan’s words again, the performers in Brecht’s plays ‘do not behave like western actors; they neither bludgeon us with personality nor woo us with charm’. To do so would be to undermine the fundamental intent of Brecht’s work, which was to lay bare the reality beneath the surface of capitalist illusion.

Brecht sought to stimulate the intellect of his audience into recognising how so much of what appears ‘natural’, rational and immutable is in reality nothing of the sort. And, as the Latin American literary theorist Roberto Schwarz puts it in ‘Brecht’s relevance: highs and lows’, an essay recently translated and adapted for New Left Review (May/June 2009), he was convinced that: ‘Once the oppressed made out the strange in the familiar, the irrational in the everyday, and the anomalous in the rule, an acceptable and comprehensive reorganisation of society [would be] close at hand.’

Brechtian politics and theatre

It is impossible to isolate either Brecht’s writing or his production methods from the political beliefs that underpinned them. The Brechtian project for the transformation of the theatre went hand in hand with the Marxist project for the transformation of society. And it was inevitable that once the 20th-century application of Marxism failed to bring about the social and economic changes that its adherents had argued were historically inevitable, so too would the nature of the Brechtian impact on theatre alter.

As Schwarz notes, ‘[when] the place on the leading edge of history that Brecht’s method presumed found itself without support in the real course of things [this transformed] clear-sighted critical superiority into an illusion’. It was the ultimate inversion: the exposer of bourgeois artifice himself exposed as a peddler of political illusion. ‘Under these circumstances, the didactic component of Brechtian estrangement was left without anything to teach, at least directly; and so changed its meaning.’

Brecht was far from alone on the Marxist left in failing to recognise the immense adaptability and social and cultural flexibility of the capitalist order. As Schwarz writes (in specific relation to Latin America but it applies more generally), ‘The “economic miracle” had brought not just a leap in manufacturing and its internationalisation, but a liberalisation of sexual mores, a normalisation of drug use, the partial – and precarious – incorporation of the poor into mass consumerism, and the desacralising commercialisation of culture. The left’s certainty that it was the party of historical progress, while its adversary would be traditionalist, lost its footing in reality. Meanwhile, commercial culture had appropriated the most sensational aesthetic discoveries of the avant-garde, Brechtian drama included, for its own purposes.’

So Brechtian methods found their way into everything from advertising new cleaning products to the exposed stage sets of television newscasts, in which ‘the Brechtian focus on the material infrastructure of ideology – [for example] on the didactic inclusion of the wings on centre-stage … [functioned] as a prop for the authority of capital, rather than a critique.

‘The cameras and cameramen filming other cameras that filmed the studio, the giant logo, the anchormen, all lent weight and immutability to the industrial-commercial apparatus which stood behind the highly partisan account of the world that we would shortly be given.’

What had been a tool in the historic struggle for emancipation was turned into another weapon in the cultural armoury of the ruling class.

An entertaining message

If Brecht’s methods were subject to appropriation, his message could not be so easily adulterated. Tony Kushner’s new translation and Deborah Warner’s direction of Mother Courage at the National Theatre remains true to Brecht’s original concept of ‘epic theatre’, capturing the ‘pointless, grotesquely protracted, gruesome catastrophe’ (Kushner’s words) that was the Thirty Years War. And in its dramatic account of that war as experienced by some of its ordinary participants it remains as relevant and insightful to a 21st-century audience as it did to a world recovering from the ravages of two world wars.

The National’s production also manages to do what the Berliner Ensemble was doing half a century ago. The critic Harold Hobson wrote of the Ensemble in Theatre in Britain (1984) that it exposed the poverty of productions of Brecht that were ‘heavy, sententious and void of life’ with an approach full of ‘verve, melodramatic vigour, and regard for theatrical effect as well as doctrinal orthodoxy’. To the Ensemble – and now to the National – ‘had been revealed a truth hidden from their British rivals, namely that Brecht and entertainment are synonymous’.

It is a myth that Brecht was ever unaware of the importance of entertainment. But stripped of its expressly didactic intent and its purposeful context as part of the transformational Marxist project, Mother Courage becomes, like the rest of Brecht’s work, precisely what Brecht would not have wanted it to become: a classic, rather than an interventionist drama.

Brecht’s methods may have become mainstream and his message may retain much potency in its modern incarnation, but the political movement of which he was a critical member – at least in its dominant 20th-century form – has been consigned to the dustbin of history.

The perfect subject for a piece of modern-day Brechtian epic theatre, in other words.

It begins with Bugles at the Gates of Jalalabad by Stephen Jeffreys. The play tells the story of the first Afghan war, which took place in the mid 19th century – one of the first major conflicts during the ‘Great Game’, the term coined to describe the power struggle in central Asia between Great Britain and Russia.

And it ends with the current bloody conflict in Afghanistan in Simon Stephens’ play Canopy of Stars, which explores the war’s impact on British soldiers and the responses of their family back home. That the opening and final stories of The Great Game focus on wars the British have fought in Afghanistan provides a sad yet beautiful framing to the play, as we see the same mistakes repeated and hear of their impact by two generations of soldiers living 150 years apart.

But the question remains; why put on such an epic play about Afghanistan? Afghanistan is the political issue of the day; our country is embroiled in a long and bloody war there, the end of which appears a long way off, and what happens in Afghanistan promises to have a massive impact on world politics for years to come. Looking at it this way, it is surprising the history and politics of the country have not been explored more by writers and artists, as for example Iraq’s have.

Politics and art have always enjoyed a special relationship; art allows us to probe our beliefs and ideas and convey them in new, interesting and creative forms. And when free political debate is stifled or silenced, art becomes the last sanctuary of expression, as people search for covert methods of communicating what they can no longer say aloud.

The Great Game tries to unpack and explore a history more hidden than visible to many in the west, and give a voice to opinions and ideas often lacking in our national ‘discussions’ on Afghanistan. In this sense it is the absolute meeting of the political and the art.

The playwrights, including Richard Bean, David Edgar, David Greig, Abi Morgan, Simon Stephens, Ron Hutchinson, Stephen Jeffreys and Colin Teevan, have delivered scripts which are politically challenging and complex and beautifully dramatic, and varied in both form and content. Each play is like a signature of the playwright exploring the history of one country but in a style unique to each, and lingering on themes of personal interest.

It is this communication and co-dependence between art and politics that inspires artists. It forces the stars to part with their egos and makes it about the experience; this is not about one playwright, one leading actor or one director but about the questions we, as a group, are asking of an audience. There is no space in The Great Game for such egos; it runs for eleven hours, in which time the audience is guided through twelve stories, each with their own characters and concerns. The same actors are used throughout, in greater or lesser roles depending on the play, creating a true ensemble experience.

In recounting the history of Afghanistan, characters and opinions are featured that are often unheard in the west. The Lion of Kabul, one of the plays within The Great Game, is a neat example. The main character is a Taliban mullah – figures much spoken about here in Britain but rarely allowed a voice. This mullah, named Kahn, asks some probing questions about how the west views Afghanistan, at one point asking: ‘Is it not our human right to reject your “freedom”? This is one human right you do not recognise.’

Some of the opinions presented may not be ones I, or the audience, agree with, but that is the point of theatre. When you stage a play you have to engage in all perspectives; the whole point is to be as objective as possible and create complex characters which are believable. We in the west are looking at the world through a western lens and our specific cultural attitudes permeate our understanding and response. When you are directing or acting you have to be as true to the characters as possible, which forces you to examine and justify a character whose opinions are not your own. But this is what makes theatre interesting. It is what makes theatre unique.

Afghan history is rich and complex, as is our relationship with it. In staging The Great Game we are not concerned with ‘supporting’ or ‘defeating’ any argument or opinion. It does not offer answers but invites questions. We hope to spark debate – but one premised upon a more thorough understanding of Afghanistan’s history and politics.

Indhu Rubasingham was talking to Kate Ferguson

My mum and dad always understood how education matters; my mum even managed to pull off the feat of training to be a teacher and bringing up three kids (when we were old enough to do at least a few things for ourselves) simultaneously. But it was always more in the sense of it giving you some kind of economic security in life – an opportunity of ending that dependence on ‘pits, pots and steel’ for employment that limited (and when those industries closed, blighted) so many lives in my hometown of Stoke-on-Trent. Like most people from ordinary sorts of backgrounds, I grew up in a cultural desert. The very idea of art and culture was something that belonged to them – the upper classes, nobs, southerners, snobs, all of whom were conflated in our resolutely proletarian provincial eyes.

You internalise a disdain for that which you have been denied. The object of potential desire is transmuted into an object of contempt. And so it is with ‘high’ art and culture.

That’s something that Lee Hall, who wrote Billy Elliot and whose Pitmen Painters is currently showing at the National Theatre, understands both intellectually and emotionally. Pitmen Painters, which premiered at the Live Theatre in Newcastle in September 2007, is the story of the Ashington Group of (mainly) miner-painters, who started off by hiring a Newcastle University lecturer to deliver a Workers’ Education Association class on art appreciation and finished up painting their own working-class niche in art history.

The group became famous not only for its art – vibrant, non-nonsense representations of ordinary working-class life by ordinary working men (no women in the WEA in those days) whose harsh lives encompassed two world wars and a seamless cycle of six-day weeks at the colliery – but also for the fact that they remained avowedly ‘non-professional’. They continued with their jobs at the pit, or in one case as a ‘dental mechanic’, even when one of their number was offered a stipend (‘What the bloody hell’s a stipend?’) to give up work and paint full time. They operated as a collective, and any money they made from the sale of their paintings was paid into the group’s funds to cover the cost of materials and other expenses.

These were men who were not unknowledgeable about their subject, for all that Lee Hall’s play enjoys some laughs at the expense of their lack of learning. (‘Let’s see – Titian.’ ‘Bless you.’ ‘Leonardo is perhaps the acme of the entire Renaissance.’ ‘I thought you said he was a painter.’) ‘We’re not thick, you know – well apart from Jimmy,’ says one of the pitmen painters, George Brown. ‘We’ve just done evolutionary biology.’ ‘Most of wi left school when we were eleven, so there’s a lot of things we divvint knaa,’ says Oliver Kilbourn, who was to become one of the best known members of the group and was the one who turned down the stipend from the art collecting aristocrat Helen Sutherland. ‘But that’s why we come here – to find oot about the world.’ In later years, as Hall comments in his programme notes, they were to write knowledgably about Cézanne and Picasso and were ardent devotees of Turner, Ruskin and Blake.

‘Quite clearly, the working classes of the early part of the last century were aspirational about high art,’ writes Hall. ‘They not only felt entitled, but felt a duty to take part in the best that life has to offer in terms of art and culture. That 50 years later I could write Billy Elliot, a story about the incomprehension of a mining community towards a similar aspirant to high culture, seems to me some sort of index of a political and cultural failure.’
Hall says that the fact that the Ashington Group achieved so much unaided and unabetted ‘should remind us that dumbing down is not a prerequisite of culture being more accessible. That is a lie perpetuated by those who want to sell us shit.’ I think it’s more than that. It is a reflection of that poverty of aspirations that does as much, if not more, to keep ordinary working people down as any material poverty. And it is a denial of the opportunity for all of us to achieve something transformative in our lives, whoever we are and in whatever circumstances we find ourselves, and to experience the numinance of art (a word, incidentally, that Hall uses in Pitmen Painters but appears as a noun in few dictionaries and gets only 47 mentions on Google) – basically its spiritual essence, the thing that moves us, that transcends the everyday and the ordinary.

There is a hugely uplifting conclusion to the first act of Pitmen Painters in which the actors deliver a shared crescendo of lines, each speaking a quick phrase or sentence in turn, starting with their experience of a visit to the Tate Gallery; taking in the notion of art not being about money or ownership but about something shared, something cherished; capturing the idea of the force, the energy, the spirituality, the creativity, the inspiration of art; and concluding with the sense of art as something that you do rather than something you consume. ‘You can take one set of things – some board, some paint, whatever. You can take this one set of things – and you can make them something else. Whatever your circumstances – rich or poor … And that is what is important about art. You take one thing – and you make one thing into another – and you transform – who you are.’

It doesn’t have to be painting. It can be poetry, music, film, theatre, dance, football (why not?) or any number of other outlets for the creativity, inspiration and artistic accomplishment and appreciation that lies within us all. Pitmen Painters should be performed at every underachieving working-class comprehensive in the country as an inspiration to those who might need a nudge to appreciate the existence of a world beyond that of Big Brother and celebrity culture; and to every single one of the shabby heirs to the labour movement that gave us the Ashington Group as a reminder not just of what has been mislaid along the cultural way but of how much might be achieved if only we put our minds to it.

Paintings by the Ashington Group were sold at exhibitions to raise funds for materials and running the hut in which the painters worked, but those that were regarded as the best were kept for the ‘permanent collection’. Most of the 86 paintings in this collection can now be viewed in a specially designed gallery at Woodhorn Colliery Museum, Queen Elizabeth II Country Park, Ashington, Northumberland NE63 9YF (Tel: 01670 528080)

I can recall the excitement that I felt when Roland arrived in Bristol in the early 1960s. ‘I’d always been a natural show off, written plays at school, been influenced by the Goon Show and the anarchy and surreality of everything – and being a Monsieur Hulot,’ he says. This 20-year-old, larger than life ‘post bohemian’ moved from a building site in Bristol to the Old Vic theatre school. ‘They didn’t want me as an actor but accepted me on a technicians’ course.’

He had an appetite for performance with wit and quickness of thought and a patter that grabbed you and made you want to engage with him immediately – or quickly escape. Working on the sites he’d become political and was part of the first strike in a drama school,. He, however, remembers being influenced at this time by a grotesque production of Ubu Roi; the anarchy and brilliance of Pere Ubu found a living model in Roland Muldoon.

Claire arrived in Bristol from Bradford at the same time. She too was working class, leaving school at 14 and working as a teleprinter operator. Her performing background had been ballet and tap: ‘I couldn’t afford to do both, so I sat in on the tap and learnt that way!’

Unity Theatre

After his stint at drama school Roland went to London to another building site and joined the Communist-run Unity Theatre, where he became company stage manager. ‘It was a wonderful thing to be part of that working class theatre but they were completely rigid about everything. They’d got a letter from Sean O’Casey or his estate saying that he wouldn’t have anything to do with them and they were stunned that he wouldn’t have anything to do with the one true church.’

Claire followed: ‘I was sort of with Roland but wasn’t and I wanted somewhere to live so stayed with him.’ Ironically, she says that she’d given up ‘a good career in the City’ to go to ZAPU (Zimbabwe African People’s Union) in a building shared by the Pan African Congress, the Movement for Colonial Freedom, the Connolly Association and the Caribbean Workers Association.

At Unity Roland became the sacrificial goat when the party discovered dissent. He was expelled, being labelled a ‘Freudian Trotskyist’. In search of a centre, Roland enrolled as a teacher at the Working Men’s College in Camden Town, and a small group of us enrolled as his class. ‘They’d thought we were going to be doing Ibsen; instead we were improvising and building the groundwork for our style,’ he says.

Our influences were rock and roll, and the immediacy of advertising images (much as we hated them), and plays were being developed through improvisation, choreographed and filmically cut and edited. All centred on a Muggins figure. ‘We’d developed a style, and what was being formed was forming us as well,’ says Claire.

CAST

CAST’s first play was John D Muggins, a young GI in Vietnam, which began with a small group of actors racing towards the audience pointing and shouting, ‘John D Muggins is dead. For what reason did he die?’ ‘We had three chairs and you jumped up and did it in 20 minutes,’ says Roland. ‘Our publicity was we could play anywhere; we could play in a telephone box!’ The rehearsing was in any spaces possible: church halls, the basement of the Architects Association and photographers’ studios. We had no money and would get on the bus to go to performances carrying red flags, ladders and props.

For CAST the 1960s meant struggles for national liberation, the civil rights movements in the US and Vietnam. We were young, committed and immensely energetic. There was constant intense discussion and argument – none of us knew much but there was an enormous appetite and once we’d shaped a play there was an urgency to perform. ‘It was art which was the magic ingredient,’ Roland emphasises. ‘We were thinking art and politics. They said you couldn’t talk about religion and politics, which made you want to talk about them. Similarly with art and politics. We made it work. When you were on stage you were about your free expression of yourself in the discipline of the play, the way a jazz musician in a jazz band was expected to fill their moment. We were artists. We loved the French film, Les Enfants du Paradis, where the mime artist was freed from the restriction of the writer.’

A series of plays followed John D, such as Mr Oligarchy’s Circus and Muggins Awakening, performed in pubs, trade union branches, student meetings, and even in the Roundhouse. They were not stories but dialectical presentations of arguments and ideas, using juxtaposed archetypical images. Roland was always critical of middle class people entering the theatre thinking they were bringing socialism to the working class: ‘We’d come out of this post-war working class generation. When we played to striking miners they were smoking pot and were all rock and roll.’ His maxim was ‘If you eat a Wall’s pork sausage you know what capitalism is!’

In the 1970s CAST split. One half went with Red Saunders and helped to develop Rock against Racism and Kartoon Klowns, who brilliantly forced the rock and roll world to look at itself and its relation to the National Front. CAST rebuilt itself, got an Arts Council grant, extended its touring, including in 1981 to New York where Roland was awarded an Obie (Off-Broadway theatre award) for Confessions of a Socialist. By this time Roland and Clair had two daughters, Laura and Alison.

With Thatcher in power they and other radical theatres lost their grants. The 7:84 company (the name comes from a statistic about 7 per cent of the people having 84 per cent of the wealth) went to Scotland. Belt and Braces gave up. CAST decided they were going into comedy. They’d already found the Arts Council regime restricting. ‘We cheated and twisted but they imposed an agenda,’ says Roland. ‘We never stopped being rude about the system and the last one we did was Sedition 81 where we cut the queen’s head off, assassinated everybody and gave out free joints to the audience as a tax rebate. We knew they were after us and the only way to go was to keep throwing stones at them’.

New Variety

New Variety was developing and was better suited to the period. For Roland, ‘You can say anything to real audiences, it’s more dynamic than plays. I wanted something I’d not heard before, and the only place was in stand-up. It carries the baton for popular theatre.’ Popular theatre in Britain had meant music hall: British, imperialist and reactionary.

CAST wanted a popular theatre about politics and art, provoking you to laugh while recognising the horror. It was not to be documentary, nor carrying tablets of stone; it needed to express the chaos that we were in.

CAST had the equipment, organised a circuit and with the GLC arts funding at the time of the miners’ strike, they became popular. Paul Merton, Billy Bragg, French and Saunders, Julian Clary, Benjamin Zephaniah and acts like Linda Smith, Jeremy Hardy and Mark Steel came in and CAST transported itself to become CAST Presentations, touring their panto Reds under the Bed with the stand-up acts. Traditionally variety had been reactionary; from the late 1970s it began to express a left popular culture. Homophobia was out, racism out, sexist acts out.

CAST was a collective but they were organising individual acts where each person paid their own stamp. This was a crucial change economically. Roland emphasises: ‘Ben Elton has become much maligned but he was there on Friday Night Live attacking the system. They were getting onto telly: Harry Enfield and Loadsa Money, a great satirical character summing up the horror that Thatcher was inventing.’

But its popularity meant the money-makers came in and took over. ‘We weren’t shocked by it,’ Claire says with a laugh. ‘You come from the working class, you don’t expect anything but hard work. You failed your 11-plus; you were already out!’

The Hackney Empire

In demolishing the GLC, with its generous arts budgets, Thatcher again ensured that CAST’s money was ending and they had to reassess their position. ‘Tom Jones, our administrator at the time, rang Mecca and asked if they had anywhere and they said, “You can have the Hackney Empire!” Thirteen hundred seats! I always thought taking it over was like workers control. Anarchists always wanted a printing press. We’d have a theatre. If we could make a popular venue outside the scheme of things, in Hackney, it would be an Aladdin’s cave.’

The opening up of the Empire in the dark days of 1986, when there was no money and everything was being pared back, was electric. Suddenly there was a magnificent building, and whatever its run-down state, it became a venue in the centre of Hackney, one of the poorest boroughs, for new variety, ballet, touring theatres, opera, orchestras, and pantomime. They put on popular entertainment and for Roland one of his proudest successes was finding Slava Polunin, the Russian clown, who transformed clowning.

For Claire the whole experience at the Empire ‘was exciting but there was always difficulty about money. The Barbican gets millions each year and we had to manage on £60,000. But we were identified with the black theatre and audiences for it were massive. The refurbishment was hard work but friends, now celebs, came back to support us. But the difficult thing was fighting the administrative caste taking over the arts.’

In the late 1990s they got a grant through the Arts Council and the Lottery for the refurbishment with a requirement to get matching funding, involving sums outside the scope of fundraising on the left. The Empire had to attract City money. In allocating funds, the Lottery imposed a new wave of people, one of whom, weirdly enough the last chief executive of Barings bank, became the chair. The board was meek in the face of the authorities, and the process led to the marginalisation of Roland and Claire. Their last years at the Empire were therefore hard.

Claire wanted out when she heard in 2004 they were introducing yet another management consultant – the sixth in all – as soon as they’d reopened. ‘I was insulted. The day they got this Barings man I knew that I wouldn’t go through their hoops. They’d no idea of the particular nature of CAST and our past. We had been administrators, technicians, developing a group and we were also performers. We weren’t middle class – we didn’t make notes at meetings – and for them working class people shouldn’t be running things like this!’ The Arts Council insisted on appointing marketing people and ‘once we had lost the power of the marketing we’d lost the theatre’.

‘The Arts Council wouldn’t subsidise black theatre. We were putting on popular black farces with huge audiences where black working class people came and paid £22 to see home-grown Caribbean farce, for which not a penny of the Arts Council money was available and is still not.’ Roland sums it up: ‘Although we’re a living legend in Hackney the board were pleased to see the back of us. We know in those circumstances you cannot win. What we achieved is great but we lost the battle.’

The Cock in Kilburn

Having now taken over the Cock in Kilburn, they’ll have to sell the beer to make it pay. ‘We want to provide a base freed of the Jongleur/ McDonaldisation pressure of conformity of stand -up comedy,’ says Roland. ‘Here comedy can be free from the move towards laddish, sexist forms. We can link up with other little places and independent venues through Britain, and keep the genre alive.’

Roland finishes with questions: ‘Can we support and fund a genre that we are fascinated by? Could we, with our daughter Laura, with us since she was tearing tickets at the age of nine, make it work? Can we become performers again?’

In the present circumstances, without subsidies, he feels it’s back to the old penny gaff and the music hall, where the arts were supported by sales of alcohol. ‘The irony is that it isn’t reactionary. At Unity I saw a play about Captain Swing – in the penny gaffs of the 1830s there was sedition in the popular culture!’

The new venture of The Cock could be great. Monday night will be Gramsci Night, ‘where poor intellectuals are let in free’. Arthur Smith will compere comedy on some Fridays. Other evenings will run with live music and new acts. Support is coming from Omid Djalili, Jo Brand and Felix Dexter, among others.

Roland and Claire identify themselves as part of the generation of Bob Dylan and John Lennon. ‘People criticised Dylan because he wasn’t consistently left wing but he was a poet, and part of our success as CAST was that we are catholic in our taste,’ Roland says.

‘If the socialist revolution ever came we would depend on the engineers and the teachers and the energy of people who make things happen and are not motivated by making money. Younger people are alienated and the left has to change. There’s nothing that shows the alternative. Against orthodox left positions, I say – let a thousand weeds bloom!’

Coming soon at the Cock Tavern Gramsci Club: Whither the counter culture or is it whithering? www.cocktavern.com