Revolutionary Theatre and the Drama of History
There is no drama like the drama of history.
—C.L. R. James, The Black Jacobins
In 1933 Edith Segal choreographed a performance called Practice for the Picket Line with the Needle Trades Workers Dance Group in New York. In interwar New York, union and party affiliated radical theatre and dance troupes were intended both as rehearsals for future political action and as vehicles to raise the political consciousness of audiences. Between 1937 and 1940 members of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU)—including sewing machine operators, cutters and basters—participated in the pro-union revue ‘Pins and Needles’ that ran on Broadway, the only hit musical to have ever been produced by a labour union. Radical theatre groups also often staged events from revolutionary history, reanimating the past in the present.
What could be learned from traditions of revolutionary theatre today? Can collective and embodied forms of political action draw inspiration from theatrical practices? What is the relationship between radical performance and political organising? If histories of radical theatre can inspire political movements now, can theatre also function as a medium for communicating revolutionary histories to contemporary audiences? The artists Onyeka Igwe and Joey Simons have both recently made works engaging with histories of radical political theatre in twentieth-century Britain that think through some of these questions.
Onyeka Igwe’s 2023 film A Radical Duet returns to the anticolonial theatre of late 1940s London, imagining an encounter between the Nigerian educator and organiser Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti and the Jamaican thinker Sylvia Wynter. In 2023 she also staged a play in Glasgow engaging with traditions of participatory theatre called ‘The Last Librarian in Glasgow’, which was commissioned by The Common Guild and performed at Langside, Woodside and Hillhead libraries. Joey Simons’ 2025 exhibition at Market Gallery in Glasgow, Their Theatre and Ours, explored histories of revolutionary theatre from a slightly earlier period, including Ewan MacColl’s Theatre of Action in Salford.
In this interview, Hannah Proctor asks Onyeka and Joey to speak about their shared interest in political theatre and to discuss how this history might speak to struggles in the present.
Hannah Proctor What initially drew you to histories of revolutionary theatre?
Onyeka Igwe I have been working on a project about anticolonial activists in 1940s Britain and thinking about their activity through the lens of cultural production. I wanted to move away from the way that those pasts have been previously thought about: newspapers, speeches, political parties, theory, parliament, lobbying. Efforts that have been led by men, that we continue to repeat today even though perhaps the current conjuncture requires something different. So, I was interested in art and culture, maybe my particular bias, but also because it is under theorised and primarily the area that women of the time were allowed to operate in. There I found theatre, where people were using it to communicate, as an accessible and maybe popular form for communicating the political ideas of the day. I kept on reading about tours of theatrical productions by the likes of Amy Ashwood Garvey or Katherine Dunham that were put on to support political causes like the campaign for the Scottsboro Boys.
More broadly, I think the answer to what drew me to these histories lies somewhere in what I think of as the function or possibility of theatre. It seems to me a fertile container for imagination; it reminds me of playing as a child, enacting worlds with others in space. I think we need to imagine new societies if they are to come into being, so theatre attracts me as a tool for that task.
Joey Simons My interest came from a few sources. Brecht was part of my political education, as well as the theatre company 7:84 and the writings of John McGrath. One of my first jobs was working at the theatre at Tramway in Glasgow so that influenced how I thought about the relationship between audiences, class, form and so on (and definitely introduced me to a lot of non-revolutionary theatre!) Another important source was the work of the Irish socialist poet and playwright Freddy Anderson and the Easterhouse Summer Festival Drama Company of the 1970s and 1980s. When I first came across this tradition of radical community theatre in Glasgow I couldn’t believe I’d never heard of it previously. I also really enjoyed getting to know Cathy McCormack and the play Dampbusters written by the Easthall Theatre Group as part of their anti-dampness campaign in the 1990s.
More recently I’ve been looking at the proletarian and revolutionary theatre traditions of the 1920s and 1930s as part of my exhibition Their Theatre and Ours at Market Gallery, which took as its starting point Ewan MacColl’s account of forming the Theatre of Action in Salford, and particularly the role of translation in the circulation of radical formal and political ideas between artists and activists in Britain, Germany, the Soviet Union and beyond. I’ve been involved in the last few years in various working-class theatre projects, such as Keira McLean’s play Fire Stories, based on the experience of the Craigallian Fire sitters of the interwar period, and Gemma Muir’s play Fever, which looked at the experience of suicide, addiction and solidarity in the Scottish prison system, and was performed by members of recovery groups in Springburn who had direct experience of incarceration. That practical experience of writing, rehearsing, performing and producing has been really interesting in terms of how the questions raised in twentieth-century debates on the aims and forms of working-class and revolutionary theatre keep reappearing (in whatever limited or changed context).
I’m interested in the possibility Fredric Jameson pointed to in the theatre of the October Revolution and then Brecht, of ‘a body of art uncompromisingly advanced in form, yet intransigently popular in intention.’ The moments when that fusion has been achieved, or at least approached, are still incredibly exciting to read and learn about, and I think the fundamentally collective and social nature of the theatre points to that revolutionary potential more than any other art form. The actor Gary Lewis, referring to his time in the Easterhouse Festival Society Drama Club, also spoke about it as a kind of training school where working-class people, housewives, young tearaways, all sorts, most of whom had never been to the theatre in their lives, were transformed into seasoned performers, dramaturgs, stage technicians and political activists. I think there is something fundamental about theatre, like poetry, that retains its force as a popular means of analysing, clarifying and exploding the contradictions of everyday life, as something that people can still use and turn to, outside of the institutions of ‘Theatre’ itself.
HP Can you give an example of a specific historical production, play or director that interests you or that you’ve engaged with in your work and describe its political significance/the political context it emerged from or intervened in?
OI Ironically, despite this focus I have mentioned around women, C.L.R. James’s Toussaint Louverture has been a production that I have recently worked with. He produced the play before publishing The Black Jacobins [his 1938 history of the Haitian revolution], from the research he had been doing once he came to England in the 1930s. The play was staged only once at the Westminster Theatre in 1936 with Paul Robeson in the main role. It’s probably the first play staged in London with a majority black cast and black playwright, but that’s not its political significance to me. I am interested in James’s choice to stage this as a play before publishing it as a book. The mass appeal and direct address that a play with someone like Robeson could offer were clearly understood as providing something important in terms of political action. In the context of burgeoning national independence movements and James’s rhetorical activities at the time (he would go on speaking tours throughout the UK expounding his political ideas), I think of the play as part of revolutionary efforts. Interestingly, critics downplayed its artistic merits because of the nature of the political writing, and looking at the play, you would perhaps argue that it’s overwritten with stage directions going beyond what is customary. I’ve done workshops reading this play and trying to adapt it for the present; what I find interesting is the dialectical symbolism that James mobilises in the scenes.
JS One text we’ve worked with a lot is Meerut (1933), a short agitprop street theatre piece calling for solidarity with the defendants in the Meerut conspiracy trial of thirty Indian and three English trade unionists and communists. The trial took place over four years with the prisoners held in atrocious conditions while they used the courtroom as a revolutionary platform. Their case was taken up by the League Against Imperialism (1927–37), which “brought together communists, socialists, nationalists and trade unionists to coordinate their ‘myriad assaults against empire.’” The Meerut sketch was performed by agitprop troupes like the Red Megaphones and the Hammer & Sickles in Manchester and London, including at LAI demonstrations in Trafalgar Square and its Caxton Hall conference. The performance notes for the piece describe how to construct a makeshift prison out of six broom poles and the use of disciplined choreography, mass declamation and voice acting to express “bitterness, oppression, resistance, triumph of class solidarity.” In workshops at the Mosaic Rooms in London we practised drilling the construction of the prison and also rewrote parts of the piece for current political conditions and in solidarity with Palestinian prisoners.
HP Who were the audiences for the kinds of plays that you’ve researched and what kinds of venues were they performed in?
JS Groups like the Red Megaphones, and then the Theatre of Action, founded by Ewan MacColl and other adolescent workers in the slums of Salford and Manchester, were absolutely rooted in the working class, and performed on the streets, in the market areas at factory gates, mills and docks in towns and villages across the North, as well as during strikes, pickets and demonstrations. Performances of Meerut were often attacked and shut down by the police. Looking back, MacColl said that,
on the whole, we were received with a distinct lack of enthusiasm by most of the men and women of our own class. Often they would pass us by with heads averted so as not to be involved, occasionally one or two would stop to leer, others met us with blank apathy and this was harder to take than the abuse. Only a small minority seemed to agree with the things we were saying and our way of saying them.
But elsewhere he gives an extraordinary account of a performance they gave during an “occupied” Burnley during a great textile strike. The Red Megaphones performed to huge crowds of striking workers from the top of one of the dozens of food trucks sent in solidarity from communities across Britain:
I remember the sun beating down and the stragglers kept getting in – the workers from Earby had come over the moors and had had to fight their way through columns of police when they came in – bloodily – and a great cheer went up, and it was a thrilling experience to stand on the top of that truck and sing and perform, for your own people…I will never forget it – it’s what theatre should be. It was what it must have been like in the time of Aeschylus in great popular theatre.
OI The plays that I have been looking at were toured around the UK but also Europe, the USA and the Caribbean, in conventional theatres and local playhouses. In London, places like the Westminster Theatre, the Scala Theatre or the Prince of Wales Theatre. In these more prestigious theatres, the plays often had short runs, sometimes sponsored by a patron. I am astounded at the amount of travel that people were undertaking in this period: Amy Ashwood Garvey put on productions that toured the Caribbean for several years, and Katherine Dunham, with her musical theatre productions, seemed to be touring almost permanently for 20 years. There seemed to be stable audiences that allowed these figures to live off this work. The plays I am interested in were popular works, which I think reflects the place of theatre as mainstream entertainment. I have also been researching radio plays written by Sylvia Wynter and Una Marson around the mid-twentieth century when radio was in its pomp and had its maximum reach. The playwrights and performers for these works were largely black, so I appreciate that the audiences corresponded and the popular reach actually maps onto racial divides. Wynter and Marson’s work was broadcast on Caribbean Voices, which largely attracted a black listenership.
JS Another playwright I’ve been interested in is Berta Lask (1878-1967) who I heard about through Sam Dolbear, who translated her play Thomas Müntzer: Dramatic depiction of the German Peasants’ War of 1525 for the play’s centenary last year. Sarah Colvin’s essay on Lask mentions that a group of workers from the Leuna chemical works attended the original performance of the play at a mass communist rally in Eisleben marking 400 years since the German Peasants’ War. They sought out Lask and asked her to record their experiences of an abortive KAPD armed strike and insurrection in 1921, which ended with the bosses directing artillery strikes on the factories and horrific beatings and massacres. Lask spent two years visiting the region, interviewing workers and survivors, eventually producing the documentary play Leuna 1921. As far as I can tell it was banned throughout the Weimar Republic and never performed, and was never translated into English. In workshops we collectively translated and performed some scenes from the play’s third act, a montage of domestic scenes which moves between five workers’ kitchens on the eve of the strike.
Lask’s plays were explicitly “by the workers, for the workers.” They were performed at mass rallies and festivals, and were explicit interventions in the revolutionary struggles of the German working class at the time. Even in a historical drama like Thomas Müntzer, there is an intertitle scene in which the figure of, for example, Martin Luther, is explicitly associated with traitorous Social Democrat leaders and warmongers.
HP When Joey and I organised a reading of this play in Pollok Park in May last year we imagined Martin Luther as Keir Starmer. The contemporary parallel to that kind of authoritarian centrist just seemed really obvious as we read it together out loud.
The emphasis on translation in Joey’s work was inspired by Ewan MacColl and interestingly it’s also something that Sylvia Wynter wrote about in an essay that Onyeka recommended to us about her adaptation of Lorca’s play ‘The House of Bernarda Alba’. The challenge, Wynter says, is not so much to produce an accurate translation but to make the play ‘live’ for the audience. Her adaptation moves the action from 1930s Spain to 1920s Jamaica and she explains that her approach was informed by Brecht, writing that: “The function of the theatre is to explode fears by bringing them into the light of day.” Staging social antagonisms can become a way for the audience to confront them. She also explicitly rejects naturalism.
Onyeka, this made me think about the second part of A Radical Duet, where the actors are shown discussing historical material with you in a rehearsal room. Do you find Wynter’s reflections on adaptation, naturalism and tragedy useful for thinking about how you approach your own work?
OI I read that Wynter piece after making A Radical Duet but before I adapted the film for an installation at Bonington Gallery at the beginning of 2024. The show was called history is a living weapon in yr hand which is a line from the Diane di Prima poem Rant. The way the film became a work in space focused on displaying the construction within the film, showing parts of the set in the exhibition, drafts of the play are on a table accessible for people to touch and read, the fake books we used in a bookshelf during a scene in the film are displayed and the gallery has floor markings that describe the parts of the set in the way they would appear in the script—‘Clive’s Living Room’. This was all inspired by the Wynter text and she is majorly drawing on Brecht so he is also a heavy influence in this. I also think Lars von Trier’s 2003 film Dogville is doing the very same things via Brecht, which I saw as a teenager and has never left me as a text that displays its construction in such a way that you realise that this medium is a tool, or a living weapon in our hands. Society is created, we participate in that and so maybe we can change it.
HP In some ways theatre seems like quite an anachronistic art form now. I used to work as a theatre producer in London so would go to see a lot more plays then than I do now and I was often so disappointed or underwhelmed by the things I saw. My impression is still that British theatre can be quite stuffy and bourgeois and formally conservative. Is your interest in theatre primarily historical or are there things about the specific possibilities of theatre that remain exciting to you now (even if just in theory rather than practice)?
OI I’ve been going to quite a lot of plays since starting this research, and I can’t say I’ve been particularly activated by contemporary theatre. There is something staid about the productions I have seen. The artifice is always present, and I don’t feel like it’s being utilised in experimental or exciting ways. I annoyingly think about it in relation to cinema, which is what I make, and still feels vibrant to me. The labour of theatre is on show; I can see the seams, because it doesn’t work with illusion like film, but it can do something else. Something transformative or galvanising, something that opens possibilities. I do think there’s something there, but I am not experiencing it.
JS I don’t know if theatre is any more anachronistic than any other art form now. And in terms of formal conservatism, I’ve probably not seen enough theatre to comment, but it seems more a case of an “aesthetic of novelty”, and the recuperation of every kind of once radical technique etc. But I think despite all the things you point to in your question, there is some kind of residual popular relationship in contrast to, say, the contemporary art scene (at least in Glasgow), despite its superficially more ‘radical’ language. And the thing which seems most exciting for me at this moment is in the sense Brecht spoke about his experiments with the Lehrstück of the 1920s and 30s: that they were “meant not so much for the spectator as for those who were engaged in the performance. It was, so to speak, art for the producer, not art for the consumer.” That fundamental collectivity of the theatre and its necessary connection to the social: the act of writing, rewriting, rehearsing, performing, staging, the practicalities of securing physical space, making sets and props; its existence as a space for working through contradictions and power relations…there’s something about it still as a training ground, forcing us to confront old debates around form and content, our attitude to history, or the contemporary nature of class, the search for new methods.
Joey for Onyeka Did using drama/writing the short play ‘The Last Librarian in Glasgow’ make you think differently about your practice as an artist and how you relate to audiences?
OI I think there is something about my practice that is kind of opaque, I struggle to directly articulate things. I want the audience to work hard and impress me by understanding what it is I am trying to say by identifying the threads I have woven. There is some kind of puzzle I construct with my work that I want to be solved, or that I want people to tell me an alternative answer to. But with ‘The Last Librarian in Glasgow’ and also maybe A Radical Duet, I have been more direct. Something about that irks me, I feel embarrassed by the revelations, by what my work now so obviously says about me. It makes me feel uncomfortable. I think the difference here is not about drama, but it is about writing dialogue.
Onyeka for Joey Is workers’ theatre today possible and/or out there? Who would watch it?
JS I think it’s an open question. What I really take from histories of the workers’ theatre is the serious attempt of those involved to analyse the political, social, cultural and artistic conditions in which they were operating, their willingness to test new ideas in practice and push against the limitations of old forms (including their own in the case of agitprop), undertake constant self-critique, and the circulation of theoretical and technical developments through international debates in the workers’ movements of the time. There’s one small example Ewan MacColl gives, when they were starting out with the Red Megaphones, of their wanting to write a series of sketches around the struggle against the eight-loom system in the weaving sheds of Lancashire and Yorkshire. They realised that actually it wasn’t enough to turn up at a factory and say “Weavers, all out against the eight-loom!” – they had to understand the real conditions in the industry. And they were able to do this because they had two teenage weavers in their troupe, who arranged for them to accompany them ‘Saturdaying’ in their mill, meet with the workers, and “act[ing] as interpreters”, describing the technical processes and translating the specific terminologies of different trades. At the weekends they’d go to Manchester Central Library and study Meyerhold, Vakhtangov, Stanislavsky: “we weren’t merely exploring the theories, we were having to learn the words that described the theories.” They would then apply these theories in practice on the streets.
I’m also thinking about our reading of Thomas Müntzer in Pollok Park through a spontaneous assemblage of comrades, friends, strangers; the way the Red Flag Players has functioned in Glasgow as a small mobile collective for readings, music, performances; Davey Anderson’s play Tam Harvie’s Dyke, performed in situ by the Clyde by whoever turns up, on land still disfigured by private ownership; Keira McLean’s performance piece Fire Stories being transformed each time it’s performed, in Castlemilk, Easterhouse, Carbeth, Armadale; the experience across three years of doing Gemma Muir’s play Fever, the guys playing out scenes from their own lives, taking control of them for the first time…There are lots of possibilities there, even just as a form in which to confront the contradictions, limitations, potential and historical context of our own power or powerlessness to overthrow conditions today.