ANTI-ESTABLISHMENT DRAMA
609
Mother Courage
its British premiere; and the Royal Court staged
The
Good Woman of Setzuan.
One of the most influential of the drama
critics met Brecht in Berlin and underwent a positively Pauline conver–
sion to socialism. Since then, social realism has been the word.
The direct influence of Brecht is still small, though most of Miss
Littlewood's distinctive mannerisms as a producer can be traced back
to his theories. His indirect influence, however, is very large. I mean
something rather more than his politics. For Brecht was a major writer
before he was a Communist, and in spite of it. This means that in his
best work his politics make themselves felt not by any tiresome didacti–
cism but by serious human concern with justice and goodness which–
at his best, I repeat-have nothing to do with any party line. But
politics he had, and this, in a century in which nearly all major
writers have either kept wholly apart from politics or been on the
Right-the last significant Left-Wing poet was Shelley-makes Brecht
an extraordinary powerful exception, who had a whole new language
of drama to offer. Moreover it was a theatrical language which had
been translated most eloquently in the production of Joan Littlewood;
hence it seemed the language most likely to produce significant and
fresh effects.
I do not, for a moment, wish to give the impression that this change
of theatrical style is any sign at all of a great change of heart in the
British electorate. Nor fundamentally in the British dramatists. None
of the four most promising playwrights who had gotten a hearing as
a result of the new fashion-John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Brendan
Behan and Shelagh Delany-seem to have much more than a bright
socialist gloss on their work. They are not so much pro-Labour as anti–
Establishment. And this is perfectly understandable. Behan apart (he is
Irish; therefore his politics are something quite special and, for the non–
Irishman, not quite comprehensible), they were all born too late to have
lived through any real domestic political conflict. Osborne is the oldest
and he, I believe, is my age. That means he was about fifteen when the
Labour government was elected after the war; politically, I imagine, he
could remember nothing at all of the 'thirties. Wesker is two or three
years younger than Osborne, and Miss Delaney about six years younger
than Wesker. This means that their most lively political experience has
very little to do with mass unemployment, strikes and union-busting, and
a great deal to do with the forlorn sight of the Welfare State sinking
under the paralyzing weight of the bureaucrats until it achieved what
J.
W. Aldridge has called Welfare Stasis. Their political ideas are prob–
ably less defined by enthusiasms and causes than by irritation.
On the stage this irritation takes a specific technical form. They are
