Propaganda Theatre

I

Introduction

Propaganda Theatre, dramatic performances which attempt to persuade or convert the audience to a certain point of view. In the broadest sense all theatre could be seen as propaganda. Even a sophisticated commercial comedy, by Noel Coward for example, could be called propaganda because it reinforces the status quo by accepting that servants should not be treated as equals.

However, the term “propaganda theatre” is normally confined to dramatic events with a primary and obvious purpose to convert an audience to a particular point of view. It was through shows with political intent that propaganda theatre developed its accepted techniques in the 20th century.

II

Early Propaganda Theatre

Large-scale political propaganda shows evolved in Russia after the 1917 Revolution, in the staging of spectacular re-enactments of historical events such as the storming of the Winter Palace. They were designed to give a feeling of national unity. This form occurs occasionally in many other countries, and still thrives in communist China, where the Central Ballet of China's very popular “Red Detachment of Women” is a good example.

A smaller scale of propaganda theatre, known as the Blue Blouse movement, was developed in Russia to help the Bolsheviks, the minority party, gain the support of the masses. Since there was widespread illiteracy, simple theatrical means, known as agitational-propaganda, or agitprop, were used to get a message across. A famous example was the technique of Living Newspaper in which items of news were dramatized in short sketches performed in varied styles from satirical to direct lecturing. The Blue Blouse movement spread from one professional company in Moscow to 484 professional groups and up to 8,000 amateur groups throughout the Soviet Union by 1928.

III

Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht

In parallel, in the early 1920s, the two main 20th-century exponents of overtly political theatre, Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht, were working in Berlin and between them they established many of the techniques common to propaganda theatre.

In rebellion against mainstream fashionable theatre Piscator established his Proletarian Theatre in 1920, performing in halls and meeting rooms in the slums. His simple sketches with stereotype caricatures appealed to working-class audiences for solidarity with communism. The audience was often invited to become involved in a cabaret-style performance, sometimes staged in a shape suitable to the subject matter, such as a boxing ring.

Brecht also began with small-scale work. His early didactic pieces, called Lehrstücke, were short plays in which one particular moral or political question was debated, often enacted as a court case, and the lesson to be drawn was a Marxist one.

However, both Piscator and Brecht achieved their greatest theatrical fame with their contributions to the development of epic theatre. Piscator used techniques which had never been used in theatre before. He introduced the use of slide projection and film, often to show the actual historical figures or incidents being dramatized on the stage itself. Captions, newspaper cuttings, and telegrams would be flashed up on screens, all designed to make the audience connect the events on stage with the world at large.

When Brecht returned, after exile in the United States, to establish the Berliner Ensemble in East Germany in 1949, he staged such epic masterpieces as The Caucasian Chalk Circle and Arturo Ui and developed fully his theory of alienation ( Verfremdungseffekt) which was designed to put the spectator at one remove from the action. Actors did not identify with characters as in realistic drama, but remained at a distance, able to judge the character.

The whole purpose was for the audience to understand the social mechanisms which shaped events, but mainstream Western theatre has sometimes taken Brecht's works and stressed the human feeling and not the message, as Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) clearly stated was their aim in staging Brecht's “Mother Courage” in 1984.

IV

1930s Onward

There were many spin-offs from the Blue Blouse troupe and the work of Brecht and Piscator. In Korea guerrilla agitprop groups aroused resistance to the Japanese occupation. In the United States in the 1930s the Federal Theatre Project, set up by the government to alleviate unemployment, used the Living Newspaper technique to criticize the capitalist system, and was consequently disbanded. In Australia the New Theatres were established to perform in factories and at demonstrations.

In Britain in the 1930s the workers' theatre movement was often determinedly amateur with the political message more important than the aesthetics, and the evolved show might concentrate on a local concern such as a rent strike. Professionalism grew, however, notably in companies such as Theatre Workshop, established by Joan Littlewood, which in 1963 produced the anti-war play Oh What A Lovely War!

The political turmoil of the 1960s, with student revolts and Vietnam War protests, produced a flurry of alternative theatre companies in the Western world, starting in the United States with companies such as the Living Theatre, advocating personal liberation. A mass of politically committed companies like Red Ladder, 7:84, and Joint Stock sprang up in Britain. Many of these disappeared in the 1980s or, as is often the way with propaganda theatre, saw their artists absorbed into the mainstream.

The 1980s saw the growth of many propagandist companies based on single issues, such as gay, black, or women's causes, and the decade also witnessed the development of drama as a tool in health issues, employed, for example, to educate people about birth control and the prevention of HIV and AIDS in South Asian and African countries.

The use of drama as an educational tool has been much developed by the Theatre In Education (TIE) movement, started in England in the late 1960s. TIE companies develop shows on social subjects such as bullying at school, racism, or drug-taking, or on historical subjects. The plays sometimes involve the school students as characters, and in discussions and decision-making.