Popular Theatre and Political Content

Abstract

The history of workl theatre is replete with examples of theatre's ebb and flow, its periods of decline and exciting rises to preeminence. With confidence, we think of Greece, the renaissance, and nineteenthcentury northern Europe when someone mentions "great ages." In turn, we reflect with knit brows about postRoman Empire Europe, eghteenth-century playwrighting, and possibly romanticism were we called upon to list the valleys that interrupt well-studied peaks. But were someone then to ask us where on the artistic geography we presently stand, we don't know whether to swell with pride or knit our brows. Not that the theatre we make has to be Elizabethan in depth and reach, but with our theatre programs, national monies, and conventions, we are clearly concerned that in our theatrical establishment something worthwhile be ongoing.At the same time that great and not-so-great moments in established theatre were evolving, another theatre history was being assembled which paralleled the established theatre, was rarely recorded, and received attention only by penetrating the stream of established theatre. For lack of a better term, let's call this theatre the popular theatre, a theatre that sprang directly from the lives of a broad class of people. This popular theatre was sometimes no more than skits at a wedding or a harvest, and at other times was as central to the development of western theatre forms as the Renaissance Italian improvised comedy, commedia dell'arte. Because this art of the people is virtually irrepressible, I have developed the following essay in an attempt to show that popular theatre is with us today. The forms, the subjects, the styles, the ideas may have changed, but popular theatre has endured and is beginning to flourish again. We can find its seeds in the language of the streets and countryside, in the yearning of people to discover their heritage, in the desire of people to know about the forces which affect their lives.