Lovely Wars and Afro-Saxons: Towards a Conjunctural Theatre Historiography
It was a pleasure to talk (at the Theatre and Performance Research Association Conference in Sept 2021) about Stuart Hall’s conception of the conjuncture and its application to problematics of cultural history, alongside Natasha Bonnelame and Tony Fisher. My contribution focused on ways in which the current culture wars may enable us to critique the hegemonic projects of Harold Wilson’s modernising Labour government of the mid-late 1960s and the ‘long white nineties’. I offer brief examples from what I see as the defeated radical projects of Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop (via Oh What a Lovely War!) and Paulette Randall’s Talawa (via Kofi Agyemang and Patricia Elcock’s Urban Afro-Saxons).
First, a few words to contextualise this brief intervention in relation to my current project on what I’m calling ‘racial economies of cultural production’, a materialist critique of the reproduction of hegemonic whiteness in UK theatre production over the last thirty years, and how it has been and/or might be effectively resisted and subverted. Researching this from the midst of the much-vaunted ‘culture wars’ that define so much contemporary political commentary, and are threatening radically to reshape both the arts and higher education, presents particular historiographical challenges and opportunities. We might conceive of the culture wars — along with the broadly liberal commentariat — exemplified by Polly Toynbee in The Guardian last week — as a ‘war on culture’ — culture, being, as these writers either imply or assert, something the UK has been ‘genuinely good at’. From this standpoint, we are watching the unprecedented trashing of a site of historically more-or-less successful British ‘soft power’. By contrast, our current ‘culture war’ might simply bring into focus considerable historical continuities in the oppressive and exclusive operation of our cultural sector, such as those that led Jerri Daboo to ask in 2017 about Naseem Khan’s 1976 report The Arts Britain Ignores: ‘how much has really changed’?’
My first response to these positions is that Toynbee is right but for the wrong reasons: a great deal has changed, but not in the form of a sudden and ‘brutish’ assault on once-justly-cherished national institutions. Instead, what we are witnessing is the latest in a series of projects of institutional capture of the educational and cultural sectors, allied to wider rearticulations of the social and cultural forces that combine to constitute the terrain of politics. Earlier examples can be seen in Labour’s 1964 election victory and 1965 Policy for the Arts, and in the gradual remodelling of both arts and education along socially-liberal-neoliberal lines that accompanied New Labour’s substantial increases in funding for both sectors after 1997. The consequence of these reconfigurations for people racialized as minorities in the UK has been, as Daboo observes, that ‘the discourse has essentially tended to stay the same’. While acknowledging such overarching continuities within racism as a system for managing human difference in the interests of white supremacy [paraphrasing Alana Lentin’s excellent Why Race Still Matters], however, my project also aims to tease out historical differences in its functioning. I ask, therefore, what different racisms have been produced and reproduced in the creation of cultural commodities, and by what structures and processes [and here I am echoing Anamik Saha’s excellent theoretical work in Race and the Cultural Industries] did they come to be racialized in these particular ways?
Of course, I cannot begin to tackle these questions today. I want, instead, to lay out some of their underpinnings, which are profoundly indebted to Stuart Hall — to his discursive analysis of race, his account of its shifting historical manifestations and their relations to ‘real material conditions of existence’, and to his conjunctural conception of history.
Hall’s conception of the conjuncture was developed through deep engagement with Marx and post-Marxist thought. Reading Marx’s 1857 Introduction, Hall emphasises Marx’s insight that terms such as ‘population’ represent ‘chaotic abstractions’ that must be refined by the analysis of gradually more specific and progressively more interlocking determinations. This will lead us — by way of Althusser — to the notion of ‘overdetermined’ historical phenomena, and to Hall’s conclusion that ‘[t]he social forces at work in any particular conjuncture are not random. They are formed up out of history. They are quite particular and specific, and you have to understand what they are, how they work’. To identify and analyse the sources, trajectories and inter-relations of these forces is the work of conjunctural analysis. It requires that we conceive of history as formed, in Hall’s words, of ‘very dissimilar currents, some of a long duration, some of a relatively short duration’ and — crucially — of how they ‘tend to fuse or condense at particular moments, into a particular configuration’. These configurations are conjunctures, and they form the fundamental conceptual paradigm of Hall’s project to ‘write a history of the present’. Reflecting on his own attempt over the last year to write a history of the present pandemic, Adam Tooze recently remarked that ‘self-consciously inhabiting our situatedness in time is what differentiates historical enquiry and writing from other forms of social knowledge. History is the attempt to produce knowledge of the flux from within the flux’. My suggestion is simply that we assign this ‘flux’ a conjunctural condition, and therefore approach the task of writing history from the present by tracing relations between conjunctural configurations. This is what I mean by a conjunctural historiography.
The ‘best icons’ of British culture cited by Toynbee — the BBC, British Council, and British universities date predominantly from the inter-war period, but were substantially expanded in the mid-1960s as the British empire finally fully collapsed, and Harold Wilson’s Labour government attempted to generate a ‘new Britain’ by — in the words of its manifesto — ‘harnessing our national wealth in brains’. Labour’s position in 1964 exemplified what Hall described, in his 1966 essay ‘Political Commitment’, as ‘the ideology of the end-of-ideologies’: the notion that ‘modern technological society renders all ideology obsolescent’. ‘Modernisation’, Hall argued, ‘is the presiding theme of British politics today’, uniting Wilson, ‘the moderniser par excellence’ and his Tory opponent after 1965, Edward Heath (who emerged, we might add, from strikingly similar social and educational backgrounds).
As I have recently argued, theatrical manifestations of this new ‘common sense’ included Theatre Workshop’s Oh What a Lovely War! and Peter Hall’s newly modernised Royal Shakespeare Company. In spite of Littlewood and her collaborators’ desire to critique capitalist war-mongering and attack contemporary nuclear proliferation, the dominant dramaturgical opposition of Lovely War was the motif of ‘lions led by donkeys’. Heroic ordinary soldiers are repeatedly pitted against the amateurish aristocrats who sent them to their deaths. This reading of the Great War not only fitted the ‘ideology of modernisation’ identified by Hall, it also mapped closely onto a central narrative of nineteenth-century liberal conservatism, that of the free-born, Saxon Englishman working to rid himself of Norman aristocratic tyranny. This narrative is further underscored by Lovely War’s exclusion both of soldiers from colonized territories and of colonial sites of conflict. Peter Hall and John Barton’s Wars of the Roses can likewise be seen as a modern carapace that cracks open to reveal conservative commitments. The materialism of John Bury’s set and costumes and the clear, contemporary thrust of the actors’ speech concealed the productions’ deep commitment to naturalizing social hierarchy and patriotic masculinity. If, in other words, we trace the current of institutional capture back from the 2020s to the 1960s, we find — in the theatre — figures such as Peter Hall and Lovely War’s producer Bronson Albery, profiting by staging a hegemonic account of ‘modern Britain’, outwardly meritocratic, efficient and unstuffy, while quietly deeply socially stratified and ethno-nationalist.
Thirty years later, Labour would once again use the ideology of modernisation, framed by a notionally inclusive nationalism, to successfully hegemonic effect against a Tory party that had worn itself out in government. Blair’s New Labour recycled some aspects of Wilson’s brand of pragmatic social democracy, but was operating within a definitively new conjuncture — that of neoliberal globalization. This was initiated — ironically, perhaps — by the capitulation of the Callaghan government to the International Monetary Fund during the sterling crisis of 1976, but rammed home in the UK — as Stuart Hall was among the first to observe — by the hybrid of neoliberal economics and brutal social conservatism known as Thatcherism. I follow Jeremy Gilbert and others in identifying a further iteration of the neoliberal conjuncture emerging in 1992 with the onset of what Gilbert has called ‘the long nineties’: a period of technocratic, moderately socially liberal but defiantly neoliberal governance marked by unprecedented cultural stasis, which only came to an end in 2015, when the economics of austerity, neoliberal technocracy and beige cultural production were finally decisively challenged from all sides.
My addition to this periodisation is to observe that this was also the long white nineties. Cultural institutions were successfully hegemonized under the umbrella of the ‘creative industries’ through increased funding that also required them to be remodelled according to the tenets of meritocratic individualism and cosmopolitan liberalism. In higher education, persistent and later accelerating inequalities were masked by the inflation of the sector to the point where the majority of young people are now designated ‘graduates’. All of this was both ideologically aligned with the interests of whiteness and would inevitably disproportionately benefit white people (mainly, but not exclusively, men).
The consequences of this period for people racialized as minorities in the theatre were importantly mixed, and the year 2003 offers a telling example. It was then that Sarah Crompton declared in The Daily Telegraph that ‘Black theatre has taken centre stage’. This being the Telegraph, we might predict it was precisely wrong, Black theatre was taken. Kwame Kwei-Armah’s Elmina’s Kitchen, that year, was only the most prominent example of Black writing staged by white directors in white institutions and for white audiences, as Darcus Howe memorably observed when he wrote that Roy Williams’ Fallout staged Black pain for white spectators who ‘lapped it up’ at the Royal Court. Black playwrights and performers, in other words, were interpellated both into a subsidised-commercial model with an increasing emphasis on the commercial, and into a representational regime that staged Blackness primarily to and for its others.
By marked contrast, Kofi Agyemang and Patricia Elcock’s Urban Afro-Saxons, directed and commissioned by Paulette Randall for Talawa at the start of her tenure as Artistic Director to address the question ‘what makes you British?’, rejected numerous tropes of the interpellated Black theatre. It departed, for example, from mapping characters on a spectrum of integration with the Caribbean dialects of those closest to the moment of immigration fading down the generations. Instead, Urban Afro-Saxons presents an articulated account of race and class. Patsy — born in Dalston in the late 60s — identifies as and sounds Jamaican: race, here, is — in Hall’s famous formulation — ‘the modality in which class is lived’. The play also notably avoids spectacular violence. There is a distant gunshot that punctures the embrace of two Black Londoners, who are slow-dancing ‘as if to ‘Lovers’ Rock’. The shooter is not assumed in the play to be a Black man like Eli Hall, whose death in the Hackney siege of 2003 prompted the scenario, but initially a drug dealer, and then either ‘a bloke [who’s] gone off his head’ or an ‘asylum seeker’. These figures are both rooted in the fractured social relations of the long nineties, and look presciently forward to the 2011 riots, our current crisis of social care, and, of course, the ‘hostile environment’.
The last of these subjected Black people to a double form of state racism. First, their ‘immigration status’ was questioned, healthcare refused and deportation enforced on racial grounds. Second, they were enlisted, under the banner of the ‘Windrush generation’, to serve as ‘good migrants’ (long-settled, hard-working, more-English-than-the-English), to sustain hostility to others. The same pattern can be seen in the history of Randall’s Talawa after 2003. First, the company’s plans to develop a permanent base at the Westminster Theatre were scuppered when Arts Council England withdrew their funding — a hostile environment indeed. Secondly, whereas Randall created a notably Black-led programme during her tenure, Talawa’s current Artistic Director, Michael Buffong, rebuilt the company by prominently programming Black-cast classics such as Waiting for Godot, All My Sons, King Lear and Guys and Dolls, all of which had formerly featured prominently in the National Theatre’s repertoire — arguably constructing the company as ‘good migrants’. A conjunctural reading of this history would not, however, frame this programming as Buffong’s ‘choice’, but observe instead that the conjunctural condition of the long nineties created a terrain that presented Talawa with narrow possibilities for ensuring its survival.
To return briefly to the questions with which I began about change and continuity, the conjuncture demands that we frame such questions always in relation to the operations of hegemony. Hegemony is not a generalised and persistent condition of oppression but a specific, historical achievement of contingent mastery over a given set of social forces in a particular set of interests. From this standpoint, theatre and other cultural forms do not swim in a mixture of social and political contexts, which they can be narrated to reflect. Rather, they work actively to shape the alignment or opposition of social forces and material interests in order to construct or contest the terrain of the political. Neither Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop nor Randall’s Talawa was able successfully to do that and both of their projects were, instead, hegemonized by their opponents. A conjunctural historiography, however, asks that we grasp the threads of these historical processes and trace them back through their various entanglements in order to identify patterns and parallels that function at an operative rather than merely illustrative level and — crucially — to identify and release their potential for a strategic reorientation of the present. A theatre history that reads performances fundamentally as illustrative of wider social change misunderstands Hall’s repeated demand that we ask ourselves ‘what has this got to do with everything else?’ This is not merely an invitation to seek parallels between objects of study, but to attend to what both cultural objects and our readings of them are doing to shape the political possibilities of our existence.
