Political Immediacy

Our recent post about the content of content on blogs, sparked a conversation that became both antagonistic and circular before this post by director Christine Bacon came up.

The piece discusses her work with London England-based and human rights-focused theatre company iceandfire and their outreach initiative, Actors for Human Rights. Their method is a “rapid response” that uses churches, pubs and everything in between “rushing the urgent news to audiences who need to hear it now”. 

Her post is a direct response to a critique of the new David Hare play Gethsemane published in The Telegraph. In it, critic Dominic Cavendish, founding editor of theatrevoice.com, argues that political theatre is too slow a medium as a producing model to respond quickly enough to current events. He expands his critique of English political theatre further:

“But to many of us, idealism has been precisely the problem. There has been too much cavalier self-belief, too much succumbing to the messianic credo of “social justice”. Many of my generation, not Sir David’s, want less fervour and more common sense – and want fiercer material from our playwrights to puncture the complacency of those baby boomers at the top of the tree.”

Does the time it takes to fundraise for and produce theatre make political theatre obsolete? Is there a developing generational split in terms of what what and how political theatre should critique? What’s different about the relationship between politics and theatre in Canada?