Traditionally, Political Drama and Theatre have been used as terms to describe drama and theatre with an overt political content, which typically encourages its audience to take up a position of struggle against a presented injustice or to ally with a particular political viewpoint. The weakness of such a definition is that it identifies a writer like Brecht or Caryl Churchill as political, while ignoring the operations of ideology which mask the political positioning of other apparently unpolitical writers whose ideas are perceived as commonsense, uncontroversial and apolitical, because they reflect uncritically a status quo. Noël Coward, for example, has traditionally not been seen as a political dramatist, but the sexual politics of his drama is highly subversive of commonsense ideas about the family and about heterosexuality. TRG SS
Further reading S. Craig (ed.), Dreams and Deconstructions; , John McGrath, A Good Night Out. |
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