British Political Theatre

Literary/ Cultural Context Note

Steve Barfield (University of Human Development, Suleymanyia, Iraqi Kurdistan)

Ed. by Aleks Sierz, Independent Scholar - Europe
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.09: English Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary Britain , 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Gina Lyle (University of York), Graham MacPhee (University of Manchester), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Andrew Radford (University of Glasgow), Jenni Ramone (The Nottingham Trent University)

Domains

Literature Topic
Theatre

Dates

Date of occurrence 1960

Places

United Kingdom (Location)

Resources

Save to Bookshelf

[Preliminary entry] Theatre is the most public and thus, arguably, the most innately political of art forms. However, the term British political theatre refers a group of diverse, yet like-minded playwrights and theatre practitioners. These would include: Arnold Wesker; John Arden; Trevor Griffiths; (early) Howard Barker; Edward Bond; Howard Brenton; John McGrath and 7:84; David Hare; David Edgar; Caryl Churchill; Peter Barnes. They believed that plays could not only diagnose what was wrong with British society, but could promote radical social and political change. Their work dominated non-commercial, alternative British theatre between roughly 1960 to the mid-1980s, the period ending with the apogee of Thatcherism (1979-1990) in the United Kingdom, the defeat of the British miners. strike in 1984, and as Communism begins to collapse in Eastern Europe in 1989.

Earlier antecedents in Britain included...

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

250 words

Citation: Barfield, Steve. "British Political Theatre". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 September 2004 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1477, accessed 09 June 2026.]

British Political Theatre

Domains

Dates

Places

Resources

Save this article

Leave Feedback