This year’s ITV serial Mr Bates vs the Post Office may be the most directly impactful piece of political drama ever in Britain. But it wasn’t the only prominent political drama of 2024. A version (by James Graham) of Alan Bleasdale’s 1982 critique of Thatchernomics, Boys from the Blackstuff (BBC2), was staged at the Liverpool Royal Court, the National Theatre and the Garrick. Like Blackstuff, Mr Bates may turn out to be comparable in influence to Jeremy Sandford and Ken Loach’s devastating 1966 BBC drama about homelessness, Cathy Come Home.
Following John Osborne, Arnold Wesker and others at the Royal Court in the late 1950s, I am part of the second wave of postwar British playwrights who sought to make political drama for the stage. We wanted to write about Britain in the here and now, and our shows became dubbed “State of England” plays as a result. In fact, the term was a bit of a misnomer: the plots of David Hare’s Plenty (1978, about diplomacy), Howard Brenton’s The Churchill Play (1974, oscillating between wartime Britain and 1984) and my Destiny (1976, about the National Front) all began during or in the aftermath of the Second World War.
Similarly, one of two new plays I have in production now is about the most pressing political phenomenon of our time—but is subtitled “an origin story” and was inspired by events almost exactly 20 years ago. Ukraine’s 2004 to 2005 Orange Revolution was an uprising against a presidential election clearly rigged by the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych. The revolution exposed something else, too, however: a political faultline at right angles to the one we were used to in the west. The Orange insurgents in Kyiv were, essentially, both social and economic liberals, progressive on social issues but Thatcherite in economics (and generally admiring of the Iron Lady). In a direct mirror image, their Blue-coded opponents in the east favoured state intervention in the economy but were socially conservative.
Obscured in the west by traditional party loyalties, this new configuration was clearly visible elsewhere. As I argued in 2009 at the time of the Iranian Green Movement, in Iran as well as eastern Europe, the new faultline was between an educated, western, socially liberal, economically neoliberal urban middle class and an economically egalitarian, socially conservative, more rural poor. Following the 2010 UK election and the emergence of a doubly liberal coalition in Britain (public spending cutbacks and gay marriage), it was increasingly easy to identify the opposite tendency in the west, represented here first by the rise of Ukip and—across the continent—by far-right parties adopting a new ideological cocktail. This consisted of superficially left-wing economic policies (on pensions, workers’ rights, the minimum wage and so on), accompanied by increasingly virulent rhetoric against socially liberal causes in general, and immigration in particular. It was and remains worth pointing out that, in the great schism between social democracy and its working-class base, it was the liberal progressives (Bill Clinton and Tony Blair) who first filed for divorce.
Like the rock formations which become suddenly visible at low tide, Brexit and the Trumpian takeover of the Republican Party exposed the new political map. In eastern Europe, the realignment had been clearer because party lines were more unstable: so Viktor Orbán could transform a progressive youth party into a national-populist juggernaut (four victorious elections in a row), propagating the fantasy that there is a sinister globalist plot to destroy the Christian nations. My colleague Jon Bloomfield and I have put our writings on this into The Little Black Book of the Populist Right, published this year. As far back as 2016, however, when the Brexit referendum led to us leaving the EU and Donald Trump became US president, it was clear that national populism was the biggest story in Europe and America. My dramatic antennae had started to quiver. I read James Harding’s Alpha Dogs, about American political strategists spreading their dark arts across the continents, and it was clear that there was a play here.
In 2010, American strategists fought on both sides of the Ukrainian general election: Democrat David Axelrod for Yulia Tymoshenko and the later-to-be-jailed Trumpian Paul Manafort for the erstwhile vote-rigger Yanukovych. What if there had been two consultants who’d worked for the same firm, split acrimoniously, and ended up in a grudge match 4,000 miles from home? Even more enticing was the idea that they might have found themselves inventing a new politics, reflecting the new but obscured political reality that would spread across Europe and to the United States.
As Timothy Snyder argued in The Road to Unfreedom, “having brought American tactics to Eastern Europe”, Manafort and his ilk “now brought East European tactics to the United States.” Or, as former Barack Obama aide Ben Rhodes put it in After the Fall, “We went to teach them democracy, they taught us dictatorship.”
Rhodes might have been overgenerous to the Americans, whose stated aim to spread their nation’s values across the globe had distinct echoes of those economists who insisted on brutal and immediate privatisation of former communist economies. Certainly, after the agony of this economic shock therapy, it’s no wonder that eastern Europe proved a fertile petri dish for national populists in power (in Poland, Slovakia and Hungary for instance) and en route to it.
The main action of my upcoming play, The New Real, takes place in the 2000s and early 2010s, but the work seeks to illuminate what is happening now in continental Europe, America and—lest we underestimate the potential of the Reform party—here in the UK. In that sense, it mirrors the dramaturgy of the plays that my generation wrote about Britain in the 1970s. Another way of writing about the political present is to set plays in an analogous period of the past. My second current play, Here in America, is connected with The New Real in that its main protagonists are American, and its main theme is political betrayal. But by inviting comparisons with Trump’s America, it also maps a paranoid political style which resulted from the export of the most disreputable aspects of American political practice, their further contamination in eastern Europe, and their return home—retoxified. As the Mueller report into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election showed, the tone of the Trump campaign that year echoed that of trolls in Saint Petersburg. But, nonetheless, its genesis lay in a domestic tradition.
Here in America is set during the McCarthy anti-communist witch-hunt. The drama concerns a confrontation between the playwright Arthur Miller and his director Elia Kazan about whether former communists subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee should name names. The early 1950s are almost certainly the most virulent and polarised period of American politics before today. Both then and now libraries are being scoured for “unsuitable” books: then, those seen to be advancing social justice causes; now, those promoting black, women’s and gay rights. The red scare has been reinvented as a woke scare. Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation severely narrows permissible sex education in schools; in the early 1950s, both schools and universities required loyalty oaths of their employees. Then, liberal institutions, movements and individuals were falsely accused of communism; now, Trump refers to Kamala Harris as “Comrade Kamala”. If elected, he has threatened “ultimate and absolute revenge” against his opponents. McCarthy is alive and well.
Pleased as I am that they are happening, neither of my new plays aspires to the influence of Gwyneth Hughes’s ITV docudrama or Bleasdale’s Blackstuff, or stage plays which have defined an age, from Joan Littlewood’s Oh! What a Lovely War via Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls to Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem. And yet political drama in the theatre is resurgent, and one of its most durable and effective methods is still to see the present through the prism of the past.
