In 1966, at the height of the Vietnam war, the Royal Shakespeare Company staged a play, US, at the Aldwych Theatre in London that became a part of the protest movement. Peter Brook's production involved the pacifist poet Adrian Mitchell, a fine cast (including Glenda Jackson), much documentary reportage, improvisation, songs, speeches and a history of Vietnam in tableaux vivants. At the end, an actor opened a box, took out a white butterfly and threw it in the air. Then he extracted and released a second butterfly. He held a third in one hand while he produced a cigarette lighter with the other. He burned the butterfly (it was made of paper). The house lights came up and an embarrassing, extended pause ensued while the actors waited for the audience to leave the theatre. Kenneth Tynan punctured the stony first night silence by shouting at the mournfully immobile actors, "Do we applaud you, or do you applaud us?"
Most critics hated the show. The lord chamberlain (who still had two years to go as a censor of the stage) had insisted on many cuts and worried about how the American ambassador to London might react. Jean-Paul Sartre, reviewing the play philosophically (he never saw it), said that while the war in Vietnam was a crime, the left was incapable of doing anything about it and that if US was indeed theatre, it represented a "crisis of the imaginary." This was a view shared by the radical American director Charles Marowitz, who had worked with Brook, but saw US as nothing more than a form of sloganeering agitprop: "Productions like US," he said, "produce superficial flurries on incendiary subjects that can be justified neither on artistic nor ideological grounds."
The idea that there is something phoney about using theatre as a form of current affairs critique is not new, and surely Marowitz is still right: any treatment of politics on the stage, if it does not first and foremost present itself as a work of theatre, should be approached with scepticism. In January last year, the theme returned with a programme at the Camden Centre in central London under the title US Revisited: Vietnam Then, Iraq Now. The evening comprised a documentary about the making of the original stage show, a cinema version Brook made of US itself (Tell Me Lies), and a debate. Whatever the objections to US by critics on the right and left, Brook never harboured any illusions that art could change anything. "But," he told the journalist Bryan Appleyard on the day of the debate, "I still believe in the principle of the drop in the ocean. All one can do is see that one is responsible for this drop."
Because so-called political theatre was so much a part of the counter-culture in the 1960s, it is odd in these consensual, liberal-minded times to imagine that US caused such a fuss, or that such a fuss could be recreated now. This September, the National Theatre presents playwright David Hare's response to the Iraq war, Stuff Happens. This will not be agitprop, not even vaudeville, and no butterflies will die. Instead, we can expect a measured drama, fuelled by Hare's opposition to the war and his sorrow at the compromised decency of a man he admires - Colin Powell. The title is an echo of a remark made by Donald Rumsfeld in response to the looting in Baghdad. Tony Blair and Condoleezza Rice also make appearances.
Suddenly, after a decade in the theatre when small was too often thought to be beautiful and the personal became the political (even David Hare wrote a play, The Breath of Life, about two middle-class women, played by Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, comparing notes on the man they both loved) everyone says that "political theatre" is back. But what do they mean? That the theatre is taking up the slack from journalism and policy debate? Or is it something deeper - that original drama is being forged out of the forces shaping our times, and that those forces represent a new clash of ideologies, or a battle between a new establishment and a new counter-culture?
The Guardian critic Michael Billington suggests that whereas political theatre usually addresses "the converted cognoscenti rather than a popular audience," the success of plays like Alistair Beaton's Feelgood (a satire on New Labour spin) and Michael Frayn's Democracy (men in suits animating Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik in early 1960s Bonn) proves that political theatre has gone mainstream. Yet people who write about political theatre tend to give it that label because they agree with the political content. They would be unlikely to celebrate a drama, for example, espousing conservative ideals, however radical or mainstream.
Political theatre in the Billington sense, as a wing of the British left-liberal consensus, found its neatest expression in a recent "verbatim theatre" production at the Tricycle in Kilburn, north London - a theatre which sits somewhere between fringe and mainstream. Guantanamo: "Honour Bound to Defend Freedom" was a piece built out of direct testimony of the Guantánamo detainees, and was greeted by critics with unbridled enthusiasm - so much so that, despite being dramatically inert, it transferred to the west end, where it duly flopped. Perhaps that merely proved it exerted little appeal beyond Billington's cognoscenti. But whereas US once aspired to theatricality, and played to packed houses of 1,000-plus customers (for 50 performances), in the case of Guantanamo, the boast of its co-director Nicolas Kent and his journalist associates Gillian Slovo and Victoria Brittain, was that the evidence of injustice spoke for itself and needed no dressing. Yet the real difference - in the quality of the politics, as well as that of stagecraft - was that the effect of US and countless subsequent post-1968 fringe adventures was to generate disagreement and disapproval, while Guantanamo seemed to thrive only on agreement and approval.
That approval was certainly shared by members of the audience the night I went to see the piece. They turned a post-show discussion into a shouting match about betrayal by Blair and a global system of anti-Islamic institutionalised racism. It was as if theatre was providing a forum for debate without earning the artistic right to do so - or even creating any real discussion. Guantanamo merely hitched its wagon to a familiar political donkey.
Other events in the past ten years at the Tricycle, while often equally theatrically impoverished, have at least been able to present both sides of a case and create a sense of historical urgency in the presentation. A reconstruction of the Scott inquiry into the arms-to-Iraq affair was followed by similar, chilling accounts of the Stephen Lawrence and Hutton inquiries, and edited transcripts of the hearings into the massacre at Srebrenica. Looking back on these events, Nicolas Kent selected The Colour of Justice, about the Lawrence inquiry, as the most satisfying. He told the Guardian in July: "It really did change things… The Lawrence play was part of the solution. It went to different theatres and was on television and it changed people's views on the issue of racism. It's even used as teaching material by the Met."
In broad theatrical terms, political theatre invokes a left-wing lineage of European precedent from the Marxist parables of Bertolt Brecht and the documentary radicalism of Erwin Piscator through such practitioners here in Britain in the postwar era as Joan Littlewood and John McGrath, who both died in 2002, and playwrights like David Hare, Trevor Griffiths, Howard Brenton and David Edgar, who emerged in the first flush of the fringe in the late 1960s. Political theatre in the 1960s and 1970s came to mean changing the world by challenging, or insulting, the audience. The problem, even then, was that the audience you wanted to insult tended not to be the audience you played to. That audience was somewhere else, watching plays by Alan Ayckbourn, Michael Frayn and Tom Stoppard, even Harold Pinter. But at least the politically overt work felt like part of a challenging counter-culture. Now it has become, for good and ill, part of mainstream culture.
Any thrill at the idea of political theatre making a comeback begs the question of what is actually meant by the "political." The ancient Greek dramatists routinely recast their country's foreign policy scandals and domestic crises in the cladding of mythology. It wasn't current affairs, but it was certainly politics. It is hard to imagine a more immediate experience than that which the Athenians must have had during the last third of Aeschylus's Oresteia, when a new democratic order is forged in the furnace of cyclical bloodletting and vendetta. Even now, two London productions this summer, of Sophocles's little-known Trachiniae (in Martin Crimp's stunning new version, Cruel and Tender) and Euripides's Iphigenia at Aulis, can pull the carpet from under the feet of two war heroes more effectively than any military tribunal - because they do what only great drama can do, which is condemn human wickedness while acknowledging human frailty and making us see ourselves in the wider picture of our own reflection. Greek tragedy also employed a system of dramaturgy - choruses, declamation, confrontation and spiritual reflection - that connected directly with its audience's concerns, just as the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre tuned into the characters, fashions, campaigns and scandals of the day.
What we mean by political theatre may be dictated more by the circumstances of performance than by content. Hamlet is political theatre, if you see it in politically charged circumstances, as I did, for instance, just after the death of Tito in Belgrade. Suddenly the play becomes one about succession and the destiny of a nation. Hamlet at Stratford-upon-Avon this summer was no such thing, and the over-praised Hamlet at the Old Vic seemed to be about a stupid kid in a woolly top messing around in his gap year.
Rather than generalising the notion of political theatre, it may be better to specify some of its different manifestations. If the Tricycle has generated "verbatim" and "tribunal" political theatre, how are we to think of Michael Frayn's Democracy - an exercise in nostalgia for a time when the world's problems narrowed to the cold war and one man's ability to start a thaw. Frayn is a more Shakespearean political writer here because he makes of Willy Brandt a heroic, even tragic, figure. Perhaps we could class this as "political history" theatre. Then again we have Alan Bennett's marvellous new piece, The History Boys, at the National, which charts the fortunes of a group of 1980s grammar school boys in an undoubted political brew about education, sexuality, attitudes to history and even examination skills. How do you place Bennett? As "entertainment-cum-political" theatre?
Then, yet again, there is the political play which is essentially a satire, and despite Alistair Beaton's Feelgood, that remains a rarity. Perhaps the lack of satire in the theatre explains why some critics objected to David Hare's cheap jokes at the expense of John Prescott in his "verbatim-cum-documentary" drama The Permanent Way last year. Surely a point of theatre - apart from its duty to entertain - is its licence to defrock. Theatre is comparatively cheap and easy to make. Its life is short, its power confined in the first place to its ability to address its audience. It can say what it wants in a small room. But political satire formed a very small aspect of The Permanent Way, which is better described as a blend of forms taken equally from journalistic and theatrical techniques.
David Hare remains our leading social dramatist. His body of work now stands at the centre of British cultural life. But the central achievement of The Permanent Way - about the scandal of Britain's railway system - was that it arranged verbatim testimony in such a way that the effect of the show, unlike the Tricycle tribunals, could not be reproduced on television. The message was not a simple-minded condemnation of privatisation, or of political personalities (despite the ribbing of John Prescott), but of anxiety over the destruction of the skilled working class and the failure of a fractured industry to take any form of individual or collective responsibility for its failures. To call it "political" or even "documentary" may be a distraction. Like all good theatre of any kind, The Permanent Way confirmed the power of its own medium.
Another problem with defining political theatre is that everyone in the theatre is now political, with the possible exception of Cameron Mackintosh and Sandy Wilson, and I am not even sure about them. Mackintosh's production of Les Misérables - likely to become the longest-running musical ever - has the underdog as its subject and the Parisian barricades for action; likewise, Wilson's The Boy Friend can be read as a deconstruction of the class system on the Riviera and the supremacy of love over materialism.
The idea of political theatre, as it has shifted and developed over the last generation, is littered with such ironies, not least of which is that, as the 1970s wore on, Alan Ayckbourn came increasingly to be seen as a comically analytical political writer. Meanwhile, Frayn and Stoppard, too civilised to be theatrically aggressive, have always allowed the seriousness of ideas to shine through. Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia trilogy at the National in 2002 was a probably underrated attempt to engage with political thought on the larger historical canvas. Frayn and Stoppard are no less political - indeed, they are more politically sophisticated - than Harold Pinter, who has become increasingly dogmatic, both as playwright and public figure, with the passing years.
Nevertheless, it is worth recalling the periods in which potent political objectives have combined with potent dramatic ones to produce some of the great moments of the modern British stage. Joan Littlewood operated first in Manchester in the late 1940s, and then on tour, and finally in the Theatre Royal, Stratford East (from 1953 until she left the country in 1975). She emerged out of the backwoods of England and the BBC like a witch in the night with a mission to confront and convert. Above all, though, she wanted people to have a great time. She was less concerned about changing society than raising two fingers to the establishment. She dreamt of a "people's fun palace." It was never realised, but her freewheeling, iconoclastic way of working was the political statement, and it created such masterpieces as Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey (1958), Brendan Behan's The Hostage (1958) and Oh, What A Lovely War (1963). It is hard to imagine how she would work now, when the theatre and the establishment are not so much firing at each other from opposite sides of an ideological fence as wrangling over a political deckchair.
Littlewood's nearest co-conspirator was John McGrath, who did want to change society. McGrath retreated from a glittering career in television and films of the 1960s to form his own touring company, 7:84, a name derived from the statistic asserting that 7 per cent of the nation owned 84 per cent of its wealth. None of his stage plays achieved the fame of Littlewood's, but he was with her in preferring, as he put it, a bad night in Bootle to a good one in the west end, and a corking piece like The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil (1973), which used the form of a Scottish ceilidh to tell the story of a nation's exploitation at the hands of capitalism, from the Highland clearances to the oil boom, was a seminal work of the era.
Interestingly, neither Littlewood nor McGrath had much to do with the Royal Court, where John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956) trumpeted a new era in working-class writing and acting, swiftly followed by the plays of Arnold Wesker and (though not at the Court) Harold Pinter, who matched east end argot to the apolitical nihilism of Samuel Beckett. In fact, the Court of the 1970s missed out almost completely on the most influential wave of political theatre-writing in Britain, the one that comprised David Hare, Howard Brenton, Trevor Griffiths and David Edgar, as well as such brilliant producer/anarchists as Pip Simmons, Ed Berman, Verity Bargate, Dan Crawford and Charles Marowitz. Together, they generated the idea of fringe theatre, and it was their way of working against the theatrical institutions of the time - rather than ideological principles per se - that still really underpins what we mean by political theatre today. The idea of a mainstream political theatre may, in this regard, verge on a contradiction in terms.
John McGrath insisted that political theatre (in his case with a radical socialist agenda) was defined by the circumstances of performance. He stood aside from the big companies, the Royal Court and even the fringe network of venues. His policy was not one of infiltration, but of separation. His artistic life had been redefined by les événements in Paris of 1968, and the Chicago riots of the same year - the year when fringe theatre really took off, partly as a result.
Between the late 1970s and the early 1980s, little of lasting value emerged from the fringe, apart from the idiosyncratic and brilliant inventions of Caryl Churchill. It was becoming increasingly removed from the counter-culture ethos that had seen its formation in the Traverse in Edinburgh, the Arts Lab in Covent Garden and the Oval House in Kennington. Meanwhile, Trevor Griffiths moved into the centre, storming the citadel of the National with two of the best plays of the 1970s, The Party and Comedians.
The first of these used the events of 1968 as a basis for a debate among a group of people representing various positions on the left, Laurence Olivier playing, unforgettably, an old-style Trotskyist dying of cancer. In the second (which Richard Eyre first mounted at the Nottingham Playhouse before Peter Hall brought it to the National), Griffiths anatomised another mostly male group in a night school for comics, with Jonathan Pryce in a career-launching performance as a violent skinhead. In both plays, Griffiths achieved a level of complexity in political argument that has been matched only by David Edgar in his study of racism in Britain, Destiny (1976), and Maydays (1983), a history play pegged to key dates in European socialism. In other words, the fringe had barely been invented before its original protagonists were going mainstream. Yet, in contrast to today's consensual transitions, the process was a matter of intense dispute.
In the Thatcherite 1980s, while the political arguments intensified, the arts did not rise to the occasion (partly because they were starved of public funds). Big public plays became a rarity; the fringe stayed locked into small venues with small ideas. The old ideological divides gave way to post-feminist explorations of the discontents of masculinity. But then there was another explosion. "In-yer-face" theatre (in Aleks Sierz's phrase) arrived, and the leader of the movement - now the grand old man of the fringe - was Steven Berkoff, whose vigorous scatological plays, like nightmarishly speeded-up versions of Pinter's poetic London scenarios, were hedonistic, self-centred and filthy. By the mid-1990s, Berkoff had his acolytes: a sex and drugs and violence brigade led by Sarah Kane (Blasted) and Mark Ravenhill (Shopping and Fucking), with a new level of shocking explicitness.
This was the moment of "personal" theatre, and it made the dialectical tradition of Griffiths and Edgar seem old hat. But the personal, in the hands of such talented writers as Kane (who committed suicide in 1999), was also political. The obscenities of Blasted, a catalogue of the horrors of war compressed into a Leeds hotel bedroom, was a response to watching the atrocities of Bosnia on television. And Ravenhill's later comedy, Mother Clap's Molly House (2001) managed to drag the fringe to centre stage at the National for the first time since Howard Brenton's Weapons of Happiness (1976). It may be that the idea of political theatre now making a comeback owes less to the Iraq war than to this other rather nebulous notion - that theatre had previously gone personal. Politics, in its variety of possible meanings, never really went away.
What is different today is that most of the theatrical battles of the 1960s have been won. Angry new plays receive good reviews in the Daily Telegraph; everyone seems to be on the same side. Yet to the extent that the political, in theatre, is code for the movement from fringe to mainstream, its importance can still be felt. Nicholas Hytner, the National's boss, is committed to many projects initiated at the tiny BAC in Battersea where Jerry Springer: The Opera was developed. Institutionally, things are rather healthy. And if there is a hunger for something of greater ideological urgency, it has to be more than a kind of dramatic anger management for the left-liberal cognoscenti of the kind represented by Guantanamo. In the events of 11th September, we caught a glimpse of apocalypse, and this may need something more than what seems to be a polite end to the sniping between the big theatres and the media on one side, and the old fringe on the other.
The National Theatre itself has assumed the role of cultural opposition to the political establishment, leaving the RSC and the Royal Court looking a bit high and dry. David Hare is re-established at the National a decade after his major, institutional trilogy about the church, the law and the failing (Old) Labour party (Racing Demon, Murmuring Judges and The Absence of War) packed out the huge Olivier auditorium. Hare has emerged as the key player in the long march from the late 1960s to the present day, compiling a body of work that stands comparison with the best of his peers (Tom Stoppard, Caryl Churchill, Harold Pinter, Alan Bennett and Michael Frayn) but which is part of the overarching scheme of development from fringe to west end (and, in his case, Hollywood). Hare has never lost his passion for controversy, but he is also a comfortable member of the cultural establishment. Indeed, he is Sir David, and that elision rather neatly sums up the current state of politics and the theatre. With Stuff Happens embedded in the National repertoire, and likely to bask in the approval of critics and public alike next month, we see the final arrival of a fringe, radical idea of theatre at the heart of the establishment. The mocking, iconoclastic power of Joan Littlewood's Oh, What a Lovely War has been displaced by Sir David Hare's civilised anguish, fully licensed and generally applauded, over the cock-up in Iraq.
