17 - Case study: Theatre Workshop’s Oh What a Lovely War, 1963

Summary

Oh What a Lovely War premièred at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, London on 19 March 1963. Its transfer to Wyndham’s Theatre in the West End in June was a landmark in British Theatre; a theatrical methodology that had been thirty years in the making had finally arrived in the cultural mainstream. European theatre with an overt political provenance had been kept at a distance by the innate conservatism of British culture between the two world wars, and in the immediate post-war period. Although Brecht was belatedly fashionable in British theatre (following the Berliner Ensemble visit in 1956), his methods were ingrained into Theatre Workshop. As the company’s co-founder and director Joan Littlewood told Kenneth Tynan, they had known ‘all about Bertolt Brecht in the thirties’.

Fewer people had heard of Erwin Piscator, but he too was a formative influence. No other British collective got nearer than Theatre Workshop to Piscator’s 1929 account of epic documentary theatre: ‘In lieu of private themes we had generalisation, in lieu of what was special the typical, in lieu of accident causality. Decorativeness gave way to constructiveness, Reason was put on a par with Emotion, while sensuality was replaced by didacticism and fantasy by documentary reality.’ Piscator’s plays of 1927, Rasputin, the Romanoffs, the War and the People that Rose against Them and The Good Soldier Schweik, set a standard for Theatre Workshop. In contrast, British treatments of warfare –whether in West End plays or popular film – have usually been naturalistic.