Conclusion

Summary

I don't think any particular play's going to effect a revolution. I don't think one starts out with that premise at all, but if there's a revolution it will have been partly prepared by the cultural change that we're taking part in.

(Roger Howard)

The plays of the nine writers we have been considering, although separated from us by mere decades, in some respects come down to us like documents of a past age. The demand for radical political change within Western capitalism now seems hopelessly optimistic, since Margaret Thatcher succeeded in imposing a monetarist consensus on both Conservative and Labour policies, and after the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe have been replaced by frequently malfunctioning free-market economies. Virtually world-wide, and even in still nominally Communist countries like China, the tendency is less towards dispossessing the rich to provide for the poor as to encouraging the rich in their endeavours, so that notionally enough wealth is created for poverty to be eradicated. As David Hare ruefully already admitted in 1978: ‘consciousness has been raised in this country for a good many years now and we seem further from radical political change than at any time in my life’.

However, it would be a mistake to treat this body of British political playwriting as a failure. While some of the plays we have considered may be of interest mainly for the light they shed on specific and topical concerns, most will stand the test of time.