6 - Staging the future: Howard Brenton's The Churchill Play (1974)

Summary

I dream of a play acting like a bushfire, smouldering into public consciousness. Or – like hammering on the pipes being heard all through a tenement.

The majority of playwrights in this volume began writing for the fringe theatre, and all went on to become established writers for mainstream theatre. Brenton stands out as a writer who preserved much of the outrageousness of the fringe in his later work. As John Bull writes: ‘More than any of the writers in this book [Hare, Griffiths and Edgar], his roots were firmly in the fringe, and more than any of them he has brought the shock tactics of the fringe into mainstream theatre.’ Brenton's ability to shock is notorious, especially since the Romans in Britain trial in 1982, in which Mary Whitehouse mounted a prosecution against Michael Bogdanov, the play's director, for ‘having procured the commission, and been party to, an act of gross indecency’. What had upset Mrs Whitehouse and other guardians of British morality was a scene in which a Roman soldier attempts to rape a young male Celt. Significantly, it would appear that the depiction of attempted, or even actual, heterosexual rape on stage would have caused far less fuss, not to mention the acceptance of other horrific crimes performed by actors – as one correspondent to a national newspaper pondered, could Macbeth be charged with murder?