John Mcgrath

JOHN McGRATH: AN ANTI-CLASS BASED SYSTEM PLAYWRIGHT One of the most prolific and outstanding figures in British drama, John McGrath was committed to socialism and used the stage as a political arena ( Kershaw, 1992: 149) to promote his opinions and provoke the labour class audience to react against the established capitalist system in Britain (Holdsworth, 2002: xvii). With socialist insights into the nature of social struggle and the provoking tone concerned with the issues of oppression, McGrath’s plays can be classified as examples of agit-prop (Agitation-Propaganda) drama (Innes, 2002: 181). Using the stage as an instrument to give political messages, the playwright performed his plays at non-theatre buildings such as working-men clubs, pubs, village halls and community centres. Having been influenced by some political thinkers of the left such as Antonio Gramsci, Rosa Luxemburg and Mao Tse Tung, McGrath grew interest in the social and political atmosphere of the late 1960s ( Holdsworth, 2002: xv) and went to Paris during the revolts of May 1968. These revolts made important marks on him and the playwright started to grow opposition to the class-based society in Britain. In 1971, McGrath, his wife Elizabeth MacLennan and her brother David MacLennan established the 7:84 Theatre Company, which took its name from a statistic that was published in The Economist that 7 per cent of the population of Britain owned 84 per cent of the country’s wealth. McGrath comments that “although this proportion may have fluctuated marginally over years, we continue to use it because it points to the basic economic structure of the society we live in, from which all the political, social and cultural structures grow” (McGrath, 1981:76). According to Patterson the reason why the company was founded lies in the fact that McGrath wanted to show the necessity of a struggle, a political organisation, and a hard, bitter, disciplined fight against powerful forces of capitalism

References: DiCenzo, Maria (1996), The Politics of Alternative Theatre in Britain, 1968-1990: the Case of 7:84 (Scotland), Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge Holdsworth, Nadine (2002) Naked Thoughts That Roam About, London: Nick Hern Books Ltd. Innes, Christopher (2002) Modern British Drama: The Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kershaw, Baz (1992) The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention, London: Routledge. McGrath, John (1981) The Cheviot, The Stag and Black, Black Oil, London: Eyre Methuen Ltd. ________ (1989) A Good Night Out: Popular Theatre: Audience, Class and Form, London: Eyre Methuen Ltd. Patterson, Michael (2003), Strategies of Political Theatre: Post-War British Playwrights, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Winkler, Elizabeth Hale (1990), The Function of Song in Contemporary British Drama, Newark: University of Delaware Press Yerebakan, İbrahim (1997), “Stages as a Political Platform: An Assessment of John