Thatcher's Theatre — or, After ‘Equus’

Extract

A dozen years after the political and theatrical watershed of 1956 came those further shifts in social thinking of 1968. which were also reflected in major changes on the theatrical scene. Another twelve years on, any theatre people who were expecting such a collision of events in 1980 appeared to be waiting in vain. Yet, in retrospect, the impact of that first full year of a new kind of Conservative government can be seen as no less decisive, though its effects on the theatrical scene are only now beginning to make a kind of negative sense. Here, Vera Gottlieb argues that the tone of ‘Thatcher's theatre’ was already being set by such earlier plays as Peter Shaffer's Equus, in which she detects both the despair of rational solutions and the willing subjection to supposedly implacable forces that have since become characteristic of our national theatre as of our national mood. Vera Gottlieb. who is Principal Lecturer in Drama at Goldsmiths’ College. University of London, is the author of Chekhov and the Vaudeville (Cambridge, 1982), is presently collaborating with Peter Holland on a study of Stanislavsky as director, and has been co-author and director of Red Earth (Hampstead, 1985) and Waterloo Road (Young Vic Studio. 1987).