Welfare State International & Radical Theatre

“In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.” (Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle)

Against the backdrop of social upheaval and left-wing student/worker activism in 1968, John Fox and Sue Gill founded the UK theatre company Welfare State International (WSI). During the 1970’s the group worked in the “performance art end of the alternative theatre spectrum”(Kershaw, p209). Travelling around Britain in caravans and attempting to blur “the distinctions between art and life” (ibid) they performed ‘carnivalesque’ events such as the first Parliament in Flames in 1976 which consisted of a ‘community bonfire’ for Guy Fawkes night and the burning of a huge model of the Houses of Parliament. WSI was opposed to the consumerist, excess culture of modern developed countries and sought to build a collective, socialist, egalitarian utopia.

As the company’s work progressed with large scale projects that attempted to apply their ideas in poltically conservative contexts, they became aware that the performances were being received to critical acclaim more for their artistic and aesthetic resonance than the ideological change that they were trying to implement. Fox located the problem as one of the company not being rooted in a specific community: “We could not allow ourselves to develop pieces organically over years to respond to or follow up the longer term needs and rhythms of the host community, because essentially we were not part of any community.” (ibid) This led to the company’s relocation to the small, conservative community of Barrow-in-Furness, in Cumbria. What transpired from their work in Barrow, and was brought to the fore in a 1987 production entitled Town Hall Tatoo, was that in order to implement their ideas in the community they had to operate in a way that both pleased the town council, who fund the company, and massage the conservative ethos of the community. In short they had to resort to the tactic of ‘infiltration’ through primarily representational means.

For example, in Town Hall Tatoo the event included:

“A Victorian market; a forty-five-minute town hall oratorio […]; a Queen Victoria lookalike competition; an official opening of the town hall by the Mayor; a grand parade of wildly decorated council vehicles […]; a ten-foot diameter, three-tier exploding birthday cake; and the ‘enhancement’ of the building itself.” (Kershaw, p213)

Translating aesthetic representation into direct social action is a problem that challenges the limits of radical theatre and its capacity to instigate change. If we agree that the existence of radical performance is to challenge the status quo in any given situation by revoking the institutional structures that support it, then to bend to the rules of the custodians of that infrastructure would suggest that the radical has been tamed to relativist social humanism of the type that is found in the ‘political plays’ that fill theatre houses across the country. But perhaps this is an assumption too far. Perhaps the ‘radical’ can exist in subtlety and metaphor and equating the term with direct action is to misunderstand the many guises of the radical?

For WSI it was clear from the start that their work existed outside of conventional structures. They created performance in places where it had never been done before, and this was certainly the case of Town Hall Tatoo. But as an audience member, a tax-payer attending that event, would there not have been a sense of feeling ‘duped’ or compromised; paying for entertainment when in reality you were paying to be ‘transformed’? Or was the codification of imagery and language so subtle that compromise not even a concern? In which case was there any hope at all that this infilatration tactic would have a palpable effect? Would WSI not have been better positioned to instigate change had they taken their views into the democratic, political arena? Canvassing voters, writing manifestos, lobbying government and all the other processes of party political change?

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Unless stated otherwise, citations all taken from: Kershaw, Baz, The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention (London/New York: Routledge, 1992)