Antithesis: The Carnivalesque Leads to Irony

In chapter 4 of Devising Theatre, Deidre Heddon and Jane Milling discuss the growth of devised performances within the explicitly political companies of the early 1970s, before charting their demise over the subsequent decades. For some of these companies, the energy and immediacy of the devised process – such as CAST’s ‘rock’n’roll’ pub theatre (Heddon and Milling 2006, p 97) or El Teatro Campesino’s happenings to support California striking farm workers (ibid, p 96) – allowed the presentation of complex political ideals in a satisfyingly potent performance. However, over time, these companies returned to the ideal of the script.

Baz Kershaw (Kershaw 1992: pp 67 - 90) identifies a dialectical process in the evolution of British political theatre during the 1970s: the thesis of Marxist agitprop theatre (represented by CAST, a company created by performers expelled from the more traditional Marxist London Unity Theatre) and the antithesis of the carnivalesque (that is more anarchic, permissive and playful, defined by Bakhtin as the inversion of the status quo and its values) as espoused by The People Show or 'early Welfare State' - this carnivalesque could equally apply to the strategies of The Open Theatre in the USA.

Kershaw sees a more sophisticated, ironic form of political theatre emerging as a synthesis of the Marxist and carnivalesque, without limiting the diversity of alternative theatre to a monolithic whole: a perfect dialectical process of thesis and antithesis tending towards a synthesis. Irony, for Kershaw evades the obviousness of rhetorical agitprop, feeds a sophisticated audience's need for complex, layered theatre. Interpretation is no longer fixed, but open to diverse readings. 

THESIS: Joint Stock's Fanshen
SYNTHESIS: Gecko's The Arab and The Jew