Cambridge Companion to British Theatre since 1945

Harvie, Jen, and Dan Rebellato, eds. The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre since 1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.

With Jen Harvie I’ve edited the Cambridge Companion to British Theatre since 1945, a collection of twelve essays on British theatre over the last 75 years. Our aim with the book was to talk about the material and discursive shape of that period. That is to say, we’re interested in the economics, the technological, the infrastructural foundations of British theatre over that period and we’re also interested in the ways people have talked about and constituted our theatre.

The book falls into four sections:, each containing three chapters: Theatre Makers (Playwrights, Directors, Actors); Theatre Sectors (West End, Subsidized Theatre, Fringe); Theatre Communities (Audience, Black, Queer)l; and Theatre & State (Government, Buildings, Nations). There’s also an introduction by Jen and me and a substantial chronology of the period.

What the book talks much less about is what happened on the stages. That may seem counter-intuitive, perverse even, but we were keen to move the focus us away from the aesthetic to the material and to look at the base rather than the superstructure, though, as we explain in the introduction, the materialist analysis is complemented throughout by a consideration of the discourses at play.

I’ve written two chapters in the book. The first ‘Playwrights: Collectivity and Collaboration’ considers the things people say about playwrights and playwriting - that it is individualistic, literary and so on - and contests that view by offering an industrial history of the playwright’s conditions of work, making a strong case for saying that playwrights have campaigned and organised for the right to protect their work but also to collaborate fully.

The second chapter, written with Jen Harvie, is about the Fringe. I should say it’s not entirely through grotesque self-advancement that I’ve written two chapters. We found the Fringe chapter extremely hard to commission and three people in turn who agreed to do it finally proved unable to do so, so we decided, for speed, to take the job on ourselves. The chapter attempts to chart the rise and fall of the first wave of the Fringe, from the mid 60s to the mid 80s, looking at the way that various complex debates in the functioning of the Fringe - its relation to the mainstream, the importance of collectivity, and its dependance on or independence from arts subsidy - formed and deformed the movement. We also focus on three exemplary companies from the 1970s: Monstrous Regiment, the Pip Simmons Group, and Portable Theatre.