Workers’ Play Time: Seven Scripts from Seven Struggles

Doug Nicholls, ed., Workers’ Play Time: Seven Scripts from Seven Struggles, Volume One (Oxford: Workable Books, 2017), 312 pp., £9.99.

In Cliffords Odets’ iconic play, Waiting for Lefty (1935), which was based on the New York taxi drivers’ strike of February 1934, there is a key domestic scene where Joe, one of the workers, has an argument with his wife, Edna, who berates him about the need to organize a grassroots trade union that is really prepared for strike action:

JOE: I’m not so dumb as you think! But you are talking like a Red.

EDNA: I don’t know what that means. But when a man knocks you down you get up and kiss his fist! You gutless piece of baloney.

JOE: One man can’t –

EDNA: (with great joy) I don’t say one man! I say a hundred, a thousand, a whole million, I say. But start in your own union. Get those hack boys together! Sweep out those racketeers like a pile of dirt! Stand up like men and fight for the crying kids and wives. Goddammit! I’m tired of slavery and sleepless nights.

JOE: (with her) Sure, sure! …

EDNA: Yes. Get brass toes on your shoes and know where to kick!¹

Not only was Odets’ play one of the most powerful examples of a stage drama that sought to raise the radical trade union awareness among its audience, it was also at the heart of a revival of political theatre both in America and elsewhere, as Stuart Cosgrave notes: “By the end of 1935 Waiting for Lefty was known in every country which had an active Workers’ Theatre Movement”.² Indeed, its success was so overwhelming, it eventually became one of the most frequently banned plays in America.³

In Britain, there was no radical play that reached out so successfully as Waiting for Lefty, even though the Workers’ Theatre Movement was active in the first half of the 1930s in trying to create a body of political drama that placed itself at the service of the trade union and socialist struggle. In a decade of economic depression, the rise of fascism and the threat of world war, there was a growing demand for more direct and public art forms such as agit-prop theatre that would help ordinary people make sense of the social, political and economic crises they were faced with.

More recently, there has been a similar cultural response by the labour movement in Britain to try to revitalize these traditions of radical theatre in order to once again inspire people in their everyday struggles. The need for this is urgent since, despite a return to 1930’s levels of poverty and unemployment, there has nevertheless been a massive drop in trade union affiliation. According to the Trades Union Council in Britain, “membership has fallen from a high of 13.2 million in 1979 to 6.2 million in 2015-16”.⁴ This is not only due to the disappearance of thousands of manufacturing jobs that have been outsourced to countries in Asia and South America, but also the huge increase in zero-hour contract employment that turns workers into a ‘precariat’ of low-paid, part-time staff, where you need more than just one job to make ends meet. In such conditions of social and economic marginalization even the most basic idea of trade union membership is difficult to maintain.

This revival of alternative theatre in Britain has therefore consciously addressed the challenge to get workers back into trade unions, partly by dramatizing their history to recover the lessons of the past, but also to link this to today’s workplace experience. These have been mainly local initiatives that have nevertheless been highly successful in reaching out to new audiences with a message that goes back to the very beginnings of the labour movement – come together, organize and fight back!

In an attempt to give these plays a wider audience, the General Federation of Trade Unions in Britain has published the first volume of what will be a series of plays (80 more plays are also to be made available) that deal with the bread-and-butter issues of fighting for better wages and working conditions, as well as the development of more grassroots trade union democracy. As Doug Nicholls, General Secretary of the Federation, writes in his introduction to the plays:

Trade-union struggles over the years have inspired some of our greatest playwrights. They have also inspired many works of drama that packed a punch in their time but have since been largely – and unjustly – forgotten. This is a rich seam that the present collection has only just begun to mine. Our call for the submission of trade-union related plays that might be showcased in an anthology by Workable Books led to so many wonderful submissions that we intend this to be Volume One in a series.⁵

It may seem a sad sign of the times that there remains a desperate need for not least young people to join a trade union in order to defend their basic rights. But in some ways this is not so surprising since one of the main aims of the neoconservative counter-revolution, from Pinochet, Reagan and Thatcher onwards, has been to undermine and ultimately break the collective strength of the trade unions. One has only to recall Reagan’s smashing of the air traffic controllers’ strike in 1981 and Thatcher’s onslaught against the miners in the 1984-5 strike against the closure of the coal mines. Trade unions have always been an anathema to these political wreckers since the very existence of trade unions challenges the power of employers to rule at the most contentious point of class contact – the workplace. From the beginnings of factory production to today’s process of post-industrialization, trade unions have had to face the daily ravages of the system, a historic role that is, according to Doug Nicholls, dramatically documented in these plays:

So the plays you have here span an important period of our history. They cover the 134-year struggle from the first charter for the universal franchise to the legislation that gave everyone over the age of 18 the vote. They move from a period when trade unions were illegal to one when over half the work force were active in them and able to win equal pay for women, thereby settling another long-standing demand. They chart the shift from when Britain was a mainly rural country through the age when it was the most advanced industrial economy on earth, to the beginning of the period when it was the first nation to de-industrialize, adopting the free movement of capital and labour”.⁶

The first two plays in the collection – Neil Duffield’s Bolton Rising (2000) and Neil Gore’s We Will Be Free! (2013) – both deal with the earliest years of the labour movement in Britain when workers fought the repressive laws of the state that totally prohibited the creation of unions of workers – the so-called Combination Acts that were passed by parliament in 1799. These reactionary laws, which were in response to the fear of the ruling class of the spread of popular revolt in the wake of the French revolution, introduced draconian punishments against anyone who signed an oath of allegiance as trade unionists – they were either hanged or transported to Australia. Gore’s play returns to the most famous case of the victimization of six trade unionists in the village of Tolpuddle, Dorset, who organized the first agricultural labourers union to protest against the lowering of their wages. They were found guilty by a court made up of landowners who sought to terrorize the rest of their workforce by transporting these Tolpuddle martyrs to the penal colony of Australia. Both plays not only reveal how a whole network of government spies and provocateurs was used to discredit, disrupt and divide the movement, something that continues to this day, but also the terrible personal cost to the wives and children of these early trade union activists, who were left without a home or any source of income.

Four other plays shift the focus onto women workers and their subsequent trade union organization as the result of a dispute at work. The Chambermaids (1987) by Kathleen McCreery is described by Nicholls as:

“the true story of a group of Grosvenor House Hotel chambermaids who, in 1979, took on Trust House Forte when their Jarrow-born shop steward was unfairly suspended, and were sacked and evicted. Divided by race, language, religion and culture, the maids found common cause in struggling for their rights as workers, as women, as immigrants and as trade unionists”.⁷

Similarly, Out! On the Costa del Trico (1973), written and first performed by the Women’s Theatre Group, replays one of the landmark victories in the struggle for equal pay when 400 women went on strike for six months at the US-owned Trico windscreen-wiper factory in Brentford, Dagenham, in 1971. Many of the women involved in the action were interviewed by the theatre group and their stories were integrated in the play. One of the things that characterized the strike was the violence directed at the women on the picket lines as they stood all night to prevent the company being supplied by scab drivers who were protected by the police:

The law’s out to fight us, scabs out to spite us
The boss who runs the show asleep in bed.
We know where we are now, they’ve driven us this far, now

It’s war and we know which side they’re on.
We stood there dazed, the headlights blazed
We were knocked and pushed and dragged
They let just six of us get close
As the scabs roared through our line.

We chased those bastards down the road
Their blood money in their hands
Midnight cowboys do your worst
The picket line still stands

The picket line still stands!⁸

A third play that connects then and now, not least in terms of the precarious way in which many women workers are employed is Jane McNulty’s Dare To Be Free (2016), which depicts the strike by 20 waitresses at the Ceylon Café Picadilly in May 1908, who protested against their poor wages and insecure employment. Nicholls once again points to the parallels in the play between the exploitation of low-paid, temporary women workers within the service sector – both past and present: “Jane McNulty reminds us that the organization of women casual workers and the struggle against various forms of zero-contract hours has a long history. The need for the young to stand up for justice in the workplace has never been greater”.⁹

The last two plays – James Kenworth’s A Splotch of Red (2016) and Eileen Murphy’s Hannah ((2001) – trace the political trajectory of three of the most prominent figures in the British labour movement. A Splotch of Red dramatizes the life of Keir Hardie, the founder of the Labour Party and its first Member of Parliament (1892), and Will Thorne, who was a prominent trade union leader at the time. Set in the same period, Hannah is centered around the pioneering struggles of Hannah Mitchell, who was an early labour activist and leading suffragette. Both plays explore the ideological clash between reform and revolution, in particular how this was played out within the trade unions and Labour Party. A Splotch of Red reveals the political tensions underlying the relationship between a workers’ party and the trade union movement on which it is based. The pressures of parliamentary compromise and the role of extra-parliamentary mobilizations such as strikes and demonstrations are still key ideological questions within the labour movement today.

As can be seen from the above survey, Workers’ Play Time brings together a unique collection of working-class drama, showing both the artistic range and political potential that still exist within this kind of popular theatre. By making these plays available in print means that they are not only accessible to a new readership, but also that they can be restaged in many other different contexts and venues. This volume, as well as the forthcoming ones, represent a very important intervention by the trade union movement in Britain. In a period in which trade unions are on the defensive, this ambitious act of cultural resistance to the forces of reaction has a resonance that goes far beyond the significance of the individual dramatic works themselves.

Ronald Paul
Department of Languages and Literatures
University of Gothenburg,
Sweden
ronald.paul@sprak.gu.se