Politics and the Popular in British Music Theatre of the Vietnam Era

Abstract

Politics and the popular in British music theatre of the Vietnam era 12,104 words (15,921 words including footnotes) Abstract: British music theatre works of the 1960s and early 1970s largely avoided direct engagement with contemporary political topics. Intriguing in this light is Michael Hall's recent proposition that Brecht's music theatre set the terms for younger British composers' experiments with the genre. Brecht proved a complicated model, however, because of composers' anxieties about music's capability to convey socio-political messages, and their reluctance to accord popular music a progressive function. The entanglement of Vietnam war activism and rock music forms the backdrop for analyses of two works that do address Vietnam directly -George Newson's Arena and Anthony Gilbert's The Scene-Machine (both 1971)both of which also pass pointed comment on different popular music traditions. Both works highlight the difficulty in emulating Brecht's model in an era when the concept of 'the political' was being significantly redefined, and the cultural gap between activist cadres and the wider population was unprecedentedly visible. figures. Of the atom bomb, class relations, civil rights, gender equality or anti-colonial struggle, there was nonein contrast to prominent theatrical works of the time from a number of American, Dutch, German and Italian composers. 3 Vietnam, too, eluded the attention of British composers, in spite of significant opposition to the Vietnam war in Britain, which climaxed with two highly-publicised demonstrations in London on 17 March and 27 October 1968. By 1967, two-thirds of the British population were opposed to PrimeMinister Harold Wilson's support for the United States' campaign in Vietnam, a view reflected in the editorials of most newspapers. 4 The first of the 1968 protests in front of the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square attracted a crowd of 10,000, and the second an estimated ten times more, the tussles with police being broadcast around the country via a live television relay. Despite the widespread concern about the conflict, this movement too failed to generate a mass following amongst the wider British public, in part (as we will see) because of the way in which leading activists identified with aspects of the counterculture and so alienated mainstream public opinion. Nonetheless, as I will describe in the following pages, the movement made an impact upon British rock musicians, a number of whom aligned themselves with anti-war activists; and it proved influential too upon the development of both established and alternative theatres in Britain.A valuable corrective to the picture of political disengagement on the part of composers has recently been offered by Michael Hall's book Music Theatre in Britain, 1960Britain, -1975, which unearths two music theatre pieces premiered in 1971 that do, in fact, squarely address the conflict in Vietnam. 5 Anthony Gilbert's The Scene-Machine takes the form of a parable about a folk singer whose surrender to commercial forces is symbo...