Hands across the sea: restaging workers' theatre
28 May, 7pm
FreeJoin artist and writer Joey Simons for a workshop around Meerut, a short agitprop sketch produced in 1933 by the Hammer and Sickle theatre troupe of North-West London. Meerut was written as an act of solidarity with trade unionists and railway workers in India imprisoned by the British colonial regime.
Together, we will read, imagine and perform the sketch, exploring how it might be translated both politically and linguistically, as an act of solidarity with anti-imperialist prisoners today.
Republished in 1985, the sketch involves drilled choreography, choral voices and a makeshift prison (made out of broomsticks). It was performed by workers’ theatre groups at dockyards and factory gates across the country, culminating with a call to 'Break the chains, break the bars!'
The piece is embedded in the rich but largely overlooked workers’ theatre movements which emerged from the maelstrom of war and revolution in the 1920s and 1930s in the UK and across Europe. Theatre became a tool for the working class to demand a radical transformation in the relationship between politics and culture, actors and audiences, language and technique, the individual and the collective. Drawing together agitprop, mass spectacle, street performance, acrobatics, music, declamation, film, projections, political speeches, statistics, slogans and satire this movement represented a “broken tradition” for much of the 20th century: its productions lost to censorship, repression and the cultural domination of art in the service of capital. In Britain, only through the conscious efforts of a few radical practitioners such as Ewan MacColl (Theatre of Action) or Kathleen McCreary and Richard Stourac were its lessons rediscovered, as theatre once more became an important site of class conflict.
This event is a collaboration with MayDay Rooms where a second iteration will take place (date to be announced soon).
Image: Cover of the pamphlet Meerut, Release the Prisoners! Published by London, the National Joint Council, Victoria House Printing Co., 1933. Image courtesy of Working Class Movement Library, Salford.
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