Left Theater

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The Left Theater was a British ensemble of professional theater professionals that existed from January 1934 to March 1937 , founded with the intention of letting the working class participate in the theater scene and addressing their living conditions. A total of seven pieces were performed, most of which focused on the subject “ strike ”.

The Left Theater was brought about by the director André van Gyseghem , Barbara Nixon, Llewellyn Rees , Ralph Wright, Miles Malleson , Maruo Fawcett, Ina De la Haye and Lionel Britton . To circumvent the censorship of the "Lord Chamberlain" , the theater club was initially the organizational form, later that of the Industrial and Provident Society (IPS) was chosen . Van Gyseghem worked for the "International Revolutionary Theater Association", which since 1932 consciously sought contact with trained theater people. Models for the British were Gustav von Wangenheim's Berlin troupe in 1931 and the American Theater Union , which had been in existence since 1933, and there were also close contacts with the amateur theater groups of the Workers' Theater Movement . Since the financial situation did not allow the purchase of its own theater - even if the conversion into an IPS was done with this in mind - public West End theaters in London served as venues. In the case of the seven productions that came about, foreign plays had to be used initially:

  1. The Sailors of Cattaro by Friedrich Wolf , directed by van Gyseghem, first ran at the Phoenix Theater and later also in Stratford and Woolwich.
  2. They Shall Not Die by the American author John Wexley described in three acts the struggle to save the so-called " Scottsboro Boys " from the execution of a death sentence. The Daily Worker praised van Gyseghem's production as useful for the solidarity campaign that was running at the time.
  3. Also Americans were George Sklar and Albert Maltz, the authors of the anti-war play Peace on Earth , in the plot of which a strike prevents a ship from being loaded with war goods. Barbara Nixon directed.
  4. Draw the Fires is the English title of Ernst Toller's Feuer aus den Kesseln , a dramatic adaptation of the Kiel sailors' uprising , which was next on the program.
  5. A courageous project was Barbara Nixon's theatrical version of Maxim Gorki's Mother ( The Mother ), which was performed in various locations for a week in November 1935.
  6. The following month, Montagu Slater's play Easter was the result of a writing competition, Slater's first dramatic attempt. The piece is about the Irish Easter Rising of 1916 .
  7. The London Westminster Theater was ultimately the location for the performance of Slater's New Way Wins . At the beginning of 1936, Wilfrid Walter directed the play that revolves around a “stay-down-strike”, the occupation of a mine by miners. Since the drama was intended for "touring companies" and therefore got along with eight actors, it did not go too well with the Left Theater, which sometimes brought 40 actors on stage

Like the American Theater Union , which had to cease operations in 1937 for financial reasons, the Left Theater could not continue to operate - the hoped-for increase in membership through the change in organizational structure had not materialized.

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  • Reiner Lehberger : The socialist theater in England from 1934 to the outbreak of the Second World War. Studies of the history and programming activities of the Left Theater, Unity Theater and the Left Book Club Theater Guild. Verlag Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main et al. 1977, pp. 43-64.