Caryl Churchill has shown a sustained interest in the inter-connections between self-definition, identity politics and revolution. In her career she has repeatedly examined revolutionary conditions, and engaged ambitiously with the artistic dilemma of how to represent political turmoil on stage. This chapter investigates three of her plays about revolution: The Hospital at the Time of the Revolution, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire and Mad Forest. /The Hospital at the Time of the Revolution / Hospital was written in 1972 though, inexplicably, it has never been staged. It draws on the writings of the celebrated psychiatrist and champion of the Algerian struggle for independence, Frantz Fanon, who was an inspirational figure not just for black revolutionaries but also for Churchill's generation of white, western political radicals in the 1960s. The decolonization of Africa followed Indian independence in 1947, and when, in 1960, seventeen former African colonies became independent members of the United Nations, it marked a turning point in the post-war world, re-mapping power relations between Europe and Africa. The Algerians' fight for autonomy was particularly complex since French occupation dated from 1830 and French trade and investment in Algeria had matched economic commitments in all of France's other imperial territories combined. French emigration to Algeria had far exceeded the scale of emigration to other French colonies and colonial legal policy even upheld that Algeria was an integral part of France - an ideological position that created a panoply of contradictions and paradoxes.

“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” (Article 19, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights) / “Dear President Bush, I'm sure you'll be having a nice little tea party with your fellow war criminal, Tony Blair. Please wash the cucumber sandwiches down with a glass of blood.” (Harold Pinter, the Guardian, 18 November 2003) / Two years after composing the above letter Harold Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Many had thought that his outspoken views might preclude any chance of such an honour, but in the last decade the Nobel Prize judges have increasingly linked the award with a politics of human rights, and a championing of freedom of expression. In their citation the judges praised Pinter as a dramatist 'who uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms'. Pinter's insistence on speaking out, like other recent Nobel prize-winners, exemplifies the spirit of article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. His blunt rage against the American/British invasion of Iraq had been made public in his poetry, in letters, and in speeches long before public opinion in the West turned anti-war; and his castigation of American imperialism has not ceased since the 1980s. In his controversial Nobel acceptance speech Pinter contended that 'the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought' in communist Eastern Europe since 1945 have been fully acknowledged and documented, but that US crimes in the same era have scarcely been admitted, 'let alone recognised as crimes'.

Brecht, Lessing and dramaturgy

Brecht was the most radical theorist and practitioner of twentieth-century theatre. His methods of writing and developing plays, his training for writers, actors and directors, his interrogation of design and stage lighting, and his collaborations with composers, singers and musicians defined a particular kind of political theatre - and practitioners the world over continue to modify and rework Brecht's theory and praxis to make interventionist theatres of their own. Central to his theatre-making, and the vital motor for the articulation and dissemination of his ideas, is the dramaturg - but curiously this centrality is not highlighted in literature about Brecht. This essay will address that neglect by examining Brecht's own employment as a dramaturg, his writings on dramaturgy, and his organisation and training of dramaturgs within the Berliner Ensemble.

Brecht's reinvention of the dramaturg rewrote a theatrical role first adopted by the German Enlightenment playwright and critic Gotthold Lessing. From 1767 to 1769 Lessing was the official dramaturg at the Hamburg National Theatre and, in an extraordinarily ground-breaking experiment, wrote plays and published critiques of the National Theatre's repertoire, its actors' performances and the creative processes undertaken in each production. Lessing's objective was to articulate the artistic travails normally hidden from the public and to generate a critical discourse on the repertoire and working practices of the institution itself.

The silent revolution

Whilst Tynan's profile as Literary Manager has remained low with theatre historians, his impact on the theatre industry itself has been extraordinary. No one could have anticipated either the scale or the extent of the changes that have taken place since the 1960s, and no one could have foreseen that professional literary management would be so rapidly embraced. Two other flagship theatres followed suit first, the Royal Court employing a Literary Manager in 1979, and the Royal Shakespeare Company employing Colin Chambers in 1981. The 1980s and 1990s saw a steady proliferation of appointments of both full-time and part-time literary managers, and it is unlikely that numbers have peaked, the current pattern indicating that theatres in the regions are embarking on ambitious and progressive experiments in literary management and dramaturgy. As I write there are now nine full-time Literary Managers in London, and sixteen working part-time; there are eleven on full-time and four on part-time contracts in the regions. In five years the numbers of full-time posts have doubled, and the haphazard, fixed-period recruitment pattern of the 1990s has changed as more funding has become available and theatre companies have opted for longer-term investment in literary development. Most subsidised and fringe theatres both in London and in the Regions have freelance readers or literary advisers where they cannot afford other arrangements.

Brecht's theory and practice of the dramaturg have brought systematic institutional and artistic reforms to German-speaking, central and Eastern European theatre. There dramaturgs in Brecht's mould are at the heart of theatre practice and operate quite uncontroversially. In Canada and the United States the professionalisation of the dramaturg has occurred since the 1970s and is now well established, though always accompanied by a good deal of hotly contentious debate. In non-German-speaking Western Europe the appointment of dramaturgs is a familiar practice in Scandinavia, Holland and France, whereas in Britain and Spain dramaturgs tend to be deployed on short-term projects, are not regarded as integral to theatre-making, and there is a greater confusion about what they do. In Britain, whilst there is no question of Brecht's international status as a playwright, nor of his place as one of the most significant theatrical thinkers of the twentieth century, the official recognition of dramaturgs is much more recent and the numbers employed have sharply increased over the last five years. What is most odd is that although the practice of Brechtian dramaturgs has demonstrably had an enormous influence in the West since the 1960s, Brecht's actual theorisations on the dramaturg have scarcely been addressed at all. This has led to considerable misunderstanding and misrepresentation.

Brecht's theory and practice of the dramaturg spread to the English-speaking West in the 1960s and 1970s, mainly through the discipleship of directors and dramaturgs either working at or formerly employed at Brecht's theatre, and through John Willett's 1965 translation of Der Messingkauf.

In Germany, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia and the Netherlands dramaturgs and literary managers are a lynchpin of mainstream, state-funded theatre, and have been officially employed for well over two centuries. Playreaders, advisers on repertoire and textual, critical and practical experts working in partnerships with directors and/or writers are accepted as an integral part of theatre-making. Similarly, though the history is much more recent, advances in American theory and practice since the 1960s mean that dramaturgy and literary management are now embedded both in subsidised theatre and as recognised disciplines in academic curricula at over forty universities. The latest edition of Brockett's standard theatre history contains significant new sections on both fields, seeking to define differences while acknowledging that the concept of the dramaturg is still not widely understood. England is now belatedly following in the wake of continental and US practice, and its dramaturgical cultures have undergone an extraordinary transformation, particularly in the last decade – a pace of change still so great that it is difficult to keep abreast of developments. Though literary managers became official only in 1963 with the arrival of Tynan at the National Theatre, and professionalisation was at first slow, it quickened exponentially in the 1990s and the number of appointments continues to rise. Literary managers are now key figures in the artistic running of many theatres, and the deployment of dramaturgs, who in England most commonly develop new plays, has become widespread.

Books written against an established academic and intellectual grain, as this one is, make possible many kinds of conclusion. If they succeed in commanding readers and forcing revaluations, they invite correction, application and enlargement by others – and I am sharply aware of how much more can be said, especially in integrating English and particular continental European theatre histories. I equally believe that the methodological framework and the historical outline I propose of English dramaturgical development since Lessing enable that further work; certainly they most clearly inform the answer I can now give to the questions with which I began more than a decade ago, as a theatre-maker in an English province observing something in process and unable to make sense of it.

The meanings of the terms literary manager and dramaturg are relative and determined by the particular cultures and institutions in which individuals operate, but the functions remain. Lessing and Brecht provide the major models, but practice in England is complicated by the fact that variants on these models have also been imported via the US. There is still powerful resistance to the theorisation of literary management and dramaturgy in England (where resistance to theory per se is not limited to theatre). Dramaturgical appointments on the Continent are supported by an ethos that criticism and research are an integral part of artistic creation, but in general the English dislike and resent intellectualising theatre.

Literary administration and the (actor-) manager 1800–1900

If German entrepreneurs were exploring and developing the function and purpose of dramaturgs, English managers were not. Lessing enjoyed popularity as a playwright, but the Hamburgische Dramaturgie remained untranslated in Britain (and America) for much of the century. Without exception a nation's first official dramaturg or literary manager appears in its state-subsidised national theatre, and England not only had none to offer, but lacked the political momentum to acquire one. Commerical success had to be guaranteed for a theatre to stay afloat, so emphasis remained firmly on box-office returns and low-risk strategies. Product, not process, dominated actor-managers' waking thoughts. Dramaturgical functions had nevertheless to be undertaken, and though, as in the eighteenth century, much can be put down to organised chaos, it is clear that unofficial, ‘hidden’ play readers, advisers, researchers and literary administrators played an important and intriguing rôle at certain theatres.

Theatre historians agree that a major feature of the nineteenth century was the irresistible rise of the manager, and that managers at the main London and regional theatres had normally made names as actors. Another feature of the age was an extraordinary growth in theatre-building: Nicoll lists nine London theatres in regular use in 1800, 89 by 1850 and 144 by 1900; in the English regions, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, he calculates that there were around 58 theatres in 1850 and 351 by 1900.

Lessing: the first official dramaturg

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81) was the world's first officially appointed dramaturg. Though his appointment in Hamburg lasted only two years, from 1767 to 1769, and the venture that inspired it sank rather ignominiously, Lessing's experimental work pioneered reforms of practice and theory throughout Germany. His example led rapidly to the centrality of the dramaturg in German-speaking theatres, and to the spread of official positions in Eastern Europe. In the West the implications of Lessing's appointment for the national reform of theatre practice were not fully absorbed until the mid to late nineteenth century, most notably through Harley Granville Barker and William Archer, and in the twentieth century the first official appointments of literary managers in English-speaking western theatres certainly owed a great deal to Lessing's model of the dramaturg. Similarly, the significance of the Hamburgische Dramaturgie (the Hamburg Dramaturgy), the theatre criticism he published while dramaturg, was not significantly appreciated by western critics until the 1880s and 1890s – yet few would now dispute that these writings rank amongst the most important theoretical documents of eighteenth-century drama. For any student of dramaturgy an understanding of Lessing's work and the cultural background to his appointment is vital.

The National Theatre in Hamburg and Lessing's appointment

There are three important points about the context of Lessing's appointment: his post was created for Germany's first national theatre project; his position was part of a scheme to galvanise a distinctively German dramatic literature; and Lessing, as Germany's foremost man of letters, polemicist, and playwright, was specifically sought out.

In October 1963 Kenneth Tynan (1927–80) became the first official Literary Manager in Britain. Widely perceived as the most brilliant theatre critic since Shaw, he relinquished the post he had held at the Observer for nine years and entered the newly created National Theatre (NT), where he remained for a decade. His tenure has interesting parallels with Lessing's, and he certainly saw his share of crisis and controversy, but unlike Lessing, Tynan has not been internationally celebrated for his rôle: he is remembered for his reviewing and his work at the NT is framed as marginal to his career as a critic. His appointment challenged traditional British management structures assigning artistic and managerial responsibility to actor-managers, and in post Tynan provided a model of literary management that continues to be appropriated and refashioned by theatre companies throughout the United Kingdom. Yet Tynan's term as Literary Manager suffers from curious academic erasures, and the official history of the NT even appears to disclaim Tynan's power and influence while in post.

One significant reason for the silences surrounding Tynan's time as Literary Manager was the invisibility of his work, much of which took place in a small office, and unlike the contributions of writers, actors, designers and directors was unfamiliar and uncomprehended. In 1998 Tynan's manuscripts became available at the British Library: they reveal his functions, working relationships and prolonged internal battle for appropriate recognition of his rôle.

Archer and Barker's construction of the office of Literary Manager was framed within their campaign for a national theatre and emerged from what leading late-nineteenth-century literary and cultural figures agreed was a crisis in English theatre. The term first appeared in the ‘Blue Book’, Scheme and Estimates for a National Theatre, privately printed and distributed in 1904 and published in 1907, when it became a focus of the national theatre debate. In Scheme and Estimates Archer and Barker constructed an alternative model to the prevailing autocracy of actor-managers by creating a new functionary, the Literary Manager, and inserting him into the artistic hierarchy. The inscription of this new official into theatre management theoretically achieved three key things: it highlighted the centrality of dramatic literature to the national project, posited the Literary Manager as guardian of literary standards, and secured a playwrights' advocate at the heart of theatre. In these respects Archer and Barker's invention of the Literary Manager can be understood as a manifestation of the wider ideological mission of the late nineteenth-century theatrical avant-garde and literary canon shapers in England, ardently campaigning for the elevation of dramatic literature and of the playwright's status. Archer and Barker's proposal preceded practice by over half a century, and if they overestimated the public will for a national theatre, they underestimated the determined conservatism of actor-managers.