The goal of this series of articles is to examine the nature of twentieth-century civil war and civil discord in theatrical representations and the conditions of performance by listening to the words of playwrights, scholars, performers, politicians and theatre historians in America, Africa, and Europe.

In an extraordinary passage of The Mind and Face of Bolshevism, the Hungarian journalist and philosopher, René Fueloep-Miller, made this observation in the 1920s on the innate theatricality of the Russian people:

If a Russian recounts an incident in company, in his political club, or even in the street, he does not for long confine himself to verbal description. Suddenly, he sends a gesture into space, like an arrow from a bow, at the same time giving a cue to another in the circle, who immediately becomes an actor in the drama. Though at first the whole thing looks like a very excited discussion, soon many emphatic gestures and words creep in and an increasing number of bystanders begin to take part in the scene. Suddenly the recital takes living form: chairs and tables are shifted with a few touches, and soon stand in a particular relation to each other and to the events being enacted. Men and things are now subject to new and different laws. Those taking no part look on in astonishment and soon become an audience, just as the story, which was at first merely related, becomes reality and attains complete actuality in the people acting and the improvised scenery … This lasts as long as the anecdote enacted, then the company at once returns to ordinary life … and the members of the circle sit smoking and talking again in their former quiet tones as if nothing had happened.

In 1986 Howard Barker abridged Thomas Middleton's tragedy Women Beware Women and wrote a new ending. This version was published and staged as a collaboration between the Jacobean and the modern playwright. There are a number of differences, but also points of connection between Barker's version and Middleton's Jacobean tragedy. Middleton sets out a moral fable on the corrupting nature of desire and greed. Leantio, a clerk, falls in love with Bianca, a rich man's daughter. They elope and live in secrecy with Leantio's mother. Despite her husband's exhortations to keep herself private, Bianca is spotted by the Duke of Florence, who determines to make her his. A wealthy neighbour, the widow, Livia, aids him in this, luring Bianca and the mother to her house where Bianca is raped by the Duke. Bianca's story is mirrored by that of Isabella, who is being ‘sold’ into marriage with a rich fool and is tricked into an incestuous relationship with her uncle Hippolito. Bianca leaves her husband to become the Duke's mistress. Leantio is taken up by Livia.

On 8 October 1990 a ceremony of remembrance took place at the Théâtre d'Aujourd'hui (Montreal) to commemorate the political crisis which, twenty years earlier, had shaken Quebec. The 1970 ‘October Crisis’ remains, to this day, a sensitive subject of Québécois history entirely oriented, as we know, towards the national question. The kidnapping, on 5 October 1970, of the English commercial attaché, James Richard Cross, by the FLQ (Front de libération du Québec), followed on 10 October, by the kidnapping of Pierre Laporte, the Quebec Minister for Labour and Immigration, marked the climax of a movement which had been trying, since 1963, to turn the ‘peaceful revolution’ into armed insurrection. On 17 October Laporte's body was found in the boot of a car, and the terrorists were arrested before the end of the year. In exchange for Cross's liberation some were allowed to go into exile to Cuba; the others were jailed, but all were freed in the early 1980s.

Though the world is aware of the political activities of the Nigerian playwright, Wole Soyinka, it might be difficult to find a better example of the relationship between a nation in a state of socio-political chaos and the arts in an African country than that of Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Kenya as exemplified in Matigari:

Matigari, the main character [in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Matigari], is puzzled by a world where the producer is not the one who has the last word on what he has produced; a world where lies are rewarded and truth punished. He goes round the country asking questions about truth and justice. People who had read [Matigari] started talking about Matigari and the questions he was raising as if Matigari was a real person in life. When Dictator Moi [President of Kenya] heard that there was a Kenyan roaming around the country asking such questions, he issued orders for the man's arrest. But when the police found that he was only a character in fiction, Moi was even more angry and he issued fresh orders for the arrest of the book itself.

Although sixty years have passed since the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War scant regard has been given to the theatre's contribution during the conflict to the entertainment and education of soldiers. Yet drama was prominent in the range of cultural and pedagogic activities which was a marked characteristic of the Republican army. A distinct genre, known as teatro de uigencia (theatre of urgency), was actively promoted by the Republican authorities as a means of encouraging soldiers and civilians towards a ‘correct’ pro-Republican perspective. Teatro de uigencia works were generally short, single act pieces but with a surprising variety of dramatic styles and propaganda intentions. Satirical lampooning of Franco's Nationalist forces took place, for example, alongside drama whose earnestly expressed purpose was to train the enthusiastic but inexperienced Popular Militias in battlefield strategy, the importance of fortification and the need for rigorous self-discipline. Such plays were performed by a variety of theatre companies. Some, such as Lorca's La Barraca and Max Aub's El Búho, had existed since before the war but travelled to frontline locations during the conflict to lend vigorous support to the Republican forces. Other companies, known as Guerrillas del Teatro, arose from initiatives of the Ministry of Education and were attached to the Army of the Centre and the Army of the East. Still more groups were encouraged by the General Commissariat of War through its Sub-Commissariat of Agitation, Press and Propaganda. While precise details are extremely sketchy, it is also clear that, within army units themselves, performance troupes were formed for the purposes of entertainment and politico-military education through drama.

Our desire for a humane future, for a future diminished in violence and enhanced in human possibility, insists that every means possible be used to warn and work against genocidal activity. Political scientists, historians, psychologists and others have their disciplinary agendas when they seek to sound the genocidal alarm, and to prevent the eruption of wholesale slaughter. I am concerned with the arts and how they contribute to moving us ‘toward the understanding and prevention of genocide’, specifically how the art of theatre can be used for the purpose of creating a world less violent and more protective and supportive of human life.

War and the military life have traditionally been perceived in most cultures as a sacrosanct ex-periental world devoted to masculine maturation and bonding. By definition both these traditionally male organizations have until now excluded women, treating them as objects to be despised (if not feared), and also the target of active opposition. Note, for instance, the gleeful celebrations among cadets when Shannon L. Faulkner, the first woman admitted (after court order) to The Citadel, a single-sex military college in Charleston, SC, decided after one week in August 1995 that she could not survive the harassment, hi refusing to admit her the institution had claimed that her presence ‘would undermine a proud and legitimate tradition dedicated to molding the minds, bodies and spirits of young men’. The counter argument was that she was being denied equal opportunity to take part in ‘a unique academic environment that requires on-campus residence and that is being built around a system of hardship, competition and bonding, […and] also a lifetime of countless, less tangible benefits’. Such was also the basis of the US Supreme Court's majority opinion written by Ruth Bader Ginsberg (1996) mandating the admission of women to the Virginia Military Institute. Though now federal government supported service academies admit women, nostalgia still exists in certain quarters for the days when the comment, ‘If the army had wanted you to have a wife, they would have issued you one’ summed up the distinctly peripheral position held by wives, who were, and are still, classified as ‘dependants’. But now women are in the United States Armed Forces, in command positions and certain combat units, as well as in the medical corps. The transition is difficult.

Greek tragedy was created under a unique and very unusual set of circumstances. What we today call Greek tragedy was not really ‘Greek’ but specifically Athenian. It articulated Athenian values, celebrated Athenian institutions, debated Athenian problems. Despite the undisputed artistic achievements of the great tragedians, the primary motives behind the creation and production of classical Greek tragedy were not artistic or literary, but social and political. Greek tragedies were contemporary and topical civic spectacles, and a central component of Athenian civic life and political discourse. Aristotle identified this ‘political’ aspect of classic Greek tragedy as its distinguishing feature by noting that ‘the earlier poets [Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides] made their characters talk “politically” [politikos], the present-day poets rhetorically’.