The following conversation took place on a number of occasions beginning on Friday 3 September, 2004 and ending on 4 February 2005, in Cardiff, where Michael Bogdanov’s Wales Theatre Company has its administrative base. It has often been the case that discussions of literary and artistic matters have historically taken place against backdrops of national politics or crises. Dryden’s Essay of Dramatick Poesy was cast in the form of a dialogue that was conducted against the backdrop of an Anglo-Dutch trade war, and these interviews with Bogdanov were no exception: on the day of the first interview the siege of the school in Beslan, North Ossetia, that was to end in massive loss of infant life, was in its third day; the aftermath of the war in Iraq continued, with President Bush of the USA announcing an aggressive foreign policy directed at ‘changing the world’, and declaring the USA to be ‘liberty central’. At the same time as being sensitive to larger global issues, Bogdanov’s theatrical endeavours are also firmly rooted in a strong sense of community; indeed the two are integrated at a fundamental level in his own thinking.

In David Zucker's 1988 film of The Naked Gun, a hapless Los Angeles Chief of Police, Lieutenant Frank Drebin, is warned by his relatively pacifist Mayoress employer to curb his propensity for violence. Drebin, himself an exaggerated post-modernist collocation of easily recognizable film texts, counters with a policy statement of his own sufficient to rival any pronouncement of Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry:

The response of his outraged employer is the embarrassed revelation that: ‘That was a Shakespeare in the park production of Julius Caesar you moron. You killed five actors: good ones.’ The choice of the assassination scene from Julius Caesar to illustrate the violence necessary to redress an alleged crime echoes parodically one of two familiar critical readings of this Shakespearian text. In Zucker's film the comic extolling of Caesarism through the wholly inept efficiency of a law enforcement officer unaware of his own representational status and also, at the same time, unable to distinguish other forms of representation, is reinforced by the reactionary nature of his task: the protection of a visiting English queen against the threat of assassination. The latter, ironically republican critical perspective is exemplified in Alex Cox's film Walker (1988) which utilizes a scene from Julius Caesar to explore, in the thinly veiled allegorical setting of nineteenth-century Nicaragua, the ironies and contradictions inherent in an imperialist project.

In the opening chapter of The Long Revolution (1961), Raymond Williams argues that ‘[e]verything we see and do, the whole structure of our relationships and institutions, depends, finally, on an effort of learning, description and communication’. In what was to become a radical challenge to the dominant modes of literary and cultural study, Williams concluded that:

Williams goes on, in his chapter on ‘The Analysis of Culture’, to challenge an historical methodology based upon the assumption that ‘the bases of society, its political, economic, and “social” arrangements, form the central core of facts, after which the art and theory can be adduced, for marginal illustration or “correlation”’, and a literary methodology which privileged its own formal laws of composition while relegating this central core of facts to the status of ‘background’. His call in 1961 was for a cultural history which had to be ‘more than the sum of the particular histories, for it is with the relations between them, the particular forms of the whole organisation, that it is especially concerned’. Thus, Williams’ ‘theory of culture’ could subsequently be defined as ‘the study of the relationships between elements in a whole way of life’.

In David Zucker's 1988 film of The Naked Gun, a hapless Los Angeles Chief of Police, Lieutenant Frank Drebin, is warned by his relatively pacifist Mayoress employer to curb his propensity for violence. Drebin, himself an exaggerated post-modernist collocation of easily recognizable film texts, counters with a policy statement of his own sufficient to rival any pronouncement of Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry:

The response of his outraged employer is the embarrassed revelation that: 'That was a Shakespeare in the park production of Julius Caesar you moron. You killed five actors: good ones.' The choice of the assassination scene from Julius Caesar to illustrate the violence necessary to redress an alleged crime echoes parodically one of two familiar critical readings of this Shakespearian text. In Zucker's film the comic extolling of Caesarism through the wholly inept efficiency of a law enforcement officer unaware of his own representational status and also, at the same time, unable to distinguish other forms of representation, is reinforced by the reactionary nature of his task: the protection of a visiting English queen against the threat of assassination. The latter, ironically republican critical perspective is exemplified in Alex Cox's film Walker (1988) which utilizes a scene from Julius Caesar to explore, in the thinly veiled allegorical setting of nineteenth-century Nicaragua, the ironies and contradictions inherent in an imperialist project.