June-July, 1932

MAY DAY has come and gone, and our troupes have justified themselves everywhere. Not only by brightening and adding interest to the demonstrations, but by taking a leading part in promoting their propaganda value. The sketches and "illustrated speeches" from the platforms of the national and local speakers of the workers' movement were received with great interest, and did much to add colour to the proceedings and illustrate the class struggle in a realistic manner.

Open Air Work

May Day gave a big impetus to open-air work. Many troupes, by taking an active part in the demonstrations, found themselves giving a show in the open for the first time. The experience was valuable, for troupes who previously thought this type of work beyond their capacities have discovered that they can do this work quite well and have turned to the possibilities of the street performance with new fervour. As many of the older troupes have realised for some while, open-air work enables them to reach the ordinary workers who are not usually interested in political meetings. This is an excellent test for our material, the reaction to our sketches by workers who are probably not yet class-conscious. Both our technique and repertoire should gain greatly as we make more use of this form of show.

National Conference

The time for the first National Conference, June 25th and 26th draws near. Many provincial groups have already appointed delegates, and every troupe should make every effort to be represented. The Conference, our first opportunity of getting together on a national basis, rnarks a real step forward in the development of our national organisation. It will be followed by a big public show presented by the London groups, which should prove especially interesting to our comrades from the provinces.

International Olympiad

Nearly thirty countries will be represented at the International Theatre Olympiad at Moscow in October. The importance of this and of our sending delegates is emphasized in an article in this issue. From the Olympiad also we should obtain great value in building of the movement in this country. Exchanges of experiences with our comrades in other lands has proved its use before, notably as a result of the visit of our delegates to Germany last year.

The New Red Stage

Comrades will notice a change of style with this issue of the paper, for the better. Every reader is invited to send along criticisms and suggestions for its further improvement. The last issue (the first one at 2d.) proved a great success, more were sold than of any previous number. But we can do a great deal better yet. We must widen the interest of the magazine still more. Ideas, stories, pictures, articles, reviews of plays and films are all asked for. Our comrades working voluntarily on production of the paper, trying to fit it in with other W.T.M. tasks and movement work, have a big job, and assistance on the literary side will be welcomed. And practical assistance through the guarantee fund is a first task of every group.

America Also

We reprint below extracts from the American " Workers' Theatre," which has just appeared in print for the first time. It is interesting to observe that their experiences are leading them along the same paths as our own.

Our task is to bring the message of the class struggle to as many workers as possible. When we want to reach the masses it is not enough to wait until they come to us or call for us. We have to go there where the masses are: in meetings, in workers' affairs, on the streets, at factory gates, to parades, at picnics, in working-class neighbourhoods. That means we must be mobile.

Our organizational structure, our plays, the form of our production must be such that we are able to travel with our production from one place to another, that we are able to give the same effective performance on a stage, on a bare platform, on the streets.

We cannot wait or look for a ready-made style for our new theatre; we have to develop the style of the workers' theatre by bringing it in conformity with its tasks and its means of expression.

The organizers, players, writers, and directors of workers' theatres are workers, the audiences are workers. Both are not prepared by a long literary and cultural education, which is only available to the members of the bourgeois class who have the leisure and the monev for it. Worker players are not able to express, and worker audiences are not able to understand, complicated structures of ideas and refined intellectual language. The workers' theatre plays must be simple, so that workers can produce them and workers can understand them. Simplicity, however, does not mean crudity, does not mean absence of art. On the contrary: the more artistic our productions are, the more effective they are, and the more efficient is the political education and propaganda we carry. The art of the workers' theatre will be any art using the simplest elements according to creative elements at our disposal, according to our economic situation and according to our audience.