Politics over the Gulf: Trevor Griffiths in the Nineties

• Published in: Modern drama 1996-10, Vol.39 (3), p.381-391
• Main Author: Garner, Stanton B
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Drama; English literature; Griffiths, Trevor (1935- ); History & criticism; Politics; Theater
• ISSN: 0026-7694; 1712-5286; 1712-5286
• DOI: 10.1353/mdr.1996.0014

Griffiths, on the other hand, while certainly recognizing the political and ideological importance of the events in Eastern Europe, has focused his dramatic attention less on change in the East than on hegemonic continuity in the West, less on the death throes of the communist system than on the ideological and economic consolidations by which capitalism has eclipsed the socialist project at home and abroad.5 To Griffiths, Thatcherism and Reaganism (and their ideological reinforcement in the 1990s) reflect the dominant term of a wider and deepening political imbalance, one which manifests itself in the fragmentation of collective action and the dispersal of radical social thought. There are bits of bloody driftwood with people hanging on, wondering which way the currents are going.6 The Gulf War and the lives of contemporary British youth, then, are intricately related: both are symptoms of a broader New World Order that has asserted its economic, technological, and military hegemony in multiple, interrelated areas.7 In view of the profound changes in the political and ideological terrain since the 1970s, and faced with a certain eclipsing of the very notion of the political itself, it is not surprising that Griffiths' s return to the theater has entailed a different mode of political drama from that of plays like Occupations and The Party. At a historical moment when the Left's traditional "moorings and harbors" have been called into question, these plays represent an attempt to devise new forms of political theater and, through these theatrical forms, to achieve new modes of what Fredric Jameson calls "cognitive mapping," the aesthetic imaging of a radically altered social and cultural space and a reimagining of the possibilities for political action.12 Such mapping participates, for Griffiths, in a broader task of reinvention, the urgency of which has not diminished despite its deepening crisis of realization: "We've got to reinvent new structures for democratic struggle, for community safety and security, for a modicum of joy, for pleasuring and self-pleasuring, all of that - all of this has got to be reinvented from the ground. The Gulf between Us is a strategically multicultural play, and this emphasis was underscored by Griffiths's decision to cast the play with Palestinian actors in the roles of the Arab characters (believing that it was important to have performers with a "lived experience" of being Arab, Griffiths flew to the Middle East to recru