Interviews

Lecturer at Sheffield University and community theatre worker. Recollections of working with CAST during the 1970s.

conducted by
Michel Reuter 02/12/03

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MR: What was your first encounter with CAST, and how did you become an active member of CAST?

BM: I first saw CAST, when they were performing at the Socialist Workers Conference in Skegness in 1978. I was very taken with their performance and taken with their politics, which I shared. And it was actually seeing that performance that made me decide that a) that was a kind of theatre that I thought I would like to do and b) they were the kind of group I would like to do the theatre with. I then saw them again, because I booked them to come to an Arts Centre I was working in in Chesterfield at the time, and after that I went for an audition. They wrote to me and said: 'Do you want to audition?' I went to audition and I joined them in 1980.

MR: So, your first encounter with them was seeing them onstage, so what was the kind of theatre like they were presenting onstage? What was the style like, how would you define it?

BM: CAST theatre were... we need to go back a little bit. CAST theatre came out of Unity Theatre and came out of a period in the sixties, mid-sixties, when the sort of radical forces, that were beginning to pulse through society and which would obviously in the end manifest themselves in the sort of events of 1968 and post-1968 here and across Europe and America, were beginning to make themselves felt. CAST were made up of young, angry young people who were outsiders, outside the mainstream, many working class, who hadn't been to drama school, who hated mainstream theatre, hated drama school students, apparently, because they'd done some work, they thought they were just beyond the pale. They thought most theatre was boring. What they wanted to do is bring to theatre a sort of energy that they saw in Rock 'n' Roll. One of the ways they defined themselves was as the first sort of Rock 'n' Roll Theatre. Roland Muldoon, who is the key mover behind CAST, its creative force and pulse, would always argue that his influences hadn't been, say, Bertolt Brecht or Piscator, but it had been Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley. It was that energy, that rawness. And so they became famous for an incredibly in-your-face, as it were - well before 'In-Yer-Face Theatre' - a very in-your-face sort of stylistic, balletic form of Agit-prop that was very unique. It was unique in two ways: one was that it was a form that was tremendously anti-realistic, which one of the ways he defined it was he called it 'presentationalism', and he said 'we don't talk to each other, we only talk to the audience.' So performers would rarely talk to each other, they would always address the audience; and there would be this sort of three-way dialogue between people onstage and the audience. And the second was the way in which they used a sort of cartoon-style editing technique, so these short, sharp scenes. So, for example, their first play John D. Muggins is Dead was about the Vietnamese War, it was their response to the Vietnamese War. And it was just a twenty to twenty-five minutes piece of theatre, which could be performed at Rock concerts, which could be performed at public meetings and so on. So that was their style, and it stayed their style really for so long as Muldoon and Claire Burnley, his partner, who was another founder member, were in the group. Because it was very much in a way we realized later, very much about the way they acted. It was very much sort of commensurate with the way he was, and so that was their style. And another important influence worth mentioning was Music Hall. He was kicked out of Unity Theatre... well, they were kicked out of Unity Theatre by the Communist Party Theatre, for trying to revamp the Music Hall nights they had there, which was fairly traditional. He wanted them to become more contemporary, more political. There is a famous minute for Unity Theatre saying that they did conspire with others to overthrow the management committee, which sounds very like the Muldoons, and so they were shown the door. So, when they left they formed CAST.
People have compared him, he was a great stand-up, he is a great stand-up, great sort of political stand-up, very talented and. neglected really. Music Hall was that other element, so it was a real mix of popular theatre forms, very unique to them.

MR: In the books I read people talk about the anarchic character of CAST. Have you got anything to say about this anarchic character?

BM: Yeah, it was. I mean this is very interesting actually, because CAST always allied themselves with the Socialist Workers Party, who are sort of Trotskyst, fully ultra-leftist party, and said they were more so in that period. And it was a very strange relationship, because, while Muldoon was most sympathetic the analysis that has to be put forward, he himself and his plays were really focused on exploring the crisis of relationship between this Party and its Marxist-Leninist analysis and the average working class punter, who went to the theatre, went to the clubs, and who Muldoon felt the Party didn't communicate with very adequately. He had this character called Muggins. And Muggins appeared in nearly all their shows in different forms, like John D. Muggins is Dead, Horatio Muggins Rises up, Confessions of Muggins and so on. Muggins is, what Muldoon said, the sort of twentieth century proletarian, is the guy who gets mugged by History. No matter what happens, they're the ones who get in the neck, very like Brecht. Muggins is the one under the wheels of the wagon as things move forward. And so these plays,people liked because of their socialist analysis also angered them. A classic formulation was in a play called Confessions of a Socialist, which had Muggins in, and in this play there's a revolution, and Muggins, the hero, is on a package holiday in Spain when the revolution happens. He comes back to England and it's all like 'Hi, Comrade' and 'Comrade, we've had a revolution, you can now spend your life anywhere you want. You can go and study dialectics, you can learn to be a mechanical engineer, do what you want.' And Muggins says 'Can I fish by the canal?' and they go 'Yeah, OK, everyone seems to want to do that.' And the point Muldoon was always making is that people are like the Muggins character, that people's aspirations are not really for dialectics. They're for pleasure and joy, and people are anarchic by nature, and that was the anarchy. He was accused by the SWP of being an anarchist. And I always felt that about him. He's the sort of person who, it doesn't matter what system was in place, he would be against it. [laughs] And it's just historical coincidence that the forces against the current system happened to be the SWP. He was very much a libertarian really, he was a libertarian socialist. Yes, it was a very interesting and tense relationship, which both sides gained from, very interesting. But he was always challenging this idea that human beings could be moulded in some sort of straightforward determined way.

MR: Going back to that, because you were part of a travelling company, did you have any special encounters with the audience, because the plays were directed towards the audience? In 1968 in The Trials of Horatio Muggins, CAST were deliberately holding up the mirror to the working class audiences. Did you experience any comments from the audience?

BM: Yeah, we did. I think the response to audiences was very interesting. Our whole relationship was very interesting at that period. I can only talk from when I was with the group from 1980 to 83-4. What I found was we had different sorts of audiences, depending on each show. There was a fundamental core audience for CAST shows, which was built up over the years. This audience was to be found mainly in Scotland, the Welsh valleys and in the old engineering heartlands of the Midlands, where the Communist Party was still strong, where the Labour Party tended to be more left, and where you could therefore guarantee a good turnout, for who CAST was a known quantity they liked. It was like 'CAST are coming, great, let's go and watch them'. My experience was very interesting, because while there was that audience there, while they were very enthusiastic in those particular heartlands, once you moved outside them, and particularly in that period, you found an evidence that we knew was available in newspapers and elsewhere of a sort of falling away in the confidence of working class communities. People would either sort of not come to the shows, there would be very few people there, or those that did were more likely to challenge you, were more likely to say: 'This isn't the case, we've lost, Thatcher is in power.' So, the audiences were very split. There was this hard core of enthusiasts, who were committed activists, and then there was this wider group, who over the period between '68 and '80 would diminish rapidly, as the Right Wing forces in society kicked in. So it depended. And you got some extraordinary situations.
I remember one extraordinary moment, when we'd be performing in Birmingham. We arrived there with this sort of play, called From One Strike to Another. It was about the government's legislation, banning secondary picketing, limiting the number of pickets on a gate to six, which was then used against the miners in '84-5. It was very important legislation, and we would take the show round and go: 'Look, this legislation's important, it's gonna curb our abilities to support each other, to act in solidarity, it needs opposing.' And we got to Birmingham, which was a regular part of the touring itinerary in that time. We had been booked into a city-centre pub by the Socialist Workers Party. We had settled specifications for what we needed for the space, and when we got there, we found we couldn't fit the set in, because the set for the play was fairly elaborate. It was sort of tall, six foot above clearance, and so we couldn't perform. So what we did was, we went and found another pub which we'd performed at before, knocked on the door and said: 'Do you mind if we come in and perform,' and they went: 'Okay, because it will bring drinks in and stuff, bring punters in.' So we left a note for the SWP saying: 'Dear Comrades, it's not big enough for the set. We have gone up the road.' So they came to see the show, and they, obviously, were very miffed and very cross. They sat at the back with arms folded, like this [folds his arms and mimics the facial expression]. We went: 'Oh, what's wrong with them? What miserable sods.' Anyway, we did the show, and it went fine. Then they disappeared as a group, and they went downstairs and they had a meeting. And at this meeting they decided that CAST were guilty of petty bourgeois aestheticism and deviation and all sorts of things, because we were carrying a set and proper lighting which meant that we couldn't perform in any hovel that the SWP decided to book. And this was a potent debate that went on during the period. It was this idea that the working class being poor should have a poor theatre, whose poverty was defined not by a paring away of equipment and stuff, but by sheer poverty, that we could do it in a rubbish bin, and that that would make it somehow more authentic. And Muldoon's attitude, which I agree with, was the opposite. His attitude was: 'No, we'd give the best. If these are poor areas, we bring the best quality theatre, we have the best quality set we can carry.' Roland wasn't actually on that tour, thank God, but his wife Claire was. Now Claire was brilliant, and she was the daughter of mill workers from Lancashire. She was a tough nut, Claire, a big woman. And they came in, the SWP, who'd been for their corkers, and they delivered this sort of: 'Comrades, we think, we want to tell you that we're deeply upset and we think that you're guilty of petty bourgeois deviationism and all the rest of it.' And Claire just went: 'What did you call me?' And they went: 'We're saying that you're petty bourgeois.' And she went: 'Yoouu're saying what?' 'We're sayin...' 'Don't you ever fucking tell me I'm petty bourgeois.' And she proceeded, you know, the set had been taken apart, she proceeded to start throwing the set at them. So [laughs], so we were upstairs in this pub room, and these bits of rust and things began bouncing down this hall towards the SWP. They were all going: 'Comrades, you know, can't we talk about this properly?' And she was so angry. And then the bouncers came up from the pub downstairs and separated us. They threw the SWP out and we were locked in until everything had calmed down. But that confrontation was very instructive for me, because it summed up so much that was problematic about the way in which we saw theatre, so much that was problematic about this idea that there were specific forms of theatre that belonged to the movement, that there were aesthetics, which were acceptable and ones which weren't. None of which makes any sense when you look through the history and richness of Working Class Theatre, or Brecht, or whatever, it was nonsense. But there was this idea of let's say from the SWP that we should be seen to be a poor theatre for poor people. I mean the problem with the SWP, as with the revolutionary Left in general in Britain, was that they're not very strong on culture, [laughs]. They don't understand it, they fear it, and if they do have it, they want it to be like the blue blouses in the 1917 Revolution, they have this very fixed conception. Even the blue blouses at Bolshevik festivals were in fact incredibly elaborate and sophisticated forms of theatre. That was very telling, that was a sort of another response we got.
An equally interesting response was when we went with an anti-nuclear show, and we got a totally different kind of audience. We started to get audiences from CND, and we were booked into communes up in the valleys in Wales, where people would come down with their four-wheel drives and their wellies to watch us. Totally different audience, who then accused CAST, quite appropriately actually. CAST was very good on class politics, but sexual politics were fairly crude and rudimentary. And so, we got into a lot of trouble when we were touring that show. We got into trouble because people though the show was essentially pessimistic. So, there were different audiences, depending on the show. One of the things I learned, one of the things I found very instructive was to be inside the shows in that period. For me it certainly was to have a very particular perspective on what was happening in the country. And the different audiences reflected in a way the sort of ascendancy of different forces, the ascendancy of different forms of activism, so class politics was being very much superseded by single issue, by nuclear, by sexual politics in a very, very big way.

MR: Starting from 1976, CAST was funded by the Arts Council. Did that change anything in the creative approach of CAST, or in the perception of the audience, because it was no longer 'free' from the State?

BM: I think it changed it.... well, I know it changed it profoundly and deeply. And I don't think they were ever the same force again. I don't think the group I was with was as a revolutionary a group or as important or as effective or as politically useful a group as the group of 1965. And the reason for that is very straightforward; there was an illusion peddled by all of us in that period that you could bite the hand that fed you, that you could be supported by the State and still subvert it. And it was summed up amongst a remarkable statement when Roland Muldoon was asked in an interview, it may be cited in Itzin [see Catherine Itzin : Stages of the Revolution ]: 'What's your objective at the moment ?' and he said : 'We need more money from the Arts Council, because theatre is very labour intensive, and if we are going to do the kind of theatre we want to do, we need more people to do it.' It was the equivalent of saying : 'Our job is to subvert the State, we wish to bring an immediate end to the structures that rule and control our lives, and we would like those structures to give us more money, so that we can do that subversive job more effectively.' All that's nonsense. The reality was that a State that funds you is a State that's very highly confident, it seems to me, that it can contain and control you. It's very complex. There were forces within the Arts Council, there were people within the Arts Council, like Mike Leigh and others, who were very sympathetic, who had also come through the moment of '68. So there's no doubt for a while that the funding came to groups like CAST and Red Light in '76 to '84 precisely because people like them were in positions of power. But it's also true that the effect of funding was that it turned them from being an activist theatre into being a theatre company. And once it became a theatre company, once they started to hire performers and to pay performers, then you come into a different set of economic and political relations. And, I'm not saying that out of that cannot come very good work that's politically useful, but certainly what you found happening to CAST and everybody else is that you lost the ability to respond to the immediacy of political events as they unfolded around you. So, from 1976, even earlier, CAST could no longer... When I joined them, there was a big steel strike in Sheffield, and a really important strike in 1980-81, but we couldn't visit during the strike, because we'd agreed with the Arts Council that we would only tour Yorkshire in May to beginning of June, because we had to be in the West Midlands when the strike was on. Or we had to be in Cornwall, because they'd given us funding. So you compromised in that way. You planned a year ahead, and irregardless of what happened in the world, you had your show to do, and you'd already decided what the show was, what the issues were. And I think that compromised it tremendously. I think it compromised it in another important ways, because you then became people who were, I wouldn't say bought, but you certainly became people who came to see your politics in the theatre as a job, it was an economic relationship. You, therefore, had relations between the company and within the company that became problematic about the handling of the money. You had issues that were not going to be touched. I mean, CAST to their credit, were fairly outrageous, I have to say. But in general you would take an issue like the Troubles in the North of Ireland and the Republican insurgency... who covered that? Hardly anyone. CAST did in '76. Belt and Braces did, once, McGrath did it once and then the play was lifted because of legal action. Nobody again went back to the Troubles, nobody did anything, nobody visited there, everybody ignored it. Why? Because you weren't going to get a grant, and you certainly weren't going to get any bookings if you did shows about the Troubles. So, a sort of neo-colonial war being fought on our doorstep, which was actually redefining our own political structures and our own legal frameworks, and in which things were being learnt on the street, counter insurgency techniques, that were then used against the miners here. Very profound effects. You know, we could go : 'Well no one's going to come to that', or 'They'll cut our grant.'

Interview continued...

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