Breaking the Frame of History:
Hitler Dances and The Churchill Play

A powerful gambit for dramatizing the spectator's share is the renegotiation of "history" on the stage. Despite the predominance of lush costume drama as the standard for historical dramatization on film and television, the standard practice of theatricalized history has become much more fragmentary, audience-directed, and disruptive. Plays as diverse as Arthur Kopit's Indians (1969), Howard Brenton's Scott of the Antarctic (1971), Caryl Churchill's Vinegar Tom (1976), David Hare's Plenty (1978), David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly (1988), Pam Gems's Queen Christina (1977), Trevor Griffiths's Occupations (1970), Frank McGuinness's Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching to the Somme (1985), and Carlos Morton's Rancho Hollywood (published 1979) might be taken as instances of the range of contemporary historical dramaturgy. History is no longer disclosed to the audience as a fait accompli. In restaging history, the drama invites and often compels the audience to play its part in the reconstruction of this narrative, and of the social order it represents and sustains.

Since his early plays for the Portable Theatre, Howard Brenton has consistently turned to the problems of dramatized history, how the staging of history traces the sign of performance in the material events of the past. Christie's horrific exhumation from a pen of crumpled newspaper in Christie in Love (1969) is only one in a series of images in Brenton's scrutiny of historical process: of the function of individualism in Scott of the Antarctic and Bloody Poetry (1984); of history and class behavior in Weapons of Happiness (1976); of the relation between myth and history in The Romans in Britain (1980); of the "news" in Pravda (1985, written with David Hare); even of the possibility of utopia in Greenland (1988). Brenton's continued experimentation with sites of performance—the ice rink of Scott , for instance—and with various experimental or fringe companies suggests that staging "history" is only part of his larger effort to recharge the political interaction between stage and audience. Two

of Brenton's most direct engagements with the problem of historical dramatization, Hitler Dances (1972) and The Churchill Play (1974), resemble his more overtly "public plays" in their attempt to articulate "the space between people" that "defines the actual physical theatre, the space between the audience itself and the actors" as "an almost moral force in the writing and in the presentation" ("Petrol Bombs" 10). Replaying the war and its immediate aftermath, Hitler Dances and The Churchill Play interrogate the reenactment, consumption, and transmission of "history" as theater.

Hitler Dances is striking not so much for the formal experimentation of its dramatic design as for its use of innovative theatrical procedures. Conceived as a workshop by the Traverse Theatre of Edinburgh, Hitler Dances originated as a series of exercises in which the actors confronted their experience and recollection of wartime England. Several of the actors, however, shared Carole Hayman's limited familiarity with the war ("I know almost nothing about it," she said), and most of the actors' memories were diffuse, mere affectual traces: "'The line I say about my father having been shot down in France was certainly true. I was born three months after his death. . . . We are left with this terrible residue of our families having been twisted and decimated by events which took place before we were born.'" As the performers themselves recognized, their war exists neither as history nor as memory, but only in the imagery of popular media bent on producing a "total myth about the Second World War." Wartime events have been so fully absorbed into the images of the screen that the ordinary behavior of their parents has become "inconceivable" (Ansorge).^[10]

To confront the "seemingly dead and buried subject" of history and to present this confrontation as part of the actors' play, Brenton sought a theatrical image that would enable the actors to use their individual responses to the war as part of their performance. Brenton found this performative frame while on tour with the Portable Theatre:

I saw children in Eindhoven, which was flattened twice during the war, first by the Germans and then by the Allies, and is now the home of the world headquarters of the Philips Electrical Company. And at night in Eindhoven, the huge Philips sign, like a weird em-

[10] On Brenton's treatment of post-war Britain, see Bull.

blem, flashes everywhere in the sky. I saw a bomb-site there with children playing on it, while we were touring Fruit, and there the idea was lodged in my mind, because it was like children playing on this heap of rubble—history. And the idea of a German soldier coming out of the ground became meaningful.
("Petrol Bombs" 14)

The scene provides the play's core improvisation: a group of children unearth a dead German soldier, who comes to life and, before beginning his march back to Germany, tells the story of a brave woman's resistance activity in France, a story taken from the 1958 film Carve Her Name with Pride . Each of the roles provides a field of playful inquiry, for the actors each take the opportunity to enact several major parts—German soldier, resistance fighter, Nazi officer, modern child. The actors continually adjust the relationship between personal and public history through roleplaying, revising themselves in their relation to history through the complex engagement and disengagement offered by the mask of "character."

Hitler Dances invokes the performative rhetoric of the participatory theater of the late 1960s and 1970s as a structuring and heuristic device. The "poor theater" enabled Brenton to sidestep the standards of British Brecht—the "Bond-Gaskill-Jocelyn Herbert" tradition—and to strike a "more emotional, uncool" stance toward the audience ("Petrol Bombs" 14). This strategy may at first seem unpromising. Although the Artaud-Grotowski style of American participatory theater has an aggressively "emotional, uncool" edge, its characteristic emphasis on the "paradise now" of unmediated self-presence for actors and audiences seems at odds with the decentered character-subjects of an openly Marxist theater like Brenton's. Even though "history" of a kind appears in Spalding Gray's performance narratives, in the Performance Group's Dionysus in 69 (1969), in the Living Theater's Paradise Now (1968), and in the Kennedy-King assassination sections of the Open Theater/Van Itallie The Serpent (1968), this history is either strongly colored as personal recollection or immediately rekeyed in the register of myth. Moreover, the exploratory-confessional mode of acting in this theater would seem to frustrate the goal of reinterpreting history as a public narrative formed by a powerful cultural machinery. In order to represent "history" as a collective construction but not as personal mythology, Hitler Dances modifies the rhetoric of participatory

theater, dramatizing the actors' confrontation with the materials of history while repressing the zone of personal subjectivity—actors' and characters'—as critical to the dramatic action or the audience's interpretation. The play suspends the defining moment of such participatory acting, the self-consciously charismatic identification of actor and character. Instead, the play requires acting in a variety of modes, and indeed represents a variety of performance forms, drawn from television and film as well as theater, to suggest that, even in live performance, "history" is a function of its means of representation. History is always already written, as memory, as literature, as television, and as film; in Hitler Dances, we await its investiture in the bodies of the performers.

Hitler Dances refigures the "total act" required of actors in the participatory mode by striking a dialectical relationship between actor and "character." The play opens with the actors masking and costuming the first actor to play "Hans"—Kevin Costello, in the Traverse production. The investment of Kevin in the role of "Hans" is accompanied by two frames of acting. In one, the actors recite the narrative underlying the scene: "At the end of the Second World War, the German soldiers walked home." In the second, the actors respond to the character of Kevin/"Hans." To play the death of a German soldier, on the last day of the war, the actors mask and dress Kevin as "Hans," cower back from him, and then proceed to indulge in a ritualized frenzy of "Bosch" beating. The play insists that all actors participate in characterizing Hans as the stereotypical Nazi villain that Kevin/"Hans" in fact becomes: "Hot black blood sausage! Sauerkraut, steaming! Black coffee boiling! Beer all frothy!" (3). To be addressed as a Nazi soldier fundamentally interrupts the actor's self-presence, requiring a reorientation to the body ("KEVIN, both hands to his mouth, fingers exploring inside his cheeks" 3), to the voice, and to the society on- and offstage. No one actor is responsible for the "character" of the Nazi soldier; all subsequently "in turn impose tiredness, cold" on him, and the actor modifies his performance accordingly (5). Since each of the male actors will play "Hans" and each of the women will play "Violette," characterization in Hitler Dances avoids both the calculated psychological interiority of realistic performance and the more spontaneous and charismatic possession of participatory theater. Although Hitler Dances retains the idiom of "poor theater," it shows both actor and character in their social relations.

The actors enter the field of history as a field of play. History speaks only a dead language, as Kevin stands with the "Hans" costume at his feet, speaking to it as though it could explain the significance of a once-familiar lexicon, "Blitzkrieg—Warsaw—shell shock—pattern bombing, Rotterdam Dresden Hamburg" (7). Yet the war's erasure from our language is offset by its reconstitution in other media. Much as he juxtaposes "Hans's" resurrection with a television horror show, Brenton juxtaposes the film heroine of Carve Her Name with Pride with her stage reenactment, a conflation of narrative, enacted, and film versions of the war that signals the transformation of history into the pastiche of popular images. The film, as Variety noted in 1958, "pays tribute to the real life exploits of Violette Szabo, a beautiful young woman who became a British cloak-and-dagger agent in France and won a posthumous George Cross after being tortured and executed in Ravensbruck camp." Notable for an understated "ordinariness," the film nonetheless emphasizes "the brand of courage which lifted an ordinary girl, with all her fears and her emotions, to the stars, and flecked her with glory." The film devotes a leisurely development to Violette's relation with her lover Etienne. Brenton eviscerates this motivation from the play's narrative, representing the film's action in a foreshortened, cartoon-like idiom: meeting, love at first sight (with cymbal clash), whirlwind romance, and wedding in a few brief minutes of stage time. The play further distances the film narrative by having the actresses both narrate and enact Violette's actions, and by seating a working-class couple onstage who watch and comment on Violette's progress as though it were a television program. Something like the opening sequence of Jean-Claude Van Itallie's The Serpent , in which actors mime scenes from the familiar film of the Kennedy assassination, here film "history" becomes the text of the the actors' performance.

Hitler Dances invokes the romantic heroine of the film but displaces her personal motivation as the focus of our response. Brenton underplays character and emphasizes the action by having all the women of the cast play "Violette," and by foregrounding their performance as openly theatrical play, rather than as possession. Throughout the play, the actress uses third-person narration to disperse the "subject" of characterization ("And these were the thoughts of Violette, and she became a heroine" 41), an interruption

conveyed in her performance as well. In scene 13, for example, Carole and Amaryllis discuss the random violence of contemporary life, the prospect of sudden rape, the suicide of friends, the prominence of grotesque mutilation in recent films. Suddenly, "A bright spot slams on ," and while Amaryllis narrates, Carole performs "Violette": "I wanna kill a German!" (43). Here, the attempt to translate the inconceivable behavior of a previous generation into a conceivable modern equivalent is undertaken in social rather than personal terms. "Violette" is not given an internalized motive; the performance of the actress is keyed to the external context of contemporary social life.

The relationship between history, film, and the stage is dramatized in the play's final scenes, in which the torture scenes of Carve Her Name with Pride are replayed as black Nazi farce ("Ja wohl donnerundblitzen zieg heil. . . . Ludwig Van Beethoven Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" 67). The play suggests that our knowledge of historical events is inevitably interceded by the images with which we identify the past, images continually appropriated to new purposes. As Sabin/"Keiffer," Violette's guard, remarks, "Nazi Gestapo Torturer Victim. After the War, torturer and victim will be seen as something sexy" (73). Keiffer's interrogation of Violette points up the inadequacy of a history that fails to acknowledge its basis in ideology, and reveals how the film transforms the history it claims to represent:

Please hear why the Gestapo never tortured you, in the Avenue Foch. Why that scene in the film, never took place. Because . . . Of administrative confusion. They lost your papers, Violette. That is why you were never sent for again, by Hans Josef Keiffer. A small bow.
(74)

Hitler Dances dramatizes the relationship between history and its representation: "Oh Vi, there's no 'magnificent gesture' that can't be defiled. Mucked. Messed. Believe me" (74). Irving Wardle, reviewing the play for The Times , remarks that Brenton's refiguration of history is at once brilliant and inchoate: Brenton seems to "fall into the trap of being engulfed in the myths he is trying to manipulate," to the degree that the interinvolving of parody, play, history, myth, horror show, and kitsch becomes "too intricate and unrestrained." The point of Hitler Dances , though, is not so much to parody or defile the magnificent gestures of the war but to open

those gestures—and the gestures that recreate them onstage—to our inspection. This is the question posed by the play's theatrical rhetoric and by its unresolved, open, inconclusive dramatic structure: does the juxtaposition of performative modes enable a revision of history by dramatizing the variety of ways—live acting, film, television—in which it has been encoded, or does it more simply provide what Fredric Jameson terms a pastiche , a history subordinated to the signifiers of style?

To Jameson, pastiche locates the postmodern aesthetic firmly in the moment of consumer capitalism: the "transformation of reality into images, the fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents" illustrates "the disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social formations have had in one way or another to preserve" ("Postmodernism" 125). Hitler Dances exhumes the past as theater, as parody, play, myth, horror show, TV show, and as kitsch, but as pastiche the performance provides no frame of value or reference, no means of ordering those images, of assimilating them to a mode of access to the past. This may be in part the result of the play's performance rhetoric, its brittle conjunction of the mode of Jerzy Grotowski's "poor theater"—which casts the audience as a present witness—and a more traditionally realistic notion of the spectator as voyeur. Hitler Dances invites the audience to consider the process of history and the complicity of entertainment in the representation of historical "fact." Oddly enough, though, the audience's play—unlike the actors'—remains largely vicarious; our own relation to the actors' exposure remains outside the process of history onstage, a notable departure from the environmental aesthetic of the Performance Group, Grotowski, and so on. Hitler Dances casts the spectator outside the frame of performance, and so outside the frame of history. We stand before or above the materials of culture rather than making cultural history even in our performance as audience, as perhaps the actors themselves have done. In this sense the proscenium operates as a "moral force," but largely by intervening between the drama of history, the stage of its production, and the audience in the theater.

The Churchill Play undertakes a more direct examination of the

work of political theater in a society where theater is marginalized as "recreation" and made within an explicit hierarchy of power relations—that is, in a society something like our own. By creating a dramatic frame for the rewriting of history in the prisoners' "Churchill play," Brenton addresses not so much the acting of political theater but its function in a specific social context, one that embraces the performers, the onstage audience, and the theatrical audience they come to represent. The Churchill Play provides an exemplary critique of historical drama as political theater.

The Churchill Play opens "Back 'ere! Inna nineteen-bloody-six-ties," at the funeral of Winston Churchill, the catafalque flanked by an army private, a marine, an airman, and a seaman. After some bitter discussion of Churchill, a knocking is heard, the bier shudders, and Churchill bursts out, cigar at the ready "Onto . . . Mah History's stage," raving about "England! Y' stupid old woman. Clapped out. Undeserving. Unthankful. After all I did for you" (9–13).^[11] This crude, fiercely funny scene is suddenly interrupted when Churchill begins to flirt with the sailor ("Give us a kiss, Jolly Jack Tar"), at which point the lights come up on the flanks of the stage, to reveal that we are not the play's immediate audience. The players are surrounded by armed guards and are performing before the officers of a concentration camp, Camp Churchill, somewhere in England.

This is a stunning moment, a condensed vignette of how history—and its theater—encodes a structure of political power in the relationship between stage and audience. The play opens in much the way that we expect of political theater, with a rewriting of the myths of the past in an apparently Brechtian style. Within moments, the apparent freedom of that activity is sharply circumscribed by its audience, its patrons and captors. The Churchill Play represents the "moral force" of the relationship between stage and audience, dramatizing the function of political theater in a society where theatrical performance is at once an act of submission and of transgression. Those who live to please must please to

[11] Page references are to the 1974 edition, but readers should consult the version of The Churchill Play collected in Brenton's Plays: One for several revisions made in the text for its 1978 RSC revival. On the 1988 revival, see Lustig.

live: in the economy of the contemporary theater, the gesture of instruction must be contained as pleasure. "The men put the play together themselves. It is recreation," claims the liberal physician Captain Thompson, defending the play to the camp's commander, Colonel Ball (18). As "recreation" the play falls under Thompson's purview, as part of his mission to care for the physical and mental health of the inmates. Like all their activities, the prisoners' recreation works to legitimate their captors, for the play is being rehearsed before the camp's officers to preview it for its real audience, a Select Committee of the House of Commons, which is looking into the recreational facilities of the camp. As Ball suggests, the play serves to empower its invisible audience, not its players: "Water it down, cut it about. . . . Put a few . . . patriotic remarks . . . About England . . . In it. That is an order" (19). The performance necessarily defines a "moral force" between stage and audience, for the prisoners' performance is figured as the sign of their "moral" and righteous subjection: "I mean what are we? Performing bears? To stand up in our chains?" (36). Contained as pleasure, theater is identified as submission, regardless of its revisionary instructive content.

As an allegory of the function of political theater in the wider theatrical economy, The Churchill Play implies that the performance environment inevitably invests the drama with its own ideological pressure. Whether political theater can reshape the dynamics of the realistic stage is the principal challenge offered by the prisoners' production of their "Churchill play" in act 4. First, in a strategy reminiscent of Genet's The Blacks , the play's production becomes a diversion, a part of the prisoners' insurrection. Moreover, the prisoner-players foreground the fact that the materials of theater—words in particular—are already marked with the sign of their subjection. The captor-audience determines the significance and consequences of any verbal act; the audience has the power to render any word as the sign of dissent, a punishable offense. As a result, the political stage must avail itself of means of expression marginal to the codes of the "legitimate" stage, even if they seem—as perhaps they must—to be inarticulate or incomprehensible. As Furry announces to the audience, when "there's a dirty word, in play . . . Stead of yer gerrin' dirty word in yer face, I hit my gong. . . . So (He hits the dustbin lid ) to you all" (67).

The audience deprives the political stage of its language; as the prisoners' "Churchill play" demonstrates, the audience erases the politics of history as well. The "Churchill play" repudiates postwar history in order to dramatize the use of history to enforce the privileges of class. When, for example, the "Churchill" character recalls being "dazzled" by his reception in Glasgow in 1945, his recollections are immediately offset by the prisoners' account of the city, which details the extent of the devastation and the scope of their suffering. "Of twelve thousand dwellings, seven only hit. Of forty-seven thousand souls, thirty-five thousand homeless. From that time on, for many months, but for a few, the whole population went to the moor at night" (72).^[12] Ronald Hayman complains that Brenton's "war never eclipsed the class war," but this is really only half the truth (British Theatre 97). As the earlier scenes between Thompson and Sergeant Baxter suggest, the class war continues but has been concealed from public view by Churchill's rhetorical integration of class interests in a national mythology. Churchill's image of a unified "Island Race" urges a common national interest, but in practice this myth reduces the working classes to minstrel-show puppets, acted on by historical forces that they cannot presume to change. The "cloth caps and waving flags" that define the working classes from Churchill's perspective are as much a prison as Camp Churchill itself: their experience, too, is unseen, trivial, and forgotten.

"Historical truth. In all 'er vulnerability" (47) is less at issue here than the process by which history is made. Furry lowers a white sheet with the legend "We can take it, Guv. Give it 'em back." On the screen, the prisoners project scenes taking us "Back through England"—Churchill's funeral, the first Wilson government, Eden, Suez, Potsdam, Yalta, and so on—to December 29, 1940, the night of the second great fire. The central scene of their play concerns one of Churchill's many visits to the East End. Mike's "Uncle Ern and Annie," working-class Londoners left homeless by the bombing, are visited by Churchill, who narrates

[12] Like that of many of his contemporaries, Brenton's view of the war has been shaped by Angus Calder's The People's War . Here, for instance, Brenton transcribes two passages from Calder's study; see 579–80, and 210. See also Johnstone, and Sinfield chapter 2.

the scene: "And I saw these good people, at the side of the crater. And they cried out to me":

ANNIE: Look. He's crying for us.

ERNIE: Good old Winnie.

ANNIE: We thought you'd come and see us.

ERNIE: We can take it.

ANNIE: Give it 'em back.
(79)

Acts of sacrifice and solidarity among otherwise competing class interests were critical to British survival, but official history transforms the working classes into "doll-like " figures, subjected by the perspective that was privileged and qualified for historical narrative: Churchill's. When the prisoners restage the scene, Ern and Annie are shown attempting to salvage a life from the rubble, but this time it is Churchill who appears to them as unreal, like a "myth. Standing there. Like he'd come down from a cinema screen, out of a film show." Ernie also recalls making a different speech to Churchill: "And I said, I swear to this day I said . . . We can take it. . . . But we just might give it back to you one day" (80).

"And in his book on war he wrote it down as . . . Give it 'em back ": much as Churchillian history embodies a gesture of legitimation, so the prisoners' play both revises history and stages an act of social aggression. The Union Jack curtain rises to reveal the play's finale: the sergeant bound and the Select Committee captive under the watchful eyes of machine-gun–bearing prisoners ready to break out. To present revised images of history is not enough. A political theater must wrest the stage from the physical and ideological control of the social audience. Yet despite seizing the stage, the prisoners finally have "Nowhere to break out to," since the world beyond the camp is itself a prison (89). In a play whose most brilliant device is the parodic restaging of recent history, this static ending seems anticlimactic. The Churchill Play appears to suggest that political theater itself has "nowhere to break out to": the best that it can offer is to open a narrow fissure in the machinery of social control. The play invites the audience to consider the process of history and the complicity of drama, entertainment, and theatrical production in its representation. Finally to alter the process of historical drama, as Brecht suggests, will require a transformation of "the field itself." Something like Brenton's prisoners, political drama will have to stage the

spectators, as a means of disarming them and of altering the field of social relations inside and outside the theater.