The People’s War and the People’s Theatre: British Socialist Theatre 1939–45

Abstract

This judgement by a modern historian was not exactly the theme of the official British commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of VE Day in 1985. This is one illustration of the conflict at the heart of the sociology of the Second World War. On one hand the war years continue to supply powerful images and evocations for the contemporary political arena, as well as a rich source of material for commercial popular culture. At a certain level peace movements are charged with ‘appeasement’ and opposed by ‘Churchillian’ qualities of leadership, just as the demands of organised labour can be countered at times of crisis by appeals to the ‘Dunkirk spirit’. This rhetoric serves to attack contemporary radicalism by the invocation of an assumed and constructed national memory. Similarly, if less obtrusively, the steady output of war films, novels, comics and television programmes in Britain supports this; when the war is treated solely at the level of individual actions, the concept of ‘fascism’ is generally submerged and the role of collective struggle dismissed. By these means popular memory and history are constructed, establishing a dominant consensus which systematically suppresses the radical meanings which these years clearly contain.

The Second World War was, uniquely, a world-wide anti-fascist war involving millions of people. For many no doubt the political aspects of the struggle were largely abstract — it was a fight merely to stay alive. And yet the general thrust of this anti-fascist war was unmistakable: a war against fascism, against the old order of poverty and unemployment, a war for a more egalitarian and just tomorrow.

(Davies, 1984a, p. 74.)