{"id":380,"date":"2016-12-02T21:10:03","date_gmt":"2016-12-02T21:10:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bravenewclassics.info\/?page_id=380"},"modified":"2026-04-27T12:49:11","modified_gmt":"2026-04-27T12:49:11","slug":"colin-chambers-and-the-cultures-of-communism-side-b","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.bravenewclassics.info\/index.php\/colin-chambers-and-the-cultures-of-communism-side-b\/","title":{"rendered":"Cultures of Communism (Side B)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?url=https%3A\/\/api.soundcloud.com\/tracks\/295215090&amp;color=cc6666&amp;auto_play=false&amp;hide_related=false&amp;show_comments=true&amp;show_user=true&amp;show_reposts=false&amp;visual=true\" width=\"100%\" height=\"450\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>This conversation between Colin Chambers, Elinor Taylor and&nbsp;Henry Stead&nbsp;took place in Elinor&#8217;s office in University of Westminster, just off Oxford Street, London, on 15 November&nbsp;2016. It is the third&nbsp;podcast from the Conversations on Communism series. There was some heavy construction going on just across the street. The photograph shows Colin on the phone at&nbsp;work for the <\/em>Morning Star. (<em>If you&#8217;re looking for&nbsp;<\/em><strong><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bravenewclassics.info\/index.php\/cultures-of-communism-side-a\/\">Side A<\/a><\/em><\/strong><em>&#8230;<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>HS. <\/strong>Did you have certain members or, not necessarily members of the Party, but people working for the <em>Morning Star<\/em>, or people within that cultural milieu that you looked up to?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CC.<\/strong> Well, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Robert_Leeson\">Bob Leeson<\/a>, who was the books editor. I learned a lot from him. <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Jack_Lindsay\">Jack [Lindsay]<\/a>, by being introduced to him through Bob\u2026 Because Jack reviewed a lot. If you ever go through the cuttings, you\u2019ll find a lot of Jack Lindsay in the <em>Daily Worker<\/em>, <em>Morning Star<\/em>, both reviews and articles about anything from anthropology through to, you know, whatever. He wrote about almost anything. So I continued to use him as a reviewer, which he was happy to do. Both because he wrote very quickly, but also he knew a lot and I thought he was a good guy. He would say the things I wanted him to say: the stance he\u2019d take towards something would be one that I would be sympathetic to. So I tried to avoid people that I knew were going to&#8230; like, with the Katyn book [discussed in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bravenewclassics.info\/index.php\/cultures-of-communism-side-a\/\">Side A<\/a>], you wouldn\u2019t give it to certain people who would say that this was &#8216;terrible anti-Soviet propaganda&#8217;.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ET.<\/strong> Were they paid reviews?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CC.<\/strong> No.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ET.<\/strong> No. Okay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CC.<\/strong> I got <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Raymond_Williams\">Raymond Williams<\/a> to review. I mean, all sorts of people did it. It\u2019s amazing. I always am, perhaps I\u2019m not amazed, but people like that who, I mean, I met Raymond Williams at Cambridge and asked him if he\u2019d supervise me, and he said \u2018I have so many people\u2019. And he just said \u2018look, you know\u2026\u2019 And I went to him and said, \u2018I really don\u2019t know what to do, because I find this place horrific. It\u2019s oppressive. I can\u2019t bear it. But I want to, you know, I want to\u2026 I feel that as somebody on the left I ought to be, you know, stepping up to the plate\u2019. We didn\u2019t say that in those&#8230;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>HS.<\/strong> There is actually a lot about your trajectory which is, to be put it bluntly, quite astonishing or baffling as well. You seem to have been senior lecturer at Kingston while you were still doing your PhD?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CC.<\/strong> While I was at the <em>Star<\/em>, I was books editor but I also then became theatre critic. Because Jack Sutherland, who\u2019d done it before, who\u2019s also a good bloke, you know, but found he was getting&#8230; well, he didn\u2019t like a lot of the modern stuff. Jack, because I talked to Jack a lot, knew that I was interested in theatre so he let me do some reviews, liked what I did, he gave up and gave it over to me. So I became a theatre critic. I joined the critic\u2019s circle and I did all that stuff and became active in that. There\u2019s a thing called the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.aict-iatc.org\/index.html\">International Association of Theatre Critics<\/a> which is part of all that UN stuff. I was in that and went to conferences abroad as a theatre critics and journalist. Through that I started to read plays for <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rsc.org.uk\/\">The Royal Shakespeare Company<\/a>, because by chance I met\u2026 I was in the pub next to the old Half Moon Theatre in the East End of London and I by that time had got to know a critic called <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Michael_Coveney\">Michael Coveney<\/a> so I was just saying hello and next to him was a guy who turned out to be the literary manager of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Michael said, &#8216;Oh,&#8217; you know, &#8216;Colin, meet Walter, Walter&#8230;\u2019. Walter said \u2018Oh, would you be interested in\u2026\u2019, you know. So I said \u2018I\u2019ll read some play scripts for you\u2019, you know, for some money. Yeah. Because I got paid\u2026 The <em>Morning Star<\/em> wage was just, you know, nothing. It was like poverty wages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>HS.<\/strong> So you were reading these plays to, say, you know\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CC.<\/strong> Whether they should be done or not. You get a play and you write a critique. You give it back to the literary manager who then reads it. He then writes back to the writer saying \u2018No thanks, we don\u2019t like it\u2019, whatever. Through Walter I got to know a director called <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Howard_Davies_(director)\">Howard Davis<\/a> who\u2019s just died. And Howard was about to open the Warehouse which was the small theatre the RSC had for new plays, which is now called the Donmar. I got involved in that. I wrote stuff\u2026 They put out their own writers\u2019\u2026 not newsletter but a sort of self-published\u2026 I don\u2019t know what would you call it really, things about playwrights and stuff that went with the show. So if you had a new play like <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Willy_Russell\">Willy Russell<\/a>, <em>Educating Rita<\/em>, I wrote a little thing about Willy Russell and <em>Educating Rita<\/em>. So I was getting into that world. And then Walter wanted to be a director so he&#8230; Trevor Nunn ran a theatre company, said \u2018You better come and work with me on a play, on a production, so I can see if you\u2019re any good at it\u2019. So when Walter was away doing that, Howard and he asked me to do Walter\u2019s job which was coinciding with the demise of the <em>Morning Star<\/em>. I did that for six months and then they wanted me to do it for another six months because <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Trevor_Nunn\">Trevor Nunn<\/a> had told Walter that he wasn\u2019t going to be a director so Walter left in a huff. Sorry, so there\u2019s a gap. So I do that. Do you remember <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Time_Out_(magazine)\"><em>Time Out<\/em><\/a>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ET.<\/strong> Yeah, yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CC.<\/strong> And <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/City_Limits_(magazine)\"><em>City Limits<\/em><\/a>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ET.<\/strong> Sure, yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CC.<\/strong> <em>City Limits<\/em>&nbsp;and <em>Time Out<\/em>&nbsp;were on strike. <em>City Limits<\/em> was about to break the strike,&nbsp;so <em>Time Out<\/em> wanted to come back on the street, so they asked me if I\u2019d be the theatre editor of <em>Time Out<\/em>. I didn\u2019t really want to do that because all my friends were in <em>City Limits<\/em>. But on the other hand it was a job and I\u2019m going to be paid rather well. So I went to Trevor Nunn and said, \u2018I\u2019ve been offered this job. I\u2019d rather stay with the Royal Shakespeare Company but not on this, I can\u2019t do six months [fixed-term contracts]\u2026 If you want to make me literary manager of the company then I won\u2019t do the <em>Time Out<\/em> job.\u2019 So, next day, Trevor said \u2018Okay, you\u2019re going to be literary manager of the Royal Shakespeare Company\u2019. So, my writing has always combined an interest&nbsp;in the cultural and the political, if that makes\u2026 So, although it might not always be obvious, the book on Unity [Theatre] is,&nbsp;<a href=\"#_ftn1\" name=\"_ftnref1\">[1]<\/a>&nbsp; I suppose, an obvious one because it\u2019s left-wing theatre. But I did a book about <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Buzz_Goodbody\">Buzz Goodbody<\/a> and the Royal Shakespeare Company and she was the director of the RSC who was in the Communist Party. And I knew Buzz very well. And she killed herself. So I did a book about her before the whole thing about women directors, so that was important for me. I did a book about the RSC because I thought as a cultural institution that\u2019s a politically important thing to analyse. A book about playwrights\u2026 A book coming at it from a political perspective, if you like. And I\u2019ve done other stuff, well, the one on <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Isadora_Duncan\">Isadora Duncan<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Charlie_Chaplin\">Charlie Chaplin<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Paul_Robeson\">Paul Robeson<\/a>,<a href=\"#_ftn2\" name=\"_ftnref2\">[2]<\/a> pretty obviously politics is at the centre of that and the cultural commitment\u2026 And then the book on Black and Asian theatre, which, you know, is a political project for me because those are buried histories.<a href=\"#_ftn3\" name=\"_ftnref3\">[3]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>HS.<\/strong> What is the relationship between Pan-Africanism and Communism?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CC.<\/strong> Tricky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>HS.<\/strong> Big question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CC.<\/strong>&nbsp;If you go slightly back, because London or Britain, let\u2019s say, because it was the centre of empire, you\u2019ve also got it being the centre of the anti-slavery movement, because it was pretty hard in America\u2026 I mean, people tended to want to come over to Britain, and a lot of escaped slaves did, and the real force came from Britain. And Britain passed the Acts before anybody else, abolishing slavery. So, you\u2019ve already got a, if you like, a cultural swell around anti-slavery that then moves into the anti-colonial struggle. And, again because it\u2019s the centre of empire, and this was after the mid-part of the nineteenth century even more so, because at that point Victoria actually becomes empress of India and all that stuff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So, you get this extraordinary concentration of people in Britain, particularly in London. And, the Pan-African movement, which interestingly was not just black African but involved, you know, it linked up with or fractured off from, or they fractured off from later, the fight for Indian self-rule. But they were, certainly at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century doing a lot of the things together. And culture was an important part of their struggle. Cultural activity\u2026 if you look at the Pan-African congresses that were held in London in the early 1900s, they always have a cultural element and it\u2019s partly the Shylock, you know, \u2018I\u2019m a human being like you are\u2019, and that\u2019s the sort of\u2026 a lot of it\u2019s within European notions of culture but they\u2019re saying \u2018we can do that\u2019, you know, \u2018we are as valid as you are\u2019.<br>The relationship to communism changed through the twentieth century because of the Soviet Union. So before you had any country that had a communist party, it was a more sort of ideological thing. You\u2019d still find both within the fight within Indian independence as well as more specifically African independence, communists playing quite a leading role in those movements. But you then get sort of the fractures that you get in the International Communist Movement. Certainly with, I suppose the first major one would be with Trotsky. And when you get, for example, the invasion of Abyssinia by the Italians and the response to that, a lot of the Pan-Africanists thought that the Soviet Union didn\u2019t support their struggle and that pushed them more towards a Trotskyist position. Then, you know, the Spanish Civil War, a lot of people found, you know, they didn\u2019t like the role that Stalin played in that, the Soviet-Nazi pact. So it sort of fractures out but it\u2019s quite complicated because there\u2019s certainly, up until, certainly up until the Second World War, you can\u2019t really look at one without the other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>HS.<\/strong> That\u2019s fascinating. I\u2019ve been puzzling for a few years, because I\u2019ve read about how <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/C._L._R._James\">CLR James<\/a> was a Trotskyite\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CC.<\/strong> Yeah. Mainly around <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Abyssinia_Crisis\">Abyssinia<\/a>, you see. He set up the main defence group over Abyssinia and he and [Paul] Robeson had to be, they were in London in the same period, and were both being radicalised in England at the same time. And then they went different ways after Abyssinia. But you\u2019ve got <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/George_Padmore\">George Padmore<\/a> there as well, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Jomo_Kenyatta\">Kenyatta<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Niru\">Niru<\/a>. Extraordinary concentration of people. Robeson sticks with the Soviet Union even though, privately, he knows what\u2019s going on. But he takes the view that you need a socialist state and okay, you know, \u2018we must make it better\u2019 and all that stuff. But don\u2019t attack it. And there are some people that believe his mental deterioration in the fifties is to do with him not being able to reconcile that contradiction. Because he had a Jewish friend and he was a great supporter of Jewish culture and he knew Jews who were persecuted by and killed by Stalin, under Stalin\u2019s orders, not by Stalin. And so he knew what was happening. But he always stuck publically with\u2026 Whereas, you know, CLR James was a self-proclaimed Trotskyist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So underlying all my work is the idea that you can be politically engaged and creative and they\u2019re not\u2026 And it\u2019s not that you then, as it were, somehow follow some puppet-like &#8212; that your creativity is somehow being directed &#8212; but political and cultural engagement are not mutually exclusive or detrimental. And that\u2019s really why I wrote the book <em>Here We Stand<\/em>, which is the one on Robeson, Isadora Duncan and Charlie Chaplin, to say you can be culturally active and politically active and it\u2019s not necessarily, you can\u2019t just dismiss it all as propaganda if you\u2019re being political. And, I suppose that was what I was trying to explore, which I haven\u2019t done properly, you know, in a specific sense, I haven\u2019t actually written that book but I\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>HS.<\/strong> You haven\u2019t written it <em>yet&nbsp;<\/em>[<em>CC.<\/em>&nbsp;<em>laughs<\/em>], but this is the project that you are working on with <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/John_Berger\">John Berger<\/a>, and\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CC.<\/strong>&nbsp;<em>Was<\/em> working on\u2026 this was back in the 1970s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>HS.<\/strong>&nbsp;O okay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CC.<\/strong> Because I was working with John on\u2026 Migration was, we thought, sort of a defining feature of capitalism. Which of course subsequently &#8212; because of globalisation and now Brexit and Trump &#8212; has absolutely proved to be the case. And I was at the <em>Star<\/em> and working with people in the hotel industry in London on articles about migrant workers. And the workforce and then also it was the time of the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Carnation_Revolution\">April Revolution in 1974 in Portugal<\/a>. One of the people I knew was Portuguese and I stayed with her&nbsp;family and covered the Portuguese revolution for the Star. And so were doing that. And John was working on a book which became\u2026 I think it\u2019s called <em>A Seventh Man<\/em>. I knew him through <em>Ways of Seeing<\/em> so it was after <em>Ways of Seeing<\/em> but not through much else. At that point he was not the figure he became and he hadn\u2019t written <em>G<\/em> and all those other\u2026 And now he\u2019s a venerable\u2026 ninety years old. I did a play that he and Nella Bielski wrote when I was at the RSC, so I kept in touch over the years.<a href=\"#_ftn4\" name=\"_ftnref4\">[4]<\/a> But I was asking John\u2019s advice, because I wanted to do this book about lots of case studies on people who espoused communist ideas or left-wing ideas that could broadly be put under the communist umbrella. They didn\u2019t have to be Party&nbsp;members. And they were all culturally significant and I wanted to use the caste studies to try and explore this, what to me when I was that age, was this myth that if you were a communist you shot poets and you put them in prison. Obviously Stalin did do that but that\u2019s not what communism is about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So I was starting to work out a series of people and Jack Lindsay was going to be one of the people that I was going to use but I didn\u2019t ever get beyond\u2026 Because of&nbsp;work. and then I ended up doing the Unity book rather than that book. And the book about Buzz Goodbody which was sort of the same thing. Buzz is a communist party member and was a great theatre director so that was sort of making my point, if you like. But by then got away from the original idea of a book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>HS.<\/strong> You mentioned earlier that at school you studied Russian and that you were actually taken by your teacher to Russia. Obviously there\u2019s this whole tradition of communists in, well, actually maybe not necessarily communists, but people, broadly speaking, left-wing people, going to the Soviet Union and being shown the Soviet experiment, and I wonder whether you see that experience of\u2026 if that had any impact on\u2026?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CC.<\/strong> It certainly opened me up to wanting to know more about it. It moved beyond just being interested in the writing. Because I was reading <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Nikolai_Gogol\">Gogol<\/a> short stories, Solzhenitsyn\u2026 I mean, it was the teacher that gave me Solzhenitsyn, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/In_the_First_Circle\"><em>\u0412 \u043a\u0440\u0443\u0433\u0435 \u043f\u0435\u0440\u0432\u043e\u043c<\/em><\/a>, when I\u2019d only done a year or something Russian but he, \u2018There we are! Read that!\u2019 Although we saw the bad side, the police presence around\u2026 We were very obviously \u2013 this is 1967 I think? \u2013 very obviously, you know, from the West. And you didn\u2019t have that many people from the West then. You were chatting to girls and the police would come over and the girls would look frightened and say \u2018Oh we\u2019ve got to go otherwise we\u2019ll be in trouble\u2019.<br>But I bought wonderful classical records for the equivalence of tuppence or something and Pushkin poems for nothing. And the fact that even though it was not brilliant but people had housing, they had childcare, they had jobs. It wasn\u2019t great but it was, there was a sense in which those basic things were being looked after. They could have been done better I\u2019m sure but that\u2026 So I was interested in what was happening. So that led me to\u2026 I probably hadn\u2019t read the Bukharin at that point but read the Bukharin when I came back. And I remember giving a talk. My mum was in this local conservative group. It was called The Tuesday Club because they met on a Tuesday. It was for nice ladies in Streatham. And I gave a talk. I\u2019d taken slides and stuff of the trip to the Soviet Union, which actually for them was pretty heavy duty stuff. I mean even the mention of going\u2026 I remember the reaction. They were all actually quite dumbstruck that I was saying positive things about it. Okay, you know, it was a pretty limited experience but, you know, certainly I was very interested in Russian culture. But that made me think there must\u2026 I\u2019d be more interested finding out. What I&#8217;d called the Second World War they called the Great Patriotic War. Why? I didn\u2019t know until I\u2019d been there how many millions of Russians had died and I thought well actually that\u2019s sort of probably, you know, in sort of statistical terms, a bigger sacrifice than ours. And I hadn\u2019t been taught anything at school of their role in the Second World War. I didn\u2019t know any of that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And my school, which is supposed to be a, quotes, &#8216;good school\u2019, taught a completely crap history. You didn\u2019t join any bits of history up. You did chunks of it &#8211; \u2018Henry VIII created the British Navy\u2019, sort of thing \u2013 you know, and then you\u2019d leap up to the Corn Laws or something. So, I was in a sense primed for reading Marx and Engels by the poor education I had. Because suddenly I read this stuff that started to make sense. You saw things being linked. \u2018Oh, so that comes from\u2026 Oh, right. That\u2019s interesting, I didn\u2019t know that.\u2019 \u2018My God, did they really do that?\u2019 You know. And I got what would be considered, okay it wasn\u2019t a public school but, you know, a good grammar school education. And it was, in many respects, rubbish. Certainly in Geography and History. Didn\u2019t do any politics. So, yeah, I mean, going to the Soviet Union was fantastic. So we went by train. First we went through Berlin to checkpoint Charlie and all that into East Berlin, into Warsaw. Stayed in Warsaw, then to Moscow, Leningrad. We went to Kiev and got the boat back round the Baltic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>HS.<\/strong> Did you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CC.<\/strong> Brilliant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>HS.<\/strong> So you took the train in a group of how many students?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CC.<\/strong> I don\u2019t know. Twelve maybe? Not bigger than that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>HS.<\/strong> Okay, wow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CC.<\/strong> With a teacher who spoke each, changed his language as he went through the borders. he was teaching himself Chinese from Russian.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>HS.<\/strong> Okay. Wow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CC.<\/strong> And he was slightly bonkers but when we had these school elections to get you used to citizenship he stood as a Maoist [<em>laughs<\/em>]&nbsp;and got two votes or something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>HS.<\/strong> We should have his name up on record shouldn\u2019t we.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CC.<\/strong> Oh, his name was Craddock. We called him Joe. But Joe was because of Stalin. His actual name was Paul Craddock. His lessons were both extraordinary for me because I became, as did my friend, very good at Russian. But he was no good at teaching people who couldn\u2019t keep up. We had an immersive system which in the sixties was quite progressive, so everything was in Russian and you had a tape, you know, with little slides and, I don\u2019t know, a hedgehog or something would say, you know, \u2018Good morning\u2019 in Russian or something. And then he stepped the pace up and my friend, he got As at O-level and As at A-level but on route a load of people dropped out because they couldn\u2019t keep up, and they got nothing. And that was the first time I\u2019d sort of become aware that this system actually wasn\u2019t all that good because, okay, you know, I might have come out of it, although I was probably an emotional wreck because it\u2019s not, you know, you\u2019re not a balanced human being\u2026 That time, they were all fucked up, I mean, it was an all-boys school of course. It wanted to be a public school but it wasn\u2019t because it was\u2026 It had houses and it rode and it did all that stuff, you know. But, you know, I came out of it with a great love of Russian. But a load of people got nothing, well I don\u2019t know if they got nothing but\u2026 I didn\u2019t talk to them about it, but they didn\u2019t get their O-levels and didn\u2019t get their A-levels. So, that\u2019s a destructive system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ET.<\/strong> Do you think that theatre has any place in contemporary cultural politics given the sort of horrible situation globally, following Brexit and the Trump victory?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CC.<\/strong> It\u2019s pretty hard now because\u2026 It\u2019s odd because the general level of sort of quality of production has gone up. You find now much broader spectrum of stuff that is, in quotes, \u2018well-done\u2019. but an awful lot of it, or most of it is fairly meaningless in any sort of political sense, because it\u2019s part of the entertainment industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ET.<\/strong> Yeah. So you think it\u2019s a kind of shift in instutions?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CC.<\/strong> Oh yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ET.<\/strong> Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CC.<\/strong> You\u2019ve got\u2026 I mean the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company do basically, they package decent\u2026 You know, if you\u2019re going to pay, it\u2019s a bloody lot of money to go to the theatre. So you don\u2019t necessarily want to have how awful the world is poked up your nose. I\u2019m not saying that\u2019s the only thing political theatre does. But I find most of it pretty bland really. But, you know, theatre goes up and\u2026 like all art forms\u2026 What happened in the late sixties, early seventies, when I happened to just come into it when it was very political, may happen again. And you\u2019ve got also, theatre, politics has become more theatrical, in a sense. I mean Trump\u2019s whole shtick is theatrical in a way. You\u2019ve got the, you know, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Occupy_movement\">Occupy<\/a> and all of that using what would have been street theatre tactics in a way which is now pretty commonplace. And also, you look at a marathon and everybody\u2019s dressed up, so it\u2019s sort of doing something else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ET.<\/strong> And do you feel like that kind of, that restricts the possibility of theatre being political because those techniques have been taken over by other forms?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CC.<\/strong> I just think you\u2019ve got to think about what you want to do, and find out what you think theatre can do. I suspect in the age we\u2019re living in, of new technologies and all that, probably what it\u2019s going to be best at is just exploring what it is to be human and the morality of choices, because it\u2019s the only, well not the only art, but it\u2019s an art form where the person presenting something and the person watching it, they\u2019re in the same room together in real time and they\u2019re talking. I mean, dance does it but you don\u2019t talk in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ET.<\/strong> Which is an increasingly rare experience I guess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CC.<\/strong> Cinema obviously doesn\u2019t do it. You watch things on streaming or whatever. You can be with an orchestra\u2026 I mean, I love live music but it\u2019s doing something different. And I think that maybe where it\u2019s got to look at\u2026 Because the stuff we were doing when it was street theatre is slightly different, because if that was about making a political point then maybe that will happen as well, you know. It is being done but it\u2019s slightly different now. I don\u2019t know if people sort of sit down and write plays. You get things like the verbatim theatre which is bringing subjective experience. That can be political and often people do come out of that saying \u2018Oh my God! Is that really what people are going through?\u2019 The tricky bit there is that it can leave you there but I\u2019m not saying it should be doing, you know, I\u2019m not saying it should have answers to everything. I don\u2019t know if you saw <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ken_Loach\">Ken Loach<\/a>\u2019s film <em>I, Daniel Blake<\/em>, but a lot of, when I saw it, you could hear people in the audience sort of saying, you know, they didn\u2019t know the system was like that. So that\u2019s doing something. But if you did know it was like that, and I think it\u2019s actually worse \u2013 it was slightly, in some ways a romanticised version of the working class within that, because he shows lots of people\u2026 I don\u2019t want to attack him \u2013 but, you know\u2026 But that\u2019s got to be part of something else which I suppose it always has got to be. It will never do it on its own. I think it\u2019s still\u2026 I think what you think of as political has changed. Because it used to be much more, you know, we know what politics are. That then went through all the stuff I was talking about. Being a woman was political. Being gay was political. Being black was political. We\u2019ve redefined politics so we redefine what cultural interventions are in politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong><em>End of Side B<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bravenewclassics.info\/index.php\/2016\/11\/21\/conversations-on-communism\/\"><strong><em>Side A<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"#_ftnref1\" name=\"_ftn1\">[1]<\/a>&nbsp;Chambers, C. (1989) <em>The Story of Unity Theatre<\/em> (L&amp;W).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><span class=\"person_name\"><a href=\"#_ftnref2\" name=\"_ftn2\">[2]<\/a>&nbsp;Chambers, C.<\/span>&nbsp;(2006) <a href=\"http:\/\/eprints.kingston.ac.uk\/843\/\"><em>Here we stand: politics, performers and performance: Paul Robeson, Isadora Duncan and Charlie Chaplin<\/em><\/a>&nbsp;(Nick Hern).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"#_ftnref3\" name=\"_ftn3\">[3]<\/a>&nbsp;<span class=\"person_name\">Chambers, C.<\/span>&nbsp;(2011) <a href=\"http:\/\/eprints.kingston.ac.uk\/19025\/\"><em>Black and Asian theatre in Britain: a history<\/em><\/a>&nbsp;(Routledge).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"#_ftnref4\" name=\"_ftn4\">[4]<\/a>&nbsp;Berger, J. and Bielski, N.&nbsp;<i>A Question of Geography<\/i>&nbsp;(1987).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This conversation between Colin Chambers, Elinor Taylor and&nbsp;Henry Stead&nbsp;took place in Elinor&#8217;s office in University of Westminster, just off Oxford Street, London, on 15 November&nbsp;2016. 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