Political playwriting: The art of thinking in public

The article reflects on the nature of the political in theatre, assessing the notion that theatre is the last free public space and evaluating the claims to be political of rival, problematic modes of writing-the theatre of fact or verbatim theatre and the allegorical late plays of Bond, Pinter and Churchill, turning to consider the problematic legacy of Brecht, the avatar of the political. The discussion turns to writers often excluded from the political nomenclature, developing the notion of the centrality of critique and offering an argument for the Naturalist writers as propagators of true 'thinking aloud', thereby suggesting they provide a model for theatre as such. The piece concludes with a discussion of the author's own contribution to the genre in the light of these analyses.