The Playbook
James Shapiro
Faber, £20

IF it is to attract the attention of readers other than those interested in plays and playmaking, Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro’s compelling book certainly needs its subtitle, “A Study of Theatre, Democracy and the Making of a Culture War.” 

The author, recognising this, prefaces his opening with dictionary definitions of the term “playbook,” including “A set of tactics frequently employed by one engaged in competitive activity.”

The activity here deals with the machinations involved in the establishment and survival of one of several programmes created as part of Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal attempting to bring the United States out of the 1930s Depression and its resulting mass unemployment. As part of the Works Progress Administration, the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) was created, principally to provide work for thousands of theatre workers and, almost incidentally, to present theatre to millions of US citizens, two-thirds of whom it is estimated had never seen live theatre before.

From 1935-39 the FTP staged, for a box office pittance and often for free, over 1,000 productions in 29 states. It presented programmes that ranged from Shakespeare through vaudeville and modern works to its innovatory living newspaper productions.

These last tackled social and political problems such as slum housing and the rise of fascism, fuelling reactionary political opposition to both FDR’s government and to the very notion of federal support interfering with free-market forces.

As with our own late government and its media allies, culture wars, which Shapiro claims go back to the American revolutionary times with pro- and anti-independence forces, serve to mask more fundamental class tensions.

He goes on to observe that the culture war that “broke out in the late 1930s over the place of the arts and especially theatre … took place at a time much like our own of economic uncertainty, racial tensions, and rising nationalism and fascism, with new technologies transforming how entertainment and news were experienced.”

Hallie Flanagan, the surprising choice to lead the project, was an academic and playwright who had studied theatre in the Soviet Union where she was excited especially by “an intellectually rigorous theatre committed to education and propaganda.” She was determined to introduce a theatre designed to shape the life of the country “socially, politically and industrially.”

After a number of shaky productions, the FTP’s first success was the famous all-black “Voodoo” Macbeth with a cast of 179 and directed by a youthful, inexperienced Orson Welles. Opening in Harlem and Broadway, it subsequently travelled the country playing even to some audiences “where Jim Crow still ruled.”

The 1937 film We Work Again, produced by the Work Projects Administration to promote its employment and training efforts for African-Americans, contains the only existing footage of the FTP production of Macbeth.

The history of Flanagan’s politically war-torn programme is dealt with chapter by chapter and based on efforts, often frustrated, to stage key shows, including a dramatic adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Can’t Happen Here, that depicted the rise of a populist demagogue and creeping fascism in the US. 

This is followed by accounts of a radical dance show, How Long, Brethren, with the famous white dancer, Helen Tamiris backed by an African-American chorus singing “Negro Songs of Protest”; and Liberty Deferred, one of Flanagan’s favoured living newspaper productions, based on the devastating slum housing problems and calling out the racism ingrained in white society.

Complementary chapters deal with the inevitable political attacks in Congress and attempts, eventually successful, to close the FTP. They include  the establishment of the infamous Unamerican Activities Committee, remembered today as the red hunting ground of McCarthyism. 

They also contribute elements of high humour as when the chairman Martin Dies, a political shyster in the Trumpian mould, questioning Flanagan on her reference to Marlowe, asked: “Is he a communist?” 

Theatre and politics have always been related and Shapiro’s book welds the two together in a way that holds the stage and throws light on so much that is happening in the US playground today.