The scheduled arrival in a West End theatre this summer of Slave Play, a Broadway multiple award-winner, has already created a big fuss. But it’s not the uncompromising content of the production – “a story of race, identity and sexuality” on a Virginia plantation – that has prompted the flap that reached Downing Street. No, it was the bold idea of “Black Out” nights, when seats in the auditorium would be sold only to black or non-white ticket holders.
Even without the alarm sounded over this plan, playwright Jeremy O Harris’s strident work will fit right into a London Theatreland that is shifting somewhat in the direction of a radical agenda, if not actually taking up the cudgels with the establishment. A mention of Palestine during last week’s British premiere of the harshly satirical German play Nachtland wrung cries from members of the Young Vic audience. It was a glimmer of just the kind of “uncomfortable moment” aimed at by Patrick Marber, director of this new play by Marius von Mayenburg that tackles the scarcely buried legacy of antisemitic prejudice in Berlin.
Only a few days earlier, Matt Smith attacked the famous campaigning role of Dr Stockmann in a modern-day version of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, a play whose plot is commonly assumed to be the basis of Peter Benchley’s Jaws and the inspiration for the film. In fact, so committed is Smith’s character to saving the community around him that he stops the whole performance midway through to address the audience about the excesses of the capitalist system. The lights go up for the sort of “heated debate” Mrs Merton used to relish. The actor says he has already seen arguments break out in the stalls, as well as the odd walkout. His show at London’s Duke of York’s theatre picks up on the immersive elements of an equally provocative production still playing across in Trafalgar Square. In A Mirror, starring Jonny Lee Miller, theatrical sleight of hand gives the audience a taste of how it might feel to lose some of their liberties under a totalitarian regime.
So what has promoted this West End lurch towards political engagement? It is a trend also marked by recent punchy revivals of Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist and Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman, starring Lily Allen. It could be something to do with our divided age. Or perhaps it’s a symptom of 14 years of Conservative rule. A cynic might suggest instead that this spate of subversive shows is not exactly the blow to the body politic it might seem. Theatre, where a full-price seat can cost more than £100, is struggling to defend itself from its image as a middle-class indulgence. It is not, playwrights and directors dearly hope, just a place for celebrities to disport themselves nightly in front of those who admired them first on the telly.
And we do know that drama can change the world. Kitchen-sink plays spawned that eye-opening 1966 TV classic about homelessness, Cathy Come Home, and Mr Bates vs the Post Office has now pricked the conscience of a government. But the impact of a good play is not always quite so direct, and social change is not the only profound purpose of live theatre. After all, mere entertainment can be hard enough to achieve.
• Vanessa Thorpe is the Observer’s arts and media correspondent
