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“It Can’t Happen Here”: Howard Brenton’s The Churchill Play

  • Judith Saunders EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: October 23, 2021

Abstract

This article proposes revisiting Howard Brenton’s The Churchill Play (1974). I contend that the play offers pertinent insights into how authoritarian governments come into being through the implicit cooperation of people who, wittingly or unwittingly, enter into a “conspiracy of obedience.” Although inspired by political issues that were current in Britain in the 1970 s and 1980 s, the play’s illustration of the fragility of democracy resonates with today’s political atmosphere, especially that experienced in the United States. By anchoring my argument to the theories of Bertolt Brecht, I aim to clarify Brenton’s intent and encourage a more parabolic reading of the play – perceiving totalitarianism not as the usurpation of power by a single individual or group, but as the consequence of people’s complacent and self-serving tendencies to comply with the status quo.

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Published Online: 2021-10-23
Published in Print: 2021-11-02

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Frontmatter
  3. “It Can’t Happen Here”: Howard Brenton’s The Churchill Play
  4. “My Skin Is Not Me”: The Transformations of William Shakespeare’s Othello in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) and Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet
  5. “You Don’t Know Who This Man Is”: Hospitality and Trauma in Alexandra Wood’s The Human Ear
  6. Family Matters: Trauma and the Legacy of War in James Allen Moad II’s Outside Paducah: The Wars at Home
  7. When Young Playwrights Are Kept Awake Because of History: Cultural Memory and Amnesia in Recent American Plays
  8. This Is England 2021: Staging England and Englishness in Contemporary Theatre
  9. Memory, National Identity Formation, and (Neo)Colonialism in Hannah Khalil’s A Museum in Baghdad
  10. Book Reviews
  11. Emily Klein, Jennifer-Scott Mobley, and Jill Stevenson, ed. Performing Dream Homes: Theater and the Spatial Politics of the Domestic Sphere. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, xvi + 238 pp., €84,99 (hardback), €71,68 (ebook).
  12. Michael Shane Boyle, Matt Cornish, and Brandon Woolf, ed. Postdramatic Theatre and Form. London: Methuen, 2019, xii + 266 pp., £52.50 (hardback), £26.09 (paperback), £37.12 (PDF ebook).
  13. Sarah J. Ablett. Dramatic Disgust: Aesthetic Theory and Practice from Sophocles to Sarah Kane. Bielefeld: transcript, 2020, 199 pp., €38.00 (paperback), €37.99 (PDF ebook).
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