Reply To: Socialist Standard Past & Present Blog

Just added a Theatre Review page on the blog.

https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/p/theatre-reviews.html

Following on from adding a Socialist Standard Film Review page on the blog last year, I’ve decided to now add a Socialist Standard Theatre Review page.

At the time of writing, the page is a chronological list of all the theatre reviews that have appeared in the Socialist Standard down the years that have been posted on the blog. The page will obviously be updated if and when new theatre reviews are added on the blog.

People will notice that some decades are more represented than others. The three most prolific theatre reviewers in the Socialist Standard were Ian Jones in the 1950s, Michael Gill in the 1990s and 2000s, and Steve Clayton in the 2010s.

I was expecting more George Bernard Shaw plays to be reviewed in the Standard, if only because Shaw was regularly at the receiving end of political barbs from SPGBers down the years but it turns out that Ibsen, Brecht and Stephen Poliakoff are the most reviewed playwrights in the Standard.

As with the case of the film reviews (and music reviews) in the Standard, it’s a shame that there are a paucity of reviews in the Standard in the early decades of its history. Especially when you consider that there were many fine Socialist Standard writers who could have quite easily turned their pens to such subjects. I guess the Party’s been a weird at times at addressing ‘culture’ in its official publications. Scared that a review of an Irvine Welsh novel might split the Party.