Stage struck

PETER CRAWLEYponders the worst that can happen

SOMETIMES, when the theatre is under fire, its rhetoric gets overheated. “Fighting for survival” is a phrase it’s not unusual to hear when companies get ready for funding cuts – even if the theatre has managed to weather every existential threat since the Goths first made ruinous refurbishments to the theatre at Epidaurus.

That’s cold comfort to those companies who saw their funding disappear this time last year. But you don’t have to look too far to see that the theatre has an awful lot more to lose than funding.

Picture this. In 2008 a European country is hit by the economic crisis, turning reluctantly to the IMF for help. Not long afterwards it has a general election. Bruised by austerity and keen to reclaim a sense of sovereignty, it swings hard to the right.

It's the kind of thing darkly prophesised by the Abbey's staging, in 2008, of Bertolt Brecht's Hitler allegory, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui.Then we saw it as an economically relevant if politically hysterical broadside against the US. But it's exactly what happened in Hungary last year.

Today, independent Hungarian theatre really is fighting for survival. In power since last May, the right-wing Fidesz-KDNP government has blocked a previously awarded budget and begun the process of cutting off state support to independent theatre. If that wasn’t bad enough, a new draft law will enable the government to censor newspapers and ban performances.

Hungary's parliament seems set to fire the director of the National Theatre, Róbert Alföldi, whose work is derided as "obscene, pornographic, gay, anti-national, and anti-Hungarian". Currently playing in the National is a satirical treatment of Hitler's Mein Kampf. And down the road at the independent Örkény Theatre? The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui.

Even in our own political tragicomedy, it’s hard to imagine Ireland sliding towards fascistic censorship. The only threat facing New Theatre’s forthcoming satire, Brian Cowen and the 7 Deadly Sinners, for instance, is an inability to keep pace with the dizzying farce of reality.

A brutal reminder of the privilege of such liberty comes in the shape of Belarus Free Theatre, which secretly stages plays in apartments and forests around Minsk under threat of arrest

from Alexander Lukashenko’s dictatorship. The group is currently in the US, where its show, Being Harold Pinter, amplifies the writer’s implicit menace into horrifyingly resonant depictions of outright violence.

In other hands, that heavy emphasis might seem overheated, but in this case it’s urgent. The rhetoric of a theatre fighting for its survival must be as loud as possible, a clarion call and a reminder to us all of theatre not as a luxury, or economic benefit, but as a civil necessity. It must be watched with vigilance and energy.

Still, even the threat against theatre from neo-fascists and de facto dictators underlines something more encouraging, stirring and essential about it: Theatre itself can be dangerous.