The Royal Shakespeare Company, in its theatres at London and Stratford, meets the obligations of a National Theatre as comprehensively as does that national theatre on the South Bank of the Thames. These obligations were formulated in the National Theatre Committee Handbook of 1909:

• (i) to keep the plays of Shakespeare in repertoire

• (ii) to revive whatever else is vital in English classical drama

• (iii) to prevent recent plays of great merit from falling into oblivion

• (iv) to produce new plays and to further the development of modern drama

• (v) to produce translations of representative works of foreign drama, ancient and modern

• (vi) to stimulate the art of acting through the varied opportunities which it will offer to members of the company.

In considering the intricate relationships between drama and society in Britain in the 1970s, we will naturally regard with special interest the ways in which these heavily subsidised national institutions treat political issues.

I write as a political philosopher who happens to be an addicted theatregoer. I have reviewed some of the plays discussed here, but in conditions of relative leisure.1 Unlike newspaper reviewers, therefore, I have always been able to read the text or acting script (after the performance, on principle and also to preserve the basic dramatic joy of surprise). And unlike most literary critics, I shall limit myself here to a discussion of specific productions. The choice of plays may therefore seem rather random, but the procedure has some advantages. It should reveal how our national companies perceive politics in plays in general, rather than in the specifically ‘political’ theatre, or in drama of commitment’. One ofmy main points is that politics is important in plays which do not invite those labels.

Literary critics sometimes worry that drama is debased or simplified by intense political commitments. While this is not necessarily so, I share their worry, since political sincerity is no excuse for bad drama. Indeed I add to it a concern of my own craft: that dramatising politics in some contemporary ways can debase politics. A strident, wholly partisan view of politics expressed in one-sided dialectic is essentially undramatic.