In collaboration with Just Press and Autonomy Films
Friday, 5th April, 8pm, The Lyric Theatre,
Barrack Street, Bridport, entrance £5
ART AND POLITICS
Can there be a political theatre?
On December 9th 1986, exactly 85 years after the original opening of the Hackney Empire, Roland Muldoon and the remnants of the underground Cartoon Archetypical Slogan Theatre group (C.A.S.T.) reopened it as a working theatre. With only £8,000 to start with, they gave new life to the dilapidated East End building and unleashed its genie. In the following 20 years they fought an unrelenting struggle against reaction from those powerful in the arts who provided only a minimum subsidy. Despite this, Roland and C.A.S.T. staged plays and concerts from the 32 different languages spoken in Hackney. They did Sunday rank and file Benefits for groups struggling against the status quo. As the home of New Variety they became a high profile venue for alternative comedy. They had widely acclaimed success in finding new audiences and sent out a signal of what else is possible for theatre. Against the odds, they turned the Hackney Empire into an iconic independent theatre.
How did they do it? Where they simply lucky to get away with challenging the status quo for so long? Roland Muldoon tells the exciting story of a dream and eventually its loss. (Copies available of Roland’s new book Taking on the Empire: How we saved the Hackney Empire for popular theatre, publ. .Just Press 2013.)
Roland Muldoon was born in between air-raid warnings in 1941 in Surrey. He left school in 1956 and worked in various jobs ranging from City clerk to labourer, Brixham fish sorter to chainman on the new Victoria line. He studied Stage Management at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. In 1963 he joined Unity Theatre before setting up the underground political theatre C.A.S.T. Their short, fast moving plays were performed in the Festival Hall and the Roundhouse in London as well as at Labour halls, student and factory occupations, pubs and working men’s clubs, nationwide. In 1986, together with C.A.S.T. Roland Muldoon took over the Hackney Empire in East London and ran it successfully for 20 years. Recently, he was made Master of Arts by the University of East London and a Doctor of Arts by London Metropolitan University, recognizing his lifetime work. He is the author of three books: Confessions of a Socialist (co-authored, 1979, Pluto Short Plays), The White Van Papers. Tales of London Today: Bugs, Murder and Privilege (Authorhouse, 2011) and Taking on the Empire (Just Press, 2013)
‘what loneliness/ to be blind in broad daylight-/and deaf, what loneliness/ when the song’s in full swing.’
