Good political theatre is few and far between. They tend to be either documentaries or cast in the Stalinist "socialistrealism" mould, in which the ordinary worker and peasant is sculpted in twice life-size and without a blemish. From the Royal Shakespeare Company one expects good theatre and "Occupations' is both well-produced and well-acted.
The central theme of this play by Trevor Griffiths is the occupation of the factories by the workers of Turin, under the leadership of Antonio Gramsci in 1921. The author shows some perception of the political realities of the time. The Italian Socialist Party (PSI) under the leadership of Turrati, was one Please send me Socialist Woman for the next year. I enclose 48p of its leadership remained reformist and it wasn't long before these elements returned to their spiritual home in the 2nd International. Only Gramsci and his closest associates seemed Christopher Davies, Report London. accomplished through the Soviets alone.
All this comes out in Griffiths' play. But he seems to have taken dramatic licence to telescope the Third International of Lenin with that of Stalin. He confuses the revolution tri umphant with the revolution betrayed.
The drama is acted out in a room in a Turin hotel. Kabak played by Patrick Stewart, the emissary from the Comintern, for some inexplicable reason, made up to look extraordinarily like Lenin. His mistress is a Countess of the old regime who, throughout the play, is dying of cancer of the womb, probably symbolical of the passing of the old order. Kabak is depicted as a cynic, more typical of the Stalinist bureaucrats than the devoted revolutionaries who surrounded Lenin and Trotsky. He brings, not only advice from the Comintern for the revolutionary workers of Turin, but lots of "Moscow Gold", which he distributes very freely.
No sooner are the workers defeated than the representative of the Third International becomes transformed into the representative of the Soviet Government. With a victorious socialist revolution in Italy now off the agenda he sends for a director of Fiats-those same Fiats whose factories were still occupied the day before by the workers-and offers him very favourable terms for setting up a plant in the Soviet Unio "You will find" says this cynic, "that our working class will not give you the same headaches as the workers of Turin." To symbolise the defeat of the revolution and the triumph of counter-revolution, the voice of Hitler is heard off-stage. This again shows the authors prediliction for telescoping two historical periods. It would surely have been more appropriate to end the play with the voice of Mussolini or to the strains of "Giovinezza".
Gramsci comes well out of the play and Ben Kingsley's make-up as the misshapen dwarf is remarkable. There are moments, especially when Gramsci is addressing the workers, that one really caputres the spirit of the times. The audience. in fact, becomes part of the occupying factory workers. For this reason alone it is worth seeing if you can afford the fl admission charge.