Ewan MacColl Plays 1

Ewan MacColl was best known as a songwriter and performer but he also wrote many plays and together with Joan Littlewood created Theatre Workshop based in London's East End, where he was the house dramatist. His experiences as a teenager looking for work in the years of depression in the 1930s formed his politics. He was a life-long socialist and one-time active Communist. His plays reflect the experiences of the British people, especially the working classes, during the Second World War and Clement Attlee's Labour government, the first socialist reforming government the country had seen. This collection contains: "Operation Olive Branch" - 'MacColl's wickedly funny adaptation of the Lysistrata of Aristophanes deals with fundamental issues of peace and war in a way not confined to the specifics of its inspiration ...and Winston Churchill's famous speech announcing the creation of the "Iron Curtain"'; "Johnny Noble" - 'The history of the Great Depression and the Second World War is re-imagined in the light of the common (but usually hidden) experience of an unemployed worker, in this case a fisherman from Hull'; and, "The Other Animals" - 'Focuses more specifically on a single person, a political prisoner asked to renounce his political ideals, in a series of scenes which are both harrowing and poetic, and as relevant today, in the post-Mandela era, as they were in the days of Hitler's concentration camps and Stalin's gulag'.