Theatre Muggins

by D.A.N. Jones

Several good things have converged on the Unity Theatre, that hard-up environment near King's Cross, where socialist drama struggles under the glum stare of the British Communist Party—a body which is healthily confused by Art: some time you should hear Jack Dash, a Sunday painter, defending his naturalistic approach against more bourgeois Marxists. Perhaps the most effective of these good things is Roland Muldoon's company, the Cartoon Archetypical Slogan Theatre, the only improvisatory group I have seen which gives a damn about the British working class. CAST has been presenting a series of excellent plays which develop and illustrate such argumentsettling prole proverbs as these: 'there's good and bad in all races,' ' the working class is its own worst enemy.' The plays are about exploitation in the abstract, and about exploited people—known as the Muggins family in this series. They have been applauded by miners in Skegness, disliked by dockers at Tilbury. I noticed Muldoon being roughly handled by dockers (Powell's, not Dash's) outside the Commons. In Mr Oligarchy's Circus, CAST parodied a Hughie Green show, in which Mugginses won prizes like Queen Alexandra's Award for Embroidery or (for a Jamaican C-of-E Muggins) a meeting with the Arch...