Confronting alienation: bringing theatre to 'areas of low cultural engagement'

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The Leadership Fellow research focussed on campaigns and episodes in twentieth-century Britain which challenged the opposition between "politics" and "culture" as usually understood. Its impact was confined to the North West of England, and primarily museum-based. The Follow-on project delivers new UK-wide social, cultural and educational impact by recasting key elements of the research in the form of an accessible and engaging multi-media documentary play produced by the political touring theatre company Townsend Theatre Productions. The play is about the 1971-2 UCS work-in, a shipyard occupation which knowingly possessed a strong 'cultural' or performative dimension in an age of mass television. Rather than withdrawing their labour, employees facing redundancy continued to work, demonstrating their industrial creativity and imagining a workplace freed from alienation, the speed-up and the bottom line. Though some in the labour movement saw class collaboration (working for free), the work-in caught the popular imagination and was a partial victory. The proposed closures were mitigated and over six thousand skilled Clydeside jobs saved. The play retells the story of the UCS work-in in its fiftieth anniversary year, and will be performed to an estimated UK-wide audience of 10,000 people in 50 performances (2020-21) across 35 venues, including theatres, libraries and community spaces. As well as returning the dispute to its original form--it was always a type of political theatre--this project creatively 'returns' the work-in to the community that made this history. The play will twice be performed at Clydebank Town Hall (the centre of UCS operations fifty years ago) where tickets for the first performance will be free to members of the local community, thanks to a trade union subsidy. The second performance will be supplemented by a free day-school. Drawing on the PI's and TTP's links with trade councils, trade union education departments and community support groups, the event will situate the meaning of the UCS work-in in relation to contemporary debates about worklessness and automation through accessible presentations from a gender-balanced panel of former shipyard workers and their families, community activists, academic researchers, local historians and archivists. Both production and day-school will be professionally filmed and uploaded onto the websites of the theatre company and the University of Manchester, prefaced by a brief statement from the PI contextualising the production and its underpinning research. In the spirit of that original research, the project connects past and present. At a moment when the Bank of England predicts that automation will displace 15 million jobs from the British economy in the decades ahead--40% of the total labour market--the issues at stake in the UCS work-in are by no means historical. The production, day-school, films and promotional material will illustrate how the key themes of the UCS struggle--creativity, alienation, the meaning of work--shed light on contemporary debates about de-growth, precarity, joblessness, automation, Universal Basic Income and what Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams' widely-discussed book, Inventing the Future, terms 'a world without work' (2016).