The Politics of Community Drama in Interwar England

There was a wave of reform-oriented drama across England in the 1920s and 1930s, which extended from urban, socialist theatre to the ‘late modernist’ enthusiasm for rural pageantry and from adult education to Church revival. Most scholarship looks at drama in these various milieus separately, but this study of three plays that were put on in a corner of South West England—a nativity play, an innovative ‘dance-mime’, and a Workers’ Educational Association narrative piece—brings them together. These plays shared a connection to Dartington Hall, a social and cultural experiment set on a large estate in Devon in 1925 by an American heiress, Dorothy Elmhirst, and her Yorkshire-born husband, Leonard, which became a nexus for the various strands of community-seeking theatre evident in interwar England—as well as for social reform more generally. This article shows how dramatic performances formed part of the quest for communal unity that was a dominant strand in social thinking between the wars: driven by fears about class strife, the effects of democratization, the recurrence of war, and the fragmenting effects of secular modernity, elites, artists, and activists of diverse hues tried to reform the very idea of Englishness by putting on plays—fostering values of community and communality, while often taking inspiration from an idealized vision of the rural community of England’s pre-industrial past.