AGITATOR
by John Norman
Directed by John Norman
Cast:
Tony Barber, Robin Ingram
THE AUTHOR
John Norman was born in Plaistow, London, in 1935 and left school at seventeen. After National Service he pursued a varied succession of occupations, including work in the docks, as a ship’s agent, for a national newspaper and as reader to a blind writer in Italy. By 1973 he was living in Canterbury, dealing in antiquarian books and concentrating on writing.
Although Crincum Crancum was his fifteenth play, it was the first to receive a full production in the 1973 New Plays Festival. The Questors subsequently presented The Owl-Winged Faculty in the 1974 New Plays Festival and Agitator in 1976. His association with the theatre continued in 1980 with a programme comprising Afternoon, Edward and Anna and Mr Smith.
THE PLAY
Agitator examines the life of George Jacob Holyoake (1817–1906), the working-class reformer, secularist and champion of the co-operative movement. Two actors portray Holyoake simultaneously: one follows his life from youthful idealism to old age, while the other travels backwards from death to birth. Both question Holyoake’s motives, dispute each other’s interpretation and sometimes challenge the dramatist himself.
Incorporating Holyoake’s own words, the play turns conventional biography into a comic and searching debate about political idealism, compromise and the gradual absorption of a radical agitator into the respectable Liberal establishment.
PHOTOS
PRESS RESPONSE
Agitator provoked the most substantial and divided response of the Festival. The Shepherds Bush Gazette found Norman’s device of presenting George Jacob Holyoake through two actors daring, entertaining and politically stimulating, while Maurice Reeve in the Middlesex Chronicle acknowledged its originality but doubted its commercial appeal and wanted greater force from the performances. Claudia Cooke in the Acton Gazette greatly admired Norman’s command of language but thought the intellectual and technical demands of the work beyond what the production could fully achieve. Catherine Itzin in Tribune similarly praised its imaginative conception and some splendid individual moments, while finding the improvisatory framework less successful and parts of the historical argument over-didactic. Tim Dehn in TOAD admired the writing and theatrical dialectic, but felt that an insufficiently incisive and stylised production failed to do justice to the play. Kitharistes in Questopics went considerably further, dismissing it as a “curtain lecture”, finding Norman’s political argument historically questionable and the experimental theatrical devices dramatically ineffective.
The consensus therefore recognised Agitator as ambitious and intellectually provocative, but opinion ranged widely over whether its ideas had been successfully transformed into theatre.
Shepherds Bush Gazette
The Middlesex Chronicle
The Acton Gazette
Tribune
TOAD (Dehn)
Questopics (Kitharistes)
QUESTORS ARCHIVES
AGITATOR