The Group Theatre: Christianity and Communism in 1930s Modernist Theatre

This project asks how theology and political theory interrelate in their attempts to create community through a fusion of High-Church Anglicanism and leftist politics in Rupert Doone and Robert Medley's Group Theatre of the 1930s. Within the Theatre, which included members such as T. S. Eliot, W. H.

Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and Stephen Spender, notions of transcendence and Christian forms of communality (associated with cultural conservatives such as Eliot) were expressed in plays of the Left.

At the same time, I assess the inverse: how left-wing and Communist notions of work and value that were reinforced by the Theatre's collaborative tendency found expression in Eliot's drama and critical writing of the 1930s. I propose that their presence is rooted in his involvement with the Group Theatre.

This interplay between religion and politics challenges notions of secularisation in cultural modernism and asserts both the transcendent possibilities of left-wing political projects and the importance of the mundane to religious aesthetic expression and community making.

In examining community in relation to dialogue between Anglicanism and leftist politics, I develop an analytic framework that draws on the work of theologians such as Stanley Hopper, David Miller, Amos Wilder, and Catherine Keller and the concept of theopoetics,whereby art allows for an aesthetic experience of religious truth that substantiates the presence, possibility, and value of God.

I argue that this method of substantiation through aesthetic incarnation is applicable to the representation of community in the Group Theatre's plays of the 1930s.