ABSTRACT
Things were different, and the new Labour government matched the feeling with liberalisation of the abortion law, the abolition of capital punishment and the Lord Chamberlain's powers and more. Arden and D'Arcy, despite their original positioning in the bosom of the Royal Court, became a ubiquitous influence on the whole alternative theatre movement. A further group of companies addressed politics more directly and created what Baz Kershaw called 'carnivalesque agitprop', oppositionism being implicit in carnival and explicit in agitprop. There were also alternative theatre companies presenting more traditional, often Brecht-influenced written plays, but they too had a fierce determination to supersede what they saw as the blandness of institutional theatre, and the plays were often experimental, innovative and challenging. Through the 1970s it became increasingly clear that the socialist revolution was not materialising, and new groups were formed to target specific issues, notably the representation, or misrepresentation, of women and gay people on the stage and in the wider society.
