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International plays
Alongside their focus on local and national stories, Merseyside Unity Theatre always kept one eye firmly on the wider world. From the outset, they saw themselves as part of an international movement—bringing global voices and ideas to Liverpool audiences, often for the very first time. Over the years, they staged a remarkable range of plays from across Europe and beyond, many of them English premieres and works that audiences in the city might never otherwise have had the chance to see.
This internationalist outlook runs right through their history. Early on, performances included mass declamations by Jack Lindsay about China and the Soviet Union, and it continues later with productions such as David Evans’ Beneath Olympus (1979), centred on the Sharpeville Massacre. Unity members were always looking outward, connecting what was happening in Liverpool to events unfolding across the world.
One of their most important international influences was Bertolt Brecht. Unity became passionate champions of his work, drawn to his sharp understanding of how society shapes—and distorts—the lives of ordinary people. As early as 1940, and only just beaten to the title of first English Brecht performance by London Unity, they staged The Informer. This tense, compact play tells of a couple living in fear that their son, a member of the Hitler Youth, might betray his father’s anti-Nazi views.
Unity returned to Brecht again and again over the decades, building up a rich relationship with his work. Productions included The Good Woman of Setzuan (1959), The Exception and the Rule (1961), Mother Courage (1964), The Life of Galileo (1967), The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1974), The Mother (1974), and The Measures Taken (1976). In 1977, marking both Unity’s 40th anniversary and the 40th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War, they paired I Am Spain—a collage of projections, poetry and documents—with Senora Carrar’s Rifles. At Hope Place, their first full season concluded with Days of the Commune (1980), while 1983 saw Brecht on Women, a show devised by members of Unity that imaginatively brought audiences into the world of the Berliner Ensemble.
European theatre more broadly was also central to Unity’s programme. They presented classics by writers such as Ibsen, Büchner, Giraudoux, Lorca and Strindberg, alongside more contemporary work. Max Frisch’s The Fire Raisers (1962) arrived in Liverpool just a year after its London debut—and a year before it controversially reached the stage of the Liverpool Playhouse—offering a stark warning about the dangers of ignoring what is happening right in front of us.
The late 1960s saw particularly powerful engagements with recent history. In 1967, Unity staged Hochhuth’s controversial The Representative, which accused Pope Pius XII of failing to take action to oppose the Holocaust. The production sparked lively debate, including a special “Late Night Line Up” discussion organised at the Everyman Theatre where the show was being performed featuring a multi-faith panel. The following month, they presented a reading of Peter Weiss’s The Investigation, a reconstruction of the war crimes trials—cutting the play to an hour and a half, as the company noted they did not wish to dwell too heavily on its horrors.
Unity also brought major international stories to Liverpool through English premieres. Armand Salacrou’s Boulevard Durand (1963) tells the true story of a French trade unionist wrongly accused of murder during a strike in 1910. Although eventually released after an international outcry, Durand’s ordeal left lasting scars, and he spent the rest of his life in an asylum. In 1968, they staged George Sklar’s And People All Around, based on the murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in the United States. For Unity, this felt urgently contemporary, coming in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination earlier that year and at a time when they saw rampant Powellism closer to home.
Taken together, these productions reveal a company deeply engaged with the world beyond Liverpool—curious, politically aware, and committed to sharing international stories that resonated locally.
