Weapons of Happiness

Weapons of Happiness is a 1976 political play by Howard Brenton about a strike in a London crisp factory. The play makes use of a dramatic conceit whereby the Czech communist cabinet minister Josef Frank is imagined alive in the 1970s (in real-life he was hanged in 1952), and his hallucinations of life in Stalinist Czechoslovakia interweave with the main plot.

In an introduction to the play, Brenton wrote that he was "trying to write a kind of Jacobean play for our time, a 'British epic theatre'. Making only limited use of naturalism, the play features several long speeches; in the same introduction Brenton quotes Julie Covington, who appeared in the original production, as describing acting in it as being "like opening a furnace door - your time comes, you open the door and blaze, then shut it".

The play was commissioned by the National Theatre as part of a policy of staging new plays by leading authors in the company's new South Bank home. At the time Brenton was a Marxist and seen as something of a polemicist, however in an interview with Theatre Quarterly from around the time the play was being written, he expressed dissatisfaction with fringe theatre - the context in which his plays had previously been seen - and a desire to reach the bigger audiences subsidised theatre companies would provide. Further, Brenton would disclaim to be a moralist in the play's programme.

Weapons of Happiness became the first commissioned play to be performed at the reopened National Theatre when it premièred on the Lyttelton stage on 14 July 1976. The cast included Geoffrey Bateman as Joseph Stalin, Nick Brimble, Julie Covington, Frank Finlay as Josef Frank, Bernard Gallagher, Michael Medwin, William Russell and Derek Thompson. It was designed by Hayden Griffin and directed by David Hare, a collaborator of Brenton's from Portable Theatre Company and co-writer with him of Brassneck and Pravda, itself staged at the National. Given the subject of the play it is ironic that its first production took place against the backdrop of the National Theatre itself was undergoing a good deal of difficulties with trade unions.

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