The anger of the Occupy and UK Uncut movements is now being reflected in theatres and comedy venues
The way comedian and actor Phill Jupitus remembers it, almost as soon as Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979 there was a wave of creativity from people intent on getting her out – "not just alternative comedy – everything took off".
In the 20 months since David Cameron became prime minister, there are signs from Britain's performing artists that the satirical, counter-cultural spirit of the early 1980s is returning to the performing arts.
Next week, Jupitus will star in Big Society! in Leeds, an Edwardian music hall parody that takes aim at the coalition. London's Ovalhouse theatre, a key venue for the black, gay and women's theatre movements of the 1970s and 1980s, is planning a "counterculture" season which they hope will return the venue to its radical roots.
Even alternative comedy could be making a comeback. Although Josie Long is currently one of only a few comics consistently satirising the coalition, Jupitus says the avowedly political comedians at a London club night called The Alternative Comedy Memorial Society show the direction comedy should be going in: "Stewart Lee was there – his missus had been performing – and we were like 'This is like 30 years ago all over again.' Embittered young men in band T-shirts and trendy haircuts talking about rape and disability is the pre-eminent form of comedy – the alternative is people playing around with ideas."
Jupitus is well-placed to compare then and now. In the 1980s, as Porky the Poet, he used to support Billy Bragg and worked on the Red Wedge campaign in 1987, an ill-fated attempt to get pop stars and comedians to mobilise the youth vote for Labour. Now, Jupitus sees the Occupy movement as embodying the spirit of anti-government protest.
Rod Dixon, artistic director of Red Ladder theatre company, which is staging Big Society, says: "I think the UK Uncut movement is very theatrical – turning banks into creches and that kind of thing. It was interesting that the protesters on the day of the royal wedding were doing something theatrical – dressing up as zombies, trying to set up a false scaffold. The fact they all got arrested for a potential breach of the peace shows that there's a lot of power in that, and that the establishment are afraid of it."
Young theatremakers such as 22-year-old Tom Ross-Williams aim to combine agitprop with the kind of immersive theatre pioneered by Punchdrunk, where the audience can choose what parts of the performances they would like to follow.
He decided to form a theatre company called Populace after the occupation of Fortnum & Mason by UK Uncut last year.
He and the Young Vic's artistic director, David Lan, planned to re-enact the occupation in the bar of the Young Vic on the weekend of the royal wedding but they were thwarted when the theatre decided to close its doors for the duration instead.
Next month, Populace will develop its ideas at the Junction in Cambridge, which includes staging an immersive recreation of a climate camp, putting the audience in the roles of protesters.
"I go to see a lot of political theatre – people like David Hare do wonderful work – but it is somewhat insular and preaching to the converted," says Ross-Williams. "If you look at what is attracting most new theatregoers, it's experiential theatre." Populace hopes to stage their first major work this autumn.
Although there has been no shortage of political theatre over the past few years, thanks to venues such as the Tricycle theatre in London, the trend has been towards verbatim theatre , in which a script is constructed from interviews or other documentary testimony – so much so that plays like the Tricycle's last work The Riots were recently attacked as predictable in a piece in the Independent by Tiffany Jenkins, director of arts at the Institution of Ideas thinktank. Playwright Stella Duffy says: "The vogue for verbatim theatre as a response to major events is really valuable, but my concern is that it preaches to the converted. People are often so very serious about doing political work and I respect that, but I think there's real place for political satire."
"We've seen some slightly lazy verbatim theatre," says Tim Roseman of Theatre503, a company that prides itself on its topicality. "It might be what they said, but it's still dull."
Roseman, Duffy, Dixon and Rachel Briscoe of Ovalhouse all cite the National's London Road, a verbatim musical about the impact the Ipswich murders had on the local community, as a groundbreaking piece of drama which showed the way forward. "It found a balance between the subject matter and being really political," says Briscoe.
Roseman says modern audiences demand a topical response to events faster than most theatres can deliver: "The 24-hour news cycle means we're much hungrier. We want things to be reflected very quickly and it's extraordinarily hard to make good art that way."
Theatre503 staged a coalition-themed season of short plays in late 2010; another called Hacked, inspired by the phone-hacking scandal, made its debut in October.
Briscoe says satire is more difficult than it was in the 1980s because "there aren't the obvious targets, in the way abolishing Section 28 was". Jupitus disagrees: "The coalition's a very clearly defined enemy. There's something quite desperate about the fact that they've had to do this deal to get power – it puts them on the back foot from the get go."
He suggests that even the jokes seem to hark back to the decade of Thatcher. Big Society features a scene in which Jupitus plays ventriloquist Lord David with a Clegg dummy on his knee, which he likens to Spitting Image's famous caricatures of David Owen and David Steel, with the latter literally in the pocket of the former.
Despite these echoes, Duffy, who has worked with Ross-Williams, is clear that the most exciting and overt political satire will come from the Occupy generation. "People have been so arrogant and sniffy about agitprop for so long that makers are scared to say, 'Yeah, I am making something in response to something that's upsetting me and I would like it to cause people to act'," she says. "I don't think young people have that worry and that's really exciting."