An alternative history

‘Reading Angus Calder's The People's War changed all my thinking as a writer’, wrote Hare. ‘An account of the Second World War through the eyes of ordinary people, it attempts a complete alternative history to the phoney and corrupting history I was taught at school. Howard Brenton and I attempted in Brassneck to write what I have no doubt Calder would still write far better than we, an imagined subsequent volume ‘The People's Peace’, as seen, in our case, through the lives of the petty bourgeoisie, builders, solicitors, brewers, politicians, the Masonic gang who carve up provincial England.’

When the projected photograph of Churchill on VE day 1945 opens Brassneck, the time of the action at the beginning of the play – the end of the Second World War – is established before a word has been spoken. Within a few moments of his entrance, the apparently old and senile Alfred Bagley is offering the van driver money for his load and begins his descent into Stanton. Named as the transaction is completed, Bagley is defined by it; he is the personification of the rejuvenation of post-war British capitalism. As the elders of the town fluster after the Labour landslide election victory, it is Bagley who is the lower-middle-class intermediary in the class war with Bassett and Edmunds; it is Bagley who becomes the compromise candidate for Master of the Lodge. Through him the audience is initiated into the secret pseudo-religious mysteries of the English establishment and the way the rules of the game of post-war politics were drawn.