tions of the previous generation was also to extend to the re-
evaluation and even outright rejection of that generation's percep-
tion of the past. A nation's history is not simply a record of events but
is an agreed version of the past which embodies present values. As
such it is a facet of what Marxists have described as that "ideological
superstructure" which encompasses other art-forms, the communica-
tion media and the education system and is employed by the ruling
group to perpetuate its power and dominance. To question or to
attack that mythic history is, therefore, according to one's political
viewpoint, tantamount either to mounting a revolutionary assault
upon a bastion of the establishment or to committing an act of trea-
son. Any variation from that myth--or, worse still, any intentionally
alternative interpretation--may in consequence provoke a quite inor-
dinate and even hysterical degree of censure from whichever interest
group perceives its values to be threatened. In 1987, for example, Jim
Allen's Perdition was to provoke accusations from Zionist organisa-
tions of prejudice and factual distortion. In response Max Stafford-
Clark, the artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre where the play
was scheduled for performance, took the decision shortly before its
opening night to cancel the production. There was some irony in the
fact that, as a director of the Joint Stock Theatre Company, Stafford-
Clark had during the 1970s been one of the foremost promoters of
plays that offered an "alternative" view of history.

The problem with Jim Allen's play was that it suggested that, with
the aim of building up a case for the establishment of the new state of
Israel, Hungarian Zionists had collaborated with the Nazis in send-
ing Jews to the gas-chambers. In spite of attempts by Allen to draw a
distinction between Judaism and Zionism, there were accusations
from the Jewish lobby of "anti-semitism" and the dramatist was
accused of employing factual inaccuracies and out-of-context quota-
tions in an attempt to mount an ideological attack. While disputing
the validity of such accusations, Allen was prepared to admit that his
socialist sympathies for the oppressed had indeed in this instance led
him to sympathise not with the Zionists but with the dispossessed
Palestinians. In common with many left-wing dramatists during the
previous thirty years, Allen had himself come face to face with that
sacred cow, agreed history, assault upon which would, apparently
inevitably, always be taken as an attack upon a whole culture.

Edward Bond, more than any other recent dramatist, has
repeatedly attracted the kind of criticism heaped upon the unfortu-
nate Allen. His iconoclastic portrayal of the Royal Family, politicians
and other national figures of the Victorian era in his nightmarish
historical fantasy, Early Morning ( 1968), and of Britain's most re-
vered national dramatist, William Shakespeare, in Bingo ( 1974), in

-2-