Daily Inspiration Quote by Trevor Nunn

There is something deliciously audacious in Trevor Nunn’s memory: being handed the General Strike and being told, essentially, to make it sing. The line carries the DNA of Stratford’s mission in the postwar British theatre ecosystem: take the “serious” national story and translate it into something immediate, popular, and stageable. Nunn isn’t bragging about his erudition so much as revealing an institutional reflex - a belief that theatre can metabolize history, even labor history, into entertainment without neutralizing its force.

The specific intent is practical and slightly defensive. Nunn frames the commission as his “very first thing,” positioning himself as a young professional entering a machinery of prestige where you prove your worth by tackling Big Subjects. The General Strike isn’t just content; it’s a test: can you make collective action legible to an audience trained to expect individual protagonists and catharsis?

The subtext is the central tension of British cultural production: class conflict repackaged for largely middle-class consumption. “Documentary material” nods to authenticity and politics, while “musical” signals accessibility and seduction. Put together, they hint at theatre’s tightrope walk between agitation and assimilation: history as spectacle, dissent as repertoire.

Context matters: the General Strike (1926) still carried ideological voltage, and Stratford’s imprimatur gave it a kind of official permission. Nunn’s anecdote captures a moment when the stage wanted to be both archive and amplifier - and when making workers’ struggle into song was either radical democratization or the most elegant form of containment.