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".^[1]