CLIFFORD COCKER was a lifelong political activist whose commitment to the socialist cause impacted profoundly on the ideas, beliefs and culture of all who came to know him and to experience his work.

His career was driven by his war on ruling-class hegemony and bourgeois values and drew on his own impressive range of talents as actor, comedian, director, lecturer, scriptwriter, avid reader and journalist. The transformative work as arts editor for the Morning Star continued right up to his untimely death in August 2021.

Cliff was born on June 27 1949 in the deprived and heavily German-bombed Liverpool 8. His father, Len, and mother, Maeve, both initially Labour Party members, were actively engaged in local campaigns to improve the lives of working people.

Having previously lived in occupied Palestine, Cliff’s parents were no strangers to oppression and hardship, and in the wake of Labour support for the Truman Marshall plan, resigned from the Labour Party and joined the communists.

Their high-principled socialist politics shaped Cliff’s life, as did Maeve’s fiercely political Irish Republican heritage.  

His interest in theatre started while he was still at school when he joined the Liverpool Youth Theatre and acted in Nikolai Gogol’s The  Government Inspector. Here he made his first connection between performance and political activism in a play that brilliantly satirises human greed, stupidity and political corruption.

He went on to read English at Newcastle University, where his interest in performance flourished, and then progressed to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, where he directed a version of Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal, an allegory of faith and doubt in plague-ridden medieval Sweden.

This period was also punctuated by a six-month tour with the Scottish left-wing agitprop theatre group 7:84, in which Cliff acted in John McGrath’s popular but radical The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil.

It was at the theatre school that Cliff met his life partner, Mary Adossides. They went on to work together on numerous theatre projects, she acting in many of his productions.

As students they had developed a joint interest in the role theatre could play as a didactic art form and became especially committed to the work of Bertolt Brecht, his poetry, his vision and his theories on performing and performance.

Together they moved to Paris, where Cliff directed Trevor Griffiths’s Occupations. The play was set in 1920 at the time of the Turin Factory Council movement, which led to a socialist insurrection and would influence Antonio Gramsci, who flagged up the hegemony of the bourgeoisie in the battle of ideas.

Occupations indirectly reflected the failed uprising of 1968 in France and splendidly articulated the views that Cliff upheld: that capitalism maintained control not just through violence or political and economic coercion but through ideology propagating its own values and norms so that they became the “commonsense” values of all.

Cliff’s continued choice of plays, cabarets and comedies explored related themes such as resistance and protest, unemployment, racism and slavery and the horror of war. In his production of Fears and Miseries of the Third Reich, which had been premiered on May 21 1938 in Paris, he adopted Brecht’s forms of didactic drama, bringing theory into practice and incorporating direct analysis with the audience, argument, song and visual projections into the dramatic presentation.

While at school, Cliff had made friends with the later-to-become actor, writer and stand-up comedian Alexei Sayle, also from a local communist family. He and Alexei continued to work and write together into adult life.

In his autobiography Thatcher Stole My Trousers, Sayle writes how Cliff, on his return from Paris, mounted About Poor BB, a cabaret of Brecht songs and poems focusing on the  more political and overtly communist aspects of the playwright’s work.

Cliff, it seems, used this opportunity to school the actors in Brecht’s performance theories and the principles of his epic theatre approach.

Cliff, Sayle and Bill Monks went on to write their own satirical material entitled: What a Load of Balkans. This proved to be a highly welcome addition to the repertoire of their Threepenny Theatre, aptly named in recognition of Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera.  

It heralded a period of zany sketches in which these fast-talking Liverpudlian comedians played pubs, clubs and student venues with their scouse wit and in-your-face humour. It was at this point that Cliff joined the Communist Party, and he remained a member for the rest of his life.     

Meanwhile, Cliff and Mary were also busy setting up the Artery Band and the Artery Choir, bringing together a repertoire of international revolutionary songs by, among others, Hanns Eisler, Mikis Theodorakis and Alan Bush, which they performed in trade union clubs and other community venues until the GLC was axed by the Thatcher government in 1986 and the grants dried up.

At that time they responded to the ad in the Morning Star placed by the theatre arts department of Addis Ababa University seeking to recruit lecturers in the field. Ethiopia had a Marxist government led by Mengistu Haile Mariam, who had deposed dictatorial emperor Haile Selassie and led many progressive campaigns to resolve illiteracy, health issues and the famine that killed many thousands of Ethiopians. Naturally, Mengistu was demonised by the West.

They were offered a two-year contract, and Cliff soon discovered a wealth of African playwrights, resulting in a co-production of Tsere the Colonialist, by Ethiopian playwright and poet Mengistu Lemma, about the resistance to the Italian occupation (1936-1941); the local resistance veterans who attended stood up after the performance and sang their revolutionary songs.
 
Cliff also co-directed Brecht’s hilarious and subversive comedy Bourgeois Wedding, adapted to Ethiopian realities. At the same time he co-directed, with ANC members supported by the Ethiopian government, a memorable commemoration of the Soweto uprising of June 1976 with songs, poems and the emblematic gumboot dance at Addis Ababa’s National Theatre..

When Cliff and Mary returned to London, they set about making a permanent home for their young family. After a period of working for Soviet Weekly, when it closed, he took on a lecturing post in performing arts at the College of North West London (FE).

Here he opened doors to students both politically and professionally through a stream of top-class productions including, among many: Jim Cartwright’s Road; Ola Rotimi’s Nigerian version of Oedipus Rex, The Gods Are Not To Blame; Brecht’s The Good Person of Sichuan; Euripides’ The Women of Troy and Aristophanes’ Lysistrata; George C Wolfe’s The Coloured Museum; Kafka’s Metamorphosis; and his own written version of The Passion.

Cliff also started and edited a glossy annual college magazine by media studies students and enjoyed seeing many of his proteges move on to established careers.  

Journalism, the transfer of ideas and its challenge to the status quo has been the golden thread through Cliff’s life. From selling the French communist newspaper L’Humanite on the streets of Paris in the 1970s to writing for the Soviet Weekly, and from becoming an outstanding arts editor for the Morning Star for more than a decade to editing the first French version of the paper in support of Jeremy Corbyn in 2015, Cliff more than made his mark.

His personal charm, intelligence, searing comic skills and clarity of purpose drew people around him and endeared him to many. Meanwhile his eclectic tastes in the arts, music and poetry showed him to be always open to the new and receptive to great ideas.  

Cliff was a fanatical supporter of Liverpool FC, the Reds, and would have wholly concurred with their legendary manager Bill Shankly’s dictum: “The socialism I believe in is everybody working for the same goal and everybody having a share in the rewards. That’s how I see football, that’s how I see life.”

Apart from his many friends and wider family, he leaves his beloved daughters Jane and Lizzie, his much-loved grandchildren Millie, Orla and Arin, and, of course, Mary, who has been his treasured wife and partner for over 40 years.

Clifford Cocker, born June 27 1949 in Liverpool, died August 25 2021 in London.