The Marowitz Compendium. Charles Marowitz

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СКАЧАТЬ Arthur Miller he would use Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Webster (Marowitz 1990: 17). After one year at LAMDA Marowitz transferred to the Central School of Speech and Drama but found his experience there to be very similar to that at LAMDA and after his G.I. Bill subsidy ran out, the Method workshop became his primary source of income. He immersed himself as much as possible in the study and practice of Stanislavsky but found that applying this practice to texts by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Webster was problematic just as others such as Michel Saint-Denis had found before him. Marowitz soon became associated with the Method label and at the age of twenty-nine, wrote his first book entitled The Method as Means (1961).

      In-Stage

      Marowitz began writing criticism for the Encore Reader magazine, the theatrical bi-monthly publication, which was originally started by Clive Goodwin in 1954 (Marowitz, Milne, Hale eds. 1965). Also, in 1958 Marowitz persuaded the British Drama League to allow him to convert a rooftop studio at Fitzroy Square in London into his own experimental theatre which he then called ‘In-Stage’ (Miles 2010: 125). At In-Stage Marowitz attempted to define a non-naturalistic style, building on the theories of the early Absurdist and Surrealists. This effort involved essentially a paring down of language as far as possible while establishing an ingrained awareness of what things are essentially, rather than what they seem to be on the surface. Marowitz’s experimental work was intended to run in parallel with classical theatre productions and commercial theatre and was warmly received by the critic Alan Pryce-Jones of the Observer (Marowitz 1990: 19-20).

      In-Stage went on to produce a play by J.B. Lynne called The Trigon, with performances by Timothy West and Prunella Scales. The Trigon, transferred to Brighton and then the Arts Theatre Club in London’s West End. At In-Stage Marowitz also mounted the British premiere of Samuel Beckett's Act Without Words II, Arthur Miller’s The Man Who Had All the Luck, and William Saroyan's The Cave Dwellers. In-Stage was also the first theatre in Britain to produce works by the playwright Murray Schisgal. This was the period immediately before Marowitz’s affinity for Artaud found expression in his theatre practice.

      Before long—one can never date these things but it was around the early Sixties—I realized I had been blinded by Strasberg in precisely the same way he had been conned by Stanislavski, and that in some kind of prophetic way, my attempt to apply Method to classics was really an indication of an entirely different temperament, one which found its realisation in the ideas of Artaud (Hewison 1986: 90-91).

      At the In-Stage theatre at Fitzroy Square spectators would line up in a small room below the rooftop studio where they were offered tea and biscuits by Marowitz’s friend and collaborator Gillian Watt. When the show was about to start audience members would move in single file up the narrow staircase that led to the tiny platform stage. Marowitz would often be backstage working the lights and sound tape. After the performance the audience would file out and Gillian Watt would stand at the bottom of the staircase holding a wicker basket into which members of the audience would drop coins and sometimes notes.

      At In-Stage the actors received no wages, and the audience paid no admission, which was also a characteristic of many contemporaneous Off Off Broadway theatres in New York (Crespy 2003). The productions were both offbeat and highbrow as were the audiences. Many of the audience members were readers of the New Statesman which, along with the British Drama League magazine, were the only publications In-Stage could afford to advertise in. The audiences at In-Stage formed the beginnings of a new theatre-going public, a public which would eventually patronise places such as the Roundhouse, UFO, Ambiance, Soho Poly, the Oval House, and the Open Space. These were the forerunners of what would eventually become the London Fringe.

      Theatre of Cruelty

      When Marowitz arrived in London in 1956 he was still writing and reviewing regularly for the Village Voice. Once in London Marowitz started writing for The Encore Reader as well. In fact The Encore Reader was what originally brought Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz together as they were both regular contributors (Marowitz 1990: 81). One of the first productions Marowitz had seen after moving to Britain was Peter Brook’s 1957 production of Titus Andronicus, at Stratford-upon-Avon, which Marowitz reviewed for the Village Voice. In the review Marowitz stated, ‘A short scalene-shaped man named Peter Brook, aged 33, is the greatest director in England’ (Marowitz 1990: 81). One of the things which had attracted Marowitz to the Encore publication was its association with Brook. Marowitz wrote a letter to Brook and invited him to a production he was directing at In-Stage of A Little Something for the Maid, by Ray Abell and Brook attended. Afterwards Brook and Marowitz met in London and then again in Paris where Brook originally introduced Marowitz to the idea of collaborating on the 1962 production of King Lear, with Paul Scofield.

      Together Brook and Marowitz were primarily responsible for the injection of Artaud’s ideas into contemporary theatre practice (Kershaw 1992: 103). During 1963/64 Charles Marowitz and Peter Brook put Artaud’s ideas to the test with the Royal Shakespeare Company Experimental Group/Theatre of Cruelty at LAMDA. Initially Brook brought Marowitz into the RSC as his assistant on the famous 1962 production of King Lear, and it was through that relationship that the Theatre of Cruelty group came about (Chambers 2004: 152). The group’s stated intention was ‘to explore certain problems of acting and stagecraft in laboratory conditions, without the commercial pressures of public performance’ (Cole and Chinoy 1970: 430). This was the first full-fledged experimental project of its kind in Britain. Artaud saw the conventional use of language in theatre as a means of repressing society (Sontag in Artaud 1988: np). Artaud’s emphasis on non-verbal communication through movement and sound has influenced a trend in contemporary theatre towards prioritising the body over conventional literary interpretation.

      It was Marowitz’s job during the first three months of the Theatre of Cruelty project to devise a series of exercises by which the actors’ untapped creativity could be accessed (Burns 1972: 178-179). This involved an effort to engage with areas of the actors’ minds and bodies which lay beneath, inaccessible to the conventional naturalistic techniques on which contemporary actors predominantly based their performances. Marowitz believed that Stanislavsky's most important discovery was the notion of ‘subtext’. Behind surface existence was something resembling a complex of needs, drives, symbols, and unformulated emotions which existed in the realm Artaud described as ‘that fragile fluctuating centre which forms never reach’ (Marowitz 1990: 85-86). The exercises Marowitz invented were intended to penetrate the realm of the actors’ primitive drives. They were designed to coax the actor into sounds, movements, spatial metaphors, and non-verbal improvisations which in theory derived from a place where individual human communication originates.

      During the period when the Theatre of Cruelty was being formed it was also Marowitz’s job to audition actors who might join the experimental company (as distinct from the main RSC). Marowitz looked for actors who were open enough to accommodate highly unorthodox techniques. Instead of seeing actors on a one-to-one basis, Marowitz worked out a system of collective auditions whereby groups of eight and ten would interact with one another through improvisations, nonsense texts, and various theatre games engineered to test both their imaginations and their critical temperament.

      Unlike a traditional rehearsal process which begins after actors have already been cast in particular roles, the Theatre of Cruelty’s creative process involved Marowitz and Brook putting the actors through a series of tests and exercises which primarily included improvisations and games in which actors’ personal imaginations were constantly being provoked into outward expression. The showing of the company's work was a kind of surrealist selection (Hewison 1986: 91). The pieces explored psychic interiors and the extremes of performance with wild bouts of violence and cruelty (Davies 1987: 159) while incorporating a variety of authors’ work (including John Arden, Shakespeare, Paul Ableman, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and others).

      It was also during this season that Marowitz first wrote and directed his twenty-eight minute version of the collage Hamlet, which was later expanded to eighty СКАЧАТЬ