The Marowitz Compendium. Charles Marowitz

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СКАЧАТЬ Hamlet, was first produced with In-Stage for the Literarisches Colloquium, Berlin, at the Akademie der Kunste in 1965. It went on to the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre in London in 1966 (Schiele 2005: 3). The company also presented a version of Genet’s The Screens, at the Donmar Studio, established in 1961 by West End producer Donald Albery as a rehearsal space for his production company Donmar Productions (whose name is derived from the first three letters of his name and his wife’s middle name, Margaret) and the RSC then turned the space into a theatre called The Warehouse (Chambers 2004: 72). Later, the company of eighteen actors was integrated into the main Royal Shakespeare Company and went on to utilise the language and techniques developed during the Theatre of Cruelty for the 1964 production of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade, directed by Peter Brook. Marowitz was offered a permanent position with the company but he turned it down because he did not want to become trapped in Brook’s shadow.

      London Traverse

      Following Marowitz’s participation in the landmark Happening during the 1963 Edinburgh Drama Conference, he and Traverse Theatre artistic director Jim Haynes, who had helped sponsor the conference, began to collaborate. In 1964 Marowitz persuaded future Nobel laureate Saul Bellow to allow him to direct three one-act plays Bellow had written, at the Traverse Theatre club in Edinburgh. The Traverse Theatre with Haynes (from Louisiana) was intended as a permanent year-round home for the kind of experimental work that was taking place during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival for three weeks in August every year. The programme became known as The Bellow Plays, and later transferred to the Fortune Theatre in London. Also, in 1964 Marowitz directed Jack Richardson’s Gallows Humour, at the Traverse during the Edinburgh Festival. In 1965 he directed Peter Barnes’s first work entitled Sclerosis, and Peter Weiss’s play A Night with Guests, at the Traverse (McMillan 1988: 105–110). Haynes believed that in order to maximise the trajectory of the Traverse’s work, both in terms of prospective talent as well as finance, a London venue needed to be directly linked with the Traverse in Edinburgh so successful productions could transfer. After a prohibitively expensive season of work at the Arts Theatre, Haynes relocated the venture to the Jeanetta Cochrane in London in 1966 and asked Marowitz to be associate director (Hewison 1986: 112).

      In 1966-1967 Marowitz directed Joe Orton’s Loot, at the London Traverse, which received the Evening Standard Award for Best Play of the Year. Previously the play had a difficult run in the regions. Nonetheless Marowitz was approached by producers Michael White and Oscar Lewenstein about the play in 1966. During the regional run the cast sensed that audiences were not engaging with the material and so they began to add one-liners and inject their own collective invention into the ‘performance script’. When Marowitz was approached about doing the play at the London Traverse he asked to see the original version of the script and when he read it he was astonished by its sophisticated literary constructions and the subtle black comedy. He immediately agreed to stage the production during the London Traverse’s first season and then worked on the script with Orton.

      Marowitz’s directorial approach to the play was to make social and moral excesses plausible, and to find the truth which lay deep within the material. The production opened in September 1966 and transferred to the Criterion Theatre in London’s West End in January 1967. Loot, ran for 342 performances (Shellard 1999: 127) but despite positive reviews the play continued to cause offended patrons to leave the theatre in the middle of the performance. Nevertheless, the production achieved such a profile that during the West End run directed by Marowitz the producers also negotiated the film rights for the play. The production also became a point of reference during the ‘dirty plays’ controversy initiated by the impresario Emile Littler, a controversy based around collective hostility towards displays of nudity, promiscuity, and most of all the representation of homosexuality (Marowitz 1990: 104–105).

      Ten months after the play opened, Orton was murdered in his sleep on 9 August 1967 by his lover Kenneth Halliwell who then committed suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills (Shellard 1999: 126). The murder-suicide was headline news and Marowitz was subsequently approached by numerous journalists and researchers interested in any insights he could provide about Orton. Although Marowitz and Orton did not particularly like each other on a personal level (Marowitz 1990: 109), they shared a similar irreverence and hostility towards the British establishment which found expression in their collaborative work together.

      Open Space

      In 1968 Marowitz opened the Open Space Theatre on Tottenham Court Road in collaboration with Thelma Holt (Hewison 1986: 200), a young actor and producer who had recently completed training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Marowitz 1974: 7-10). Marowitz first met Holt when she was acting in Leonid Andreyev’s play, He Who Gets Slapped, at the Hampstead Theatre Club in 1964. Marowitz said he explained that he wanted to create a permanent home for a small resident company and mount experimental and unorthodox theatre and performance, including works which were not plays necessarily but collaborations collectively devised by a permanent ensemble. Holt was interested, according to Marowitz but only on the basis that she would have an active managerial role in the new theatre.

      Over the next twelve years the Open Space would become one of the leading experimental theatres in Britain and introduce new works by such British playwrights as Howard Barker, Trevor Griffiths, Howard Brenton, Peter Barnes, David Rudkin, John Hopkins, and Mike Leigh. The Open Space would also introduce new work to the British theatre by many important American playwrights including Sam Shepard, John Guare, Terence McNally, Lawrence Melfi, Charles Ludlam, Mike Weller, as well as work by Jean Claude van Itallie.

      Marowitz was interested in utilising the best material from Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway. Such material in addition to being novel material within a British context, was also written to be performed in very similar conditions to those provided at the Open Space. In his introduction to Off Broadway Plays 2, Marowitz explained that ‘The Open Space Theatre rapidly became a kind of extraterritorial Off Broadway outpost.’ (Marowitz 1972: 10) In many respects the Open Space was an Off Broadway Theatre in London. The Open Space was known for environmental pieces, Shakespeare collages, and premieres of new writing, including the 1971 British premiere of The Four Little Girls by Pablo Picasso. Picasso and Artaud had been friends and it was the link with Artaud that, at least in part, piqued Marowitz’s interest in directing the text as part of Picasso’s 90th birthday celebrations (Schiele 2005: 53).

      The first production presented at the Open Space was Fortune and Men’s Eyes, by John Herbert. The play opened on 10 June 1968 and was set in a Canadian reformatory. The audience was ushered in through a fire exit instead of the main entrance and walked in single file through a narrow passage way on the iron fire escape. A metal door was opened by an armed guard who took the audience’s tickets while two inmates stared silently from behind iron bars as the audience entered. Another guard with a submachine gun supervised from above. The audience was fingerprinted, and then ushered into a cell until twelve people were in each cell. Meanwhile loudspeakers blasted announcements related to prison life until the sound of a shower and the appearance of the four actors who were central to the play marked the beginning of the performance.

      The production was an attempt to break down the traditional barriers associated with a proscenium arch theatre and to implicate the audience directly in the action of the play. The audience is made to adopt a role and is inculcated into a subjective view of a criminal justice scenario. This in turn had the potential to alter the individual audience member’s view as it relates to the criminal justice system. Before the foundation of the Open Space Marowitz had repeatedly stated that, in his view, there was no theatre movement in Britain which could be described as avant-garde. His fundamental concern was with breaking down the conventional presentation of character (Schiele 2005: 111). The run of the play was extended at the Open Space until 4 October 1968. It transferred to the Comedy Theatre in London's West End on 17 October (Moffat 1978: 69).

      In 1970, during the Open Space’s third year of operation, the theatre received £1500 СКАЧАТЬ