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InterviewsChristopher Baugh John Bury; censorship; critics; designers; Stephen Joseph; Everyman Theatre, Liverpool; National Theatre Company; Oh What a Lovely War!; repertory; Royal Shakespeare Company; The Society for Theatre Research; theatre lighting. conducted by |
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Interview with Christopher BaughInterview continued... LJ: OK. Prior to 1968, when the Theatres Act abolished censorship, did you ever feel that a play was deliberately or gratuitously pushing the laws of censorship? CB: There was one play where I honestly, a play by John Arden called Left-Handed Liberty, which I saw at the National Theatre - No! Armstrong's Last Goodnight, not Left-Handed Liberty - with Albert Finney. It was a National Theatre touring production which I saw at Manchester when I was an undergraduate and I was surprised that I had not heard about any murmurs of censorship and I felt that that would have been a ten times better play. It needed a freedom and I felt it was battering at the edges of something. Obviously battering at the edges of censorship. I don't really think, I'm not sure how aware the theatre was of censorship as a restriction, really until the fury over Edward Bond's Saved. It affected me personally once at university. We wanted to put on a play about the Moors Murders. They were very recent and this play was written about Myra Hindley and Ian Brady and we were going to stage it in the studio. It was inevitably an amateur production. It was done by university undergraduates in our studio, which just like yours in Sheffield was a converted chapel. Most decent studios are converted chapels or churches. But because it would have a public audience, the script had to be sent away to the Lord Chancellor's office at least three weeks before performance, and it was banned. They would not allow us to perform it. On other occasions we had play scripts that the student drama society were putting on or the drama department itself were putting on and we would come back and I remember one, because it was a line I had to say, the word ‘arse’ was deleted but I had to replace it with ‘bum’. I could say ‘bum’ but I couldn't say ‘arse’. They were trifling, silly things, but the Myra Hindley play that was an actual imposition of censorship. LJ: Is there a particular theatre company that you associate with consistently good productions? CB: Of the period? LJ: Of the period and perhaps continuing into now. CB: Immediately thereafter the period, the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool, really beginning round about 1970 and continuing for most of the 1970's. That had the same quality. By that time I was in Manchester and my wife was the theatre photographer for the Everyman and some of my ex-students. In one year from Manchester, Tony Cher, Bernard Hill, the designer Joe Van Eck went across to the Everyman and I used to drive the car and assist my wife loading films and stuff like that and it was always a wonderful surprise arriving in Liverpool and going through the door and thinking 'Oh my God I'm going to see whatever by Max Fish. I've never seen that before. Excellent!'. The going to the theatre, the actual atmosphere of the theatre, the fact that in the bar downstairs you could get Bertorelli ice-creams and Newcastle Brown. Now in the late sixties, early 1970's, you could not get Newcastle Brown south of Newcastle and Bertorelli ice-cream was like Ben and Jerry's, it was a very esoteric, rare imported ice-cream. So the fact that this scruffy theatre had this wonderful bar where you could get a bowl of chilli con carne, Newcastle Brown and Bertorelli ice-cream, that was going to the theatre. The bar was also the home of the Liverpool poets and there was the most wonderful graffiti all over the place and I remember the manager of that theatre who used to, not in a dress suit, he used to stand at the front of the theatre as the audience came in. As you entered the front doors, there were stairs going up ahead of you and they were old wooden stairs, because it was a converted (on Hoke Street) Congregational Chapel so it had a big gallery up top. There were these wooden banisters coming down and at the bottom there were two newel posts with knobs on them and I remember going in one day and the manager was standing there with the knob in his hand, it had come off, and he said 'You know, I've stuck that on once a week for the last month. I don't think our audience likes it' and he just chucked it away. It was this really run-down theatre: as you sat in the stalls, the scenery for the next week's show, un-painted or half built, was standing around the walls because there wasn't the storage space. There was still gas lighting in the corridors and the toilets and things like that, but it had an atmosphere of enormous creativity and excitement and daring, and again, you trusted the actors. As an audience you developed a relationship with a group of people that you liked. Bill Nighy was there and Jonathan Pryce and you wondered what they were going to do that week. You trusted them to take you on a journey, whatever the play was. They had a bigger commitment to new material, so you saw more of Alan Bleasedale plays that were premiered there, so you couldn't really be going to watch plays. Although you began to develop a relationship with the author, 'Oh, it's another Alan Bleasedale, I wonder what that's going to be'. That's where jobs for the boys, where Bernard Hill, you know where that kind of started in Liverpool political theatre. They had a very active community programme, both in terms of schools and in terms of working men’s clubs and factories and things like that. They really dug their feet in. They were to my perception a kind of a model of how a theatre company might work. Round about 1976/77 they were quite well known. Aaron Dosser, the artistic director at that time, left. I think he went to Nottingham Playhouse. What do you do? That theatre would have been started by excited, committed people who had left the drama department in Bristol. Terry Hands and somebody else, Peter James. They'd left Bristol as new graduates, taken a couple of shows to Edinburgh, found this deserted chapel, found a bit of money and started this company. Now, getting on for almost ten years later, the company was quite well known, so they advertised for an Artistic Director. Of course people who were quite famous applied, because 'Hey, Liverpool Everyman, I want to go there, I want to go there'. Actors consciously turned down other jobs to go there. It's a kind of a standard, they begin to get funding from the Arts Council, they decide that they are going to rebuild the theatre, they were going to build from scratch then they decide to rip the place apart and convert it and it was never the same again. It has lost that, it's almost as though theatre companies have got a life cycle, rather almost biologically they are born out of the energy and commitment of young people, typically who find their energy as undergraduates or as trainees. Doing something for free because they love it, they leave, their energy finds the ways of doing it, typically takes place in Edinburgh, they get a bit of funding and they get somewhere together and they start a company and that energy pushes them forward. They then achieve and are recognised by the critics, they are recognised by the press and then what do they do? There are some who say 'We need a van, we need an administrator, we need offices, we need some premises, we need a rehearsal room' and before you know where you are you've got to find £100,000 a year before you put on any shows. You've got to then think about what shows you put on, because you know you've got to pay the salaries of your administrators, you've got to pay for your computers increasingly, you've got to pay for your vans, your buildings, your rent and all the rest of it and there are others who are saying, who are noticing that their creativity and their energy are being absorbed into management rather than creating new theatre. Most companies split apart. One or two people will leave because they are plucked to stardom, if you like, as a writer or as an actor, some will stay on and the company will slowly die down again. A lot of interesting research was done in the 1980's early 90's on dance companies, which all paradigmatically, almost typically start in that way, even more so than theatre companies. The Everyman never really survived its new premises. This fabulous new building, which was totally re-built never really survived that. It's lost its way. It's a shame. LJ: What you've said so far regarding your early experiences of theatre
seem to CB: No, only in seeing. I saw, what's it called? World War One... Oh, What a Lovely War!, it totally escaped me - that's age. I saw it when it just came on tour. It left London and came to Manchester, the Palace Theatre Manchester, I saw it on a matinee and it was stunning. There were about 150/200 people in the audience, which was in a 2500 seat theatre and it was embarrassingly empty. It was a fantastic performance. I saw that and went with my tutor, who knew her quite well. My tutor at Manchester was a guy called Steven Joseph, who started professional Theatre in the Round in this country. As well as being a fellow in drama at Manchester University, he was the Artistic Director of the theatre in Stoke-on-Trent and every summer he ran a season at the Library Theatre, what was then the Library Theatre in Scarborough. He took students there and I went along one summer as a stage manager and he took us along and we got to see this Joan Littlewood, so that was my only contact with it. I recognised its values from my tutorship, if you like, with Steven Joseph. It was a great show, very difficult, the cast getting 150/200 people, because 200 people in a studio is packing it out, but imagine 200 people in a theatre like the Lyceum. It was quite embarrassing. Interview continued... |
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