Interviews

Theatre-goer. Berthold Brecht; Early Morning; fringe theatre; Hedda Gabler; impact of the Lady Chatterley trial; Italian theatre; Liverpool theatre; Living Theatre; Marat/Sade; Mother Courage (Gaskill production); Royal Shakespeare Company; Saved; Paul Scofield's Lear; theatre dress-code; Monica Vitti; The Wars of the Roses.

Conducted by Dominic Shellard on 17/07/06

Pages 1 2 3 4 5

Interview continued...

TD: Absolutely wonderful experience of that. Then there, again talking about the RSC, that, say, was… I can't remember, was it ‘62 or was it ’63? ‘63 I think it was - ‘62 or ’63 - and then the Marat/Sade, and the Marat/Sade was ‘64. There again another epic type play, completely different period of course, but a debate play of a kind that obviously that Shakespeare is not, and in prose Peter Weiss, Peter Brook, and that was again an extraordinary experience and it is one that I have got a few memories of here. I saw it in November 1964 - in fact to be precise November 20 - and of course what was fascinating about that was the beginnings of the presence in our lives of another figure, and that's Berthold Brecht. So the central dialectical debate that takes place there between De Sade and Marat, we were beginning to see as imitative of or derivative from the kinds of dialectical debates that we were going to see later on or at the same time in Mother Courage and other plays of Brecht, so Brecht begins to come on stage for us in a way. I'm not saying that Weiss is just an imitator of Brecht - by no means, but that kind of combination of spectacle and debate, spectacle and debate and the attempts to join the two together seems to me to be an extremely adventurous kind of thing to try and do. Brook directed that, Peter Weiss of course was the author and somehow and in such a way as to not let spectacle overcome debate or the other way round; so it's almost as if English theatre - which has a long tradition of spectacle and certainly did from the nineteenth century and you know, just up the road at Drury Lane was indeed, you know, were very prominent musicals in the period - and here on the stage of the RSC at the Aldwych, you had spectacle but you had debate. And how to hold those two together I think in part is how the Marat/Sade develops. So I find it a brilliant production, and you know, the way in which the lunatics were as if categorised by specific sorts of traits, I have got one here – ‘one forever twisting a piece of twine’ - and then some brilliant strokes of stage invention, I’ve got some notes here. 'The swaying oblong sheet held up by the lunatics for Marat’s nightmare’. And then a very interesting note, the beating of De Sade with the girl’s hair. That was Glenda Jackson playing Charlotte Cordet was it not?  Quite. 'The beating of De Sade with the girls hair' and what I have in brackets here may be of interest, 'What an advance that this could be shown on stage – but presumably only because it is an historical play.'. So if you're talking back to the Lady Chatterley thing and so on and so forth, that still, you know I am still surprised to see that possible I mean. Today let's not talk about it, but we're talking history here so, that's my little comment on that. And then yes the oil funnel, rasped across the grille to represent the guillotine. Again so the inventiveness with, you know the transformation of realist objects into other realist objects while keeping the quality of them in themselves, the rapidity of it. And again, the economy of it, the economy of the hair across the back, the economy of the rasp across the grille. And then a number of clown-like figures that were continuous. I have also got some notes on a thing that I think emerges very much in the theatre in that period, and that is Sade’s important point that he is discovered lying in the isolated misery of the Bastille that - and this is a quote from the play - 'Only bodies matter. I saw for the orifices of the body, convinced that only through those could any human warmth be generated'. Now, that's a theme, obviously, that has been taken up, elaborated both in theatre, in academe and shall we say in popular culture… I won't say ever since then, but with that coming on the agenda in that way in a very dialectical and political play because Brecht is a bit anti-flesh I think, Brecht is an anti-sensualist, I think, in much of his work: there is not much sex in Brecht at all. A lot in his own life, but not much on stage! I always thought his interest in Galileo’s portrayed as a sensual man but sensual in what? Food. But these kinds of plays, and if you take them together with plays that I didn't see in the period but plays by figures such as Genet, a lot of whose work is done by the Royal Court, but I think there was a production of one of his plays by the RSC in that period and it may have been… it was either Le Balcon or maybe The Screens later on. But someone like Genet is equally interested in that public-private split and the effect of flesh on both. So I made a note of that, and that is something that you know, perhaps might be taken up in other areas, but I am going to say both Marat and Sade are supremely isolated individuals and they hold apart from particular parties and factions. And my kind of summing up of what the play is about from the point of view of Sade is 'nothing but the body is true. That is a reservoir of such cruelty that it must continually be battered and chastised to reach any state of human warmth.’ Thus Sade links - long before Camus and Artaud - the doctrines of the theatre of the absurd and the theatre of cruelty.  My next note is rather neat but somewhat superficial, however I did go to the Theatre of Cruelty season at the LAMDA in 1963. My memories of that - again a long time ago - but my memories of that are - I think I am right in saying this - of again Glenda Jackson, rising up from a coffin as Christine Keeler, I certainly remember that! And I think there was also an early run of a chopped up Marowitz Hamlet there. But that was a very off off-season organised at the LAMDA - again by Brook - and this was meant to begin to promote these ideas of the Theatre of Cruelty which were then in some sense to be embodied in something like the Marat/Sade.

DS: You mentioned Christine Keeler. To what extent did you feel theatre at that time was beginning to reflect or comment on contemporary political events?

TD: I think it was doing its best to, and I think it was impelled towards it by the satire boom because actually it was a form of theatre, indeed began in the establishment as theatre.  Beyond the Fringe had already run in Edinburgh for some time I think just prior to the Keeler affair, sometime prior, about ‘59, ‘60. So That Was The Week That Was  was having great fun. Private Eye of course was delirious, so I think all of that meant that a) there were people who were in that world who also had a foot in theatre through revues and shows and b) that yes theatre felt that it too, felt there was material here to deal with. Of course its business is not just contemporary, it's history presenting the past and the classics from their political angle is also important. But I suppose in retrospect you could say there was a certain inflection to do with the politics of the day, in relation to the shenanigans of kings in The Wars of the Roses and the attempt to as it were simplify, you know the lies and the smoke screens put across all of this by the sheer starkness of the throne and that's what everyone's after. A bit of a long shot, but I have no doubt in my mind that Hall and Brook saw themselves as wanting via the classics, via new theatre from abroad, via new work in the theatre here to make some kind… yes, to make some commentary on society.

DS: So does that sort of lend credence to your view that the sixties didn't really start in 1960, it perhaps started more in ’62, ’63?  ‘63 is the great year of the Beatles, ‘63 is the year when Macmillan resigns, where there seems to be this kind of shift in social mores.

TD: Yes, it is very debatable, I am just reading Dominic Sandbrook’s book. The way in which he is wondering about periodisation and has come to the conclusion that in a sense ’58- ’63 or ’56 through ’63 represents a kind of period and is the fifties, and then from ‘63 on we have all these other phenomena. I think it is always going to be difficult to sort that out, where the sixties as it's commonly known begins, because one could equally say something like ‘65. He goes through the various periodisations in his book. The point I certainly - as someone growing up in that period, the point that I certainly think is that the fifties doesn't end in 1960, the fifties carries on in all sorts of ways, and I think one of the ways to indicate its disintegration is the disintegration of the ruling elite. As soon as you see a ruling elite openly stabbing each other - Wars of the Roses -  then I think is a fair sign that it is beginning to collapse because a great deal of the way in which the show is kept on the road is that everybody is solid, and you know [that] however outrageous the actions, [if] people at the top keep saying 'it's all all right, it's all all right, we have everything under control,' people by and large will go along with that. But when it busts out in the way that it did, and the way that it did is a combination of you know, the ruling elite in the country house and the working class girl from - not south London, where is she from, Surbiton?  Surrey? Somewhere in Surrey and she is a whore and she is making her way that way - so the moment that gaffe is blown, then it becomes very difficult to maintain the fiction that we are as John Major used to say 'back to basics'.  Here are basics, so I think yes, I think the gaffe got blown then. Secondly, I think that the fifties ended with the election of Alec Douglas-Home as Prime Minister and as Tory leader. That really did seem an extraordinary anachronism. That really, you know, nobody could really swallow that and the confidence that the then Tory party had that such a figure would be swallowed as Prime Minister, not elected as you know in those days but emerging…

Interview continued...

Pages 1 2 3 4 5