The Marowitz Compendium

Introduction

During 1963 and 1964 Charles Marowitz and Peter Brook put Artaud’s theories into practice with the Royal Shakespeare Company Experimental Group/Theatre of Cruelty at LAMDA. This was the first full-fledged experimental project of its kind in Britain and injected Artaud’s ideas into contemporaneous theatre practice. Marowitz was the first American to direct at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the first American to direct at the Czech National Theatre (while collaborating with Vaclav Havel). A police raid on his theatre in London during the screening of an Andy Warhol film was the subject of a debate in the British Parliament involving a future prime minister. He wrote over a million words and numerous figures who have come to shape contemporary theatre and larger society were influenced in the formative stages of their careers by Marowitz. Marowitz directed the British premieres of Pablo Picasso’s The Four Little Girls, Samuel Beckett’s Act Without Words II, Arthur Miller’s The Man Who Had All The Luck, Saul Bellow’s The Bellow Plays, and the 1966/67 production of Joe Orton’s Loot, which received the Evening Standard Award for Best Play of the Year.

It has been seven years now since Marowitz’s passing on 2 May 2014 due to complications from Parkinson’s disease. It is important with perspective and hindsight to consider the significance of his life and career and his impact on theatre and the times in which he lived. Without Marowitz the theories and ideas of Antonin Artaud would potentially remain obscure. The entire trajectory and ecology of theatre and performance since the 1960s has been considerably influenced by this alone. The present-day popularity of ‘immersive theater’ was a mode of performance originally popularized in British theatre by Charles Marowitz and Allan Kaprow in the famous ‘Happening’ at the 1963 Edinburgh Drama Conference. The conference may be seen as marking the point when the experimental practices of the Edinburgh Fringe began to proliferate more widely to the rest of the UK.

In 1968 Marowitz started the Open Space Theatre on Tottenham Court Road in collaboration with Thelma Holt. The Open Space was an experimental theater run as a repertory company and introduced many important American writers to the British Theatre including Sam Shepard, Terence McNally, and John Guare. In many respects the Open Space was an Off Broadway Theatre based in London. It hosted an American season of plays in 1969 and continued to premiere many more American plays. The work at the Open Space also included British theatre artists such as Howard Barker and Mike Leigh in the early stages of their careers. There is a gap in our collective understanding of this important figure and a gap in currently available literature about him.

I collaborated with Marowitz four times and he sent me his new writing for feedback over the last fifteen years of his life. In an informal sense I inherited Charles’ collection of theater journals, magazines, and trade publications, and in reading my way through the material I found a number of gems that have not seen the light of day in fifty years or more. I also had works of his that have not been published as well as several hours of recorded interviews with Marowitz and his close associate Jim Haynes. This inspired me to organise a compendium of Marowitz’s unpublished and otherwise obscure but intensely valuable writings.

The purpose of The Marowitz Compendium, is first to spark a posthumous revaluation of Marowitz oeuvre and second to provide an edited collection that surveys his entire contribution to the theatre for generations encountering his work for the first time. The collection contains previously unpublished material including a selected section from Marowitz’s memoir Out of the Melting Pot (2014) as well as the play script for Tea with Lady Bracknell (1981). There is also obscure material of great value such as Marowitz’s 1966 interview with Roger Blin, director of the world premiere of Waiting for Godot. Included in the collection is work that is emblematic of his oeuvre and ‘greatest hits’ or at least reference to them such as the Broadway production diary for Sherlock’s Last Case (1987). The Epilogue is Marowitz Remembered (2014) by Thelma Holt his lifelong friend and closest collaborator.

This chapter introduces Marowitz and places him within the context of contemporaneous theoretical movements and changes in broader culture. In addition, indicators of his influence on performance are identified and discussed. This introduction provides a map of the book so that readers can more easily navigate each section. It also provides a brief description of the methodology, and a set of claims about substantive and theoretical issues at the core of the compendium’s purpose. This book shows that Charles Marowitz had an impact which has not been fully acknowledged or examined to date. It contributes to a more comprehensive and dynamic understanding of the forces which shape theatre and culture today. The audience for this book includes students, postgraduates, specialists, and general readers interested in drama and the history of contemporary theater.

Volume II

Due to the Covid pandemic it was not possible to access the Marowitz archive at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin during the preparation of this collection. The archive contains adaptations of Timon of Athens, and Tartuffe, Poetry by Marowitz (Approximately 75 Pieces) and correspondence with Peter Brook, William Saroyan, Glenda Jackson, Vaclav Havel, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, Julie Harris, Lynn Redgrave, Trevor Nunn, Robert Brustein, Robert Lewis, Mel Brooks, Thelma Holt, Dudley Moore, Eric Bentley, Hermione Baddeley, Edward Albee, Larry Gelbart, John Schlesinger, Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, Kenneth Tynan, Steven Berkoff, Sam Wanamaker, Jonathan Miller, Janet Suzman, and Christopher Fry. Given proper permissions there will almost certainly be a second volume of The Marowitz Compendium, containing some of this unpublished material once the pandemic is over. There are also Village Voice columns, personal columns from the Army (Chateauroux), The Promising Young Man (BBC script), Breach of Faith (BBC script) containing handwritten notes, play reviews, articles, and profiles from the London Guardian, London Times, and the New York Times including lengthy profiles of Peter Brook, Ingmar Bergman, Harold Pinter, and Glenda Jackson. Beyond that there is also the Open Space archive at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Biography of Charles Marowitz

1932–2014

Early Years

Marowitz was born in Manhattan on January 26th, 1932, and raised in poverty, the third child of exclusively Yiddish-speaking immigrants, on the Lower East Side of New York City. At the age of sixteen he read The Fervent Years (1945) by Harold Clurman. Clurman detailed the troubled history of the Group Theatre (1931-1941). At the age of seventeen Marowitz founded his own acting company on the Lower East Side of New York. In 1950, while still in High School Marowitz became the youngest theatre critic for the newly formed Village Voice and experienced first-hand the advent of the Off Broadway movement. Greenwich Village, where Marowitz spent his youth, was also the site of Off Broadway Theatres. ‘Off Broadway’ is a geographical demarcation but also has roots in definitions of the alternative theatre movement in America (Aronson 2000).

During the early 1950s Marowitz considered American life to be dominated by superficiality and conformity. He was drafted by the US Army during the Korean War but ended up spending two years stationed in France. He believed French culture could have a civilising influence upon him and began to imagine that he would have a more meaningful life in Europe. In due course he endeavoured to find a drama academy in France that he would be able to attend. However, there were no G.I. Bill approved drama schools in France whereas in England there were approved drama schools in both Glasgow and London. Marowitz opted to train at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art in the hope that he would be able to return to France on a regular basis.

London

At the age of twenty-four Charles Marowitz moved to London, during the summer of 1956. Continental influences as well as new American drama were beginning to open new possibilities for the future direction of the British Theatre (Shellard 1999: 17). Along with the work of Ionesco and Adamov and the London premiere of Waiting for Godot, in 1955 at the Arts Theatre, Joan Littlewood’s productions of Brecht promised change in theatre subject matter and practices. These productions were followed by the London tour of the Berliner Ensemble in the autumn of 1956. On 8 May 1956, Look Back in Anger, premiered at the Royal Court Theatre.

The Suez crisis as well as the Hungarian uprising in 1956 led to reverberations in British society. Other factors such as the growing power of young people, changes in family relationships, and new standards of sexual behavior would lead to widespread social upheaval in the two decades which followed. As a relative outsider Marowitz became conscious of certain tendencies within British culture. He found people obsessed with class identity. He found a society in the midst of radical change, given to dissent, anti-establishment fervor, and new trends which were convulsing British culture.

According to Marowitz, he became aware at LAMDA for the first time of the British as opposed to the American approach to acting. He developed a perception that the British approach was somewhat weighted towards voice and movement. He found that from his point of view, the British approach at the time was almost exclusively concerned with externals and uninterested in the concept of inner technique (Rebellato 1999: 78). In his view, Stanislavsky was given mindless lip service. Only one class at LAMDA theoretically touched on his ideas, a bi-weekly improvisation session. Marowitz considered these sessions to be a travesty of Method work, consisting exclusively of improvisations of little playlets worked up by the students under the instructor’s supervision. When some of the other American students who were already versed in the Method suggested that the work they were doing was devoid of appropriate actions, subtext, and palpable contact, the instructor did not appear to understand or be versed in the terminology they were using (Marowitz 1990: 14-15). Marowitz became bitterly disillusioned at LAMDA as did two of his American classmates who left the course. Marowitz wanted to follow suit but had he done so he would have lost his G.I. Bill subsidy and would have had to return to the United States, which he was unwilling to do.

Marowitz considered the training at LAMDA to be backward, although he did encounter some interesting work on verse technique and he was exposed to the habits of established British classical theatre practitioners. He found that acting was thought to be merely a mode of projecting language and physical technique. In his view the school was intellectually and artistically a kind of British feeder for the West End theatre establishment and he felt himself becoming increasingly anti-social. Marowitz decided to branch out into the London theatre itself and directed his first theatre production in Britain at the London Unity Theatre. He directed a production of his own adaptation of Gogol’s comedy Marriage, and the production received a favourable notice in The Times (Marowitz 1990: 17). Marowitz was then asked to work on a Living Newspaper called World on Edge, being devised at Unity in November 1956 on the subject of the recent Suez crisis and the Hungarian uprising (Chambers 1989: 340-345).

Shortly after that production Marowitz started a Method workshop at Unity Theatre which he used to introduce a number of English actors to the principles and ideas of Stanislavsky although Unity had run a Stanislavsky based school in the late 1930s (Chambers 1989: 361). He also developed his own exercises and ideas. Marowitz decided that instead of using material such as Clifford Odets, Gorky, and 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.