The Marowitz Compendium. Charles Marowitz
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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 (now worth roughly £40,000) from the Arts Council but was otherwise struggling financially. Marowitz and Thelma Holt decided to arrange film screenings of a new Andy Warhol film called Flesh, about a male prostitute who is pressured by his wife to raise money for her lesbian girlfriend’s abortion. Warhol was a popular sensation at the time. Marowitz and Holt believed that the film screenings would generate some much-needed income for the theatre and also reflect Marowitz’s interest in the avant-garde and Greenwich Village experimentation. The film was screened three or four times daily for three weeks, starting in January 1970. On 3 February thirty-two police constables and a superintendent from Scotland Yard raided the Open Space during a scheduled screening and ordered the projectionist to stop the film. The film and projector were confiscated by the police as were the Open Space’s documents, books, and receipts (Miles 2010: 292).
The following day the raid was headline news and there was shortly thereafter a debate in the House of Commons about the film, involving then Labour Home Secretary and future Prime Minister James Callaghan. Ultimately, the Director of Public Prosecutions advised the Metropolitan Police that a criminal prosecution with respect to charges of obscenity was not warranted. Nevertheless, a magistrate’s hearing on the lesser charge that the theatre had allowed members of the general public into a licensed club was allowed to go forward. The Open Space was fined £220 which was then paid by Andy Warhol himself in a gesture of public support for the theatre (Marowitz 1990: 143–145).
Works known as the Marowitz Shakespeare collages which were produced at the Open Space included Hamlet, A Macbeth, An Othello, The Shrew, Measure for Measure, and Variations on the Merchant of Venice (Marowitz 1978: 7–27). Marowitz’s intention in creating these works was primarily to confront the substructure of the plays in an attempt to test or challenge, revoke or destroy the foundations on which classical plays were revered and generally accepted. To accomplish this Marowitz challenged Shakespeare's presentation of theme and character and altered it to suit his own interpretation or intentions. He objected to the reverence with which he believed these plays had been treated and endeavoured to extract something new and pertinent by breaking them into pieces and reassembling them in a particular way (Schiele 2005: 15). Marowitz wanted to create a different vantage point and obtain an inside view of external developments which he believed would potentially alter the entire resonance of the theatrical experience. In challenging the institutionalisation of Shakespeare’s canonical texts Marowitz sought to reinvigorate these works and redirect their potential efficacy within culture and society in parallel with work his colleague Peter Brook was doing about the same time.
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