From filmed pleasure to Fun Palace

Abstract

The Fun Palace, a collaborative enterprise initiated by the radical theatre producer Joan Littlewood and architect Cedric Price in early 1960s London articulated a response to the ‘increased leisure’ available to postwar British society. A critical model for cultural production in which civics met pleasure, the Fun Palace project aimed to construct situations for playful exchange conducted through self-directed actions as a way to activate audiences. Pleasure for all – a ‘breakthrough to total enjoyment’, in opposition to what was seen as existing commodified leisure practices – became understood as a critical agenda pitched against the elitist and interventionist Labour government's 1965 White Paper, A Policy for the Arts: The First Steps. Enforcing class-based distinctions between the high arts and popular entertainment, state arts policy failed to address the key role played by the media in the rise of the leisure society. In analysing British communications in the 1960s, the cultural critic Raymond Williams argued that, rather than opposing fine art with popular entertainment, social growth could only be achieved through the circulation of public and independent media, opportunities for which were at the time limited within the corporate structure of British broadcasting and press.