Tell Me When It Hurts: the ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ Season, Thirty Years On

Abstract

The piece which follows was written in 1964 after seeing the Theatre of Cruelty season, directed by Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz at the then recently opened LAMDA Theatre in West London, and has never been published in full before. It was my attempt to sum up discussions with colleagues and friends in the weeks after performances, and has served something of that purpose with students later. Following from this I was asked by Albert Hunt and Geoffrey Reeves if they could quote from it in their recent book on Peter Brook in the CUP ‘Directors’ series. Since then, another author has quoted from this source, and, in the event of further excerpting, it seems wise to publish the document in full so that any future quotation will be in recognition of the context in which the statement is made. There are other reasons. Looking back, 1964 can be seen as a crucial crossroads in the British theatre, and the interest in Artaud and Theatre of Cruelty one of the manifestations of a growing frustration with the British actor's inability or unwillingness to physicalize the action rather than intellectualize and verbalize it. It takes up the gauntlet thrown down by Littlewood in that year with Oh, What a Lovely War! and the formation of E15 Acting School by Margaret Bury, as with the Copeau-style training work initiated by John Blatchley at Central School, which led to his formation, with Christopher Fettes and Yat Malmgren, of Drama Centre. The founding of these two schools signalled a significant shift in the training methods and programmes for British actors. The Theatre of Cruelty season seems in retrospect to sum up Brook's frustration at being unable to realize his ideas in the British theatre. Subsequent writers, who in the main never saw the performances, have tended to mark down the season as a great success, instead of the dismal failure I thought it – whether in terms of finding solutions to the problems posed or of keeping any sort of faith with the ideas propounded by Artaud. So a mythology has grown up. Looking at what I wrote then from the position of today I stand by my critique, though I also see what I gained from the performances in the development of my own work, since they revealed clearly a number of blind alleys to be avoided and also enabled me to view the area of training actors to be the crucial issue to be addressed if the British theatre was to move forward. After this, Brook moved Paris and began to experiment further with the problems he was pursuing by importing actors, and consequently skills and styles, from other countries and traditions. Early in his time there, I was present in the Meubilier National, along with an audience of school-children, to witness work in progress on forms of narrative. The experience was as enlightening and enlivening as the Theatre of Cruelty had been stultifying. Though I assured him that I had nothing but praise, Brook asked me not to publish anything on what I had seen, and I did not want to offend him. I have often wished that I had set down my analysis of that experience to counterbalance what I had written on Theatre of Cruelty. I am happy to publish the following article to give an alternative view of this crucial moment in British theatre history, but I regret not being able to put the positive companion piece alongsid.