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Brecht and the Culture Industry: Political Comedy on Broadway and the West End, 1960-1965

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Brecht and the Culture Industry: Political Comedy on Broadway and the West End, 1960-1965 BRECHT AND THE CULTURE INDUSTRY: POLITICAL COMEDY ON BROADWAY AND THE WEST END, 1960-1965 A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Anne Elizabeth Beggs May 2009 © 2009 Anne Elizabeth Beggs BRECHT AND THE CULTURE INDUSTRY: POLITICAL COMEDY ON BROADWAY AND THE WEST END, 1960-1965 Anne Elizabeth Beggs, Ph. D. Cornell University 2009 This dissertation investigates the development of popular political drama on Broadway and the West End in the first half of the 1960s. It puts English and American theatre histories in dialogue, suggesting an approach to Anglo-American theatre history as both an institutional and a cultural frame. By investigating the incorporation of Brechtian drama and theatre theory into New York and London theatres, I argue that although Brecht’s works themselves failed on the mainstream stage, an embrace of Brechtian theory by select theatre practitioners informed a new type of radical political comedy that succeeded on the West End and Broadway in the early 1960s. Chapter 1 is an intellectual history of the perception and reception of the avant- garde in the late 1950s through the 1960s, paying special attention to the work of Susan Sontag. It establishes a critical and cultural milieu in which we can interpret the unfolding development of Brechtian theatre theory. The different critical methodologies that came out of this changing moment reflect the relationship between the avant-garde, postmodernism, and comedy that informs the subsequent cultural history of 1960s Anglo-American theatre. Chapter 2 examines the Brechtian dialectical theatre and its relation both to the historical avant-garde and to a postmodern critique of culture. I postulate that Brecht’s project for a political theatre operates through a comic dialectic and that a sense of comedy is essential in realizing the radical potentialities of Brecht’s theatre. Chapter 3 traces the English-language dissemination of Brecht’s dramas and theories, which in the early 60s unfolded in the context of on-going attempts to (re)define the “avant-garde” in relation to English and American realism. In Chapters 4 and 5, I present Beyond the Fringe, Oh What a Lovely War, and Marat/Sade as case studies of successfully radical productions on Broadway and the West End which placed history into a critical dialectic and challenged the audience to question where history has become myth or a narrative of transcendent truth, through varying adoptions of comic, Brechtian, and Artaudian performance. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Anne Elizabeth Beggs received a B.A. in Theatre in 1997 from the School of Theatre at the University of Southern California. She received her M.A. in Theatre from Cornell University in January 2006. iii Dedicated to my parents, Tom and Flo Beggs, and my sister, Jane. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My sincere thanks go to the wonderful librarians at the Billy Rose Theatre Collection and the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, both at the Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center, New York City, a branch of the New York Public Library. The Special Collections librarians at Princeton University, Syracuse University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of California, San Diego were also very helpful as I conducted research. My heartfelt gratitude to Michael Steinberg of Brown University, Martin Puchner of Columbia University, and Sabine Haenni and Timothy Murray of Cornell University for all of their suggestions and support for this dissertation. My friends and colleagues in the Theatre Arts Ph. D program at Cornell, especially Megan Shea, Diana Looser, and Lindsay Cummings, have been an invaluable personal and intellectual resource. Most of all, my deepest thanks to David Bathrick and J. Ellen Gainor for their generous support and guidance, and for their patient reading of many drafts throughout this project. v TABLE OF CONTENTS BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH …iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS …v TABLE OF CONTENTS …vi INTRODUCTION …1 CHAPTER 1: Critical Histories: …12 The Comic Cold War Clash of the Avant-Garde and Postmodernism CHAPTER 2: Brecht and the Postmodern Avant-Garde …54 Politics, History, and the Dialectics of Comedy CHAPTER 3: Brecht in New York and London: …100 History and Critical Contexts CHAPTER 4: Brecht’s Legacy: …146 Political Satire and Historiography CHAPTER 5: Marat/Sade: …190 The Mad Grin of History CONCLUSION …236 BIBLIOGRAPHY …242 vi INTRODUCTION Theatre Histories Writing a sixties cultural history, one comes upon an interesting phenomenon: although “The Sixties” is usually written around the 1968 tent-pole—the contexts leading up to 1968 and its aftermath—there is another remarkable indicator of rupture: 1963. British historian Arthur Marwick, for one, in his comprehensive (and exhaustive) history The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, c.1958-1974, divides the study at 1963. There were “The First Stirrings of a Cultural Revolution, 1958-1963,” and then “The High Sixties” unfolded from 1964 to 1969.1 Bruce McConachie’s American Theatre in the Culture of the Cold War stops at 1962. Sally Banes boldly declares that “[i]n 1963 what we now call the Sixties began” in her monograph on “Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body.”2 When we consider this particular date, it is also notable that the majority of American theatre histories that start here focus upon the burst of experimental performance, such as Banes’s Greenwich Village 1963; James Harding’s and Cindy Rosenthal’s collection Re-staging the Sixties: radical theatre and their legacies; Bradford Martin’s The Theater is in the Street: Politics and Public Performance in Sixties America; Steven Bottoms’s Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement; and Mike Sell’s Avant-Garde Performance & the Limits of Criticism: Approaching the Living Theatre, Happenings/Fluxus, and the Black Arts Movement. These studies offer a fuller history of American experimental and activist theatre, charting the influence and legacies of such groups as the Living Theatre; the Bread and Puppet Theatre; the San Francisco Mime Troupe; At the Foot of the Mountain; the Open Theatre; the Performance Group; the Free Southern 1 Marwick, The Sixties. 2 Banes, Greenwich Village 1963, 1. 1 Theatre; El Teatro Camposito; the Diggers; and the Play-House of the Ridiculous; performance spaces such as Caffe Cino, Café La Mama and the Judson Poets’ Theater; and performance art such as Happenings and Fluxus. Indeed, in a special May 2002 Theatre Survey issue on theatre in the sixties, guest editors James Harding and Mike Sell confess to this strategy yet again, admitting “a loss of this [historical] sense of plurality when, at the expense of mainstream and popular theatres, scholarship focuses too narrowly on the experimental theatrical practices of the 1960’s, a practice that we admittedly perpetuate in the special issue of Theatre Survey.”3 In the interest of expanding our understand of sixties theatre history, the following study investigates this moment of cultural change in the context of the mainstream, commercial theatre industry. The interrogation of Broadway theatre is also, inevitably, an engagement with the mainstream London theatre scene as well. As chapters 3 and 4 of this study will demonstrate, the post-World War II theatre audiences in both New York and London were linked by ever-increasing similarities in demographics and a shared culture of affluence and consumption, and the cross- Atlantic dialogue between critics, playwrights, directors, and producers was vital to the development of new works, translations, and artistic techniques. My aim is not to gloss over the significant differences in the development and production processes in each theatre realm, but I think that the balance of handicaps in each realm (i.e., the lack of a public subsidy for the arts in the U.S.; continued censorship by the Lord Chamberlain in London until 1968) informed the cross-Atlantic theatrical dialogue in an important way. The system of public subsidy for the Royal Shakespeare Company, for instance, was instrumental in supporting the development process behind Peter Brook’s groundbreaking production of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade, which is the focus of chapter 5. Likewise, as English director Richard Eyre has pointed out in a popular 3 Harding and Sell, “Research and Pedagogy for a Turbulent Decade,” 2. 2 history of British and American theatre in the twentieth-century, “the American theatre continued to provide the body of [post-1956] British theatre—if not with the life-giving jolt—then at least with a stimulating transfusion.”4 In fact, by the mid- 1960s there were already signs that these respective institutional obstacles were weakening: in 1965 President Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act, laying the groundwork for federal subsidies through the NEA and the NEH, and in Britain also in 1965 the power of the Lord Chamberlain was being tested and subverted by the Royal Court Theatre with their “club performance” productions of John Osbourne’s A Patriot for Me and Edward Bond’s Saved.5 By putting American and British theatre histories into dialogue—such as McConachie’s American Theatre in the Culture of the Cold War and Harding and Rosenthal’s Radical Theatres and their Legacies; and Dominic Shellard’s British Theatre Since the War and Stephen Lacey’s British Realist Theatre—this study is, in part, an argument for Anglo-American theatre history as both an institutional and a cultural frame. A key trope in these theatre histories of the 1960s is an increasing engagement with the concept of the avant-garde in general, and with the legacy of Bertolt Brecht in particular. By investigating the incorporation of Brechtian drama and theatre theory into New York and London theatres, I argue that although Brecht’s works themselves failed on the mainstream stage, an embrace of Brechtian theory by select theatre practitioners informed a new type of radical political comedy that succeeded on the West End and Broadway in the early 1960s.
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