Читать книгу The Marowitz Compendium - Charles Marowitz - Страница 13

When Marowitz arrived in London in 1956 he was still writing and reviewing regularly for the Village Voice. Once in London Marowitz started writing for The Encore Reader as well. In fact The Encore Reader was what originally brought Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz together as they were both regular contributors (Marowitz 1990: 81). One of the first productions Marowitz had seen after moving to Britain was Peter Brook’s 1957 production of Titus Andronicus, at Stratford-upon-Avon, which Marowitz reviewed for the Village Voice. In the review Marowitz stated, ‘A short scalene-shaped man named Peter Brook, aged 33, is the greatest director in England’ (Marowitz 1990: 81). One of the things which had attracted Marowitz to the Encore publication was its association with Brook. Marowitz wrote a letter to Brook and invited him to a production he was directing at In-Stage of A Little Something for the Maid, by Ray Abell and Brook attended. Afterwards Brook and Marowitz met in London and then again in Paris where Brook originally introduced Marowitz to the idea of collaborating on the 1962 production of King Lear, with Paul Scofield.

Together Brook and Marowitz were primarily responsible for the injection of Artaud’s ideas into contemporary theatre practice (Kershaw 1992: 103). During 1963/64 Charles Marowitz and Peter Brook put Artaud’s ideas to the test with the Royal Shakespeare Company Experimental Group/Theatre of Cruelty at LAMDA. Initially Brook brought Marowitz into the RSC as his assistant on the famous 1962 production of King Lear, and it was through that relationship that the Theatre of Cruelty group came about (Chambers 2004: 152). The group’s stated intention was ‘to explore certain problems of acting and stagecraft in laboratory conditions, without the commercial pressures of public performance’ (Cole and Chinoy 1970: 430). This was the first full-fledged experimental project of its kind in Britain. Artaud saw the conventional use of language in theatre as a means of repressing society (Sontag in Artaud 1988: np). Artaud’s emphasis on non-verbal communication through movement and sound has influenced a trend in contemporary theatre towards prioritising the body over conventional literary interpretation.

It was Marowitz’s job during the first three months of the Theatre of Cruelty project to devise a series of exercises by which the actors’ untapped creativity could be accessed (Burns 1972: 178-179). This involved an effort to engage with areas of the actors’ minds and bodies which lay beneath, inaccessible to the conventional naturalistic techniques on which contemporary actors predominantly based their performances. Marowitz believed that Stanislavsky's most important discovery was the notion of ‘subtext’. Behind surface existence was something resembling a complex of needs, drives, symbols, and unformulated emotions which existed in the realm Artaud described as ‘that fragile fluctuating centre which forms never reach’ (Marowitz 1990: 85-86). The exercises Marowitz invented were intended to penetrate the realm of the actors’ primitive drives. They were designed to coax the actor into sounds, movements, spatial metaphors, and non-verbal improvisations which in theory derived from a place where individual human communication originates.

During the period when the Theatre of Cruelty was being formed it was also Marowitz’s job to audition actors who might join the experimental company (as distinct from the main RSC). Marowitz looked for actors who were open enough to accommodate highly unorthodox techniques. Instead of seeing actors on a one-to-one basis, Marowitz worked out a system of collective auditions whereby groups of eight and ten would interact with one another through improvisations, nonsense texts, and various theatre games engineered to test both their imaginations and their critical temperament.

Unlike a traditional rehearsal process which begins after actors have already been cast in particular roles, the Theatre of Cruelty’s creative process involved Marowitz and Brook putting the actors through a series of tests and exercises which primarily included improvisations and games in which actors’ personal imaginations were constantly being provoked into outward expression. The showing of the company's work was a kind of surrealist selection (Hewison 1986: 91). The pieces explored psychic interiors and the extremes of performance with wild bouts of violence and cruelty (Davies 1987: 159) while incorporating a variety of authors’ work (including John Arden, Shakespeare, Paul Ableman, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and others).

It was also during this season that Marowitz first wrote and directed his twenty-eight minute version of the collage Hamlet, which was later expanded to eighty minutes. Marowitz’s eighty-minute version of his collage Hamlet, was first produced with In-Stage for the Literarisches Colloquium, Berlin, at the Akademie der Kunste in 1965. It went on to the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre in London in 1966 (Schiele 2005: 3). The company also presented a version of Genet’s The Screens, at the Donmar Studio, established in 1961 by West End producer Donald Albery as a rehearsal space for his production company Donmar Productions (whose name is derived from the first three letters of his name and his wife’s middle name, Margaret) and the RSC then turned the space into a theatre called The Warehouse (Chambers 2004: 72). Later, the company of eighteen actors was integrated into the main Royal Shakespeare Company and went on to utilise the language and techniques developed during the Theatre of Cruelty for the 1964 production of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade, directed by Peter Brook. Marowitz was offered a permanent position with the company but he turned it down because he did not want to become trapped in Brook’s shadow.