Читать книгу The Marowitz Compendium - Charles Marowitz - Страница 14

Following Marowitz’s participation in the landmark Happening during the 1963 Edinburgh Drama Conference, he and Traverse Theatre artistic director Jim Haynes, who had helped sponsor the conference, began to collaborate. In 1964 Marowitz persuaded future Nobel laureate Saul Bellow to allow him to direct three one-act plays Bellow had written, at the Traverse Theatre club in Edinburgh. The Traverse Theatre with Haynes (from Louisiana) was intended as a permanent year-round home for the kind of experimental work that was taking place during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival for three weeks in August every year. The programme became known as The Bellow Plays, and later transferred to the Fortune Theatre in London. Also, in 1964 Marowitz directed Jack Richardson’s Gallows Humour, at the Traverse during the Edinburgh Festival. In 1965 he directed Peter Barnes’s first work entitled Sclerosis, and Peter Weiss’s play A Night with Guests, at the Traverse (McMillan 1988: 105–110). Haynes believed that in order to maximise the trajectory of the Traverse’s work, both in terms of prospective talent as well as finance, a London venue needed to be directly linked with the Traverse in Edinburgh so successful productions could transfer. After a prohibitively expensive season of work at the Arts Theatre, Haynes relocated the venture to the Jeanetta Cochrane in London in 1966 and asked Marowitz to be associate director (Hewison 1986: 112).

In 1966-1967 Marowitz directed Joe Orton’s Loot, at the London Traverse, which received the Evening 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.