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Charles Marowitz became a key figure in an important new phase in the development of contemporary theatre. The groups and people associated with Marowitz would serve to delineate the antithetical purpose of the alternative theatre and establish an engagement between this sector and the commercial theatre establishment which could be argued had dialectical characteristics. A synthesis of alternative and mainstream characteristics has emerged and influenced contemporary theatre as a whole into a more comprehensive level of engagement with society. In this a somewhat more representative and comprehensive number of communities and voices find representation. One could go to the most commercial theatre in the present day and identify characteristics, such as an increased emphasis on physicality and non-verbal expression, or the irreverent deconstruction and decentring of canonical texts, and trace these characteristics back to the influence of the alternative theatre. In several societies, there is a tendency for mainstream theatre to draw direct influence from the alternative theatre if it exists.

In a conventional proscenium arch actor/audience scenario the audience is a part of an active/passive relationship. In conventional narrative-text-character based theatre the reception of the performance will be optically and auditorily focused and selective with regard to the incidents and their narrative significance. The audience member will sit in a designated position which orientates in a certain direction. The seat is fixed to the floor and the lights are extinguished except for a specific area where the performance activity is located. The audience is expected to acquiesce in a level of subordination and passivity. Marowitz’s theatre sought varieties of alternatives to such a rigid format.

These changes were intertwined with his own personal journey as well as contemporaneous events. Marowitz experienced the advent of Off Broadway firsthand as a youth in Greenwich Village and as a theatre critic for the Village Voice climbing fire escapes and attending unconventional performances in unconventional locales. His move to Britain during the watershed year of 1956 combined with his iconoclasm and his pattern of confronting established practices and institutions were perhaps in some way emblematic of the changes in the theatre itself during the period.

During the earlier period of his career Marowitz was caught up in prevailing theatrical preoccupations of the day. During the 1960s his theatrical temperament transformed from an interest in applying Stanislavski’s methodology to the ideas of Artaud whom he first read in 1958. In his own sensibility Marowitz shifted away from socially committed plays and ideology to an emphasis on aesthetic innovation and metaphysical exploration. In particular, when he was working with the Traverse he found that there was a predominant emphasis on new writing. He decided that no amount of new writing would really change theatre itself or free it from a state of aesthetic obsolescence so he began to search for new forms and techniques which would transcend the mundane and the temporal (Marowitz 1973: 8-9). He became committed to the creation of a collective instrument based around the idea of a permanent company. Working collectively in collaboration with a director but without specific reference to a single playwright per se would, in his view, by virtue of its artistic chemistry, create a new and original kind of artistic specimen that was more efficacious than the written word itself (Marowitz, Interview, 2011). It was in order to realise this vision that Marowitz originally collaborated with Peter Brook on the Theatre of Cruelty season in 1963/64, which effectively popularised the ideas of Artaud within contemporary theatre. He created the Open Space Theatre Company in 1968 which was the only example in Britain of a laboratory company run on a repertory basis. Marowitz’s development in this direction started with his experience of the Group Theatre and the emergence of the ‘American Method’ or rather American derivations of Stanislavski. In particular, Stanislavski-based improvisational techniques were an important formative influence on Marowitz.

Characteristics of his work included a subversion of conventional narrative, the exploration of non-traditional time, experimentation with location and space, an emphasis on a diversity of voices, and new approaches to the physicalisation of performance, experimentation with audience and stage configuration and relationship (Total Space), artistic experimentation with form and content, Post-Brechtian forms of political engagement, non-traditional venues and audiences, non-narrative and language based (physical theatre), use of American ‘Method’ techniques, anti-class based form and content, and the use of obscene language and nudity. In addition included experimentation with language (physicalisation and obscenity), experimentation with form (performance art and one-acts), and a breaking down of traditional hierarchies in terms of the economics and process of production as well as the actor/audience relationship. Further he explored issues of identity as expressed in theatre in ways which problematise and challenge perception of identity in terms of any single overarching or homogenising categorisation.

During the 1950s General Eisenhower, who embodied in many ways older attitudes, was elected to the US presidency twice and former soldiers who were now in their thirties applied the discipline and group ethos that was engrained during the War into civilian activities. Meanwhile the younger generation who had greater educational opportunities as well as fewer financial restrictions and arguably, as a consequence, a greater emphasis on individual fulfilment emerged as a characteristic of the new ‘Baby Boom’ generation which by the late 1950s was entering its teenage years. Teenagers began to assert their identities and it was in part because of these contrasts and contributing factors that a generational clash grew on both sides of the Atlantic, in which many American influences, including what may be described as an emerging youth culture, played an influential role.

In 1956, in Britain, for example more than eighty local councils banned screenings of the hit musical film Rock Around the Clock, amid widespread fears it would foment teenage delinquency. The system of theatre censorship in Britain and taxation combined with a lack of public subsidy led to a situation where theatrical output was restricted. American work, meanwhile, was not created with the intention of satisfying these conditions and over time had a role in changing the prevailing environment in Britain.

In the years after World War II an economic boom in the United States eventually created economic conditions during the 1950s which led to a need for an alternative to Broadway in order to cultivate experimentation, discover new voices, and test untried material which in the pre-war period would have been possible on Broadway (Aronson 2000: 4). By 1951 New York was the richest city in the world and an inflationary boom during the 1950s drove the costs of production on Broadway to unprecedented heights while at the same time Broadway’s audiences were being lost to the cinema and to television (Bottoms 2004: 19). The increasingly severe economic imperatives of commercial Broadway Theatre meant that conventional producers were unwilling or unable to risk money on unfamiliar names and unconventional material so that full scale productions produced on Broadway of plays by unknown playwrights became very difficult.

In this context the Off Broadway sector emerged in Greenwich Village. Greenwich Village was also the place where the ‘counter culture’ started as a rebellion against 1950s conformity. On the Road, by Jack Kerouac was written in 1951 (published 1957) and figures such as William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Thelonious Monk, and Jackson Pollock, to name a few were revolutionising literature, music, and the visual arts. There were important distinctions between Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway but there was also a certain continuity. During the late 1950s and early 1960s Off Broadway theatres also became increasingly commercial and as a consequence young theatre artists and writers began to form (and perform) in tiny cafes and non-theatre spaces such as church basements, lofts, and living rooms. Most of these spaces were also located in Greenwich Village or in the East Village and became associated with the label Off Off Broadway.

The emergence of these non-theatre spaces coincided with the blossoming of the downtown arts scene. Poets, dancers, painters, musicians, and filmmakers were simultaneously experimenting with anti-narrative based art forms and means of collective creation in comparable ways. Julian Beck, the co-founder of the ground-breaking Living Theatre, for example, was himself an abstract expressionist painter of some renown. Together with his wife Judith Malina they saw the purpose of the Living Theatre was to introduce the new movements expressed in experimental dance, music, painting, and poetry into live theatre (Bottoms 2004: 25). In his 1961 book Theatre of the Absurd, Martin Esslin suggests that theatre had a delayed reaction to movements which had broken the boundaries of other traditional art forms in the earlier part of the century such as abstract expressionism.

The mixed media interventions known as ‘Happenings’ were part of a fundamental layer in the development of alternative theatre during the 1960s. In 1911 Boccioni used part of a wooden window frame in a piece of futurist sculpture, and ever since 1911 or 1912 when Braque or Picasso, depending on which source one follows, glued a piece of real material to a canvas and originated collage, actual elements have been incorporated into painting. The picture moved out into the real space of the room. As an environment the painting then took over the room and finally as a sort of, environment with action, became the alternative theatre form known as ‘Happenings’ based at the Reuben Gallery in New York (Kirby 1965: 22). ‘Cultural’ and ‘ideological’ transactions took place and were brought about through the rupturing of established norms and contexts which were facilitated by the anti-hierarchical use of space, interdisciplinary content, and inclusive modes of audience assemblage and participatory performance practices (Aronson 2000: 7).

In September 1963, Jim Haynes, John Calder, and Kenneth Tynan organised the International Drama Conference at Edinburgh University’s dedicated graduation hall, McEwan Hall. One hundred and twenty international theatre artists attended, including Peter Brook, Sir Laurence Olivier, Ionesco, and Martin Esslin (Marowitz 1990: 55). During a scheduled speech at the 1963 conference Marowitz seemingly set out to codify a rigid interpretation of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. He insisted that his should be the official interpretation of Godot, no flexibility or alternatives allowed. Although clearly intended as satire, Marowitz’s provocation set a chain of events in motion which resulted, on the last day of the conference, in what is widely considered to be the very first Happening in the UK.

A Happening is a collective experience, based on chance, surrealism, Dada, non-narrative theatre and the Zen Huang Po doctrine of universal mind which held that ‘centricity within each event is not dependant on other events’ (Aronson 2000:38). Marowitz, Allan Kaprow, and a number of collaborators were responsible. Kaprow had earlier coined the term ‘Happening’ during the spring of 1959 in New York and had since become a well-known practitioner. The Happening was a deliberate attempt to generate performance crisis and subvert and replace dominant post-Renaissance theatre and Western theatrical conventions dating back to Aristotle. In this case, it included a nude woman being wheeled across a gallery space. Although at the time women could appear nude on the British stage as long as they did not move, pictures on the front pages of the national press depicted nudity in motion and it caused a scandal. The Happening itself was received with great outrage by many of the attenders. Nevertheless, it provoked important questions about performance consciousness and what was ‘real’ and what was ‘not real’. Essential questions were posited concerning time and the collective versus individual experience of performance (Marowitz 1990:66).

The Happening was a deliberate attack on the conference participants’ fundamental sense of what is theatrical. In most traditional theatre the play is understood through a cumulative reading of information transferred to the audience through plot, dialogue, sets, and costumes. Conventional centres of interest and meaning were totally removed from the Happening. The event was attended by the Queen’s cousin, Lord Harewood, then Artistic Director of the Edinburgh Festival, and, importantly, was also televised on the BBC’s Monitor programme. An unsuccessful case was later brought against the conference organisers in the Scottish Law Courts. The case was front page news for weeks in the UK and influenced the production of many similar events during the 1960s and 1970s (Haynes 1984: 61). A poetry conference proposed for the following year, however, was cancelled as a consequence of the furore.

The Happening in Edinburgh is a clear example of performance as ideological transaction. It generated a performance crisis by rupturing the accepted rules and norms which govern the use of signs and conventions in performance. A Happening is seen from as many viewpoints as there are participants and witnesses. There is no common consent about its centres of interest or meaning. Its meaning is dynamically conditioned by contextuality and the spontaneous perceptions of those involved, who tend to respond to stimuli and incidents not specifically intended by the participants, stimuli and incidents often brought into meaning by reactions to prepared events thereby contributing to the potential for performance efficacy.

The majority led by a harried Ken Tynan, apoplectic with rage, deplored the disturbance…. Celebrated directors from Yugoslavia, India, Ireland, and Germany called it ‘nonsense’ and ‘child’s play’. Joan Littlewood immediately sprang to its defence, dismissing questions such as ‘What did it mean?’, ‘Was it Theatre?’, ‘Did it succeed?’ Alexander Trocchi spat the word ‘Dada’ in Tynan’s face and exclaimed that critics could not merely explain away new forces in art by bundling them into ready-made classifications. (Marowitz 1990: 62–63).

To summarise, Marowitz’s work revolved around utilising aesthetic and intellectual tools to upset the status quo. Marowitz agitated conventional theatre and this disruption had the effect of shaking things loose, calling various received notions into question, and generally turning accepted conventions on their head. What was taking place during this period was a loose constellation of activities whose objectives at times were very different but, although there was never a singular unifying premise or manifesto, there was a shared antipathy to the conformity and commercialism of mainstream society and mainstream theatre. What happened was the evolution of a theatre diametrically opposed to the conventions of drama as literature common in the West since the Renaissance. It was an approach that rejected the beliefs and expectations of traditional audiences, complemented experimental influences and radically altered both the aesthetic and organisational basis upon which performances are created. These cultural and ideological intersections in turn helped to shape the identity of the theatre during this period.