Playwrights' Theatre: The English Stage Company at the Royal Court by Terry W. Browne, and: Disrupting the Spectacle: Five Years of Experimental and Fringe Theatre in Britain by Peter Ansorge, and: The First Thrust: The Chichester Festival Theatre by Ronald Hayman (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 99 University ofCincinnati PLAYWRIGHTS' THEATRE: THE ENGLISH STAGE COMPANY AT THE ROYAL COURT, by Terry W. Browne. London: Pitman, 1975. viii & 135 pp. £3.50 (£1.95 paperback ) DISRUPTING THE SPECTACLE: FIVE YEARS OF EXPERIMENTAL AND FRINGE THEATRE IN BRITAIN, by Peter Ansorge. London: Pitman, 1975. vi & 87 pp. £2.50 (£1.25 paperback ) THE FIRST THRUST: THE CHICHESTER FESTIVAL THEATRE, by Ronald Hayman. London : Davis-Poynter, 1975.215 pp. £4.50. The English Stage Company at the Royal Court spearheaded the renaissance in British theatre from 1956 on, with John Osborne, John Arden and Arnold Wesker (as well as some who have not lived up to early promise, like Willis Hall and N.F. Simpson), continuing in the mid-sixties with Edward Bond, Christopher Hampton and David Storey. Terry Browne's Playwrights' Theatre is not a full and definitive history of the Company. It has not even the focus implied in the title, referring only in passing to many of the Court's authors, such as Wesker and Ann Jellicoe, and rarely evaluating a play (Osborne's A Patriot for Me is curiously described as "genuinely beautiful," p. 61). In fact, the book might be titled Scenes from the Royal Court Story. In his first chapter Browne traces the interests and personalities ofthe mixed bag of people who came together in 1955, drawing attention to the vital behindthe -scenes role of Neville Blond and to the exceptional abilities of George Devine . He has also listened carefully to Ronald Duncan's many grievances. Chapter 2 reports the first year, a scissors-and-paste job with the critics, in which the reviewers of the Tablet, the Universe and the Liverpool Daily Post are quoted as attentively as the influential ones. Chapter 4 isolates the Court's various disputes with the Lord Chamberlain's censorship. The other three chapters supply a lot of facts - often abortive plans for re-building or liaison with schools, with figures on losses, subsidies and receipts. The work ends with 25 pages of financial tables and a list of all Royal Court plays, though not, unfortunately, a list for the Court's Theatre Upstairs, which has operated since 1969. Browne is two years out on the first run of The Chalk Garden, which was 1956-57, not 1954-55 (p. 3), and Keith Dewhurst's musical was Corunna, not Corona (p. 96). Playwrights' Theatre, then, brings between covers a variety of information relating to the development of British drama in the last twenty years. But I am disappointed: Browne has so little to show for studying "first-hand the day-today workings of the theatre" (p. vii) and for interviews with William Gaskill, Osborne , and many others. Perhaps his publishers required him to cut his text by half or more. What I missed especially was a sense of the thrill of the Court's early days, when in quick succession plays like Roots, The Kitchen, One-Way Pendulum and Serjeant Musgrave's Dance were staged, and a host ofnew writers were part of a youthful movement which also involved the New Left Review and Aldermaston Marches. Further, only Martin Esslin in his Foreword reminds us that the success of the Royal Court dramatists has been enormously influential, on 100 BOOK REVIEWS films and television, and in a "liberalization of attitudes" (p. iv). Browne instead bogs down in the minutiae ofbalance sheets. Disrupting the Spectacle is in the same new Pitman "Theatre Today" series, with the same vertical Michelin-guide shape. Ansorge's subject is the rise (and possible fall) of what he calls experimental and fringe theatre in Britain, 1968 to 1973 - others have named this alternative or underground theatre. He finds this phase began through the stimulus of the visits of La Mama and the Open Theatre's America Hurrah to London in 1967, prompting the founding of the Arts Lab. by Jim Haynes, Inter-Action by Ed Berman, and the Open Space by Charles Marowitz. While Ansorge comments on a handful of writers (mostly relatively little-known: Howard Brenton, David Hare, Snoo Wilson, Trevor Griffiths, John McGrath), he shows that the alternative theatre was essentially a matter of companies: Portable, Welfare State, Freehold, People Show, CAST...