by John Calder
In July I went to an experimental play in Paris by a young American, which interested me for its new techniques and ideas, and afterwards I went backstage and talked to him. His name was Kenneth Dewey, and he called his play, which he had written and directed, “a happening”. He told me it was an innovative form of mainly street theatre, where the audience was expected to participate, but without ever knowing in advance exactly what it might have to do. It was intended to bring real life, with all its unexpected hazards, into a performance context. The link with Artaud’s epic “total theatre”, not yet the subject of fashionable debate, struck me forcibly. Dewey told me that the principal innovator of “happenings” was another American called Allan Kaprow. I invited Ken Dewey to come to Edinburgh to talk about his work and I also contacted Kaprow and invited him.
I now had a new worry, and it was money. I had organized the Writers’ Conference on a tight budget, getting subsidies from foreign embassies, the British Council, publishers and some individuals, much of it in the form of air fares, hotel accommodation and entertainment. Big names had previously been housed with wealthy hosts. Ken Tynan would have none of that. Theatre people wanted comfortable hotels with room service; there was no one to pay air fares from California or New York. The only subsidies I managed to get, outside of a few individuals brought in by the British Council, were from Poland and Eastern Europe. Tynan had told me that the freelance theatre critic, Ossia Trilling, really worked for the KGB as a cultural spy and adviser, and that if he were invited, it would be easier to get some official Russians to come. He was right: they came; they were all very official, and of no value to the conference. Not a single one had a word to say on the platform.
The Festival had given me little co-operation the first year, but now things were different. I sent bills to the Festival’s treasurer and they were paid. I booked hotel rooms and hoped that the money to pay for them would also be forthcoming. Ken Tynan never thought of cost, only of glamour and having the best facilities that were available. Whenever we disagreed, he would appeal to Harewood, who always backed him against me. In two respects, which I shall come to later, this seriously hurt the conference.
I also had a few censorship problems. I was asked to go and see Duncan Weatherstone, Edinburgh’s newly elected Lord Provost. I turned up at eleven o’clock, my appointed time, and was ushered into his office. He looked at me uncertainly. “Er yes, Mr Calder,” he said. There was a long pause. “I’m feeling rather tired,” he continued slowly. “I think I’ll have a drink. Would you like one?”
“No, thank you, Lord Provost,” I answered. “It’s a little early for me.”
“Well, I think I’ll have one anyway.” He opened a closet and poured himself a large whisky, and took a gulp. “Now, let’s see. What is it you wanted to see me about?”
“I’m not sure, Lord Provost. I think you wanted to see me.”
Another pause, then he flipped on his intercom. “Mr Murdoch.”
“Yes, Lord Provost,” came the answering voice from the next room.
“I have Mr Calder with me.”
“I know, Lord Provost.”
“Why is he here?”
“Could I have a word with you alone, Lord Provost?”
I then had to wait for a few minutes in the corridor, and when I returned his face was not friendly. Nor did he invite me to sit down again.
“About this man” – he glanced down at a piece of paper – “this Lenny Bruce. I don’t want him.”
“I don’t understand you, Lord Provost.”
“You’ll understand me well enough. I don’t want people like that at the Festival. Do you understand me?” His glass was empty and he obviously wanted to refill it, but not in my presence. Murdoch had told him enough to make him a real enemy, like many in Edinburgh who had disapproved of me in the past, but Weatherstone had the power, and he wanted me to know it.
“And I want no more talk about homosexuality and so on. If there is, I’ll shut you down. And another thing. Don’t go talking to the press about this. If you do, I’ll cancel the conference.”
And that was that. I cancelled our invitation to Lenny Bruce, a controversial American comedian who used strong language in his cabaret act. And just before the conference started, we were told that Helene Weigel, Brecht’s widow, and other actors from her company in East Berlin would not be given British visas to enter the country. We made a token protest about that, as we had the previous year when we had invited Alan Paton and the South African government had refused him a visa to leave.
Ken Tynan and I had to decide on topics for discussion, basically following the pattern of the previous year, but this time we had six days, not five, and Harewood had put us into the third week. Ken wanted the first day’s topic to be: “Who controls the modern theatre: the playwright, the director or the actor?” I protested that no two intelligent people would spend five minutes on such a question. The answer was obvious to anyone: if you had a dead author and a strong director like Peter Brook, it was the director. If you had a big star who was the only real attraction, it was the actor. But he insisted, and when I appealed to Harewood, he backed Ken.
I had promoted Jim Haynes to be my titular assistant, and as usual I kept a back seat, but with a few exceptions made the arrangements and the decisions. Jim had taken on a large new flat in Great King Street, and it became both an office and a dormitory. Berry Bloomfield and Rozina Adler both stayed there for a week before the conference, although I think we later moved them elsewhere. They were supplemented by a volunteer, Sheila Colvin, recently returned from working in the US. An Edinburgh girl, who had previously been with the BBC in London and Glasgow, and an assistant to James MacTaggart, the legendary producer of the Wednesday Play, she had since become a secretary in the commercial world, though her heart was in the arts. Sheila was so efficient that at the end of the Conference Ken Tynan offered her a job to work with him at the National Theatre as his personal assistant. Instead, she accepted an offer from me.
With many more people coming this year, there was much to do. At the start of the Festival and two weeks before the Conference, I moved into Jim’s flat from Ledlanet, which was only thirty miles away, but the Firth of Forth, the great estuary that separates the Lothians from Fife and the north, had in those days to be crossed by a Ferry which could take hours, the alternative being a long drive to cross Kinkardine Bridge, near Stirling, an extra hour away.
Harewood had again pushed Edinburgh audiences to new experiences in music: Janáček, then little known in Britain, but largely promoted in London by Rafael Kubelík and Charles Mackerras, was his main composer that Festival, with Liszt also featured. I managed to get to some musical performances during our two weeks of office preparation. I had also given Harewood some suggestions for the drama that year, even though he had a deputy director to do that. I had persuaded him to stage Martin Walser’s The Rabbit Race, which I was publishing, and Ionesco’s Exit the King, which, because it had Alec Guinness in the cast, later transferred to the Royal Court in London. I had also suggested a Beckett/Ionesco double bill of two operas, Mihailovici’s setting of Krapp’s Last Tape (in the French version) together with Germaine Tailleferre’s of Ionesco’s The Leader. Harewood liked the idea, but it was too expensive and would have been difficult for the Edinburgh audience.
On Sunday the 1st of September, our conferencees began to arrive. I stayed by the telephone at Great King Street. Tynan met the plane as it brought the largest number of Americans, who having changed from one flight to another in London, arrived at Turnhouse in driving rain, being filmed on the runway by Tutte Lemkow. Others were met at the station and taken to their hotels. A Dr John King, who had a large house in Murrayfield, west of the centre, gave an opening party. I did not think I should leave the telephone to attend, so I deputed Sheila Colvin to be there in my place and help King to host it. Dr King later proposed marriage to her, but was not acce
pted.
One of Jim’s volunteers brought in an early edition of the Monday Scotsman. I opened it to see a large cartoon of myself by Emilio Coia, the newspaper’s resident cartoonist, looking sharp-nosed and thoughtful. Beside it was a large personality piece entitled “Calder the Conference” by Magnus Magnusson. I barely had time to peruse it, because the telephone was now ringing steadily. Writers, directors and theatre personalities were arriving from everywhere, and wanted to know where to go and what to do. Sheila and others came back from the party in Murrayfield, which had been a success, everyone was settled into their accommodation, and the next day was well prepared. The simultaneous translators had arrived and had set up their equipment. Max Frisch was in his hotel with Marianne, but his baggage had been lost; the next day he was buying new clothes. There was trouble at the Scotia Hotel across the street from our headquarters. It had objected to a playwright bringing in someone who was not his wife. Two other male writers, both well-known names, were in a double room, both gay (the word had just come into use that year). “What do you think those two are doing in there?” said the disappointed playwright to the receptionist. It may have been Arthur Kopit who protested, but I cannot exactly remember now. I will not say who the other two were, except that they were prominent British playwrights. The anecdote appeared later in an American article about the conference where it was certainly Arthur Kopit who mentioned Charles Marowitz as “an American who lives in Britain and ought to stay there.”
The next morning we had our first briefing meeting at McEwan Hall in the same room that we had used the year before. We knew that we had a sold-out house at 2.30. There was only a flimsy programme to sell this time: we had not repeated the experience of producing a glossy volume full of articles, but it had introductory pieces by Tynan and myself, a list of delegates and a summary of each day’s subject. There would be enough Festival staff to take tickets and rent earphones. I explained to the crowded committee room that the point of the conference was to educate the public, and I told of the excitement that the novelists had aroused in those who had come to listen to them. But Ken often stopped me. Entertaining the public was fine, but the real discussions should, he thought, take place in private sessions. Our dissension soon became rather obvious. J.B. Priestley was to chair the afternoon under the overall chairmanship of Ken Tynan. Priestley was rather insular in his approach. When I told him that Erich Fried would always have a great deal to say, he replied that yes, he knew, “typical little German pedantic bore!”
The first afternoon was a bore. Without a topic, all we could muster were little set-pieces, prepared in advance, without spontaneity, passion or conviction. The most articulate saved their fire for the next day, when we would discuss “Commitment”. Laurence Olivier (he was Sir Laurence, but not yet Lord Olivier by then) came in late in the afternoon and gave us an elegant little speech, ending with a flourish and a “Who controls the modern theatre? Why, the actor of course!” But otherwise it was dull, dull, dull, and by four o’clock many people were leaving. There were a lot of empty seats for the next three days, and only during the last two did it begin to fill up again, but nothing like the 1962 Writers’ Conference on the novel.
I had arranged for the BBC to record everything and to put out nightly a shortened version of the afternoon, as they had done the previous year. In addition, the BBC were to bring in television cameras for the last two days. I had made two other arrangements: I had given TV facilities to Annie Leclerc of Belgian Television, who televised some of the conference (and in spite of a written agreement, we were never paid for this), and I had also arranged for Tutte Lemkow to record all the proceedings on camera. But when the television lights were switched on during the first day, those on the platform, blinded by the light, shouted for them to be turned off, while the audience, being made extremely uncomfortable by the heat they engendered, also complained loudly. The discomfort was another factor in the early departures. Tynan ordered them to be turned off, and from that point they were on and off at random while the filming went on.
The Tuesday newspapers gave negative reviews to the first day. At the briefing, I took over control, and Tynan let me. I harangued everyone present, emphasizing that we were there not to posture, but to seriously discuss the theatre, its aims, influence on changing the world and what it might become. We wanted fireworks and plain-speaking like the previous year, and I rearranged the panels to make this more likely to happen. In the hall, we then did have some fireworks, particularly from John Arden, Arnold Wesker, Wolf Mankovitz and Barry Reckord, the latter launching a fierce attack on colonialism – which, he said, the bourgeois theatre propagated. The audience began to enjoy itself, but it was a small audience now. Many seats that had been paid for were not being used. As the week progressed, the interest of the discussions kept improving, and Ken Tynan became less sure of himself and increasingly let me run things my way.
The subject of the second day was “Differences of Approach”. It was chaired by Martin Esslin, then at the BBC Drama Department, and not yet an academic, and it was lively as British and foreign playwrights argued as to how to make a play work and what it should do to the audience in forming their opinions. Peter Brook chaired the Wednesday session, “The Theatre and its Rivals”, where the relationship between life, drama, cinema, television, radio and other performing arts was discussed. Then came “Subsidy and Censorship”, rather crassly chaired by Harold Clurman, who made it more about money than principles; it was not a patch on the previous year’s debate, but we did hear some amusing anecdotes about the misunderstandings of the Lord Chamberlain’s office. “Nationalism in the Theatre”, chaired by Hilton Edwards, was the fieriest day yet, and I especially remember the contributions of Barry Reckord from the Caribbean and Wole Soyinka from Nigeria.
In the meantime, life at Jim’s flat was becoming complicated. It was a large flat, but all the space was occupied. A certain Austrian girl of aristocratic background, engaged to marry a Prince, also Austrian, was there in bed with several of us, but she was a virgin and had to remain one, as proof would be demanded on her wedding night. Everything was allowed other than penetration. She spent at least two nights with Ken Tynan, who viewed her virginity as childlike innocence and was fascinated by it. A lovely young French professor was also part of the ménage, though mainly with Jim, but Bettina and I remained friendly with her after the conference was over. Bettina was installed in another flat with our new baby, Anastasia, but was little in evidence. During the last few days, Kathleen Halton, a reporter on the Sunday Times, turned up. She was married, but having an affair with Ken, which had to be kept secret. I had known Kathleen for some time and did not like her much. She was the kind of journalist who twists everything to make a better story, and she had let me down in the past. Ken, although often sleeping in different places and with different women, was staying at the George Hotel, and he took a room in the annex, because you could enter it directly from the street without passing a reception desk or concierge. Kathleen joined him there for the last days of the conference.
But there were many other changes of partner going on. Two Dutch sisters came to the conference, one married to Cees Nooteboom, the Dutch writer, who she then left for an Edinburgh doctor, while the other married another doctor, a friend of Jim Haynes. Various divorces came out of the conference as well as new pairings.
One morning I walked early into the office to find Rozina Adler on a mattress with Tutte Lemkow. Sex was everywhere in the air during the conference. There were parties, but not as many as the previous year, and the conference participants seemed perfectly capable of looking after themselves outside of our afternoons in McEwan Hall. I had rented the Circus Place flat again, where Malcolm Muggeridge, Sonia Orwell and later Norman Mailer had stayed the previous year, and two parties were given there.
Marion and Arthur Boyars had, during that summer, become a couple, and I had put them in a room there. At one of the parties they went to bed e
arly. Arthur Adamov, quite drunk, and needing to pee, simply opened the bedroom door, saw the room was dark, and started to drown the carpet. “Non, non, Monsieur Adamov, pas ici!” shouted Marion, but it was too late. On another occasion, in the same flat, Miodrag Bulatović, a Serbian writer, locked himself into a room with one of the many girls who had attached themselves to us and tried to rape her. She began screaming “Police, police!” It was Trocchi who forced the door open and rescued her. “But she wanted it. She was saying ‘Please, please’,” protested the disappointed writer.
At the conference we worked through our topics. This year I occasionally made a point or two of my own. Some writers like Harold Pinter only came for a single day. It became more relaxed and more interesting for the public, and I was able to give one or two little dinners to get people of similar interest together: one evening with French writers, another with German-speakers such as Martin Esslin, Erich Fried, Max Frisch, Peter Weiss and Martin Walser. The great issues of the day were all aired: nuclear disarmament, the cold war, apartheid, the various freedom movements around the world of emerging nations, the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain which still hindered and emasculated the British theatre, forcing some plays to be performed only in theatre clubs, like the Arts in London and the newly emerged Traverse in Edinburgh.
The principal new theatres that did interesting innovative work in the Sixties were still looked at with a beady eye by the Lord Chamberlain’s office, which had to read every new play before it was performed, often insisting on cuts that could totally change the thrust of the play. These were, in the main, the Royal Court Theatre, the embryo National, about to move from the Old Vic to its new home on the South Bank, the Royal Shakespeare’s London company at the Aldwych and Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Royal in London’s Stratford East, as well as those theatres in provincial towns that occasionally performed new plays. They were all in constant trouble with the official censors, who often picked up double meanings that were never intended by the authors. There was much about this at the conference, which called for an ending to all state theatrical censorship.