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In the spring of 1965, shortly after my piece on Dürrenmatt had been published, I got the idea for a play which was to cause me as much pain and pleasure combined as anything I have ever written. Though it was never to be performed, it was to make me the talk of the theatre world in several countries and led directly to my receiving my fellowship in Berlin. Basically, it was a play about political assassinations, a theme then at its peak of topicality. It was controversial because it proceeded from a thesis I still subscribe to, one based on profound principles of eastern thought, namely that violence in general, or even any single act of violence, cannot be assigned to any one political persuasionwhether on the left or the rightbut rather to the uncontrolled passions of both sides which eventually lead to confrontation.

I explored this explosive concept at a time when all of us were trying to grasp the meaning of the first Kennedy assassination, before the many facts and interpretations which have since engulfed us were available. I wrote the work from the point of view of the left trying to understand its own motivations and responsibilities at a time when many still held it likely that Oswald was a lone assassin connected with the left. Since then my own view of these eventsand everyone else'shas gone through so many permutations that it is almost impossible to recognize, through all the lies, cover-ups investigations, and preconceived notions, where the actual truth may lie. Even leaving the play's theme aside, it was an extremely powerful piece of theatre in pure terms of stage movement and action, and although I have since approached this in another play, I have never equaled it.

I had the play finished by June of 1965 and had begun submitting it, but no one acquainted with the theatre will be surprised to learn that it was slow to catch fire. In fact, as the summer dragged on and no word was forthcoming from any theatre, Ilene and I again discussed returning to America. We had now been in England almost two years, which with our previous two years in Italy made four years away from the States. Ilene's paintings were selling better than ever, but she was still getting only survival prices compared to those we felt sure they would fetch in America. In fact we had talked the Portal Gallery, where she showed, into arranging an exhibit for her in New York the coming autumn, and we were playing with the idea of going back to attend it, of possibly even remaining there.

We were also beginning to become a trifle bored with our circle of acquaintances in London. We felt, like spoiled children perhaps, that our lives were just not sufficiently interesting, that there just wasn't that much going on in England, in spite of our continuing visits to the theatre. Or that if something was happening, then we had failed to find it. Our own work was steadily improving, and we had both keyed ourselves up to an edge of excitement where we felt we had to break through to some new level of recognition, or we would just give up in disgust. We lamented that we really only had each other to share the intensity of our interest and felt that somewhere in the city there must be people alive with the same level of excitement we were more and more beginning to associate nostalgically with New York rather than London. If there was an arrogance in our attitudes, it was no doubt of the type that centers like New York and London tend to nurture in at least some of their citizens.

One day towards the end of August our phone rang. The voice at the other end claimed it belonged to Jeremy Brooks of the Royal Shakespeare. I had never spoken to Jeremy before, and I listened carefully as he explained that the Company had a desperate emergency which only I could help them with. He seemed somewhat on edge as he told me that the Royal Shakespeare wanted to take part in an international theatre event on October 19, when theatres throughout East and West Germany and in Holland and Italy would simultaneously premiere the new work by Peter Weiss, author of the Marat/Sade.

It was a play taken from trial testimony of concentration camp guards and officials, entitled The Investigation: Oratorio in 11 Cantos. The main problem, he told me, was that they had no translation, and the job had to be done within three weeks to allow time for possible revisions before rehearsals for a staged reading. Peter Brook would be directing and was in despair over the problem of finding a translator in time. Brooks told me he realized this was a staggering demand to make on any writer, but he honestly knew of no one else in London who could possibly do the job, and did I think I could conceivably get it done within the deadline, perhaps even a few days sooner, if possible?

I replied that three weeks ought to be more than ample for a rough translation, knowing perfectly well that the new writing skills I had gained and the understanding of translation problems I had recently acquired from a then little-known book by Vinay & Darbelnet had allowed me to do my first draft of the Dürrenmatt in only three or four days. It occurred to me that one of my friends, knowing of my love for the RSC and particularly for. Brook's production of the Marat/Sade, might be trying to hoax me, and I began to listen for any sign of this. To my surprise the voice began to give precise directions as to where I could pick up the script. It was somewhere in the north of London, and Ilene volunteered to go off and fetch it so that I would be as fresh as possible and could start the job that very evening.

Before I knew it, Ilene had returned bearing the book. I was somewhat dismayed to find that the play was at least twice as long as the Dürrenmatt, but I set myself to work. I have already given my impressions of this work and the effect it had on me in my first chapter on Berlin (and my dramaturgical notes for this play are included on this website). I will therefore limit myself to saying that I completed the rough translation, polished its first two sections into a second draft, and appended an introductory essay and numerous notes, handing the whole thing in after ten days. I was of course aware that I would be creating a good impression of myself by doing this, but I was scarcely prepared for the awe my feat aroused at the Shakespeare.

As a result of that one phone call, my life took on an edge of excitement which it has retained to until this very day. To describe in detail what happened next after I finished my translation would be needlessly complicated, and even to simplify it would be to tread into the territory of resumé-writing or mere name-dropping (and the basics about the play are in any case covered in the section containing the dramaturgical notes). I can perhaps best sum it up this way: a few days before the phone call I was lamenting that I would never meet any "interesting" people, yet a few weeks afterwards I was already meeting more than I could possibly cope with. I was even beginning to entertain intermittent doubts as to the worthiness of my ambitions.

And this heightened pace was to continue, with a few gaps, for the next year at which time life became even more exciting when I left London for Berlin. But I still had a whole year ahead of me in London, a year in which I could conceivably, through my new-found acquaintances, have catapulted myself to the heights of "success" in the English cultural world, if this had been my aim. But my goals, to the extent that I had any precise ones, had been determined by forces much larger than anything so petty as my own personal success or failure. And I certainly do not think I could have realized, in any case, how fragile the whole fabric of English culture then was, including its very pinnacle, on whose rim I now stood, doing my best to keep my balance.

Within a day or two of the first performance of my translation of The Investigation, I found myself with a London agent. This was Dr. Suzanne Czech, a wiry little white-haired lady born in Austria, who not only admired my translations from her native language but swore to me with fire in her eyes that my own latest play was one of the most powerful pieces of writing ever done for the theatre. Although the American translation rights for the Weiss work had already been reserved by Ulu Grosbard, my own "English" version was soon to be performed on BBC radio and commercial English television and premièred in Scotland, Australia, and New Zealand. This not only kept my name in circulation that fall but brought me more money than I had ever before seen from all my writing put together.

If I was feeling the least bit heady or exultant over this, it did not last long, as there was plenty to bring me down. The world of "successful" theatre people, far from being populated with elegant, eloquent souls indulging in noble discourse on the highest themes, as I might have imagined in my more romantic moments, seemed to be merely another level of the business and cultural jungle, populated by sleek, ravenous beasts ready to make a meal of each other.

While any romance I might have entertained about this world was tempered with at least some realism, I had nonetheless supposed that most of the people in the London theatre world knew each other fairly well and respected one another. I was soon to learn that this was very far from being the case. In fact, except on the very highest level, very few people who worked for the Royal Shakespeare Company had even met anyone working for the equally renowned Royal Court Theatre or for the emerging National Theatre. Not only did they not know each other, they often hated each other's guts.

On almost my first meeting with the Shakespeare's literary manager, Jeremy Brooks, he had parried my question about whether the company would be able to consider doing my own play with his own request. He asked me to sign a petition to save the Royal Shakespeare from what he regarded as its imminent destruction and told me that if I did not sign, the company might never be able to produce any modern play again.

What had happened was that the National Theatre was just starting its first year, and there were rumors that the Arts Council of Great Britain had decided to provide no further funds to the older company for its London theatre (though they would continue to finance the Shakespearean productions in Stratford) on the grounds that the new National Theatre would be taking over their London function. Although the RSC was best known at home and abroad for their Stratford productions, they had already for several years been doing productions of both Shakespeare and the modern classics, extending down to the most contemporary, at the Aldwych Theatre in London. In fact, some critics had commented that their main passion seemed to be for producing modern plays, and that they had continued putting on Shakespeare merely as an excuse to mount the more modern pieces.

Actually, the controversy was much more heated than this simple description conveys and went deep into the class warfare so bitterly consuming England. Until Peter Brook and Peter Hall had come along and taken over the production of Shakespeare at Stratford, most English productions of the bard had been long-winded, predictable readings of the plays, using dated sets, poor lighting, and heavy-handed direction. Shakespeare had become a showcase for ham actors wallowing in the sacred words, while audiences drowsed as they waited for the immortal lines to come along. Brook and Hall had set English audiences on the edges of their seats by using adventurous sets and costumes, modern music, and lighting techniques brought in from America. They had employed these effects, new for England, to make the plays seem more relevant to current conditions and had also, in the case of the longer historical sequences, taken certain liberties with the texts. This had horrified purists, but it had created a new audience for Shakespeare and enlivened much of the old one.

But even this account, based on purely theatrical principles, was not the real reason a number of people had it in for the Royal Shakespeare. The real reason, as I was to discover for myself, was far less related to anything having to do with the theatre and far more connected to much baser motives. For the real reason that some people were out to axe the Shakespeare was that Peter Brook was a Jew and Peter Hall was of lower class origins. Furthermore, their literary manager Jeremy was a garrulous Welshman, as was Peter Brook's chief protegé David Jones, and another of their top assistants, Michael Kustow, was also a Jew, as was their casting director, Gillian Diamond. And to add insult to injury, they were now actually looking for some slight assistance to an American, namely myself.

That the cultural hegemony of England's fair and sceptered isle should be in the hands of an assortment of Jews, Welshmen, and low-grade foreign adventurers was more than many could tolerate. It was no doubt these attitudes which played a considerable part in the foundation of a "national" theatre at a time when the Old Vic was fading and the Royal Shakespeare had already attained considerable international fame and might have been expected to move into this role itself.

The prejudice against Peter Hall for his "lower-class" origins was an open secret in London. Or rather it wasn't even a secret, since there was really no trick to discovering it. At the mere mention of his name among anyone remotely informed about the theatre, one would regularly and predictably hear the comment that Hall's father had been a railway clerk (clerk rhyming with "lark," of course). At first I was taken aback when I heard this, as I could not imagine what light Hall's father's work could shed on his son's directorial abilities. I soon learned that I was expected to make some sort of comment on this, however, and I would usually make do with a properly obscure English murmur, indicating I knew what the other person meant

Then, if the speaker were a liberal, I would be told that it was a proof of how far Britain had come, and how free from class prejudice we all now were that the son of a railway clerk, could head a theatre that produced Shakespeare. Occasionally I would try to tell these "liberals" that if they were really free from class prejudice, they would never have dreamt of mentioning any of this and that this sort of thing rarely occurred in America, but I would draw only a blank stare of incomprehension for my pains.

Alternately, if the person were a Tory (and this was a good deal rarer in my circles), I would be told what a scandal it was that a mere worker's son should be allowed such a position. What I was really hearing was a continuation of the conversation I had about "meritocracy" with my friend at the British Council in Florence. As incredible as it may seem to those accustomed to regard the English as a model of fairness and good sense, the implications of Peter Hall's father having been a railway clerk seemed to be one of the burning issues in London's intellectual world during the 'Sixties. I assume all of this has changed now, but for all I know it may still be discussed in some circles.

In this context, it was not surprising that very little was done to "popularize" culture in England at that time. True, the lower classes had their own traditional pastimes of darts, dog races, and the pub, but since the passing of music hall there had never been a more generalized "popular" culture in Britainsupposedly, this was only a vulgar American phenomenon. Such attempts as were to be made from on high during the early 'Sixties to "reach the masses" were on the whole heavy-handed, condescending, and fairly risible. The counter-culture was to prove more successful in breaking through this barrier, but even here the victory was not an absolute one.

We are so accustomed in this country to viewing the English class conflict as something distant and unreal, as no more than an episode in operettas ranging from Gilbert and Sullivan to My Fair Lady, that it may be hard for some Americans to visualize how bitter a struggle it really wasand perhaps still is. The English "public" (meaning private) schools continued to pump out products to rule the "Empire" decades after it collapsed, while the vast majority of youth had their life destinies sealed for them by comprehensive exams they took at age eleven. It was almost impossible to break out of either pigeon-hole. Many letters in the English underground press were soon to reveal the guilt and tension this "streaming" of students was creating, for the system had ceased to serve the interests of either upper or lower classes.

Peter Hall was so gifted a director and administrator that he was able to keep afloat amidst these controversies caused by class and was even eventually to take over the National Theatre. Peter Brook was slightly more self-destructive, and I suspect his story may have something to do with the problems of being a Jew in modern England. That these problems were acute I had no doubt long before I first came to England, simply from my experiences with my own half-brother and half-sister. I had seen them both completely deny their Judaism, even though they were like myself half-jewish by the same father. This did not disturb me terribly, as I had never thought of myself as a practicing Jew and had in fact been raised as a Christian. Or so I explained it to myself at the time.

What did disturb me was that I found that neither one was prepared to discuss their jewishness or even admit it existed. They had if anything gone entirely in the other direction and done everything they could in their habits and appearance to ape the manners, speech, and thought patterns of the gentile majority. This even included indulging in gratuitous anti-semitic remarks. It was not for me to judge them, and I realized I was dealing with not only another nationality but another generation, but I was nonetheless horrified by the contortions their Englishness had forced them to perform with respect to their Jewishness.

During the next year I got to know Peter Brook fairly well. I had the deepest respect for his work and had when younger sat through his film of The Beggars' Opera many times, savoring the clever effects and delighting in the color and movement of the final scene. And I have already described my feelings about the Marat/Sade. But if I came to him at first in an attitude of reverence, it did not take me long to discover feet of clay. Peter was trying to play every side of the theatre world at once, from highest establishment to wildest and most radical experimentalist, and the mixture didn't always gel. His was a strange career in many ways, in that he started at the top almost before he left university and directed a long series of commercially successful productions in London and New York. Only after reaching forty did he develop a taste for the experimental, the outré, some would say the totally weird. When I met him, he had just reached the turning point from being a widely hailed, major director commanding broad audience appeal to becoming a full-time experimentalist and cultist.

Perhaps because his own roots in the theatre were in more conventional work, he now tended to go overboard for any experimental idea, however wild it might be. He was also to a great extent coming under the influence of a number of ideas that blossomed out of the counter-culture. I would not say that I had any influence on the direction he was already going in, but I do know that he listened very carefully to everything I had to say during that time and incorporated many of my ideas, as he had those of others, into his current and later productions.

My very first impression of him was as something of a poseur. Two weeks after I had completed my translation of the Weiss piece, I received a phone call from Peter's assistant David Jones, who has since become a well-known director in his own right, telling me that Peter wanted to direct my text as is, with very few changes, and would like to meet with me that afternoon to discuss details of the production, which I was to help with. A few hours later I was ushered into his office, and Brook greeted me with considerable effusiveness, complimenting me on the translation. But then he felt the need to turn to a specific page of the original text and explain some imagined subtlety of the German to me. He was dead wrong, though I said nothing.

The sole purpose of his maneuver had been to make me believe he knew German as well as I did. In fact, he had succeeded in proving to me exactly the oppositethough he may have picked up some German from attending Brecht rehearsals in East Germany or have been familiar with the language from a childhood knowledge of Yiddish, his German was definitely a good deal worse than he wanted me to believe. He then went off on something of a monologue about the play. This combined a few practical observations with a great deal of what I have come to think of as English "criticalese."

This is a specific jargon which English intellectuals indulge in, perhaps best typified at that time by the dialogue on a Sunday noon BBC program called The Critics. This program was listened to religiously by students and little old women all over Britain who wanted to believe they are au courant with the latest cultural trends. It combines a vast amount of verbal foreplay and titillation but produces almost no climax to speak of, thus keeping listeners in a perpetual state of nervous excitement and caressing them into the conviction that they are experiencing something of vast importance.

I had developed a cordial dislike for this sub-variety of the English language, but I had also become proficient in it, so I murmured the conventional counterpoints in "criticalese" myself, which seemed to satisfy Peter. In essence, we agreed that Weiss's play, while a profoundly moving work because of its content, was unlikely to find a large or lasting audience in England, first because most English play-goers supposed that the concentration camps concerned only the Germans (and not the English at all), and second because London, unlike New York, had a very small Jewish population. It was therefore decided to do a staged reading, which Peter would direct, rather than a full-scale production, as was later undertaken by others in New York. We also agreed that the text was far too long for an English audience to take, and I told him I had already worked out a system for making cuts which would not violate the spirit of the work. The rest of our conversation dealt with production details and plans for the rehearsals, then only ten days off.

A dinner I attended with Peter Brook around that time also stands out in my mind. Jeremy Brooks had called me a few weeks after the first performance of the Weiss play to say that Peter wanted to have dinner with me and another hopeful young playwright named Tom Stoppard to pick our brains for his next production, and we should come with that in mind. I should probably also mention that Jeremy was to become for a time one of my closest friends in London. In addition to his theatre work, he had gained considerable renownthough not richesas a novelist, and yet he was also one of those who did most in London to discover and encourage new writers.

I told Jeremy I felt I had more than a sufficient number of ideas running through my mind, and Peter was welcome to them, if they were of any use to him. As luck would have it, I arrived at Peter's bringing the latest news of the big theatre scandal then dominating London. The night before I had attended a round-table discussion at the Royal Court Theatre dealing with the government's censorship of a play then running there, Saved by Edward Bond. It included a scene in which two juvenile delinquents from the lower classes stoned a baby carriage ostensibly containing a baby. This was considered excessively brutal, and the Lord Chamberlain had acted to ring down the curtain after complaints were lodged, though the play had passed its required earlier censorship by the same official's office.

I should perhaps explain here that until quite recently, it had been the law for almost two hundred years that all plays appearing on the English stage had to be passed for obscenity and other allegedly antisocial tendencies by the Lord Chamberlain. There was at that time a vigorous movement to abolish this function of the Lord Chamberlainall of my friends were quite active in this movement, and we were eventually successful. The previous evening Kenneth Tynan, Mary McCarthy, who was visiting from America, the play's author, and several other notables had appeared on stage at the "Court" to denounce the Lord Chamberlain's action, and Peter was quite interested in my report.

But to my great surprise, he did not take the part of the Royal Court nor of the play's director William Gaskell. He seemed, if anything, happy that the Court was having problems with the censor and actually suggested that there was little reason to join in defence of the "Court," for they had chosen a bad play and ought to suffer the consequences. I agreed with him that the Bond play had few really impressive moments, for the child-stoning sequence was perhaps its only exciting scene. But it still seemed to me that this play involved an important issue of censorship, around which we should all unite.

Tom Stoppard arrived a bit late, and the conversation had by then begun to move slowly around to my own play and my recent translation of the Weiss. This was my first meeting with Tom, who at that time had been trying in vain for over a year to secure a production of his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. I found him somewhat fatalistic, but he had good reason to be so, for like most artists he was leading an extremely precarious existence at the time.

Hearing of my recent work with the Shakespeare, he chose to regard me, ironically enough, as part of the establishment that evening and launched into the standard lament of poor leftist artists everywheregod knows I had used it often enough myselfabout the rigged system, the unfeeling establishment and the coming revenge of true socialism. I suspect Tom and I were both jockeying for position in the hope that the Shakespeare might be producing our plays, but this was not to be even for Tom, although Jeremy had been working behind the scenes on behalf of both of us. Tom's play ought to have been a natural for the "Shakespeare," but it still went overlooked until the rival National Theatre picked it up after a smaller production in Edinburgh.

We had both had our share of Brook's attention, and now it was his turn to demand ours. Peter launched into another of his long monologues couched almost entirely in "criticalese," as indeed was almost all of our conversation, and through its murky recesses we began to dimly discern his purpose in inviting us to dinner. He informed us that he had determined, based on his vast experience of the theatrewhich neither of us would have dreamt for a moment of challengingthat the age of the playwright was most probably over. The future of the theatre now depended on the age of the director. There was little surprising in this concept, for it had been bouncing around radical-experimental theatre circles for some years, indeed for some decades. But what was new was the almost religious fervor with which Peter delivered his dictum.

No one playwright, according to Peter, had the depth or breadth of experience necessary to make the theatre a truly living phenomenon in our era. This was partly because of the enormous complexity of the modern age, against which any individual playwright could necessarily only be seen as a petty egotist with petty visions. And it was partly because there were simply no playwrights today who could match up to the world vision of that author whose name was commemorated in the name of Peter's troupe, the Royal Shakespeare. Peter seemed almost to salivate as he mentioned Shakespeare's name, to salute the flag, or rather to deck himself out in the Union Jack with a variorum edition of Shakespeare as a throw pillow.

The only solution to this impasse, if the theatre were to survive, would be for the writer to subordinate himself completely to the vision of an inspired director, said Brook, to be willing to work in a team with him and perhaps other writers towards a new vision of theatre, which only through this cooperative effort could be realized. And it was for this reason that Peter had called me and Tom together, to see if we would be willing to contribute to such an enterprise or take an active role in it. As to the theme of this ultimate theatre project, all Peter was able to say concretely was that it was to deal with Viet Nam in particular and human violence in general.

I think there was a long moment of stunned silence in which not a word was spoken, though Tom, Jeremy, and I were all looking at each other meaningfully. It must be remembered that this was no mere academic, no third-rate provincial director, no petty egotist delivering this screed, rather it was the man whom many of us had every reason to respect as one of the most ingenious innovators of modern film and theatre.


Peter had had his own problems in his youth, as he was willing to tell anyone with the time to listenhaving been brought up both a Jew and diminutive in stature, he had endured more than his fair share of "fagging" at the public schools. Yet he had transcended and even commemorated this experience in his film version of William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies. But with his production of the Marat/Sade, he had brought the theatre to such a level of excitement and excellence that many of us wondered it there were any place left for either Brook or the theatre to go. I think we all felt great compassion and even affection for Peter and were quite eager to be included in any venture he intended. But at the same time I expect we were rather appalled by the manner in which he had presented it, though being in England we were of course far too polite to tell him this.

The Viet Nam theme and the communal aspect of his plans show how totally the spirit of the 'Sixties had already begun to impinge on all of us, even on England's most established theatre company at a time before the real 'Sixties scene had begun in London. Concepts of theatre probed by Jarry and Artaud were on everyone's lips. The influence of the Living Theatre, which had already begun its European sojourn, was enormous.

We all felt the temptation of treating enormous themes, of breaking down the traditional barriers of theatre, of reaching totally new audiences. It was just one brief step from standard stage technique to street theatre, and from street theatre to mounting actual demonstrations, using all of life as theatre and all of society as the cast, was again only one step further, though a precipitous one. Its goal would not be the petty peripeteia (or "turning point") of Aristotelian dramaturgy but the transformation of human society. I suspect many theatre people played with the idea of taking that step during the 'Sixties, though of the four of us in that room I was the only one to actually attempt it.

Throughout this period the emerging counter-culture continued to impinge on the theatre, and theatricality became an increasing part of the counter-culture, though it was still some months before I was to realize any of this. I went on doing work for the Shakespeare and wrote up several reports for Brook on various foreign plays. In December of 1965 Jeremy called and asked me to do a translation of Dürrenmatt's latest play, The Meteor, which he told me was virtually sure to be produced by the company. The last Dürrenmatt play the Shakespeare had staged, The Physicists, had been quite successful, and Brook had taken the production to Broadway with a number of changes.

I completed the translation of the new work, which was eagerly awaited by everyone at the theatre. I gave it everything I had and attempted to make the English as lyrical and expressive as I could. But there were problems: the first act worked well enough though it was a bit forced, but the play fell apart completely in the second act. Not the greatest translator in the world could have saved it. I realized it would probably bomb and wrote a very non-committal essay about it, expecting the Company might prefer not to produce it. They had had the good sense to realize this with my translation of Hercules.

But this was a somewhat better play than Hercules, and I had not yet realized how locked into policy decisions major theatre companies, like other big businesses and industries, actually were. The Royal Shakespeare had committed themselves to the proposition that it was "okay" to do the plays of Dürrenmatt, therefore they would keep on doing them, whether they were any good or not, at least until a corporate decision was taken that it wasn't okay to do Dürrenmatt anymore. And then it might be Dürrenmatt's tough luck if he happened to come up with a good play.

Just as America looks to England for much of its culture and theatre, so the directors of the Shakespeare, finding themselves on the spot to determine what good theatre was, were looking to the continent at that time. But not so much to France, as one might have suspected, but rather to the German theatre world, embracing the two Germanies, Switzerland, and Austria. The works of Dürrenmatt and Frisch had originated in Switzerland, and Brook had taken the Marat/Sade from the Teutonic embrace of its Berlin premiere. Because of their vast network of state-subsidized theatres, only the Germans, as I was to discover, were in a position to take an overview of what was going on in the theatre everywhere. But even the Germans were prone to producing plays merely because they had been done elsewhere, though they were far more likely to take a flyer on an unknown writer than either England or America.

Brook himself did not want to direct The Meteor, as he must have recognized its problems. In any case he was now mainly concerned with his new vision of the theatre and had no time left for mere plays. But Clifford Williams, another director at the Shakespeare, managed to convince himself that the work was a masterpiece and decided to direct it. Jeremy informed me that I, as the translator, was to work with Clifford as Dramaturg, which is what I had also done with Peter on the Investigation.

The term Dramaturg is still not too well understood in America, and I will explain it briefly here, as I think it goes some way towards explaining why many English productions seemed so much more polished than homegrown efforts. The terms Dramaturg and Literary Manager were being used almost interchangeably in England at the time, Jeremy Brooks being the "Chefdramaturg" of the Shakespeare, Kenneth Tynan of the National. Though a dramaturg is also responsible for overseeing the reception and reading of manuscripts, as well as arranging for contracts with writers, his most important duties begin when a play goes into production.

If it is a foreign play, he must see that it receives an adequate stage translation. If none exists, he must take an existing translation and adapt it so that actors can speak the lines. This is an exacting skill and can become an art in certain hands, for a play can easily be better in the translation than it is in the original. Or it can be worse. It is rarely ever exactly the same. When the dramaturg has this translation in hand, he sits in with the director through at least the first week of rehearsals, making such further changes as may be in keeping with the needs and idiosyncrasies of the actors. More important, where an actoror less frequently a directorchooses to change the text in a direction which the original text will not support, he interposes himself to protect the original, unless it can be demonstrated that the change is an undoubted improvement.

With a classical English play, the role of the Dramaturg might or might not be less vital. It would depend how much work was needed to make the play accessible to a modern audience, or what special point of relevance the director might want to stress in his production. Some purists may still be shocked to learn that all but the most famous plays of Shakespeare were invariably subjected by the RSC to a thorough editing process. This is particularly true of the historical plays, for which John Barton merged many lines and scenes, deleted others, and wrote whole new stretches of "Shakespearean" dialogue, all with the praiseworthy goal of making these works more accessible to a modern audience.

There is a romantic school of theatre buffs that holds that somehow if we listen to exactly the same lines as the people of Shakespeare's era heard, we will be able to understand them as purely and completely as they did, for the words of Shakespeare must surely be immortal. This view, which is close to being a religious one, does not jive with the practical experience of anyone working in the theatre and is probably just a more ornate way of saying "I wish things stayed the same and never got old and changed."

Our production soon ran into trouble, as is usual in the theatre, even the "non-commercial" theatre. Shortly after we started work, Dürrennatt's agent demanded that the RSC use a different translation approved by him. He had a financial motive, as he would then be collecting a percentage on both the author's and the translator's cuts. Clifford Williams read the other translation being offered and refused, saying that if he had seen that translation first, he would never have dreamed of directing the play. Brook, Hall, and the company brass backed him up, saying that the play's only hope for success lay in using my translation, though I had grave doubts that even this could save the play. Finally, an unpleasant compromise was worked out by which my translation would be used but the name of the other slightly better-known English writer would appear on the posters as the translator, and I would be credited at the top of the program as the Supervisor of the "RSC Version."

The production bombed, as I had quietly been warning it would, and this little episode of theatre history mercifully ended. The reader may wonder how I can talk of a "bomb" or a "failure" being perpetrated by the supposedly non-commercial repertory companies of England. But the Shakespeare could little more afford a flop in the long run than Broadway can (though we were permitted our "quota" of these), as its funding through the Arts Council of Great Britain depended in large measure on attendance figures. Furthermore, discovering a play that could be taken to Broadway to show the flag of English cultural superiority (and perhaps earn a few dollars on the side) was always very much on everyone's mind.

What was the most fascinating part of my otherwise not terribly remarkable time with the Shakespeare was my discovery that the cultural upheaval, which was beginning to make itself felt throughout Britain, was having its effect even here. In helping to shape the text of these plays I would on several occasions offer our actors two or more permissible alternatives of the same line or expression, one of which I might sometimes label disparagingly as "rather American." Or sometimes I would offer the Americanism without comment. To my surprise, they would opt for the Americanism far more often than not, making a mockery of my efforts to bend over backwards concerning my own linguistic roots.

Fowler's Modern English Usage speaks of "the apparent belief of many English entertainers that to imitate American diction and intonation is a powerful aid to slickness." But this went even further, for these actors were willing to accept not merely as their own, but preferable to their own, quite slangy American expressions and images. Moreover, they were often not able to tell which was English and which American. What was going on at many levels of English society was a desperate search for change at all costs, otherwise I do not believe any of these expressions would have been accepted.

Even the battle over the translation, into which I had been unwillingly propelled against an older writer of some distinction, was a case in point, for his version of the play was written in the older stage idiom of Priestley. Only a few years earlier, it would have been considered the height of good taste, yet this style, with its heavy, sonorous Latinisms (and Priestley with it.) had been abandoned as old hat.

With the beginning of 1966, my life was quite active. Not only was there the production of The Meteor, but I was also involved in another Dürrenmatt production, in this case of my original translation of Hercules by a semi-professional group called the Questors in the London district of Ealing. I was in demand to do translations, because of my reputation for skill and speed, and I actually had to turn some of these jobs down. The tentacles of the German theatre world were already reaching out for me, for I was taken out to breakfast by a German publisher visiting London who ultimately turned out to be my agent-publisher in Germany.

But all this activity was rather superficial, for inside myself I was feeling extremely uneasy about my new life. For one thing, despite many words of praise and promise from Jeremy and several others at the Shakespeare, my own play remained unproduced. I was continually doing reports for them and soon was asked to read foreign plays for the Royal Court as well. Peter Brook was still waiting for my contribution to his great new vision of the theatre, but I think he was beginning to sense I had no real enthusiasm for it. This is partly because I knew that whatever writers did finally collaborate on this project would be submerged by Brook's name and ego (which did indeed prove to be the case), partly because I had no real passion for his concept as he had outlined it, though I could see the potential of such a project somewhat differently organized. I also suspect I was already too disturbed by events in Viet Nam to be able to write clearly about them. In any case, I had been permitted to see that Peter could be terribly wrong about things, important things, theatre things, and that it was impossible to turn him around when he got himself in one of his blind alleys. I found this rather unfortunate.

I could probably have written some sort of ticket for myself in the London theatre world at that time through my other contacts, might have become a full-time dramaturg or even have broken through into directing, but my health as usual was causing trouble. During the Dürrenmatt rehearsals I had been forced to get up repeatedly for over three weeks at what for me was an early hour and then go through a whole day of listening to lines I had never particularly liked and was now beginning to hate. The prospect of being forced to do one production after another of plays I did not terribly enjoy, as professional directors like Hall and Williams regularly did, appalled me, even assuming I had possessed the stamina to do so. My health stood in my way from ever taking such an onus on my shoulders, whether as a hindrance or a protective buttress I have never been able to decide.

I had also failed to find among the successful, after the first fling of novelty was over, the good conversation and the deep commitment to truth I had been convinced must exist at the top of the heap. I was beginning to conclude that everyone at this level of the arts was to one extent or another little more than a compulsive egotist, eager to dominate the wheels of culture for reasons that had little to do ultimately with taste or sanity or responsibility, and I had to face up to the likelihood that I might be no better. The only thing distinguishing those at the "top" of the pile from those in the demi-monde I had inhabited during my first two years in London was the size of their drives and egos.

This impression was fortified by several meetings I had with the English playwright John Arden and his wife Marguerite D'Arcy. John was at that time another one touted to be the great white hope of the theatre, and his works had been widely produced throughout England, though they were rarely great successes even at home and are now usually performed only by small college groups in America. Despite his fame, he was not very well off at all, exiled to a large cold house in the far north of London. Since he had been associated with the so-called New Elizabethans at the Royal Court a few years before I had come to England, I asked him what life had been like during that already mythical part of English stage history, and what sort of life the well-known Royal Court playwrightsOsborne, Wesker, Jellicot, and several othershad shared together. He replied to me candidly that there had never been any kind of life at all and that he had been the only one to suggest to the directors that there ought to be some sort of conviviality at the theatre, some sort of way for the playwrights to get together and talk at least, but that nothing had ever come of it. It appeared that the image of the "New Elizabethans" was largely a hype, quite possibly intended for American consumption. Knowing how cold and uninviting England could be even during the so-called "Swinging London" period, I saw no reason to doubt his account of how things had been a few years earlier.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

One morning in March of 1966 I received a phone call from my agent asking me to drop by. There was no reason to suppose she had anything of earth-shaking importance to impart, as we were constantly conferring over details of various translations and productions. When I arrived at her office, I ran into her husband, a retired English army officer who was waiting for her to finish work. He was rather old-fashioned in his outlook and had more than once held me trapped me in Suzanne's outer office with prolonged tales of his military exploits on the Ethiopian front during World War II, replete with his opinions of the Italians and the natives ("bloody lot of kafirs and fuzzy-wuzzies, you know").

This time, however, he spared me his tales of how he won the war, for he was more concerned about my hair. At that time it was beginning to creep down on my forehead, first on one side, then towards the middle, until finally it was entirely covered. This was also happening to many of my theatre and artist friends, as the unmistakable Beatle look took over. He was positively incensed by my appearance and launched into a long tirade about declining standards, lack of neatness, and the need for self-respect in the young. I replied as diplomatically as I could, pointing out that the Queen herself had received the Beatles, and what's more I really found their music rather amiable, though I preferred classical. This left him coldI later discovered he had a tin ear for all musicbut he insisted on making what he regarded as one last conclusive argument for my benefit.

"Listen here, you don't have to tell me about the Beatles," he told me, "I know what they are. I spent two years in Liverpool on service, and I used to see ones like them all the time. You could see them on any street corner, that's how common they are. Guttersnipes, that's all they are! Do you hear me, nothing but guttersnipes!" He shouted the last word, something quite unusual for England.

I had long ago accustomed myself to the somewhat archaic vocabulary and frame of reference of the British Isles, and although I still heard a few things that surprised me now and then, I had still never imagined I would hear this purely Dickensian expression spoken other than in jest, much less in a rage of anger. I asked him if he had really meant the word he had used, and he repeated it several times to me, as if he were mystified that I should ask. I managed to control myself, but when Suzanne became free a few minutes later, I told her the whole story inside her office and confessed my horror.

I knew that she couldn't possibly share her husband's feelings, not being a native Briton, though she had once expressed to me a naughty self-conscious form of shock at how short the miniskirts were getting. She assured me that her husband was just old-fashioned and I shouldn't worry about it, as she had some important news for me.

A new theatre group was about to start up in London. They had heard about my play from the Shakespeare and were quite anxious to produce it. The group was the Traverse Theatre from Edinburgh, which I already knew a good deal about, for it had an excellent reputation for a small group. Now they were going to start a London branch and exchange productions between here and Edinburgh. The person running the group was an American named Jim Haynes, about whom I had also heard a great deal. Would I be free to meet with him the next day? Needless to say, I would, and an appointment was made.

As it turned out, the arrival of Jim Haynes in London was not to lead to a production of my play or even to the formation of a theatre group in any accepted meaning of the word. It was, however, to lead to just about everything else that happened in London over the next few years. It was also the first warning I received of the arrival in London of the Hustler Saints.

(click here for the continuation of this excerpt)

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