During the sixties and early seventies, a curious amusement took the fancy of London's theatrical fringe, later spreading to the august precincts of the Royal Shakespeare Company. This sport had no formal name, but it took the form of insulting the audience, by way of peddling some more or less abstract banality about politics or society ("the system"). Once during that time there was actually a play put on called Insulting the Audience, imported from a ferocious Continental writer. It consisted of an extended and aggressive harangue by a single character and was at least a critical success on the fringe, provoking comments on the "breaking of new ground," and the like. Another production, the name of which I have forgotten, was staged by a very fringy group called the People Show, directed by a self-styled poet with the appropriate name of Geoff Nuttall. He herded the audience into cages, turned blinding spotlights on them, and had the actors stalk about the auditorium, banging on the cages with iron bars and clubs, meanwhile shouting imprecations and calumnies at the paying customers. This went on for a couple of hours, after which the audience was let out to go to the bar and discuss how awfully excited and amused they had been, how this was really "breaking new ground" in the theater, and such. This was the heyday of Herbert Marcuse, and the idea was to make a point about our tolerantly oppressive society, or system.
Gone with Fidel's Halo
Until last November I had imagined that such japes were old hat, vanished, gone with the wind like hippies, the delights of psychedelic mushrooms, Fidel Castro's halo, Timothy Leary, and that little harmonium used by Allen Ginsberg to accompany his mantras. It came as a surprise to discover that Insulting the Audience had acquired a new incarnation, rising like scum to the glossy commercial surface of London's West End Theater. Here there are none of the harsh trappings of yesteryear's fringe: no cages, hard benches, or small unheated rooms doubling as "acting spaces." We have instead the modern baroquery of a West End theater, with plush seats and a proper proscenium-arched stage. The new version of the old game is currently being played in this setting at the Globe on Shaftesbury Avenue (London's equivalent of Broadway) and not far away on Charing Cross Road, where the portraits of Sheridan and Congreve look down from their perch above the stage of Wyndham's Theatre, perhaps wondering what is going on down there.
The play at Wyndham's is a transfer from the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, Chelsea, which despite the address is run by a radically leftish director, Max Stafford-Clark. Last January, he broached an idea for a show to the playwright Caryl Churchill, who shares his political sympathies. This was to be a spectacle with songs, built around the newly computerized money markets in the City, London's financial district. There followed a two-week workshop, with director, writer, and actors exploring the City and meeting on weekends to discuss their impressions. At the beginning of February Ms. Churchill began to write the play; by the end of the month she had one act and a scene finished. Ian Drury was then brought in to do the songs, and rehearsals began. On March 21 the show opened to enthusiastic reviews, and became the show for City yuppies to go and see. In due course, the production was taken to the shinier West End environment of Wyndham's. The title is Serious Money, and as I write, the play has opened to dithyrambic reviews in New York under the auspices of Joe Papp's Public Theatre and has quickly moved onto
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