Charles Marowitz - The Marowitz Compendium

Marowitz was born in Manhattan on January 26th, 1932, and raised in poverty, the third child of exclusively Yiddish-speaking immigrants, on the Lower East Side of New York City. At the age of sixteen he read The Fervent Years (1945) by Harold Clurman. Clurman detailed the troubled history of the Group Theatre (1931-1941). At the age of seventeen Marowitz founded his own acting company on the Lower East Side of New York. In 1950, while still in High School Marowitz became the youngest theatre critic for the newly formed Village Voice and experienced first-hand the advent of the Off Broadway movement. Greenwich Village, where Marowitz spent his youth, was also the site of Off Broadway Theatres. ‘Off Broadway’ is a geographical demarcation but also has roots in definitions of the alternative theatre movement in America (Aronson 2000).

During the early 1950s Marowitz considered American life to be dominated by superficiality and conformity. He was drafted by the US Army during the Korean War but ended up spending two years stationed in France. He believed French culture could have a civilising influence upon him and began to imagine that he would have a more meaningful life in Europe. In due course he endeavoured to find a drama academy in France that he would be able to attend. However, there were no G.I. Bill approved drama schools in France whereas in England there were approved drama schools in both Glasgow and London. Marowitz opted to train at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art in the hope that he would be able to return to France on a regular basis.

At the age of twenty-four Charles Marowitz moved to London, during the summer of 1956. Continental influences as well as new American drama were beginning to open new possibilities for the future direction of the British Theatre (Shellard 1999: 17). Along with the work of Ionesco and Adamov and the London premiere of Waiting for Godot, in 1955 at the Arts Theatre, Joan Littlewood’s productions of Brecht promised change in theatre subject matter and practices. These productions were followed by the London tour of the Berliner Ensemble in the autumn of 1956. On 8 May 1956, Look Back in Anger, premiered at the Royal Court Theatre.

The Suez crisis as well as the Hungarian uprising in 1956 led to reverberations in British society. Other factors such as the growing power of young people, changes in family relationships, and new standards of sexual behavior would lead to widespread social upheaval in the two decades which followed. As a relative outsider Marowitz became conscious of certain tendencies within British culture. He found people obsessed with class identity. He found a society in the midst of radical change, given to dissent, anti-establishment fervor, and new trends which were convulsing British culture.

According to Marowitz, he became aware at LAMDA for the first time of the British as opposed to the American approach to acting. He developed a perception that the British approach was somewhat weighted towards voice and movement. He found that from his point of view, the British approach at the time was almost exclusively concerned with externals and uninterested in the concept of inner technique (Rebellato 1999: 78). In his view, Stanislavsky was given mindless lip service. Only one class at LAMDA theoretically touched on his ideas, a bi-weekly improvisation session. Marowitz considered these sessions to be a travesty of Method work, consisting exclusively of improvisations of little playlets worked up by the students under the instructor’s supervision. When some of the other American students who were already versed in the Method suggested that the work they were doing was devoid of appropriate actions, subtext, and palpable contact, the instructor did not appear to understand or be versed in the terminology they were using (Marowitz 1990: 14-15). Marowitz became bitterly disillusioned at LAMDA as did two of his American classmates who left the course. Marowitz wanted to follow suit but had he done so he would have lost his G.I. Bill subsidy and would have had to return to the United States, which he was unwilling to do.

Marowitz considered the training at LAMDA to be backward, although he did encounter some interesting work on verse technique and he was exposed to the habits of established British classical theatre practitioners. He found that acting was thought to be merely a mode of projecting language and physical technique. In his view the school was intellectually and artistically a kind of British feeder for the West End theatre establishment and he felt himself becoming increasingly anti-social. Marowitz decided to branch out into the London theatre itself and directed his first theatre production in Britain at the London Unity Theatre. He directed a production of his own adaptation of Gogol’s comedy Marriage, and the production received a favourable notice in The Times (Marowitz 1990: 17). Marowitz was then asked to work on a Living Newspaper called World on Edge, being devised at Unity in November 1956 on the subject of the recent Suez crisis and the Hungarian uprising (Chambers 1989: 340-345).

Shortly after that production Marowitz started a Method workshop at Unity Theatre which he used to introduce a number of English actors to the principles and ideas of Stanislavsky although Unity had run a Stanislavsky based school in the late 1930s (Chambers 1989: 361). He also developed his own exercises and ideas. Marowitz decided that instead of using material such as Clifford Odets, Gorky, and Arthur Miller he would use Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Webster (Marowitz 1990: 17). After one year at LAMDA Marowitz transferred to the Central School of Speech and Drama but found his experience there to be very similar to that at LAMDA and after his G.I. Bill subsidy ran out, the Method workshop became his primary source of income. He immersed himself as much as possible in the study and practice of Stanislavsky but found that applying this practice to texts by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Webster was problematic just as others such as Michel Saint-Denis had found before him. Marowitz soon became associated with the Method label and at the age of twenty-nine, wrote his first book entitled The Method as Means (1961).

Marowitz began writing criticism for the Encore Reader magazine, the theatrical bi-monthly publication, which was originally started by Clive Goodwin in 1954 (Marowitz, Milne, Hale eds. 1965). Also, in 1958 Marowitz persuaded the British Drama League to allow him to convert a rooftop studio at Fitzroy Square in London into his own experimental theatre which he then called ‘In-Stage’ (Miles 2010: 125). At In-Stage Marowitz attempted to define a non-naturalistic style, building on the theories of the early Absurdist and Surrealists. This effort involved essentially a paring down of language as far as possible while establishing an ingrained awareness of what things are essentially, rather than what they seem to be on the surface. Marowitz’s experimental work was intended to run in parallel with classical theatre productions and commercial theatre and was warmly received by the critic Alan Pryce-Jones of the Observer (Marowitz 1990: 19-20).

In-Stage went on to produce a play by J.B. Lynne called The Trigon, with performances by Timothy West and Prunella Scales. The Trigon, transferred to Brighton and then the Arts Theatre Club in London’s West End. At In-Stage Marowitz also mounted the British premiere of Samuel Beckett's Act Without Words II, Arthur Miller’s The Man Who Had All the Luck, and William Saroyan's The Cave Dwellers. In-Stage was also the first theatre in Britain to produce works by the playwright Murray Schisgal. This was the period immediately before Marowitz’s affinity for Artaud found expression in his theatre practice.