Some words from Fred Proud...

Fred Proud, 'in situ' (photo. Nick Coupe)

It was an almost magical, never to be repeated period of utter artistic freedom for me in this little one-time, pop-up theatre – more accurately perhaps ‘pop-down!’  While running the ship, or the submarine that was The Soho Poly all of forty years ago, there were forty productions or more staged  – mostly at lunchtime, though there were half a dozen notable evening productions too.   

At that time there was no board of directors, no vetos, no rules, no censorship, no limits, (except financial) on what bold experiments one could undertake. There had already been a sado-masochistic strip-club play with a torture scene, another where two monks humping a fresh corpse in a coffin were avidly pursued by a necrophiliac and one other with a grotesque cross between a spider and a rabbit who ate the brains of a US marine with a spoon. These were at the first Soho Theatres in New Compton Street or featured in the two seasons at The King’s Head in Islington.

I had been discovering there how I just loved rehearsals most of all and was learning how to do it on my feet as it were.  And also about programming, casting and making a fair crack at all aspects of production.  I discovered during the performances all you could do was watch perhaps rather anxiously from the back as things went well, or the opposite .  And I was surprised to find that invariably the best ever performance was the penultimate one: when the cast could really do it all right off the top of their heads and not be holding onto it, or semi-consciously lingering a little too much, as in the ultimate one.

Audience capacity was around 48 in those heady days and in such a small space they were very influential.  A play could be an hilarious black comedy one night and a serious drama the next. Very often we could have filled the theatre four times over and had to turn very many away. The National Press were often very complimentary about us - the result I suspect of grabbing the best available scripts around, the odd established name and also thanks to Verity’s excellent  PR work.

The Poly had a unique ambiance and was more flexible than you would think as we had a good lighting rig and a succession of able designers who invariably rose to the challenge. Their designs were as in-your-face as the performances.  I remember for example John Hallé’s all wood set for Chekhov’s  ‘On the Road’ which hit your olfactory sense at the first stone step as you came down from the street;  there was the immense pile of dung (thankfully not the real thing) for Durrenmatt’s ‘The Fifth Labour of Hercules’ and the reek of oil and petrol for Barrie Keeffe’s  ‘Gotcha!’ with real motorcycle . Then there were extraordinary moments like when Mum smashed through the bedroom door with a real axe to get to her son making love to the girl from the despised upper classes in ‘Kong Lives’ (or ‘Gracie Fields Betrayed the Working Class’ by George Byatt) or The Headmaster telling the no-hope schoolboy holding a lit cigarette over the petrol tank he could be a brain-surgeon if he wanted and then the sight of ten politicians, up to their necks in ‘merde’ hotly arguing how they were going to get shot of it.

I loved the fact that you were so close to the actors that you could count the pores on their noses if you wanted.  A tough challenge for them but incredibly satisfying for all once they got used to it. Experiment was rife everywhere it seemed and venues were beginning to pop-up in all manner of places in the early and mid- seventies.  Most were certainly never intended as theatres. The Fringe was the centre of enormous interest and coverage. I think now that it was reminiscent of Paris of the inter-war years. For example Erik Satie’s new Furniture Music where the audience was instructed to ignore the music and regard it as background noise , or his taking the principles of Cubism into musical composition: or the exotic Henri Rousseau, (who despite his subject matter had never been anywhere), the gun-toting Alfred Jarry,  and Cocteau, Dali, Apollinaire and so many others in their different ways causing laughter and sensation in equal measure as they promoted themselves as artistic geniuses and their far-out experiments were embraced by the ‘anything goes’,  spirit of the time.

It is interesting that as a direct result of the explosion of artistic freedom in Paris that Modernism usurped the arts in every direction everywhere and also that theatre here, when Thatcher changed everything for the worst, (incidentally sowing the seeds of the present day recession) there followed a time where every theatre in the land, new and old, felt the need to build a small experimental studio somewhere round the back. 

So the opportunities are there, if not the cash, and perhaps there is more opportunity now than ever and, in addition an urgent need to invent a new kind of theatre that is honest and provocative; one that pulls down the dumb obedience to consumerism and hand-me-down depression and encourages out-spoken individualism.  Time to promote new waves in experimental theatre.  Something to ‘Stop the world’, change one’s thinking about the Self and the many myths and half-truths about the Society in which we live. What are we waiting for?