THE GANG BANG SHOW REVISITED
by
Neil Hornick
July 2014
The undated introductory note included in my transcript of The Gang Bang Show (June-July 1967) was probably written not long after the show had been performed. While it supplies some valid background detail, it also omits some stuff of possible interest, especially from the broader perspective of 47 years on.
Firstly, it was my first production since leaving Bristol University Drama Department, a year earlier, in 1966. Because no-one involved was paid for their services and the cast consisted of a mixture of professional and amateur actors, it’s possibly best described as ‘quasi-professional’. Two members of the cast, Cindy Oswin and Richard Mayes, were recruited from the Cochrane Workshop, the experimental improv group that I’d assisted Charles Marowitz in running. Another, Adrian Harmon (‘Viet’), was a singer and former flatmate from my folk-song days. I’d got acquainted with David Young (‘The Volunteer’) during my post-grad year at Bristol University. The rest of the cast must have come my way via the Angry Arts network.
I’d been introduced to the organisers of Angry Arts Week by Abby Cronin, American wife of my old folk-singing partner, David, and I attended various preparatory meetings. I’m not sure now whether I was invited to devise a show for the week-long event or whether it was my own suggestion – my hunch is that it was the latter since I was eager to get my teeth into a writing/directing project. Once having committed I racked my brains to come up with a governing concept and well remember the Eureka moment when, lying in bed in the room I rented from friends in Hampstead, I hit on the idea of a front-line troop show. It seemed to me that the idea was perfect for the occasion, not only because it could accommodate separately written self-contained routines (hence easily rearranged or cut at short notice) but also because it could ‘justify’ any amateurism in performance – and there was plenty of that, as it turned out. As a footnote to the script indicates (footnote 3), the concept was actually inspired by such Hollywood musicals as Jolson Sings Again, With a Song in my Heart and White Christmas, all of which feature rather phoney-looking front-line troop entertainments put on by or for ‘the boys’. The show’s title derived from Ralph Reader’s annual Boy Scout revue – The Gang Show[1].
There were meetings of Angry Arts Week people in a house in Rosslyn Hill where I was impressed to meet such participants as Kerry Kelly, daughter of Gene Kelly and Betsy Blair, Siobhan O’Casey, daughter of Sean O’Casey, and Gavrik Losey, son of Joseph Losey. I also attended a related garden party at the splendid Hampstead residence of Donald Ogden Stewart, blacklisted screenwriter of many hit movies, including The Philadelphia Story, who had emigrated to Britain that very year with his wife, the writer and activist Ella Winter. I have to confess that rubbing shoulders with this ex-Hollywood grandee and his pals was quite a treat for a lifelong film fan like me.
And that’s to say nothing of the illustrious names who signed up to perform during the Week, ranging from senior RSC thesps such as Peggy Ashcroft and Paul Scofield to leading poets, and folk, jazz and rock musos. Harold Pinter was invited to write something specifically for the occasion. Gavrik Losey showed me a letter from Pinter stating that he’d like to oblige but he could not, he simply could not do it – unless, maybe, Joseph Losey were to direct it. As it turned out, Losey Snr. declined but Pinter did take part in a programme of verse and dramatic readings. In later years, he was to be less bashful in expressing his opinions about American foreign policy.
Apart from established writers, actors and activists, and folk-singing acts that included Ewan McColl, Peggy Seeger, Julie Felix and Pentangle, alternative theatre was represented by Roland Muldoon’s C.A.S.T. (Cartoon Archetypal Slogan Theatre) and… the newly founded ‘The Troupe’, forerunner of The Phantom Captain.
* * *
Two members of our four-man writing team, Brian Phelan and Peter Buckman, were Angry Arts Week activists whom I’d not met before. Phelan was an established film and TV actor who’d appeared opposite Judi Dench in one of her earliest films, Four in the Afternoon. During the run-up to the Week, it was painful for me to inform him that one of the sketches on which he’d laboured, involving an inventive use of puppets, would have to be dropped as the show was too long. And Peter Buckman later confided that some, if not all, the Hick and Hunk cross-talk routines had in fact been ghosted for him by none other than ex-Cambridge Footlights supremo Eric Idle, in pre-Monty Python days. Buckman went on to a flourishing writing career in both fiction and non-fiction (e.g. The Limits of Protest, 1970).
My third co-writer was David Michaelson, a Jewish Scotsman of pungent left-wing opinions and journalistic credentials. The Michaelson family played a significant part in my early career. I knew David because I was lodging at the time in the home of his son John. John’s wife, Susan, as well as being my landlady, was an old university friend who worked on costumes for The Gang Bang Show. John’s sister, Jean, was cast as Sister Sugardoll Hokum, one of the four chorus girls in the show, and went on to become a key associate as both actress and workshop assistant in various group projects of mine and in Wherehouse La Mama, before becoming a founding member of The Phantom Captain company in 1970. It was also at one of John and Susan’s parties, where, led by John and his fellow-musicians, we indulged in long, freeform, if not chaotic, improvised ‘poetry and jazz’ riffs, that I met my future artistic partner, Joel Cutrara.[2]
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The Gang Bang Show was my first non-collegiate stage production and also the only explicitly political agit-prop show I ever directed.[3] That sort of show wasn’t really, as we used to say in those days, ‘my bag’. But its showbiz-derived format and modular structure was somewhat in the vein of Dadadidactics, the show I’d directed at Bristol, and it was a natural stepping-stone toward the extreme black social satire of The Hilton Keen Blow Your Chances Top of the Heap Golden Personality Show of the Week, which I devised and directed for the Wherehouse La Mama in 1969. That show, too, was in the form of a crass TV entertainment. And it was by no means the last.
The inclusion of Bunny Girl chorines was not as outlandish as it perhaps seemed. Some time after Angry Arts Week, I read that Playboy bunnies were actually flown out to Vietnam to perform for the troops – they feature in a sequence cut from Coppola’s Apocalypse Now that can be seen in the restored footage included in his extended version, Apocalypse Now Redux. Cindy Oswin, who played one of the bunnies, as well as Captain Marvo’s glamorous assistant, has reminded me that her boyfriend at the time, the painter Peter Joseph, designed body-applied stickers depicting guns and rockets for the bunnies who modelled in the ‘Fashion Show’ sequence.
By way of pre- and post-performance ‘atmosphere’ we piped a medley of war-themed songs into the auditorium. Titles included ‘He’s My Man of War’, ‘Will They Miss Me at Home Tonight?’ and ’We’re a Couple of Soldiers, my Baby and Me’. But in retrospect I think this was a mistake. They were all rather quaint retro numbers from a 78 rpm record collection, whereas it would have been more to the point (if perhaps more predictable) to play some thunderous contemporary rock music.
The Gang Bang Show was a vaudeville, deliberately brash, vulgar and corny, which may or may not excuse its artistic crudity. It couldn’t have gone down well with the Angry Arts Week organisers because – now it can be told! – part-way through the run I was approached by a somewhat embarrassed member of the Committee who tentatively asked if I would close down the show, on the grounds (I have forgotten his exact words) that it wasn’t considered to be up to scratch. Appalled by this turn of events, I took a stand and refused outright because, as I told him, a hell of a lot of unpaid work had gone into creating the show and I could not face telling the actors and production crew that their efforts were not appreciated. The Committee member conceded. And so we were allowed to continue to perform (perhaps it was only once nightly from then on) and I don’t believe I told any of the cast about that descending axe for fear of disheartening them. As it turned out, too, the show was never mentioned in press publicity[4], nor did it receive a single review. In fact, a review of Angry Arts Week in New Society by Richard Boston, all unaware, it seems, of our nightly presentation in the Roundhouse Annexe, expressed regret that ‘something more adventurous than a mere assemblage of star turns by famous names’ wasn’t attempted. To its credit, New Society at least published my letter of rebuttal.
Was it all that bad? Probably. Though it wasn’t exactly an issue at the time, the format of the show was such that the women tended to be in strictly secondary roles. Some of the cast were inept, beyond justification by the show’s supposed ‘amateur’ premise. The actor playing General Blastmoreland never learned his lines properly and frequently stumbled during his speeches which, to be fair, were overlong and the preparation time short. The two performers playing cross-talk comedians Hick and Hunk lacked both acting and comedic skills but no other candidates were available. On the other hand, an American actor called Ron House was very funny as Captain Marvo, Illusionist Extraordinary (a routine written by Dave Michaelson). When Peter Brook came scouting around with a view to filming part of the show to include in his film, Tell Me Lies (a spin-off from US, his controversial stage production about the Vietnam war), he asked me what would be a good segment to shoot and I unhesitatingly recommended Ron’s Captain Marvo routine. Brook duly filmed it (the act of filming fitted in well with the action of the show) but it didn’t make it into the completed film. Perhaps a can of that cut footage still lies rotting in some backroom cupboard somewhere. Incidentally, Jean Michaelson spotted Brook sniffing around back-stage as she was getting changed one evening. Failing to recognise the intruder, she told him to fuck off, which must have been a rare experience for the revered theatrical guru.
From the beginning, as soon as I was commissioned to present a show during Angry Arts Week, I decided to use it as a jumping off point for creating a company of my own and I circulated an ad to that effect – which is why that first improv-based workshop company was called The Troupe. As it turned out, only Jean stayed on as a core member[5], largely, I suppose, because other eligible members of the Gang Bang Show company had their own fish to fry and were very much on the move. These included the excellent Cindy Oswin, with whom I was to work again, however, on several later occasions; Ron House, who went on to create the highly successful Low Moan Spectacular comedy company (Cindy was in that too)[6]; and Brenda Dixon, a young African-American dancer and choreographer who became my girlfriend that summer before returning to the USA and a distinguished career firstly as a member of Joe Chaikin’s Open Theatre, then as a dance practitioner, teacher, scholar and author. Long resident in Philadelphia, Brenda remains a warm and open-hearted friend to this day.
Only a couple of weeks after Angry Arts Week four members of the Gang Bang team – Brenda, Jean, Adrian and myself – became involved in another Roundhouse extravaganza, a happening created by Carolee Schneemann for The Dialectics of Liberation Congress. For my recollections of that event and its connections with Angry Arts Week see http://www.dialecticsofliberation.com/1967-dialectics/the-dialectics-of-liberation-redialled/
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Finally, something about The Gang Bang Show and the Censor.
The Lord Chamberlain’s censorship office, established in 1737, was abolished in 1968. The Gang Bang Show, presented in June-July 1967, was therefore one of the last plays to be submitted to the office for scrutiny. Surprisingly, they made no objection to the show’s title. But we were required to cut the phrase ‘Sleep Tired All Happy, or S.H.A.T.’ (a trading company name invented by Dave Michaelson). Such were the scruples of our moral guardians in those far-off days.
However, it wasn’t until 2006 that, thanks to a friendly contact in the British Library where Cindy Oswin and I had recently performed, I actually got to see the brief summary report on our show written by the Lord Chamberlain’s reader.[7] The Library, it should be explained, now houses the Lord Chamberlain’s archive of submissions and reports.
Here it is.
STAGE PLAY SUBMITTED FOR LICENSE
Title: The Gang Bang Show
No. of Scenes or Acts: Sixteen Scenes
Date of Production: 24 June 1967
Author: Neil Hornick and others
READER’S REPORT
Anti-Vietnam War propaganda in the form of a burlesque American army show, where the jokes are all sick ones about napalm and the Vietnamese introduced into the sketches are always bullied and knocked down by the Americans.
It seems not worth bothering much about, but I think that the Assistant Comptroller should glance through the script.
There seems to be a missing page, or pages, at the end of the sketch called Hick and Hunk V. We must see this and any additional material.
Otherwise
RECOMMENDED FOR LICENSE
Cut the marked line: ‘Sleep Happy All Tired, or S.H.A.T.’
C.D.Heriot
21.6.67
So there you have it, from the very heart of the conservative establishment: ‘Not worth bothering much about.’ A fitting epitaph? Who knows, perhaps some future researcher/historian will find it a bit more interesting than that.
* * *
[1] Some years later (in October 1974), I escorted my wife Savka and my Phantom Captain compadres Joel Cutrara, Peter Godfrey and Julia McLean on a Mystery Trip – to attend the last ever Gang Show at the Gaumont State Theatre in Kilburn. We wore full Phantom Captain uniformed regalia for the occasion. I wrote a detailed account of this singular event, though it was never submitted for publication.
[2] This was in 1971. A tape recording of the two of us verbally improvising to music at the party where we met has survived. It makes embarrassing listening.
[3] Spoiled Papers, The Phantom Captain’s contribution to Time Out’s Election Night Party (1974), scarcely counts.
[4] It was, however, featured in the flyer for Angry Arts Week.
[5] Gail Boston, an American member of the costume team, also joined my improv company for a while.
[6] Ron also produced El Grande de Coca-Cola, in which Jeff Goldblum appeared and was talent-spotted by director Robert Altman.
[7] The inner workings of the censorship system had been secret, as was the appeals procedure. – 2018