by There was a brief period in British theater – 1968 to 1973 – when everything changed as the American counterculture took root in the performing arts, music and journalism in Europe. Pip Simmons’ Theater company, as well as David Hare and Tony Bicât’s Portable Theatre, Nancy Meckler’s Freehold company and Jeff Nuttall and Mark Long’s People Show were the main theater initiatives.
These start-up companies were the enterprises – guerilla groups, you might say – that toured in vans and small trucks to the new arts laboratories and centers that were springing up around the country, after major US companies such as the Living Theater and the Open Theatre. The post-Stanislavsky theories of “bad theater” were touched by the great Polish guru Jerzy Grotowski.
Simmons, who has died aged 80, was one of a number of truly original and energetic theater directors not supported by the Arts Council or the cultural establishment in Britain – Joan Littlewood and Peter Brook were among the others. Littlewood left the fray in 1975, the French government funded Brook in Paris, and Simmons found a spiritual and artistic home in the Netherlands, mainly at the Micery theater run by Ritsaert tan Cate in Amsterdam.
His production of An Die Musik at the ICA theater in London in 1975 (and on tour abroad), revived at the Jewish State theater in Bucharest in 2000, was one of the best avant-garde productions of my life, a masterpiece terrible, terrible.
It was about a group of internees in the Nazi concentration camp Dachau who were forced to provide their own musical entertainment; Among the critical responses were the racist responses to the proposal. An unacceptable reality was confronted in an unforgettable display of disturbing pleasures and lush, colorful classical music.
At this show, Harold Hobson, the eccentric but influential post-war critic of the Sunday Times, said: “Pip Simmons has the most terrifying mind I have ever met in the London theatre. To hope for the happiness of his soul is that he himself does not understand all that his dark recesses suggest.”
Pip was born in north London, the son of Jack Simmons, a chemist, and his wife, Sybil. The family – which included Pip’s older sister Ursula – moved to Eastbourne, where he attended grammar school, before returning to London, training at the now defunct New College of Speech and Drama in Hampstead. .
He then linked up with the musician Chris Jordan who was an inseparable colleague on all his productions, a constant in a multi-talented company that included Sheila Burnett, Poppy Hands, Roderic Leigh and Rod Beddall.
His explosive, confrontational style of theater was inspired by American extraordinaire Jim Haynes, who ran an open policy at the short-lived Arts Laboratory in Drury Lane, Covent Garden. Simmons’ style was blasphemous and nonconformist, using loud rock music, flowing dry ice, nudity, strip lighting, masks, cartoon caricatures and free rink to attack the liberal values of tolerance and philanthropy.
From 1968, his work at the Arts Laboratory – described by Haynes as “high camp opera” – inspired plays by the German expressionist Georg Kaiser, the French surrealist Jean Tardieu and Lewis’s The Hunting of the Snark. Carroll.
In 1969, Superman was a cartoon and an ironic repetition of Nietzsche’s hero in Thus Spake Zarathustra. Superman’s career as a crime fighter was undermined by his seduction of rock music and a highly publicized campaign urging the public to “block a public highway”. Not surprisingly, in those days, the show led to extensive European tours for the first time.
A visit to the Edinburgh festival in 1970 also led to Michael Rudman, who ran the Traverse theater at the time, commissioning Do It!, adapted from activist Jerry Rubin’s book documenting the anti-Vietnam war protests at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago Mayor Daley’s suppression. .
Author and film producer Peter Ansorge provided a hot-off-the-press account of that period in fringe theatre, Disrupting the Spectacle (1975), in which he pointedly noted that Simmons, who did not visit the US until 1973, responded, it. with the myths related to the big cities in line with Kafka, Brecht and Fritz Lang: the city was only part of a geographical reality; more importantly, it epitomized American excess, confusion, barbarism and popular culture.
Even more controversial than Do It!, the George Jackson Black and White Minstrel Show (1972) pitted white actors against blacks angrily portraying the tragic plight of George Jackson, a black Panther who was killed trying to escape from prison. Critics of the show said it perpetuated racial stereotypes in entertainment while glorifying the black power movement.
In truth, the tone of the show was too cynical, too horrifying, too flat, to accommodate any category of contempt or approval. Above all, he took a historic staple of US entertainment, the minstrel show, violently shook it up and turned it inside out.
Apart from Micery, Pip’s company has found enthusiastic audiences at the Oval House and Theater Upstairs in London, the Traverse, Glasgow Citizens and international festivals in Belgrade, Hamburg, Nancy, Sweden and Denmark.
There was a lull in activity in 1973, but after a nine-month residency in Rotterdam, behind closed doors, the company recharged and returned with An Die Musik and, in 1976, a delightful reworking of Dostoevsky’s short story, The Dream of a. A Ridiculous Man, in which said person was saved from the brink of suicide by a wonderful vision of paradise.
They celebrated their 10th anniversary in 1978 with a 90 minute rock version of The Tempest. Their last half-dozen shows included an adaptation of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s brilliant dystopian novel We; fantasia casino gambling, Rien ne va plus; and, finally, a grim, visceral version of Kafka’s terrifying In the Penal Colony.
The group disbanded in 1978. In 1993, Pip moved with his wife, Helena Fransson – whom he married in 1977 – and their daughter, Sophie, to Sweden. He continued to work throughout Europe, including several productions at L’école du Théâtre des Teinturries in Lausanne. He enjoyed the outdoors, boating and fishing, and playing golf.
Although it may be a matter of regret that Pip was never invited to direct Euripides’ The Bacchae at the National Theatre, his joyous, confrontational theater had an impact on our cultural and political life, even if the revolution did not take place ever.
Helena is survived by Sophie, a grandson, Oliver, and his sister, Ursula.
• Philip (Pip) Simmons, theater director, born 1 December 1943; he died 24 January 2024
