There was a brief period (1968 to 1973) in British theater when everything changed as the American counterculture took root in the performing arts, music and journalism in Europe. The main movers of the theater were the Pip Simmons Theater company, David Hare and Tony Bicât’s Portable Theatre, Nancy Meckler’s Freehold company and Jeff Nuttall and Mark Long’s Folk Performance.
These start-ups were enterprises – guerrilla groups, you might say – that toured in vans and small trucks the new arts laboratories and centers that were springing up around the country, following on from influential US companies such as Living Theater and Open Theatre. He was influenced by the post-Stanislavsky “poor theatre” theories of the great Polish guru Jerzy Grotowski.
Simmons, who has died aged 80, was one of Britain’s most highly original and energetic theater directors who was not supported by the Arts Council or the cultural establishment; others included Joan Littlewood and Peter Brook. Littlewood had just withdrawn from the fray in 1975, Brook was funded by the French government in Paris, and Simmons found a spiritual and artistic home in the Netherlands, particularly at the Mickery theater in Amsterdam run by Ritsaert tan Cate.
His production of An Die Musik at the ICA Theater in London in 1975 (and touring abroad), its revival by the Jewish State Theater in Bucharest in 2000, was one of the best avant-garde productions of my life, a chilling, overwhelming masterpiece.
It was about a group of internees at the Dachau Nazi concentration camp who were forced to provide their own musical entertainment; Critical reactions ranged from anger to praise. In an unforgettable show of shock tactics and heartbreaking classical music, an unpleasant truth was confronted.
On this performance, Harold Hobson, the eccentric but influential Sunday Times post-war critic, said: “Pip Simmons has the most frightening mind I have ever encountered in the London theatre. It is to be hoped for the happiness of his soul that he himself does not perceive all that its dark recesses imply.”
Pip was born in north London, the son of chemist Jack Simmons and his wife Sybil. The family – Pip had an older sister called Ursula – moved to Eastbourne, where he attended grammar school, before returning to London and studying at the now-defunct New College of Speech and Drama in Hampstead.
There he bonded with musician Chris Jordan, who became his inseparable colleague on all his productions and a fixture in a multi-talented company that included Sheila Burnett, Poppy Hands, Roderic Leigh and Rod Beddall.
The inspiring catalyst for his explosive, confrontational style of theater was the remarkable American Jim Haynes, who operated an open-door policy at his short-lived Arts Laboratory in Drury Lane, Covent Garden. Simmons’ style was profane and uncompromising, using loud rock music, billowing dry ice, nudity, strobe lighting, masks, cartoon caricatures, and free-form dancing to attack liberal values such as tolerance and humanitarianism.
From 1968 his work was lavished at the Art Laboratory – Haynes described it as “high camp opera” – springboarding from the plays of German expressionist Georg Kaiser, French surrealist Jean Tardieu and Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark.
In 1969, Superman was both a caricature and an ironic version of Nietzsche’s hero in Thus Spake Zarathustra. Superman’s career as a crime fighter is undermined by his seduction by rock music and a highly publicized campaign encouraging the public to “make love on a public highway”. Unsurprisingly, in those days the show led to a widespread European tour for the first time.
A visit to the Edinburgh festival in 1970 led to Michael Rudman later managing the Traverse theater and Do It!, based on activist Jerry Rubin’s book documenting anti-Vietnam war protests at the 1968 Democratic convention in oppressive Mayor Daley’s Chicago. led to his appointment. .
Writer and filmmaker Peter Ansorge presented Disrupting the Spectacle (1975), a warm press account of this period in fringe theatre; here he shrewdly observed that Simmons, who did not visit the United States until 1973, responded. Kafka, Brecht, and Fritz Lang alike to the myths surrounding large cities: the city was only a partial geographical reality; more importantly, it represented an epitome of American excess, confusion, barbarism, and popular culture.
Even more controversial than Do It!, the George Jackson Black and White Minstrel Show (1972) presented white actors in blackface angrily narrating the tragic case of George Jackson, a black Panther who was killed while trying to escape from prison. Critics of the series said that while the show glorified the black power movement, it panned racist stereotypes in entertainment.
In reality, the tone of the show was too cynical, too ugly, and flat to fit into any category of disdain or approval. First of all, he took the minstrel show, the historical foundation of US entertainment, violently shook it up and turned it on its head.
As well as the Mickery, Pip’s band has found enthusiastic audiences at London’s Oval House and Theater Upstairs, the Traverse, Glasgow Citizens and international festivals in Belgrade, Hamburg, Nancy, Sweden and Denmark.
There was a lull in activity in 1973, but a nine-month sojourn behind closed doors in Rotterdam re-energized the company and it returned with An Die Musik and, in 1976, a delightful reworking of Dostoevsky’s short story The Dream of a They returned. Ridiculous Man is the film in which the aforementioned man is saved from the brink of suicide by a sensational vision of paradise.
In 1978, they celebrated their 10th anniversary with a 90-minute rock version of The Tempest. Among his last half-dozen shows was an adaptation of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s brilliant dystopian novel We; Rien ne va plus, a casino fantasy; and finally a bleak, prescient version of Kafka’s terrifying Penal Colony.
The group disbanded in 1978. In 1993, Pip moved to Sweden with his wife Helena Fransson, whom he married in 1977, and their daughter Sophie. He continued to work throughout Europe, including several productions at the L’école du Théâtre des Teintureries in Lausanne. He enjoyed the outdoor life, boating, fishing and golf.
Although it is regrettable that Pip was never invited to conduct, for example, Euripides’ The Bacchae at the National Theatre, his cheerful, confrontational theater had an impact on our cultural life and politics, even if the revolution never took place .
He is survived by Helena, Sophie, his grandson Oliver and his sister Ursula.
• Philip (Pip) Simmons, theater director, born December 1, 1943; Died January 24, 2024