The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [346]
But the biggest sensation of the season was a full-length production by Peter Brook, one of its two co-directors, who had been responsible for the `Spurt of Blood' sketch. Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade showed the crazed inmates of Charenton lunatic asylum re-enacting the assassination of the French revolutionary leader Marat, under the direction of their fellow inmate, the Marquis de Sade. This nightmare vision of a twilight world of violence, madness, sexual aggression and revolutionary hysteria, featuring the author of Justine as its hero, provoked uproar, led by various impresarios representing the commercial theatre, deploring how the London stage was being taken over by `filthy plays'. This set off an equally hysterical response from the `progressives; led by the left-wing politician Michael Foot, who ostentatiously published a telegram:
One leading `progressive' critic Penelope Gilliatt solemnly claimed the play `had the nerve to investigate the sort of violence that Shakespeare himself depicted'. 3
Another theatrical sensation of 1964 was Entertaining Mr Sloane, a `black comedy written by Joe Orton, a defiant homosexual who had recently spent nine months in prison for obscenely defacing books from a public library. His `comedy showed a mysterious stranger, Mr Sloane, arriving as the new lodger in a house occupied by an unmarried woman in her 30s, her homosexual brother and their father. In the first act Sloane is seduced by the sister. In the next he seduces the brother. The father then identifies him as the man he had seen kicking a pornographer to death, at which Sloane kicks the father to death. The woman then discovers she is pregnant by Sloane, who makes it plain he can think of no fate worse than being tied for life to a woman. The story ends with the prospective mother sucking at a boiled sweet, in a regression to infantilism. Three years later, after writing more plays in similar vein, Orton himself was hacked to death with an axe by his homosexual lover, overcome by a fit of jealous rage.
On both sides of the Atlantic in 1964 the state tried to mount a last-ditch effort to halt the tide of sex and violence which now seemed to be engulfing storytelling in all directions. When publishers in London and America decided to exploit the new freedom of the times by disinterring Fanny Hill from its two centuries of suppressed obscurity, the authorities realised that, if ever they were going to persuade the courts to distinguish between `literature' and `pornography; this was the case to go for. Surely no bishops or professors of English literature would rush to defend what no one had ever pretended was anything other than an unashamedly `dirty book'? In London the magistrates were briefly persuaded by this argument, although their verdict was soon reversed. In America the case actually reached the Supreme Court, where in a historic judgment in 1965 the justices accepted that Fanny Hill had `literary merit' and should no longer be censored.
A more contemporary novel which also briefly faced legal disapproval in 1964 was Hubert Selby Jr's Last Exit to Brooklyn. This was excitedly hailed as another triumphant breakthrough in `pushing back the frontiers, with its unrelievedly black picture of New York slum-life set during a strike in the early 1950s. The plot centres on Harry, a brutal union activist involved in the strike, who begins cheating on his wife with a drug-addict; Georgette, a transvestite homosexual; and a prostitute Tralala, who dreams of escaping from her hopeless day-to-day existence selling her body to men at the back of parking lots. Georgette ends up being crushed to death by a car. Harry, after the strike has come to its climax in a series of explosions when the strikers set fire to a fleet of trucks, is caught attempting to have sex with a young boy from the neighbourhood, and is kicked to death by a gang, who hang up his corpse on a billboard in a parody of the Crucifixion. Finally, as the story's climax, Tralala is subjected to a prolonged and violent gang-rape,