There was a brief period in British theater – from 1968 to 1973 – when everything changed as the American counterculture took root in the performing arts, music and journalism in Europe. The Pip Simmons Theater company, along with David Hare and Tony Bicât’s Portable Theater, Nancy Meckler’s Freehold company, and Jeff Nuttall and Mark Long’s People Show, were the major theatrical movers.
These start-up companies were the enterprises – guerrilla groups, you might say – that toured in vans and small trucks to the burgeoning new arts labs and centers across the country, in the wake of influential American companies like the Living Theater and the Open Theater. was moved by the post-Stanislavsky theories of the ‘poor theatre’ of the great Polish guru Jerzy Grotowski.
Simmons, who has died aged 80, was one of many highly original and energetic theater directors who were not supported in Britain by the Arts Council or the cultural establishment – including Joan Littlewood and Peter Brook. Littlewood simply withdrew from the struggle in 1975, Brook was funded by the French government in Paris, and Simmons found a spiritual and artistic home in the Netherlands, mainly at Ritsaert tan Cate’s Mickery theater in Amsterdam.
His production of An Die Musik at the ICA Theater in London in 1975 (and on tour abroad), revived by the Jewish State Theater of Bucharest in 2000, was one of the most beautiful avant-garde productions of my life, a horrific , overwhelming masterpiece.
It was about a group of internees in the Nazi concentration camp Dachau who were forced to provide their own musical entertainment; critical reactions ranged from outraged to praise. An unsavory reality was confronted in an unforgettable display of shock tactics and compelling, heartbreaking classical music.
During 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 encountered in the London theater. It is to be hoped for the happiness of his soul that he himself does not realize all that is suggested by its dark corners.
Pip was born in North London, the son of Jack Simmons, a chemist, and his wife Sybil. The family – Pip had an older sister, Ursula – moved to Eastbourne, where he attended grammar school, before returning to London, where he trained 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, a constant in a multi-talented company that also included Sheila Burnett, Poppy Hands, Roderic Leigh and Rod Beddall.
The inspiring catalyst for his explosive, confrontational theater style was the extraordinary American Jim Haynes, who maintained an open-door policy at the short-lived Arts Lab in Drury Lane, Covent Garden. The Simmons style was profane and uncompromising, using loud rock music, billowing dry ice, nudity, flashlights, masks, cartoon caricatures and free dancing to attack the liberal values of tolerance and humanitarianism.
From 1968, his work spread in the Arts Lab – Haynes described it as ‘high camp opera’ – inspired by plays by the German expressionist Georg Kaiser, the French surrealist Jean Tardieu and Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark.
In 1969, Superman was both a cartoon and an ironic retread of Nietzsche’s hero in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Superman’s career as a crime fighter was undermined by his seduction by rock music and a highly publicized campaign calling on people to “fuck on public roads”. It is not surprising that the show led to widespread European tours for the first time at that time.
A visit to the Edinburgh festival in 1970 also led to Michael Rudman, then director of the Traverse Theatre, commissioning Do It!, an adaptation of activist Jerry Rubin’s book detailing the anti-Vietnam war protests. the 1968 Democratic convention in Mayor Daley’s repressive Chicago were documented. .
The author and film producer Peter Ansorge delivered a fresh account of this period in the fringe theater, Disrupting the Spectacle (1975), in which he astutely noted that Simmons, who only visited the US in 1973, reacted to myths surrounding the big cities in a similar vein like Kafka, Brecht and Fritz Lang: the city was only a partial geographical reality; more importantly, it represented a summary 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 recounting the tragic case of George Jackson, a black panther who had died trying to escape prison. Critics of the show said it panders to racial stereotypes in entertainment while glorifying the black power movement.
In reality, the tone of the show was too cynical, too outrageous, too outright, to fit into any category of disdain or approval. Above all, the historic staple of American entertainment, the minstrel show, was violently shaken and turned inside out.
In addition to Mickery, Pip’s company found enthusiastic audiences at the Oval House and Theater Upstairs in London, the Traverse, the Glasgow Citizens and at international festivals in Belgrade, Hamburg, Nancy, Sweden and Denmark.
In 1973 activity came to a standstill, but a nine-month residency in Rotterdam, behind closed doors, gave the company new energy and they returned with An Die Musik and, in 1976, a beautiful adaptation of a Dostoyevsky short story, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, in which the aforementioned chap was saved from the brink of suicide by a sensational vision of paradise.
They celebrated their 10th anniversary in 1978 with a 90-minute rock version of The Tempest. Their last six shows include an adaptation of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s beautiful dystopian novel We; a gambling casino fantasy, Rien ne va plus; and finally a somber, visionary version of Kafka’s terrifying In the Penal Colony.
The group disbanded in 1978. In 1993, Pip moved to Sweden with his wife Helena Fransson – whom he had married in 1977 – and their daughter Sophie. He continued to work throughout Europe, including several productions at L’école du Théâtre des Teintureries in Lausanne. He enjoyed the outdoors, boating and fishing, and golfing.
While it may be a matter of regret that Pip was never invited to direct, for example, Euripides’ The Bacchae at the National Theatre, his joyful, confrontational theater had its impact on our cultural life and politics, even though the revolution never took hold .
He is survived by Helena, Sophie, a grandson, Oliver, and his sister Ursula.
• Philip (Pip) Simmons, theater director, born December 1, 1943; died January 24, 2024