Théâtre

1967 · 179842 — Dublin: 1967. With notes in the director's hand A collection of ephemera from The Living Theatre Company's Dublin performances of Frankenstein and The Antigone of Sophokles: a programme for each play six photographs of the staging for Frankenstein and a notecard with handwritten typesetting for the programme. Each programme is heavily annotated in different hands with corrections to the cast list of both plays. The title page of the programme for Frankenstein has several notes by the director Julian Beck. The experimental Living Theatre Company was founded in New York in 1947 by Beck and Judith Malina. They were the among the first in America to produce plays by European authors including Bertolt Brecht Jean Cocteau and T. S. Eliot and helped to originate the concept of off- and off-off-Broadway. Following tax disputes in the US the group spent much of the 1960s touring Europe. Frankenstein was first conceived for the 1965 Venice Biennale beginning with 30 minutes of silence. Beck planned for there to be no script stating "The action the words the effects will all be created by the company working together with the techniques we have developed amongst ourselves" Beck quoted in Tytell p. 208. The play was reworked several times before its staging in Dublin including a five hour performance in Cassis. The photographs show Beck's cubist set "A thirty-foot high iron grid of wooden platforms and steel piping the space was divided into fifteen connected cubicles on three levels" Tytell p. 210. Antigone first opened in Paris in 1967 with a script translated by Malina. Her version "was based on Brecht's version of the lofty translation the German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin had done of Sophocles' play" Tytell p. 221. A review of the Dublin staging of Frankenstein was cautiously positive stating it was "epic total theatre and though I often felt bored during the long acts it finally sent me into a state of semi-hypnosis which I was reluctant to break" The Guardian. Together 8 items: 2 programmes octavo pp. 6 and pp. 4 with notecard 153 x 103 mm; 6 photographic prints 148 x 909 mm to 196 x 240 mm. Programmes in original red and white wrappers lettered in black white and red. Programmes a little rubbed and creased photos generally well preserved several overexposed two with damp stains: very good copies. John Tytell The Living Theatre: Art Exile and Outrage 1995; Robert Waterhouse "Frankenstein at the Dublin Theatre Festival" The Guardian 7 October 1967. unknown