The year is 1937, and at a farmhouse in a village on the edge of the Chilterns named Fawley Bottom, two of the greatest artists of the 20th century have retired to the piano. It is August bank holiday weekend and as “rows – and more rows” detonate around them, Wystan Hugh Auden picks out the melody to Stormy Weather with a single finger, while Benjamin Britten improvises a masterful accompaniment.
Auden, Britten and others including the poet Stephen Spender had been summoned to the home of the artist John Piper for the Group Theatre congress. It is an occasion that, like so many air-clearing exercises for artistic collectives before and since, no doubt seemed very important to its participants at the time, but was actually a storm in a teacup. The only reason it’s remembered at all is because of what each of these men did next. (What Britten actually did next, he wrote in his diary, was “smoke two cigarettes … with disastrous consequences in the morning. Never again.”)
It wouldn’t be at all surprising if you’ve never heard of the Group Theatre. The Wikipedia entry for it, for instance, is just six lines long. Yet it wasn’t just Auden, Britten, Spender and Piper who had some involvement with the ensemble in the 1930s; Christopher Isherwood and Louis MacNeice wrote for it too, while Duncan Grant, Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland contributed designs for productions, which utilised the talents of actors like Alec Guinness and Trevor Howard, singers including Hedli Anderson (women did feature, occasionally) and directors such as Tyrone Guthrie. Bertolt Brecht, TS Eliot and WB Yeats are described by Michael Sidnell, the only person to write a book about the Group Theatre (long out of print), as “especially attentive spectators”.
Over eight years, between 1932 and 1939, the group produced a number of notable original plays, including Auden’s The Dance of Death (1933), co-directed by Guthrie with designs by Moore; Auden and Isherwood’s The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F6 (1936) and On the Frontier (1938) the latter two with music by Britten; MacNeice’s The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1936) and Out of the Picture (1937), both again with music by Britten; and Spender’s Trial of a Judge (1938), with sets designed and painted by Piper. These were interspersed with some Shakespeare here, a Cocteau translation there, an important adaptation of Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes in between, along with numerous revues, experimental happenings and cabarets, performed in obscure venues across London – and also occasionally Cambridge, thanks to the encouragement of John Maynard Keynes.
It was, in other words, one of the motliest and most distinctive gatherings of British and Irish genius of the first half of the 20th century, a dynamic collaboration between artists who transformed their fields and changed the course of modern literary, musical and artistic history.
So why has it not garnered more attention? Consider, once again, Fawley Bottom: these might have been great men, or men who would become great, but they were also quite silly. There was something residually schoolboyish or studenty about how the Group Theatre operated – artistically, politically, commercially, socially. Reading about them, your reference point is sometimes the Cambridge Footlights, or Beyond the Fringe. The underlying homosocial-verging-on-sexual dynamics, the pretentiousness (one 1935 performance was described as “a Harlequinade”), the shambolic finances (Keynes was shocked to discover the company was legally incapable of entering into a contract), the relaxedness about only ever reaching a small coterie of cultural insiders with their work, the epic rows: all will be familiar to anyone who’s ever taken a university show up to Edinburgh. Silliest of all was Rupert Doone, the group’s founder, a long-forgotten dancer and former lover of Cocteau’s, plucked from obscurity in Paris by Sergei Diaghilev. He was, by all accounts, modestly visionary, especially in his openness to European theory and techniques, and maximally impossible.
Then there’s the timing. The second world war was a turning point in the careers of all these men; only Auden and MacNeice could be said to have produced a good portion of their most serious and lasting work before its shadows descended. Moore, Piper and Sutherland became official war artists. Auden, Isherwood and Britten fled as pacifist exiles to the US. It was there that Auden would write September 1, 1939 and The Age of Anxiety, and live on and off for the rest of his life. Britten would return in 1942 with the idea that he would write an opera about a Suffolk fisher named Peter Grimes.
But to skip over the Group Theatre on the way to the 1940s, and beyond, is to miss at least two reasons why it really does matter. For here are the seeds that some of the later masterpieces grew out of; and here also is a case for an alternative view of the 1930s: as a high point of English radicalism, plugged into the wider European avant garde, harnessing the talents of a lavishly gifted generation to reach mass audiences with highly politicised high culture. (This was, after all, the age of the socialist pageant, vast high-concept spectacles capable of filling the Royal Albert Hall and Wembley Stadium, to which many of the Group Theatre’s luminaries contributed.)
Both patterns can be traced in the peculiarities of the Group Theatre’s greatest hit, The Ascent of F6, which made it to the West End, briefly. JMD Pringle’s review in the Manchester Guardian from 5 July 1938 was recently republished as an archive curio. “So much for the plot,” Pringle writes, “but that is the least of the play and the least of our difficulties.” And he’s not wrong. The play centres on a climber, Michael Ransom, who has been asked to lead an expedition up an untrodden peak in “Sudoland” known as F6. But from the outset what really drives it on are intercut chorus scenes featuring a suburban couple for whom patriotic reports on Ramsom’s quest offer temporary escapism from their dreary lives. They speak to one another in pungently satirical couplets that are pure Auden:
When will they notice us? When will they flatter us? When will they help us? When there’s a war.
Then they will ask for our children and kill them; sympathise deeply and ask for some more.
By the time an increasingly delirious Ransom is straining for the summit of F6 in the final scene, rhyming stylisation has completely overtaken prose naturalism, and one part of the script will be familiar to anyone who has seen Four Weddings and a Funeral:
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Finally, at the top, Ransom encounters a mysterious figure, whose “draperies fall away”, revealing … his mother! He dies. Heady stuff, and not unsilly too, but there is so much here that is nevertheless interesting, without even getting into a psychoanalytic reading. “Stop all the clocks …”, which Auden reworked into the poem Funeral Blues, was performed in the play by Anderson, and became Britten and Auden’s most celebrated cabaret song.
By 1937, Britten was increasingly frustrated by Doone and the Group Theatre’s feckless bohemianism, but he evidently remembered the lessons of his years spent composing incidental music on the hoof as its house composer. Peter Grimes is an opera that is celebrated to this day for its intense, tightly sprung theatricality. There are clear echoes of The Ascent of F6 in the mad scene at the end, when the ghosts of Peter’s regrets rise to the surface in little snatches of half-remembered dialogue and melody, which Britten weaves into an eerie tapestry.
And in its mishmash of verse and song, symbolic sincerity and anti-imperial satire, highbrow themes and lowbrow expression, lighting effects and agitprop coups de théâtre, Auden and Isherwood’s play, and the success it enjoyed, challenge certain received notions of 20th-century theatre history. These tend to characterise the 1930s and 40s as defined by Terence Rattigan’s buttoned-up bourgeois naturalism, and to credit Joan Littlewood, rather than Rupert Doone, with shaking things up a full 25 years later, in Oh, What a Lovely War!
As total war broke out and its stars dispersed, the company went into hibernation and never quite woke up, despite Doone’s best efforts. Like Ransom’s climb, the lofty ambitions of the Group Theatre ensured that its eventual, inevitable failure was at least partly heroic. As longstanding member John Allen wrote in his foreword to Sidnell’s book, slightly damning Doone with faint praise: “He was near to creating the most interesting theatrical ensemble Britain has seen this century.”
Songs and incidental music from The Ascent of F6 are part of the programme for Perfection, of a Kind: Britten vs Auden, a special concert at Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall on 5 November 2023, presented in partnership by the City of London Sinfonia and the London Review of Books
