There was a short period in the British theatre – 1968 to 1973 – when everything changed as the American counterculture took root in the performing arts, music and journalism in Europe. The Pip Simmons Theatre company, along with the Portable Theatre of David Hare and Tony Bicât, Nancy Meckler’s Freehold company and the People Show of Jeff Nuttall and Mark Long, were the main theatrical movers.
These startup companies were the enterprises – guerrilla groups, you might say – that toured in vans and small lorries to the burgeoning new arts labs and centres around the country, in the wake of influential US companies such as the Living Theatre and the Open Theatre that had been touched by the post-Stanislavsky “poor theatre” theories of the great Polish guru Jerzy Grotowski.
Simmons, who has died aged 80, was one of several highly original and energetic theatre directors unsupported in Britain by the Arts Council or the cultural establishment – others included Joan Littlewood and Peter Brook. Littlewood simply retired 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, primarily at the Mickery theatre run by Ritsaert ten Cate in Amsterdam.
His production of An Die Musik at the ICA theatre in London in 1975 (and touring abroad), revived by the Jewish State theatre of Bucharest in 2000, was one of the finest avant-garde productions of my lifetime, a gruesome, overwhelming masterpiece.
It was about a group of internees in the Dachau Nazi concentration camp compelled to provide their own musical entertainment; critical responses ranged from the incensed to the laudatory. An unpalatable reality was confronted in an unforgettable display of shock tactics and plangent, gut-wrenching classical music.
At this show, Harold Hobson, the eccentric but influential postwar critic on the Sunday Times, said that: “Pip Simmons has the most terrifying mind I have encountered in London theatre. It is to be hoped for the happiness of his soul that he does not himself realise all that is suggested by its dark recesses.”
Pip was born in north London, the son of Jack Simmons, a chemist, and his wife, Sybil. The family – Pip had an elder sister, Ursula – moved to Eastbourne, where he attended the grammar school, before returning to London, training at the now defunct New College of Speech and Drama in Hampstead.
There, he bonded with the musician Chris Jordan who became his inseparable colleague on all his productions, a constant in a multi-talented company that included Sheila Burnett, Poppy Hands, Roderic Leigh and Rod Beddall.
The inspirational catalyst for his explosive, confrontational style of theatre was the extraordinary American Jim Haynes, who ran an open-door policy at the short-lived Arts Lab in Drury Lane, Covent Garden. The Simmons style was blasphemous and uncompromising, using loud rock music, billowing dry ice, nudity, strobe lighting, masks, cartoon caricatures and free-form dance to assault liberal values of tolerance and humanitarianism.
From 1968, his work splurged at the Arts Lab – Haynes described it as “high camp opera” – spring-boarding from plays by the German expressionist Georg Kaiser, the French surrealist Jean Tardieu and The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll.
In 1969, Superman was both a cartoon and an ironic retread of Nietzsche’s hero in Thus Spake Zarathustra. Superman’s career as a crime-fighter was undermined in his seduction by rock music and a highly publicised campaign urging folk “to have a fuck on a public highway”. Unsurprisingly, in those days, the show led to widespread European touring for the first time.
A visit to the Edinburgh festival in 1970 also led to Michael Rudman, then running the Traverse theatre, commissioning Do It!, adapted from the activist Jerry Rubin’s book documenting the anti-Vietnam war protests at the 1968 Democratic convention in the repressive Mayor Daley’s Chicago.
The author and film producer Peter Ansorge supplied a hot-off-the-press account of this period in the fringe theatre, Disrupting the Spectacle (1975), in which he cannily observed that Simmons, who did not visit the US until 1973, responded to myths surrounding the big cities in a similar vein to 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 black face angrily recounting the tragic case of George Jackson, a black Panther who had been killed trying to escape from prison. Critics of the show said it pandered to racial stereotypes in entertainment while glorifying the black power movement.
In truth, the tone of the show was too cynical, too outrageous, too flat-out, to fit any categories of either contempt or approval. Above all, it took the historic staple of US entertainment, the minstrel show, shook it violently and turned it inside out.
Apart from Mickery, Pip’s company found enthusiastic audiences at the Oval House and the Theatre Upstairs in London, the Traverse, the Glasgow Citizens and at international festivals in Belgrade, Hamburg, Nancy, Sweden and Denmark.
There was a lull in activity in 1973, but a nine-month residency in Rotterdam, behind closed doors, recharged the company and they returned with An Die Musik and, in 1976, a delightful reworking of a Dostoevsky short story, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, in which the aforesaid fellow was saved on 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 half dozen shows included an adaptation of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s superb dystopian novel We; a gambling casino fantasia, Rien ne va plus; and, finally, a bleak, visionary version of Kafka’s terrifying In the Penal Colony.
The group disbanded in 1978. In 1993, Pip moved with his wife, Helena Fransson – whom he had married in 1977 – and their daughter, Sophie, to Sweden. He continued to work all over Europe, including several productions at L’école du Théâtre des Teintureries in Lausanne. He enjoyed the outdoor life, boating and fishing, and playing golf.
Although it may be a matter for regret that Pip was never invited to direct, say, The Bacchae by Euripides at the National Theatre, his joyous, confrontational theatre had its impact on our cultural life and politics, even if the revolution never took hold.
He is survived by Helena, Sophie, a grandson, Oliver, and his sister, Ursula.
• Philip (Pip) Simmons, theatre director, born 1 December 1943; died 24 January 2024
