In a piece for the Guardian in 1971, Tom Stoppard elaborates at length about working with the community arts pioneer Ed Berman, an American born in Maine who later became a British citizen. Stoppard obviously found a fellow jokey libertarian spirit in Berman that sometimes disguised an intense seriousness of purpose. Stoppard’s early play After Magritte was in a season of plays in Berman’s Ambiance theatre in London. Later he wrote other plays for Inter-Action, the hugely ambitious community arts company created by Berman and a team of talented collaborators in arts and education.
Among these plays was Dirty Linen, a satire on the sexual indiscretions of politicians. Embedded in the play is a diversion called New-Found-Land, based around Berman’s bid for UK citizenship. The American and the Czech shared a vision of Britain where liberty, creativity and a sense of the ridiculous were thought to be entrenched. The play’s subsequent four‑year run at the Arts Theatre allowed a stream of supportive royalties to go to Inter-Action, which in its turn became one of the most significant social and communitarian organisations of the later decades of the 20th century, pioneering everything from city farms to IT training for young people, to basing their operations on a minesweeper opposite the South Bank.
