1953-1961
'BEFORE THE BEYOND'
Pictured - Oxford's High Street, 1950s.
"Perhaps Man's greatest wealth, and one that doesn't need security, is the immeasurable wealth of knowledge - and where better to go in search of it than Oxford! Or, if you want to be difficult, Cambridge." - British Pathé, 1961 [source].
The king had died young, and as his eldest daughter Elizabeth ascended to dominion, Britain reeled still from the impact of World Wars, which had weakened the strength of its empire irreversibly [source]. Yet, in spite of this, the country's self-perspective in the early 1950s was one of primly maintained optimism - a confidence in a prosperous future and, via the sustained allegiance of the Commonwealth, a perpetual position as a major global force. It was an outlook that had, previously, served the United Kingdom well.
"We had won the war, created the Welfare State, nationalised the major public utilities, expanded education, begun the process of decolonisation, put in place a structure of collective security. There seemed nothing that we could not achieve." - Tony Benn, Labour MP 1950-2001 [source]
Oxford exemplified this attitude of optimistic continuity. Just as it had retained its dreaming spires through the ravages of the Blitz, had the city's ancient university retained a great number of its bureaucracies, systems and customs across the previous centuries - from term-dates defined obscurely around the Christian feasts of Michaelmas (autumn), Hilary (winter/spring) and the Trinity (summer), to the semi-autonomy and wealth of each of the university's 'Colleges' (every Oxford student belongs to one).
Given such antiquity, it is surprising that, by the 1950s, a university-wide student-run theatre community had only existed at Oxford for around 70 years. The Oxford University Dramatic Society (O.U.D.S.) was founded in 1885 as a splinter group from the 'Philothespian Society' (a now-extinct drama collective which had been tightly regulated by the university Vice-Chancellor) [source]. The formation of O.U.D.S. was an act of protest against an aloof and restrictive administration and, needless to say, it took little time for other theatre groups to then follow in its wake.
While O.U.D.S. was undoubtedly a radical shift towards greater student agency, its output was rather safe, consisting largely of familiar 'classical' works - its inaugural production, attended by Oscar Wilde, was Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I. The group also carried much of the established bigotry of the day - most obviously in how the abilities of female students were almost entirely dismissed.
"For many years, O.U.D.S. sought professional actresses for female roles in its plays [instead of students]... Understandably, the professionals usually acted circles around the adolescent Romeos and Lears, but the policy could be defended on the grounds of both tradition and necessity, since the women's colleges at Oxford have yet to produce much of a crop of actresses. The first "undergraduette" finally appeared in an O.U.D.S. show in 1927, and the Second World War forced abandonment of the former policy, so nowadays the local talent usually fills all the female roles." - Roderick Robertson, University Theatre at Oxford, 1956 [source].
Perhaps as a reaction to this attitude, the Experimental Theatre Club (E.T.C.) emerged within the Taylor Institute, the university's centre for the study of European languages [source].
"The E.T.C. was founded in 1936 by Nevill Coghill, who felt it was time for the creation of a more adventurous group than the O.U.D.S., and also for one that gave women equal opportunities. A note on its first performance said it was intended 'to give scope to all those lesser creative talents and crafts that are involved in the Art of Theatre...[and] to present the little-known masterpieces of the past'." - Humphrey Carpenter, O.U.D.S.: A Centenary History of the Oxford University Dramatic Society 1885–1985, 1985.
"Most likely undergraduate men interested in theatre belong to both societies, and if any serious differences can be drawn between the two groups, it could fairly be admitted that whereas O.U.D.S. is intensely proud of its noble past, its classical traditions, and its widespread prestige, E.T.C. is intensely proud of its more bohemian and experimental character and its almost limitless freedom to explore world drama. An undergraduate might join O.U.D.S. for its snob appeal, he might ignore the productions completely and turn up only for the formal dress banquet each year to revel in sherry and cigars; but the duffel-coated, moustachioed, aesthetic radical would more likely be found sweating out an E.T.C. production... Competition exists between the clubs, and at certain times this has been expressed in outward hostility." - Roderick Robertson, University Theatre at Oxford, 1956 [source].
Below is an example selection from the Experimental Theatre Club's first ever musical Crime Of Your Life [source], recorded live in the Oxford Playhouse (the city's historical theatre) in 1955 and digitised for the first time for this Archive. Lyrics penned by Welsh poet Stuart Evans [source] are accompanied by melodies from the E.T.C.'s then-musical director Gwyn Arch [source]. The show is a light-hearted romp about prison escapees who find love, only for their pasts to catch up with them...
The song titles given here are for illustrative purposes only - their original names are seemingly lost to history. The song and sketch titles from the E.T.C.'s 1954 show have, however, been recorded, and include 'Literary Luncheon', 'Plebs' Delight', 'The Emperor's Nightingale' and 'Does Your Mother Come From Ireland?' [source].
Pictured - the logo for Fancy That!, the Experimental Theatre Club show that played at the Oxford Playhouse on May 25th-29th 1954.
By the early 1950s, Oxford was positioned as a significant creche of future talent, not only through O.U.D.S. and the E.T.C., but the Playhouse's own Theatre School, operated by local drama teacher Isabel Van Beers.
"She began with twelve students in October 1951, among them Margaret (Maggie) Smith. The actors' union Equity gave Mrs Van Beers permission to have eleven speaking parts a year, for which students auditioned, but Margaret 'nearly always got [them] because she was so good'." - Don Chapman, Oxford Playhouse: High and Low Drama in a University City, 2008 [source].
The Oxford public was, however, unmoved. A national crash in theatre audience numbers had stunted the profits of even the most prestigious UK theatres, and from 1949 to 1956, the Playhouse spiralled towards a financial collapse and ensuing temporary closure (much to the presumed annoyance of its freeholder St John's College) [source]. Serious efforts now sought to reinvigorate the productivity of the British dramatic arts - among them, a venture of impressive scale first formulated by opera manager Rudolf Bing in the mid 1940s. Oxford itself was briefly considered as a potential host city for the project [source], but even as Bing's imposing ambitions settled north of English borders, their effect would soon exert inordinate control over the fate of the city's student theatre.
"The Edinburgh International Festival of Music and Drama was first discussed over a lunch table in a restaurant in Hanover Square, London, towards the end of 1944... [Rudolf Bing] was convinced and he convinced my colleagues and myself that such an enterprise, successfully conducted, might at this moment of European time, be more than temporarily significant and might establish in Britain a centre of world resort for lovers of music, drama, opera, ballet and the graphic arts." - Henry Harvey Wood (Festival co-founder), reproduced in Ralph Lownie's Auld Reekie: An Edinburgh Anthology, 2011 [source].
"The [Edinburgh Festival] Fringe originated as a spontaneous buildup of performing groups appearing at the same time the official Edinburgh International Festival began in 1947... the Fringe supports innovation and covets marginality, as suggested by its very name. Its ideology is markedly egalitarian. No central selection process determines the groups that appear. Anyone with the time and resources may come..." - Wesley Shrum, Fringe and Fortune: The Role of Critics in High and Popular Art, 1996 [source].
"Mention should ...be made of the Oxford Theatre Group, an independent organization which forms itself yearly to take a play and a revue to the Edinburgh Festival [Fringe]. This lively company has been doing this... with mounting success, excellent reviews, and a strong credit balance." -
Roderick Robertson, University Theatre at Oxford, 1956 [source].
The emergence of the Oxford Theatre Group (O.T.G.) had a unique family connection with one of Oxford's most prestigious future alumni.
While O.U.D.S. and the E.T.C. oversaw pieces within Oxford, the function of the O.T.G. lay resolutely in the annual theatrical success of a Scottish summer. Every August from 1953 onwards, a coterie of O.T.G. players would present a selection of shows at the Edinburgh Fringe, including the annual Oxford Revue - a title which, while unimaginative, displayed admirable transparency as to the underlying thesis of the production. (N.B. For the sake of clarity, the italicised Oxford Revue will henceforth refer to the O.T.G. Fringe show. It would take a great many years for the name to describe an actual Oxford-based student troupe, the Oxford Revue).
"Revue. A rather more sophisticated kind of music-hall type entertainment, i.e. a series of turns, songs, dances, sketches, not usually connected by any particular theme. The revue is intimate in character, generally in a small theatre with a small cast who show off their versatility by appearing in numerous sketches and turns... It is aimed at, and appeals to, a rather more highbrow audience than the music-hall, and the main nursery for revue talent in this country has been the universities, particularly Oxford and Cambridge..." - Peter Gammond and Peter Clayton, A Guide to Popular Music, 1960.
The first Oxford Revue, titled Cakes and Ale, featured the talents of Ned Sherrin and the aforementioned Maggie Smith [source][source]. The earliest known recording of the Oxford Revue, however, dates from 1958, included here courtesy of the personal records of writer and actor Jon Dryden Taylor, whose parents met and fell in love when participating in Oxford student theatre.
Taylor's mother and father were working class, and some of the first affected by the so-called 'Butler Act' of 1944, which promised extended education for all [source]. With greater access to schooling, a new generation of English and Welsh students began to receive offers from prestigious universities like Oxford, and soon encountered the attitudes endemic to such establishments.
In the face of such callousness from their upper-class peers and professors, cohorts of working class students would often band together and establish friendships through theatrical performance - capitalising on the opportunities Oxford elicited, alongside friends and colleagues who better understood their respective backgrounds and hardships. One organ scholar who regularly supported Taylor's parents on the stage grew up on a public housing estate in Dagenham, but would, in time, go on to achieve two Golden Globes, an Academy Award nomination and a CBE - a Mr. Dudley Stuart John Moore.
"[Dudley Moore] was educated (and I use the word in the loosest possible sense) at a local grammar school... by diligent study, or possibly bribery, he won an Organ Scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford. It was here, through mingling with his betters (not me, I was at Cambridge) that he acquired his somewhat effete upper class accent. At Oxford he divided his time between the serious study of his classical organ, and the futile pursuit of women... Like many smallish men (Napoleon, Adolf Hitler, to name but two) Dudley has a superficial charm and warmth that deceive many. Underneath lurks a demented sadist, capable in private of unspeakable deeds. It is my personal belief that his secret ambition is to initiate World War Three." - Peter Cook (Moore's friend), Behind The Fringe programme notes, 1972 [source].
"Moore also apparently proposed to Mum but [quoting Taylor's mother] ‘he was drunk and didn’t mean it. I wasn’t tall and blonde’. They never dated or anything so the drunkenness explanation seems likely." - Jon Dryden Taylor, 2021 [source].
Pictured - Dudley Moore, circa 1969.
In spite of such camaraderie, performing with Oxford University at the Fringe was still immensely difficult for students without significant disposable wealth - a sobering parallel to the financial inaccessibility of the festival today [source].
The Oxford Revue of 1958, named All For Money, was a heady mix of sketches and music (the latter likely written by Herbert Chappell [source]), and seen as a much-needed triumph by the Oxford theatre community. The decision to record the performance may have been motivated by the belief that, prior to this show, the quality of O.T.G. output had slipped over the past few years - having a permenant record of a successful Revue could thus only be a good thing.
The music of All For Money was a particular showcase for the abilities of Dudley Moore, be he playing a reminiscing gangster or a tangoing 45 r.p.m. record.
The original template for revue performance was a popular pre-War holdover, with firm and steady roots deep within the dreamy nostalgia for the Edwardian music hall [source] - the Oxford Revue, as it was initially conceived, was a late addition to this format. Yet the Revue's origination in 1953 occurred only a handful of years before an enormous cultural shift - an overdue societal acknowledgement that the aforementioned optimism for continued British supremacy was ill-founded. Many former imperial possessions and Commonwealth nations were beginning to lean away from their anticipated British allegiance and, as the 1950s progressed, the UK's relevance ebbed in the wake of the Cold War between the United States and the USSR. The military humiliation of the 1956 Suez Crisis was also quick to contribute to the pre-existing scars in the country's self-perception.
The appeal of 'first-generation revues' reflected the stability many Britons perceived from a position of comfortable global power - brazenly apolitical amusements, surveyed from the seat of Empire. But now times had changed and, to reflect this era of uncertainty, the world of humour outside The Oxford Revue had begun to change too.
Perhaps the most significant new comedic spearhead of the day was motivated primarily by corporate spite. By the conclusion of the 1950s, Edinburgh International Festival administration carried increasing concern that the ever-growing Fringe would eventually draw public attention from its own more professional productions [source]. It was reasoned that, for its fourteenth run, the Festival would introduce a new theatrical presence - the additional competition would surely rebalance the distribution of paying audiences across the city, and hence temper the Fringe's unmoderated sprawl. Director John Bassett began to construct a show intended to exceed all previous expectations for entertainment and comedy. Its content would, it was hoped, go 'Beyond the Fringe'.
Dudley Moore was swiftly enlisted for the sketch show, having at one point played in a jazz band with Bassett. The young director then cast a young Alan Bennett - the son of a Loiner butcher, Bennett was too of working class stock, known in Oxford both as a skilled cabaret artist and a junior teacher of medieval history in Magdalen College (having formerly been a student at Exeter College) [source].
Pictured - Alan Bennett, circa 1973.
Moore and Bennett were further joined by two students trained in the doctrines of the Cambridge Footlights, Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller, with Bassett arranging the quartet's first meeting.
"All of them had pretty tremendous reputations in university circles and no one wanted to make the first joke that nobody else thought was funny... [Eventually] Dudley did an impression of Groucho Marx. He got up in this Italian restaurant and followed one of the waitresses through the swinging doors to the kitchen and immediately came out of the swinging doors with another waitress." - John Bassett, The Telegraph, 2006 [source].
The show had minimal set dressing - a world away from the glitz and glamour usually expected of 'first-generation revues'. However, such apparent limitations were no real detriment, the emptiness of the space instead drawing the eye with greater focus to each of the four's performance and, in turn, their controversial targets of comedic ridicule. At the premiere on August 22nd 1960 in Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum Theatre, patrons were invited to enjoy sketches which ruthlessly mocked politicians, rulers, war heroes and figures of the church - authority figures that, in the old ways of the empire, would have been untouchable. The near-instant success of Beyond The Fringe demonstrated transparently that a revolution in how authority was approached was sorely needed, in both the realm of comedy and the identity of an entire country. It was the second half of the 20th century, the British Empire was crumbling and nothing was sacred anymore. Beyond The Fringe can be considered as a sort of 'second-generation revue', and as the beginning of a period in British comedy known as the 'satire boom'.
"It was the idea of character and breeding as the key to political legitimacy that was most brazenly sent up in Beyond the Fringe. The end of empire provided fertile ground for new innovations in British comedy. The satire boom has generally been interpreted as a symbol of profound changes in the dominant values of post-war British society." - Stuart Ward, British culture and the end of empire, 2001 [source].
By the end of the first week, John Bassett had received over twenty separate offers to transfer Beyond The Fringe to London at the conclusion of its Edinburgh Fringe run. The show transferred to London's Fortune Theatre in May 1961, and to New York's John Golden Theatre in October 1962 [source].
"The biggest theatrical hit of recent London seasons was not a drama, nor a musical comedy, but a satirical revue written and performed by an all-male cast of four. Now transplanted across the Atlantic, Beyond The Fringe promises to make its American audiences just as sore (with laughter) as it did the British at the Fortune Theatre in London‘s West End. The brilliant and zany foursome, whose combined ages barely add up to 100 years, are vastly different in their looks…" - Beyond The Fringe Broadway album blurb, 1962 [source].
Pictured - the cast of Beyond The Fringe, circa 1963. Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett, Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller are positioned from left to right.
The reach of Beyond The Fringe was extended even further by the publication of abridged performances on LP. The first of these was published in 1961 by Parlophone - at the time, a neglected German-British subsidiary of EMI, which specialised in classical recordings and obscure genres [source]. The label had only recently pivoted towards comedy records through the efforts of its fresh-faced manager, who had previously aided Dudley Moore with his jazz album Strictly For The Birds [source]. To have him also produce Beyond The Fringe was an obvious course of action.
It is, then, a satisfying circumstance that, almost exactly a year after the UK LP release of Beyond The Fringe, that same manager of Parlophone (a man named George Martin) would encounter another decade-defining quartet of young performers, and subsequently produce their records for the following seven years. Martin would later comment that the cast of Beyond The Fringe and this new (albeit more mop-topped) group operated with similar internal democracies [source] - a useful dynamic, one assumes, for both the Edinburgh stage and the Liverpudlian Cavern Club.
"Rock and Roll. A more commercial form of skiffle generally using contrived themes instead of folk-music and with the emphasis on the rhythm or beat, which is magnified to frantic proportions... The effect is also generally emphasized by suggestive body movements... It would seem to have the characteristics of a temporary craze rather than the more lasting folk element of skiffle." - Peter Gammond and Peter Clayton, A Guide to Popular Music, 1960.
The 'satire boom' that emerged from Beyond The Fringe changed British culture forever. There may seem to be, however, a certain irony in the extent to which Oxford graduates contributed to the movement - from Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett; to the broadcaster and Exeter College alumnus Ned Sherrin and his satirical television programme That Was The Week That Was [source]; to the veritable troop which established the still-running political magazine Private Eye [source]. The 'satire boom' is remembered and lauded for its lampooning of the privileged, yet an Oxford education is extreme privilege in itself.
It is crucial to recall, though, that almost all of these men were the children of the 'Butler Act' - an entire generation of working class people had been finally granted the opportunity to access one of the country's most elite institutions, only to face the persistent hostility of its archaic Victorian ways and attitudes. In this way, the 'satire boom' could be reframed as not just a generalised cry against Britain's crumbling authority figures, but a near-biography of the working class experience in the University of Oxford. The authority figures mocked in Beyond The Fringe are easily perceived as thinly veiled representations of all breeds of the derisive Oxford upper class. It is little surprise, then, that one prominent member of the E.T.C. in 1959 was Ken Loach [source], director of such dissections of the British working class and poverty as Cathy Come Home and I, Daniel Blake.
If you want space and agency in a place skewed against you, being rowdy and sardonic through your art is a powerful option. After all, that is why O.U.D.S. and the E.T.C. were established in the first place, long before the 'satire boom' was conceived.
But, in the early 1960s, Oxford student theatre troupes faced an artistic crossroads. What could they do to ensure success and relevance in the shadow of an entity as momentous and monolithic as Beyond The Fringe? Were they to continue making sweet and nostalgic revues like All For Money, directly replicate the trappings of Beyond The Fringe to capitalise on its impact...or attempt something even more caustic and extreme?