Tony Bicât and David Hare formed Portable Theatre in 1968, a year that saw widespread political unrest in Britain (and internationally) and where a youth orientated ‘counter culture’ flourished and was seen to challenge the existing order.
The Drury Lane Arts Lab, set up by Jim Haynes the previous year, was an important venue for newly founded ‘alternative’ or ‘underground’ theatre companies.
[8] The Stage newspaper commented: ‘despite a muddle of Socialist politics,[it] is a surprisingly vital and impressive work’ [9] Hare and Bicât had met Snoo Wilson at UEA[10] and when he graduated in the summer, he joined them in a general production capacity for their second season.
Brenton was a friend from Cambridge and had been a resident writer with the Brighton Combination in 1968[14] and now had a new play opening at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs - Revenge - a ‘satirical melodrama’ about the relationship between criminals and the police and society.
Hare directed Christie in Love and explains the way commissioned material was developed to meet the company’s needs: ‘we started to shape plays deliberately to be portable – a kind of resilient drama you could throw on in a church hall.
Christie in Love’s popularity led to two revivals in 1970[18] and significantly clarified for Hare and Bicât the direction the company should take: ‘from now on, there was no question of Portable doing old plays’ [19] Whilst Hare’s claim about not doing old plays isn’t entirely accurate - there was a Snoo Wilson adaption of Pericles (Pericles, the Mean Knight) in February and Strindberg's The Creditors in June [20] - Portable were gaining public attention and had developed a powerful house style with new work.
[28] By the end of this tour the sheer exhaustion of life on the road was getting to Hare and Bicât: "we were doing the laundry, we were doing the lights, we were buying the props, we were driving the van, we were organising the meals and we were just about going out of our minds after five months of this.
Alongside Pericles, the Mean Knight was a ‘comedy’ set in a post-nuclear war Britain - Device of Angels [31] and in February 1971 Pignight toured[32] prior to a London run at the Young Vic.
[33] The critic, Dusty Hughes notes that Wilson ‘used fiercely imagined characters in comic and often savage works’ and summarised Pignight’s plot: ‘a paranoid East End gangster and his prostitute girlfriend are sent to guard a battery pig farm inhabited by the ghosts of its former tenants, and are visited, with fatal consequences, by a German prisoner of war/farm worker who has escaped from a local asylum’.
[37] He began his season with Portable in April directing two new John Grillo plays, Zonk and Food at Edinburgh, London, Nottingham, the Midlands, Yorkshire, the South West and East Anglia.
Chris Megson: ‘Lay By offers a kaleidoscope of perspectives on the plight of Lesley, a struggling drug user and porn model, who accuses a van driver of raping her ….The action retraces the events of the encounter while detailing Leslie’s difficult life and background; it also offers a putative critique of the exploitation of women in the sex industry and criminal justice system.’ [39] The confrontational relationship the production took towards the audience in relation to the depiction of drug use, sex and violence led to controversy.
The four [43] short plays satirise the sex and violence of American pulp magazines targeted at US service-men – with stock characters of Nazi war criminals, Vietnam soldiers, revolutionaries, hippies and ‘go-go’ dancers.
Griffiths wanted a company – three men and three women – to operate as a theatre workshop whereby writers worked with the players in the shaping of the material and the development of projects.
[52] This permanent company –‘nobody can be sacked’ - started in April 1972 with Nick Ball; Michael Harringan; Diana Patrick; Mark Penfold; Pat Rossiter and Emma Williams.
[65] Meanwhile Portable Theatre Workshop Company continued under Griffiths’ guidance with a new name 'Paradise Foundry' [66] Their first productions were Snoo Wilson’s Vampyre and David Edgar’s Operation Iskra.