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The Reluctant Escapologist
By Mike Bradwell
Nick Hern Books £14.99
302 Pages
Dateline: 25th July, 2010
For those of us that know Mike Bradwell as a rather lovable, larger-than-life
figure who spent so many years running the Bush Theatre in Shepherd's
Bush, this book, subtitled Adventures in Alternative Theatre,
is something of a revelation.
It should also come with a minor health warning, since the language
is ripe but then anybody picking up a book of this type should not find
that off-putting.
While history records that Bradwell set up and spent many years working
with the Hull Truck Company, his experiences in the 1960s and 1970s
prove to be thoroughly entertaining, even if they might suggest that
he bordered on barking madness for most of that period.
Bradwell just happened to come of age as the Swinging Sixties freed
up youngsters to do their own thing. However, where many highly intelligent
school leavers undoubtedly followed Bradwell's example and plunged themselves
into the counterculture of sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll, most will
swiftly have emerged to become lawyers and bankers rather than following
the dream to its logical conclusions and beyond.
The pleasure of The Reluctant Escapologist lies in its author's
honesty, his memory but also a rich and somewhat eccentric sense of
humour.
The story starts in Scunthorpe as a young lad emerges from school and
wonders what to do with his life. Having got hooked on theatre and performance
in childhood, a drama school course for directors seemed an obvious
next step and being wary of conventionality, the Northern lad plumped
for East 15 with its connections to the legendary Joan Littlewood and
her Theatre Workshop at Stratford East.
Bradwell also immersed himself in the strange artistic outpourings
emerging from both the United States and closer to home and, having
attended so many of the happenings and concerts personally, he provides
a valuable history of alternative performance art during a period when
it was probably more successful and influential than during any other.
The directors' course was pretty much non-existent but the life experience
and the people that he met helped to develop Bradwell, who soon enough
moved on and began to work with a varied group of performance and theatre
artists, almost all characterised by an unusual view of life.
In particular, these included Mike Leigh and Ken Campbell, both of
whom the author clearly has a deep affection for. Indeed, he had the
good fortune to star in Leigh's Bleak Moments, an early improvised
stage play that was eventually filmed, and then joined the Ken Campbell
Roadshow along with Bob Hoskins and Sylvester McCoy.
It was Leigh's theories that provide a theoretical basis when Bradwell
set up Hull Truck Company and toured the country, typically putting
on a triptych of performances, one for children to make some money,
a stage play for adults to fulfil artistic needs and desires and a cabaret
or rock concert for fun.
The bravery of someone who could run a theatre company without money,
live communally for years and without previous training dive into a
pool while chained up and tied in a sack can only be admired.
What each of these companies had in common was their desire to remain
outside the mainstream. Given the choice, they were much happier being
regarded as "a bunch of profane hippie gypos" than anything
else. Indeed, our guide expressed genuine concern when Hull Truck started
tapping into normality and got "perilously close to becoming the
Establishment".
The last 100 pages take us on a detailed canter through the Bush years
- the theatre, not either president. The writer seemingly covers every
play of the period in enough detail to give readers some kind of feel
for the mood and content, in doing so bringing back many happy evenings
watching great humanising theatre in the discomfort of a building that
is desperately in need of a refurbishment.
Mike Bradwell became increasingly disillusioned in the latter years
and vehemently rails against the commodification of theatre and the
political climate in which creativity must take second place to commerciality.
In some ways, this might come to be regarded as the most valuable aspect
of what is a very fine and highly entertaining portrait of alternative
theatre and a lovely man who has spent the whole of his life promoting
that medium.
Philip Fisher
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