CAN ENGLISH SATIRE DRAW BLOOD ?

On Thursday a club of an entirely new kind opens in London, one that may restore to our national life an element that has long been in abeyance - theatrical satire. It is called "The Establishment." The name itself is ironical, as established authority will be the chief target of its attack. It will be run by Peter Cook, one of the "Beyond the Fringe" quartet, and Nicholas Luard, a young writer recently returned from America, and will provide - besides a jazz orchestra and the usual club facilities - a nightly cabaret by resident and visiting performers, in premises devised by Sean Kenny. Free from the Lord Chamberlain's control and managerial restraint, the accent of the show will be on scurrilous vigour, daring and inventive. Below, Jonathan Miller, another of the "Beyond the Fringe" team who will himself appear from time to time in the cabaret, discusses the background of the venture.

It is significant that the opening of "The Establishment" should capture the front page of the OBSERVER WEEKEND REVIEW. It is also slightly disturbing, since it shows an interest the very benevolence of which could well disarm the toxic intentions of the project.

The original idea of the club was born eighteen months ago in Cambridge, conjured out of the amber haze of an all-night drinking session. Nicholas Luard, and undergraduate, was entertaining Peter Cook, another undergraduate who had already startled Cambridge with his bizarre contributions to the Footlights Review. Cook had been fascinated, on his visits to the Continent, by the famous political night-clubs there. Luard, who had spent a year painting in Paris before coming up, shared Cook's interest. Between them they realised the exciting possibilities of starting the same sort of thing in London.

They reckoned that the time was ripe. The English Theatre had begun to stir in its sleep. The fall-out from the Osborne explosion was already yielding its genetic changes as were the satirical non sequiturs by N.F.Simpson. (Cook had played in an A.D.C production of "A Resounding Tinkle" and his own sketches bore the scratches of his new surrealist attack.) Becket's ragamuffin metaphysics, Pinter's psychotic menace and the success of Joan Littlewood's saucy productions had all sharpened the climate of the London theatre. There was, as yet, however, no lace where an audience could sit and for the price of a drink enjoy the harsh, impromptu satire which had for years been an accepted feature of the Continental scene.

Revue, with its rapid montage of sketches an songs, seemed to offer the best form for the satire that Cook and Luard were aiming at. Unfortunately, at that time revue was stifled by the values of Shaftesbury Avenue. Cook had already written many of the numbers for the highly successful "Pieces of Eight." but the bony outlines of his contributions were softened and blurred by their gay commercial setting. Tinselly dance routines, a-fidget with glow-paint and fishnet would follow one of his dour, screwy little numbers and promptly erase it from the mind of the audience.

In our revue, "Beyond the Fringe," we tried to rinse away some of this gaudy sentiment. We abandoned decor, dancing and all the other irrelevant dum-de-da of conventional revue, hoping to give the material a chance to speak for itself. Even then, however, the full effect was dulled by the demands of the Lord Chamberlain. Until one could escape his bloodshot gaze there was no real hope of putting the last edge on the satirical scalpel. The privacy of a club offered a unique new opportunity. There is a satisfying irony in the fact that the final choice of premises should have fallen on a disused strip-joint.

In France and Germany social and political has always been readily available. It is an ancient idiom and part of the popular culture of the Continent. The cabaret, the chansonnier and the night-club were a strong tradition which stemmed from the stylish buffoonery of the eighteenth-century commedia dell'arte. The popular ballad was commonly exploited. By juggling with the lines of well-known songs, twisting the verses and shuffling the stanzas, the singer would produce a sort of musical collage which often had a strong satirical effect. Then there would be sketches, recitations and lampoons.

The targets of these attacks were often very local. While some of them were extremely witty, many of the sketches relied for their effect on simple name-dropping. The audience gained considerable pleasure from hearing the names of local luminaries merely mentioned in the same context of the cabaret. In this respect the artists were enacting a primitive social ritual which springs from the magical belief that the pronunciation of the opponent's name somehow reduces his power - an extension of the Rumpelstiltskin story.

Even today, this naming ritual plays an important part in political cabaret. It is to be seen in the Paris chansonnier where many of the acts consist of an elaborate double entente upon the names of politicians. Even Mort Sahl sometimes uses the technique. He started one of his acts by simply reeling off the names off the names of Eisenhower's Cabinet. The audience squealed in delight. He helped to puncture the the McCarthy myth as much by naming him as by any witty construction.

In the austere intimacy of a cafe or a night-club this name-dropping is an effective and legitimate device. In the extravagant and impersonal setting of a full-scale theatre revue it can become vapid and irritating. One can see this rather nicely in some of the recent English revues. Alerted to the prestige that was attached to political comment some contemporary revue writers have tried to gain favour with the critics by conscientiously peppering their otherwise perfectly conventional sketches with roguish references to well-known politicians.

Naive attempts such as these are clearly hopeless, but it is also doubtful whether genuine satire could ever succeed in the context of conventional revue. Comment is muffled by glamour and in a large theatre the mere distance between performers and audiences dissipates the effective energy of a satirical statement. In the cafe and the intimate cabaret, on the other hand, artists and audience are bound together in sceptical conspiracy. They hatch the satire between them. At The Premise, in New York, for example, the audience suggest the topics they would like to see dealt with. After a short interval, in which the players go away and discuss the suggestions, a new act is produced, which is neatly tailored to the issues of the moment.

The cafe set-up in Germany and Austria ensured the same fertile intimacy. The cafes and bars were, and still are, important social centres The cabarets performed in these places simply crystallised and put in a more epigrammatic form the conversational topics of the clients - a sort of comic feed-back. The cafe proprietors were always on the look-out for new stunts for filling their large premises. A good, sharp cabaret fitted the bill nicely.

The performers were often students and young artists: the productions done on a shoe-string, consisted of sketches and ballads built around a compere who provided a caustic commentary. There were geniuses of the idiom such as Aristide Bruant in Paris and Karl Valentin in Munich. The drama of Brecht shows the signs of his early association with such performances, with their ballads and commentaries.

These cabarets drew many creative currents, especially from the area of the graphic arts. In the quick, improvised decor of these shows the young artist George Grosz, for example, found an exciting platform for his work. It was at the cabaret Voltaire, in Zurich, in 1916, that a group of young émigrés which included Kokoschka, Tristan Tzara and Hans Arp started the dada movement. Brecht showed a lively use of back-projections in his productions of "Mahagonny."

Cabaret of this sort is a natural product of the restless European scene. The political flux of the Continent generates a creative scepticism which had a ready-made vehicle in the traditional forms of popular entertainment. The ceaseless va et vient of princelings, parties and politicians, the wars, the revolutions, the barricades and all the other furnishings of turbulence prevented the formation of that stifling sense of Establishment which marked the English scene from the from the accession of the Georges. European satire thrived best under the old-fashioned, indolently repressive regimes in which offensive comment was punished by short terms of imprisonment rather than by execution. The sort of regime, for example, which would fine Phillipon 6,000 francs for his famous pear-face cartoon of Louis Philippe, or imprison the Austrian comedian Nestroy for his attacks on the malpractices of the local tradesmen.

Such satire is soon stamped out by the more streamlined repression of the modern totalitarian State. In France today, for example, the rather outdated paternalistic absolutism of De Gaulle is a good atmosphere for the chansonnier and for journals such as Le Canad Enchaine. These, however, would soon wither if the more extremist elements succeeded in unseating De Gaulle. East Berlin does, in fact, boast a few cabarets but they deal with the abuses of bureaucracy; a form of satirical criticism which is tolerated and even encouraged by the Communists. All-out political satire, on the other hand, would not stand a chance.

American cabaret presents a different aspect altogether. Isolated from the baroque traditions of European satirical theatre, the idiom of American satire draws its inspiration from slick-tongued confidence tricksters of the old frontier: the tall-story-teller, the peddler of patent medicines and the hot-gospeller. The modern American cabaret performer is a distillation of this wise-guy tradition; by Mark Twain out of Elmer Gantry. It is the apotheosis of pure talk.

Today there are many clubs devoted to such acts: where fast-talking hipsters keep up a breathless commentary on the social and political scene in a language which combines urban jargon with the rural, cracker-barrel accents of the West. In San Francisco there is the "Hungary i." where Mort Sahl first made his Custer stand. Chicago has the "Second city." New York has the "Premise." There are many others.

Mort Sahl is the natural spokesman of his group and it is unfortunate that his true talent should have been so shabbily distorted in his recent visit to England. America spawns these new humorists as fast as satellites. In the first wave came Sahl, Lenny Bruce and Bob Newhart. Up and coming are Dick Gregory, Mel Brooks and a host of others, Sahls favourite victims were the golfing Magoos of the Eisenhower Administration, although he is now upsetting his Democrat following by sniping along the New Frontier. Mel Brooks takes a swipe at the sentimental heroism of the New Astronauts ("What do you plan on doing up in space ? I guess I'll puke my guts out"). Bob Newhart has a routine which involves Krushchev being rehearsed for a television appearance ("There's too much glare off his head, we'll have to use a headspray on the night"). Lenny Bruce produces an imaginary conversation between Eisenhower and Nixon in which Eisenhower tries to explain why the Vice President's Latin American tour was such a disaster ("It's your wife, Dick. She overdresses!"). The American air is a-buzz with these hornets.

While America is stung into a new political insight, the English satirical scene displays an oily cal. English satire, unequalled in the eighteenth century both for ferocity and point, has dwindled to a whimsical form of self-congratulation. The small plays of Fielding, the pamphlets of Swift and the cruel cartoons of Gillray and Hagarth were the last flowering of a formidable national talent for political criticism. The growth of good manners and the rise of the philistine values of an Industrial elite soon suffocated this native genius. There is a record of a guest at a house-party in the early part of the nineteenth century causing monumental offence by passing round a sheaf of political prints - prints of the kind which only thirty or forty years before were the accepted currency of satirical entertainment.

It is the same spirit that makes it a breach of good taste today to discuss politics or religion in the intimacy of a club. Such a spirit coincides, I imagine, with the development of the nineteenth-century English public school with its emphasis on Loyal and unquestioning service: with the rise of a new class, anxious to establish itself with unshakeable values and a reputation for reliability and sound judgement.

"Theirs not to reason why" is here an expression of praise and approval rather than a signal for a rain of scorching contempt which such blinkered loyalty richly deserves. "Bloody Fools" will ring loud and clear through Soho and down the courtly reaches of Whitehall.

Good manners have suffocated English satire more effectively than any secret police . The smug courtesy of the public school sixth-former, neatly adjusted to the demands of loyal service in a growing Empire, takes all the lifeblood out of satire. John Osborne, Nigel Dennis, Pinter and Simpson have gone a long way towards blowing the top of this Fifth Form at St.Dominics. The sturdy, sterling figure of the school prefect is at last becoming an object of ridicule.

Forster had already effectively knocked against this tradition in the novel, but the philistine values persisted in the theatre. "The Establishment" represents a research station in which we might see developed the weapons necessary for the final overthrow of the Neo-Gothic stronghold of Victorian good taste.

As I mentioned earlier, however, the success of this project is seriously threatened by a subtle defence with which the members of "The Establishment" protect themselves against these new attacks. It is the threat of castration by adoption; of destruction by patronage. Cook is already somewhat disturbed by the number of applications for membership which bear the post-mark S.W.1. We have begun to experience the same threat in our revue. Each night, before the curtain-up, sleek Bentleys evacuate a glittering load into the foyer. Some of the harsh comment in the programme is greeted with shrill cries of well-bred delight which reflect a self-indulgent narcissism which takes enormous pleasure in gazing at the satiric refection.

It is the same spirit that moves the Queen magazine to make smart talking-points out of misery and squalor. One might get something like this: "Everything is talking about trachoma . . . the beastly eye complaint which blemishes the eyes of millions every year. Holiday in Bizerta and see it for yourself. The beaches in this disaster-struck Tunisian town are unparalleled in Europe." Cook and his associates will have their time cut out slipping the dart through the complex defences of this group.

The ranks are drawn up and the air resounds with the armourer's hammer. When battle is joined one can only hope that blood will be drawn. That "The Establishment" will be attacking from without rather than firing off pop-guns from within, for the entertainment of one big happy family.

Jonathan Miller