There was a short period in the British theatre – 1968 to 1973 – when everything changed as the American counterculture took root in the performing arts, music and journalism in Europe. The Pip Simmons Theatre company, along with the Portable Theatre of David Hare and Tony Bicât, Nancy Meckler’s Freehold company and the People Show of Jeff Nuttall and Mark Long, were the main theatrical movers.
These startup companies were the enterprises – guerrilla groups, you might say – that toured in vans and small lorries to the burgeoning new arts labs and centres around the country, in the wake of influential US companies such as the Living Theatre and the Open Theatre that had been touched by the post-Stanislavsky “poor theatre” theories of the great Polish guru Jerzy Grotowski.
