GORDON PASK - The Cybernetic Brain - page 352

Second, we can note that, as in all of Pask's projects, the cybernetic theater
undercut existing power relations. Most obviously, the audience was given a
new weight in determining the substance of each performance in real time.
The role of actors was likewise elevated relative to writers and directors in
their responsibility for making smooth traditions from one plot trajectory to
another. And, at the same, Pask's vision entailed the integration of new so-
cial roles into theatrical performances: the interpreters who provided meta-
information to the audience, the technicians who would wire up the feedback
channels and maintain them, even the cyberneticians as new theorists of the
whole business, quite distinct from conventional theater critics.
And third, we need to think about the kind of company that Pask kept. In
the 1960s, Joan Littlewood was one of the most successful directors in British
theater: “She had three shows in the West End by 1963, triumph on a Lloyd
Webber scale, and to incomparably higher standards” (Ezard 2002, 20). In
his collaboration with Littlewood just one year later, Pask thus crossed over
from the narrow world of typing trainers into one of the most lively and visible
currents of British popular culture. It is therefore worth examining precisely
which current he stepped into.
The key observation is that, unlike Andrew Lloyd Webber, Littlewood was
an avowedly antiestablishment figure, who understood theater as one of those
technologies of the self we have discussed before, aimed now at reconstitut-
ing British society. After studying at RADA (the Royal Academy of Dramatic
Art) she moved first from London to Manchester, which brought her “closer
to the counter-culture she sought,” and where she worked for the BBC, the
Manchester Guardian , and “small leftist agit-prop groups dedicated to taking
drama to the people of the north.” The Theatre Union, which she cofounded
in 1936 with the folksinger Ewan McColl, “saw itself as a vanguard of theory;
its productions were influenced by Vsevolod Meyerhold, the Stanislavsky dis-
ciple who was the first director of postrevolutionary Soviet drama until Stalin
purged him.” During World War II, her group was “often splendidly reviewed
but [was] always refused grants by the Council for the Encouragement of Music
and the Arts, the Arts Council predecessor. She and McColl were blacklisted
by the BBC and by forces entertainment group ENSA as subversives.” Her
group renamed itself Theatre Workshop after the war and supported the early
Edinburgh Fringe Festival—the alternative to the high-culture Edinburgh
Festival—and rented the Theatre Royal on Angel Lane in London in 1953 for
£20 a week—“a dilapidated palace of varieties reeking of cat urine”—before
making its first breakthrough to the West End in 1956 with The Good Soldier
Schweik (Ezard 2002, 20). “She was wholly unclubbable,” wrote a fellow the-