‘In 1964, in Edinburgh, on the last day of the Festival Drama Conference, a nude lady was wheeled across a balcony in a trolley.’ So observed poet, painter and occasional pop star Adrian Henri in his book, Environments and Happenings, published a decade later. ‘Ever since then,’ Henri concluded, ‘the Great British Public has associated happenings with naked ladies.’While this possibly says as much about Henri’s preoccupations as anything else, he wasn’t wrong. Apart, that is, from the date of the incident, which actually occurred a year earlier, during the first week of September 1963. One of the event’s co-conspirators, theatre director Charles Marowitz, dates it in his memoir, Burnt Bridges, as having taken place in 1962. Both men’s recollections suggests that the old cliché about how if you can remember the ‘60s you weren’t really there might well be more true than anything said by either chronicler of their age. Nevertheless, Henri’s highlighting of one of the popular (mis)concept…
Paul Lucas – Theatre producer, writerBorn October 15, 1961; died August 11, 2020Paul Lucas, who has died peacefully at home in New Jersey aged 58 following a short battle with cancer, was a theatre producer whose work was fired with passion and energy. Whether presenting solo pieces or ensemble works, Lucas was unwavering in his integrity and his dedication to saying what needed to be said onstage. Lucas facilitated this with a charm and an inherent sense of fun that embraced anyone who became part of his orbit. If you were a friend of Paul Lucas, you were a friend for life.This openhearted ebullience never undermined the seriousness of Lucas’s work. That was the case with both the Herald Angel winning The Be(A)st of Taylor Mac and Simon Levy’s dramatic adaptation of Eliot Weinberger’s prose poem, What I Heard About Iraq, both of which Lucas brought to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2006. It was there even more in Trans Scripts, Part 1: The Women, which revealed Lucas the playwright…