CONTEXT: Stuart Marshall
By Conal McStravick
As a student in 1970, Bruce Bayley (b. 1947) founded the first gay society at Kingston Polytechnic. Entering the London School of Economics as a PhD candidate in 1971, he cited sociological field research in the politicisation of deviant sexual behaviour – namely the recently formed Gay Liberation Front and its milieu of gay discos, communes and meetings. Choosing to become active in GLF, Bruce left academic research behind. Increasingly he was drawn through GLF meetings and communes to a burgeoning gay and lesbian theatre scene.
Following GLF Bruce trained as an actor, starting out in 1975. In 1977 he joined the leading gay theatre company Gay Sweatshop to play Magnus Hirschfeld in the original touring production of As Time Goes By. Bruce describes the piece as “a panoramic history lesson” combining musical theatre to tell the 20th-century tale of the homosexual subject up to the moment of the Stonewall Bar altercation that sparked gay liberation. Following its resounding success the play was re-conceived as a month-long residency of weekly cabarets at the ICA where the critical moments of queer history captured- 1890s London, 1930s Berlin and 1960s New York–and inspired period-themed irreverence and satire.
It was in these ICA/ Action Space Drill Hall productions that Stuart Marshall first saw Bruce Bayley perform. They met and from 1979 to 1984 Bruce appeared with Grazyna Monvid in Stuart Marshall videos Distinct (1979), The Love Show (1980), and Bright Eyes (1984). After working with Stuart Marshall, Bruce left theatre and retrained as a drama therapist.
Bruce and I met at the BFI in March 2015 to share material we'd gathered on Stuart Marshall and Gay Sweatshop, and to talk about his experience of working with Stuart Marshall and Grazyna Monvid.
– CM
Conal: What I'd like to take you back to is talking specifically about your experience of Gay Liberation Front and Gay Sweatshop. I really think that Stuart and Stuart's work and methodology benefitted hugely with this interaction between gay politics, gay theatre alongside his existing methods as an artist. The use of historical subject matter to examine the construction of a gay political conscience by these methods was very tangible in gay theatre and gay film and video than perhaps the more experimental film and sound world that Stuart started out in and was coming out of. I'd like you to take me through that, up to the point where you met Stuart and how you met Stuart.
Bruce: My coming out was GLF. I was in my early 20s at Kingston Polytechnic and I did my BSc Sociology there. I went from there to LSE. In that transitional year I discovered that I was gay. Well, I knew I was gay but I just sort of uncovered it while I was in college. I went to the LSE and said I wanted to do research in politicisation of deviant behaviour. A big umbrella term, I was going to hide under. I was working towards a PhD, I was quite young. The politicisation of deviant behaviour became more specific -- into the politicisation of deviant sexuality. Then I had a real struggle, I was doing research in the field, which meant going to GLF discos and GLF meetings These were in Middle Earth which was in Covent Garden. I didn't go to the very first meetings in '70 in LSE itself. But I went to the meeting at LSE where they produced the first GLF manifesto - lilac coloured with a big fist on the front. I think it was 1971. I was very much a part of the GLF after that... The first year it was with other people like David Fernbach and Aubrey Walters. These were the High Priests of the Left. They were Marxists. Very, very Marxist. The development in 1971 to '72- it was all happening very quickly- the radical feminist men, the drag queens, the communes, Bette Bourne, the Colville Terrace Notting Hill commune and the Bethnal Rouge commune in Bethnal Green and the King St commune in King's Cross and the one in Brixton, which then became the Brixton Faeries.
Conal: They're all very well known now aren't they..?
Bruce: I have somewhere, a box full of all this, I was researching all of this for my PhD.
Conal: Oh wow! Interesting...
Bruce: I was going to these meetings and there was a real conflict with my tutor’s position on objectivity and my changing identification. It was a real crisis that year for me and I abandoned my research.
Conal: I'm not surprised actually...!?
Bruce: I'm now gay. It was like that was my coming out and I realised that I was using it as a means of getting in.
Conal: Subterfuge sort-of-thing...
Bruce: But also keeping it at a safe distance so I could control it. I left the research and put myself into gay theatre in one way or another- feminist theatre, gay theatre. I went to drama school, abandoned the whole academic thing... Little jobs as a jobbing actor. I got my Equity card which you had to have in those days before you could work. And then I joined a group called Bite Theatre which was a gay socialist theatre company, very short-lived.
Conal: Was this '73 or '4?
Bruce: '75 I got my Equity card, this would have been '76?
Conal: Little later... Right.
Bruce: '75/'76 something like that?
Bruce: '77 I joined Gay Sweatshop... I was in one Gay Sweatshop show which was As Time Goes By which was arguably the seminal work... And it was the time after As Time Goes By that I got to work with Stuart.
I got to know Stuart through Jane, his partner. Jane had known some of the lesbian actors that I knew. Stuart said he saw me playing Magnus Hirschfeld in As Time Goes By and he wanted that sort of professorial, academic, lecturing, commenting kind of portrayal.
Conal: Male authority...!
Bruce: When I met Stuart he said, “You know what you did with Magnus Hirschfeld...? That's...! It was that form.
Conal: That's the key to his interest in a way...
Bruce: ...As Time Goes By had that kind of spirit. It was like a panoramic history lesson- you know? Comments... And the comments were either cabaret songs between the acts in the scenes or they were moments where the cabarets would stop and the actors address the audience and give them 'the text' and my portrayals tended to involve those. Where I would stop the action. Certainly Magnus Hirschfeld had a whole monologue to the audience about terminology, words, the use of words, the nuances, between languages. And I think that struck a chord with Stuart.
Conal: Oh definitely. The whole Hirschfeld thing appears again and again not only in Stuart's work. I don't know if you know Guy Hocquenghem, a French academic? I haven't direct evidence, but I suspect Race d'Ep his 1979 film made with Lionel Soukaz influenced Stuart Marshall while developing Bright Eyes- they're twinned to my mind. Race d'Ep has this big sequence on the Institute of Sexology and Hirschfeld. Obviously As Time Goes By has happened at this stage. I wonder if there's this feedback happening? I've been reading Gay Left as well- Simon Watney reviews Hocquenghem, and there are reviews of Gay Sweatshop for that matter, which I have here...
(I show Bruce a picture in a review of As Time Goes By from Gay Left No.? )
Bruce: No, I didn't but this is a cabaret. This is Drew Griffiths as Mary Whitehouse and Alan Pope?
Conal: Ah, I really like that image.
Bruce: Alan being Mary Whitehouse. Drew being- I've forgotten her name now? Anita...? Orange County Queen?? She was very fundamentalist Christian, Mary Whitehouse sort-of thing...
Conal: Anita Bryant?
Bruce: Anita Bryant. I've got the audio tape of the cabarets, all the cabarets, yeah.
Conal: Have you, really?
Bruce: I've been listening to them and some of them are really risque material. We did a season at a space called Action Space Drill Hall, which was in Chenies St. off Tottenham Court Road near Goodge St tube station, and we did something called As Time Goes By season. So we presented... At that time they had a very small underground fringe black box theatre and the AsTime Goes By set wouldn't fit in there, we had a wonderfully designed set which covered three big acts. Victorian, German...
Conal: Weimar period.
Bruce: And 60s...
Conal: Stonewall bar sort of thing....
Bruce: So they split it up. They split it up into three weeks so the first week was the Victorian week, the second week was the German week, and the third week was the Stonewall week and at the end of each night we did a relevant cabaret. So the Victorian cabaret was all music hall, Victorian songs and Wilde and all that stuff.
Conal: So it was expanded As Time Goes By... Oh right, OK...
Bruce: So then the second bit was the German bit and then we have all the German cabarets of Brecht/ Weill, the political left cabaret, Pirate Jenny, things like that. And then in the contemporary Stonewall one we had Mary Whitehouse songs which are all old music hall songs, My Name is Mary, Mary- daddle-dee-dah-dah-dah... Anyway, this is not about Stuart.
Conal: On no, no! It is in so many ways. One of my interests is that Stuart obviously came from an art school and experimental sound and video background. And that is a very different scene and a very different history I think... Its not to say Stuart's background is not political, it is. But I think you know John Cage and Alvin Lucier and the experimental sound tradition that that extends from that has a certain politics, what hasn't?
Bruce: Absolutely.
Conal: But its not an out gay political agenda. And that is a very different history I think...?
Bruce: And neither is Stuart's work strictly speaking- you know in those days there used to be that phrase 'Agit-Prop'- you know political theatre or gay Agitprop. Neither was Stuart's work gay agit-prop. It wasn't this (pointing to Gay Sweatshop review). This was absolutely in the front window of the Theatre of the Oppressed. Right in the middle of that. And touring the country and bringing information, education and all that but in a cabaret sort of way... Stuart's work wasn't anything to do with that. Gay Sweatshop was very, very political.
(Bruce has brought a working script called The Paths of Least Resistance later re-titled The Love Show.)
Bruce: I remember The Love Show was an evolving piece. It was going to be a bit of that, and a bit of that, and then there were a whole bunch of other things. And it was kind of like a melee and it looked like a melee of things...
Conal: And it was based on language, televisual language; conventions within televisual language. So like the news reporter, the news journalist interviewing someone, the children's TV presenter, the sit com or whatever... ?
Bruce: It was originally called The Paths of Least Resistance when it was written. And its really about sexual relationships and the secrecy of sexual abuse. One character who is 18 years old qualifies as a minor, pre-regulation. You know, there's one brilliant line back in that play, which I think Gryzyna had, which is: “What's gonna happen to fucking after the revolution.” And there was quite a lot of internal-to-the-left disagreement embodied in that. As to whether or not because, if it was considered suitable or would benefit gay people, to allow Socialist Worker or IMG (International Marxist Group/ Trotskyists) to hijack Gay Pride marches. You know a lot of it seemed to be quite deep, about taboo, it was about the place of sex and sexuality. How much can you talk about freedom of choice and information when it comes to sexuality when we're in a culture and a context in which it was taboo anyhow.
Conal: That notion, that ethical/ moral argument goes through all the work...
Bruce: Absolutely, which is why I see it as more than 'political'. I used to see it as fundamentally political. The business of life as opposed to revolution: where are we going with all this...?
Conal: If we can try to merge these differing senses of the political maybe its by saying in a philosophical sense its quite Althusserian/ post-Althusserian. It’s got that very strong emphasis of how ideology permeates society in a very intrinsic way.
Bruce: Discourse mattered a lot to Stuart in his work. Every so often there's a little bit about language and description and the use of words and playing around with the use of words. That was what was terribly exciting about his work. At some point he would say, “Put this line in!” And of course- “I don't know if this is going to work out .” Or whatever? As an actor and a performer that raw editing was really what sold Stuart to me. We knew we weren't going to do Stanislawski, get to the character, tell the story... It was- “Here... You're telling the story...” “Here... You're commenting..”. It was like when I was an actor and you're in that tradition of portraying a character and then next minute you'd be commenting on it, breaking it up. And then you would put it all together in a different way, with a different slant. That was quite obvious in Bright Eyes.
Conal: It demands quite a lot of the viewer I think. The movement in Stuart's work, the zooming in and out of the personal is political is personal if you will, is very informed by his personal trajectory at the time. I mean he's coming out as a gay man, he's making this work which is deconstructing society, the individual, the subject. But inevitably this requires a certain honesty about forming a politics of one's own subjectivity, which was to include coming out, and is about re-identifying as a gay man.
Bruce: It wasn't all that easy for the performers either. I remember Grazyna and I saying, “ I don't understand what this speech is about. Its just the speech- there's no context!” And: “...how am I meant to be presenting this?” And then Stuart would come and he would be very clear with it all... With his directions he'd say. “You know that professor type thing. You know when you're commenting...?” And then I go: “Yeah, well, but, I need a little bit more than that!”
Conal: Yeah, yeah...
Bruce: And there were no stage directions. So at times it was really challenging. As actors we had to get some sense of:“Why are we saying this now..?”.
Conal: Well, what does it actually mean?
Bruce: Yeah. Why am I driving a car while I'm saying this. From an actor's perspective you can deconstruct things up to a point but you have to have some handle on what its supposed to mean apart from some abstract theory on the deconstruction of language.
Conal: Stuart's sat on a roundtable towards the end of his life with four video makers talking about their practices and various elements of their work. Stuart mentions that after Bright Eyes he really stopped making work for a couple of years.
Bruce: He did.
Conal: Maybe you could fill this in a bit. Stuart states that then obviously with the AIDS crisis and with his work being taken up as a cause celebre in the US and North America there was this very, to his mind, significant increase in visibility of the work as people realised that it wasn't just about the AIDS crisis- there was a lot going on in that work. It was as much a history of homosexuality, a deconstruction of sexuality, gender, whatever. I don't know if you have a lot to add to that.
Bruce: In an intellectual kind-of sense, it informs where I am as a therapist. I'm not a theoretical therapist. Its a question of let's look at it afresh and let's take apart what it is that we've got. What I found exciting then and still do about Stuart's approach to these questions is that it shouldn't be a closed resolution because once you have a resolution, its closed and then it needs to be opened up again, because if you keep it open you can keep changing and transforming the universe in which you're going to be looking at all of this. And I really liked that.
Conal: Its a very artistic strategy as well. In Alvin Lucier's short piece from Leonardo Music Journal -a reflection really- looking back at Stuart’s sound work in specific, he writes about slips in language, double meanings or spoonerisms, the importance of this. He writes about how Stuart used that in his mid-period sound into early video work. So its stuff that he made under the pretext of being a sound artist primarily moving into video. He notes that this really informed the later work. It is this semiotic, signifying, deconstructive approach to language. There's a speculative thing at play there an experimental edge. I find it interesting that there was a need on Stuart's part to situate some of this deconstructive emphasis within a political project which became and was LGBTQ rights- but it seems bigger also. Its interesting to see how this develops through his move into television and broadcast media. Really by the end of his life, and arguably well before, he's very much in tune with the queer project.
Bruce: After that my relationship with, or my connection with Stuart went away, never to come back again. Jane got in touch with me to say he'd passed. And then there was the celebration of his life. And then it all went away, and then I went away in a manner of speaking. I did my course in Dramatherapy but always working with sexuality. So even as a therapist I work with queer sexuality. I was working with street homeless sex workers- male and transgender- between 1990 and 1993 and I seem to remember it was during that time- or just after that Stuart died. But since that time a lot of my work has been in sexuality, as a therapist. I have people looking at relationships, looking at identity, their own and our identities, through Dramatherapy. And a lot of it links up with some of the things I came into contact with in that period of theatre. Brechtian commentaries and deconstruction of someone's life story, rather than following set narratives. Most therapies follows this story that somebody has written and re-written themselves. My encouragement and facilitation is to wake up the story and to tell the story by the way of the views of a GP or a social worker... Looking at the story.