Ultz
Uncle Vanya
Under Milk Wood
The Unexpected Man
Unfinished Business
US
Theatre piece developed at the RSC by Peter Brook with Sally Jacobs (designer), Richard Peaslee (music), Adrian Mitchell (lyrics), Denis Cannan (original text), Geoffrey Reeves and Albert Hunt (associate directors), Michael Kustow and Michael Stott (adaptors of documentary material), David Read (lighting), and Morgan Sheppard, Barry Stanton, Ian Hogg, Michael Williams, Glenda Jackson, Clifford Rose, Robert Lloyd, Patrick O'Connell, Mike Pratt, John Hussey, Hugh Armstrong, Eric Allan, Noel Collins, Marjie Lawrence, and Pauline Munro (actors).
A year in preparation, fifteen weeks in rehearsal, Brook's radical statement of protest against the Vietnam War opened at the Aldwych in October 1966. Words, songs, movement, a montage of disturbing images and sounds, the repetitive expression of rage and pity—Brook and his collaborators set out to shock, provoke, and to end detachment. At the end Michael Williams appeared to set light to a butterfly (live butterflies had been let loose in the theatre, but the burnt butterfly was in fact a piece of paper). The play's anti-American tone worried the government. The Lord Chamberlain, unable to ban it, sought to influence the RSC's Chairman, but Sir Fordham Flower supported Peter Brook and Peter Hall. State funding of the RSC was questioned in Parliament, and sections of the press screamed about the 'butterfly'.
US was the culmination of Brook's experimental work at the RSC, and of the RSC's radical phase.
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