Performance history of Beyond the Fringe (original cast only):

Royal Lyceum Theatre, capacity 1650, Edinburgh 22 August 1960 for 1 week
Arts Theatre, capacity 673, Cambridge
Theatre Royal, capacity 952, Brighton for 1 week
Fortune Theatre, capacity 432, London 10 May 1961 to mid 1962
National Theatre, Washington DC, 6 September 1962 for 2 and a half weeks
O'Keefe Centre, Toronto, Sep-Oct 1962
Colonial Theatre, Boston, 10 October 1962 for 2 weeks
John Golden Theatre, New York

"Beyond The Fringe '64"

John Golden Theatre, New York

Beyond the Fringe opened at the Fortune Theatre on Wednesday, 10 May 1961. The night before,Willie Donaldson had taken the cast to "a tart's boudoir" to see a porn film, a new experience for them, and an awkward one for Bennett especially, who according to Bassett spent most of the evening hiding under a bed (Bennett, however, denies this). Cook and Moore, on the other hand, found it hilarious, no doubt helped by the fact that Jonathan Miller and his wife Rachel, both doctors, took it upon themselves to give an impromptu medical commentary on the film. After this somewhat unusual bonding exercise, they were asked to leave the premises separately, to avoid suspicion.

On the opening night, Donaldson sent the cast a telegram which, in his typical tongue-in-cheek style, read simply "Good luck tonight girls. You may not be good but at least you are cheap!". He didn't believe it, and neither did anyone else, least of all the assembled critics on the night who went away after the show to file enthusiastic and sometimes rapturous copy with their respective papers. The Daily Mail's theatre critic Pearson Phillips announced "I predict it will cause a sensation" while TC Worsley in the Financial Times declared it was "the kind of thing people will go to again and again for the pleasure of introducing it to their friends and hearing them laugh". The most enthusiastic review, however, was that by Bernard Levin in the Daily Express, who opened his piece with the declaration "The theatre came of age last night" and continued in breathless fashion...

On the tiny stage of the tiny Fortune Theatre erupted a revue so brilliant, adult, hard-boiled, accurate, merciless, witty, unexpected, alive, exhilarating, cleansing, right, true, and good that my first conscious thought as I stumbled, weak and sick with laughter, up the stairs at the end was one of gratitude.
   Gratitude that there should be four men living among us today who could come together to provide, for as long as memory holds, an eighth colour to the rainbow.

In another much-quoted review, under the title "English satire advances into the sixties", Kenneth Tynan declared it

With such effusive reviews, it is little wonder that Beyond The Fringe instantly established itself as the hottest ticket in town. After all the difficulty of finding a venue for the show, its eventual home at the 432-seater Fortune Theatre - the second-smallest in the West End - not only provided a very becoming intimacy, but also ensured that demand for tickets easily outstripped supply. The show was the must-see attraction of the year, and its (still almost unknown) stars were the brightest young things to hit town in many a year. Even Harold Macmillan turned up to see himself being parodied. According to legend, Cook embellished the TVPM sketch with a direct dig at Macmillan: "When I've a spare evening, there's nothing I like better than to wander over to a theatre and sit there listening to a group of sappy, urgent, vibrant young satirists, with a stupid great grin spread all over my silly old face." Bennett recalled this as eliciting more embarrassment than laghter from the audience, but it was typical of Cook that he ploughed on regardless. If those really were the words that Cook uttered, then they were also a sly acknowledgement of how people responded to Beyond The Fringe itself. The cast usually disliked the word "satire" but like it or not, they had become trailblazers. In describing the cast as "vibrant young satirists", Cook may have merely been referring to the way they were seen by the critics, but by now he must have realised that it was also the truth; that without ever intending to be, the stars of Beyond The Fringe were indeed a group of sharp satirists, young, vibrant and completely in tune with a youth culture that was increasingly at odds with the establishment.

As an aside, it should be noted that the Macmillan skit was possibly the bravest item in the show. In theory, the Lord Chamberlain could have refused permission for the sketch to be used at all, citing pernicious representation of a living person - one of the major grounds for censorship. What appears to have rescued the sketch from this fate is that although Cook's delivery would make the target very clear, the script itself does not actually identify the speaker as Macmillan, thus making it a spoof not of the prime minister, but merely of a prime minister.

Posing for the Beyond The Fringe album sleeve

For those who couldn't make it to London, or simply couldn't get tickets, there was always the cast album, taped by George Martin on the 16th and 17th of May (only the eighth and ninth London performances) and hitting the shops in early July. With  23 minutes a side, it was nowhere near being a complete record of the show, and even those sketches that did make the cut tended to be edited quite ruthlessly to bring them down to a suitable length. Nevertheless, it was better than nothing, and the record would spend the rest of 1961 bobbing in and out of the top twenty.

Onstage, the performers were a close-knit quartet. Offstage, they led very different lives. Both Miller and Bennett were still working their dayjobs - Miller as a pathologist, Bennett as a tutor at Oxford. Both still expected to do Beyond The Fringe for a short spell, then return to their old lives, and while both enjoyed performing, they could hardly be said to have been seduced by the trappings of fame. (There is a certain irony in the fact that it was Miller, the most reluctant perfomer of the four, whom reviewers tended to see as the "leader" of  the group, many recalling his earlier stage and broadcast success and hailing Beyond the Fringe as his triumphant comeback. Few could have guessed that after BTF, he would effectively give up performing altogether.)   Being in relatively low-paid jobs, Bennett and Miller were certainly glad of the money that Beyond The Fringe brought in, and both were able to buy the houses that they still live in nearly half a century later. But their ambitions still lay elsewhere.

In contrast, Cook and Moore had no outside jobs to go to. For Moore, offers soon came in from various quarters. He composed the music for Gillian Lynne's ballet The Owl And The Pussycat (they would collaborate on several other ballets over the next few years), and also contributed to a revue called England, Our England, which was mostly written by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, later to be key writers on That Was The Week That Was. He also got his own jazz programme on Southern Television, called Strictly For The Birds, and cut the title song as a single. (The b-side, "Dudley Dell", would later serve as the theme for the radio panel game Quote... Unquote.)

Meanwhile, Cook took the path that would lead him to be dubbed "the godfather of British satire", an epithet inspired less by his own comedy and more by his patronage. With money coming in from Beyond The Fringe (and from One Over The Eight too) Cook saw his chance to realise the ambition he had held since his pre-university jaunt to Germany and open a satirical nightclub in London, to which he gave the superbly double-edged name "The Establishment". Being a members-only club helped it in three very important ways: firstly, it established an exciting air of exclusivity; secondly, it freed the club from having to meet the demands of the Lord Chamberlain (whose purview as censor specifically excluded members-only clubs); and thirdly, it enabled Cook to raise money for the venture by selling memberships: three guineas a year (discounted to two guineas if purchased before the opening on 5 October) and twenty guineas for life membership. Most of the money, however, came from Cook's business partner, Nicholas Luard, whose family were in the oil business. Even the venue itself carried a whiff of scandal - until a few weeks earlier, it had been the Club Tropicana, a "strip revue" bar which was raided by the vice squad and had to vacate the premises in a hurry. A resident revue cast was recruited, including John Bird and John Fortune, along with John Wells, Jeremy Geidt, David Walsh (who left soon after the opening night) and an actress called Hazel Wright (later replaced by Eleanor Bron). They would do a nightly show, supported by other acts, and were paid generously, at £25 a week. Among the famous names happy to be publicly paraded as supporters of the club were Lionel Bart, J.B. Priestley, Graham Greene, Brian Rix, Ben Travers, Yehudi Menuhin and even Sir Isiah Berlin.

The link to Beyond The Fringe was played up in the pre-publicity material, which promised (rather rashly) that "the boys will come in from Beyond The Fringe to perform at half past midnight". This planned fixture of the schedule never came about, though as proprietor Cook would frequently do a solo turn, often taking his conversations with club patrons as a starting point. Dudley Moore made regular appearances too - playing jazz with his trio in the basement. Johnathan Miller appeared on stage a few times too, but never felt comfortable there and only did a handful of performances before giving it up as a bad job. Miller did however support the club in other ways - appearing in one of a number of short films screened there between acts, and penning an article in the Observer, "Can English Satire Draw Blood?" by way of promoting the club.

September 1961 brought news of the death in a road accident of Hugo Boyd, the bass player in Dudley Moore's group. Boyd had provided additional accompaniment in the Edinburgh show and regularly played during the interval at the Fortune. His death stunned Moore especially. Boyd was just 26.

A few months earlier, satire was almost a dirty word. By October, the "satire boom" was established and with a guiding role in The Establishment, as well as the sell-out Beyond The Fringe, Cook had emerged as the leader of what looked like (and for a while was) a whole new movement refreshing British comedy and seeping into the wider culture.  Even the Beyond The Fringe LP, which had been hovering around the bottom end of the top 20 for months, was boosted by news of fresh victories, reaching a peak of number 11, which even back then was a very respectable showing for a comedy album. 

On 1 October, ABC launched a new arts programme, Tempo, under the editorship of Kenneth Tynan, and it was no surprise that the cast of Beyond The Fringe were invited to contribute. Sadly, without an audience to play to, their stage act didn't translate well to the screen, and after three fortnightly appearances their five-minute slot was dropped.

October was also the month that Beyond The Fringe took its first steps into the wider world, a licensed production being put on in South Africa by local troupe The Cockpit Players, under the direction of Leonard Schach. It was a risky venture, since there was no guarantee that the very Anglocentric humour would be understood in South Africa, or that it would even be possible to recreate the magic of the London show with a substitute cast - after all, part of what gave Beyond The Fringe an "edge" was that those performing were also the writers. There was no way the Cockpit Players could recreate that, and indeed even recreating the text of the show was a far from simple matter. In the absence of a printed script, the cast had only the soundtrack LP and a tape recording made from the wings of the Fortune Theatre to work from. Unfortunately, the tape recording was not of high quality, the performers' voices were often faint and sometimes completely drowned out by the sound of the audience. And the LP only covered about a third of the show as staged, leaving the Cockpit Players relying on a lot of guesswork to fill in the gaps.

The Cockpit Players rehearsing "So That's The Way You Like It"

Among the Players, and given (along with stage manager Paddy Canavan) the responsibility of transcribing the ropey tape recording, was the young and then unknown Nigel Hawthorne, for whom the show was a huge break. He'd spent several years in London seeking work as an actor and getting little, so the opportunity to take part in a proven hit was particularly important to him. Although in later years he would be acclaimed for performing the words of Alan Bennett as George III in the Madness Of King George, in the South African Beyond The Fringe he took the part of Jonathan Miller, with David Beattie as Peter Cook, Siegfried Mynhardt as Alan Bennett and Leon Eagles as Dudley Moore. 

As in London five months earlier, the show was an instant and enduring hit in South Africa. Opening in Cape Town on 11 October 1961, it gained a rave review from the Cape Times' theatre critic, Ivor Jones. who opined that "The Hofmeyr [Theatre] has not often been the scene of such sustained hilarity and generous applause as was given there last night when Leonard Sachs presented four of his Cockpit Players in Beyond The Fringe, the satirical revue which has taken London by storm and will certainly do the same to Cape Town." Jones was proven right, with the show's run in Cape Town having to be extended to meet demand before moving on to play to packed houses in Johannesburg, Pretoria, the Rhodesias, East London and Bloemfontein. And those packed houses were typically three-thousand seater venues - far larger than the tiny Fortune Theatre where the London cast were still playing to 432 people a night. If anyone doubted that Beyond The Fringe would travel well, or that it would work without the original cast, the success of the Cockpit Players' version dispelled all concerns. Though in a rather ironic twist, when Hawthorne went to London in 1962 and finally saw the original show for himself, he was stunned to discover that he'd actually got a lot of the transcription wrong, meaning that the South African script often bore scant resemblance to the original.

Back in London, the show that David Jacobs thought might run for six weeks had just kept going and going, and the strain of eight performances a week began to wear on the cast, who started to go off-script in an attempt to make the others "corpse". Ad-libs abounded, and some sketches went off on bizarre tangents, particularly "Civil Defence", which now incoporated an extended question-and-answer session involving Moore's heckler character, and Cook's solo "Sitting On The Bench", which became embellished with each performance and would on occasion run for as much as fifteen minutes, simply of Cook alone on stage and rambling magnificiently.

Although this helped to alleviate the boredom induced by playing the same material, eight performances a week for months on end, it also generated some friction between the four stars. Bennett in particular disliked having his own performance derailed by the others, and Miller especially felt Bennett's disapproval, later saying that "I was regarded [by Alan] as a sort of frivolous, non-contributing dilletante, whose capering around on stage got more attention than he, the diligent writer, got".  But regardless of any tensions between the four stars, all realised that Beyond The Fringe was something special, and so the show went on.

And on. At one point, it all became too much for Dudley Moore, who  collapsed with exhaustion, leaving his understudy Robin Ray to stand in for two weeks.

The success of Beyond The Fringe was such that the cast now felt able to renegotiate their original contracts. In the years since, much has been made of the show's financial arrangements, with some historians suggesting that Donaldson ripped the cast off. It's a harsh criticism and not entirely fair. The arrangements were certainly above board and not exactly stingy, but there can be little doubt that Donaldson got them cheap. The initial contracts for the London run gave the cast £70 per week each, plus seven percent of gross takings, split four ways. This netted them around £114 per week each, which was a pretty tidy sum - but vastly eclipsed by the amount that the show's management and backers were raking in. Now in a relatively powerful position, the cast were able to negotiate a raise, to £120 a week each plus 10% of profits between the four of them. It was a reward richly deserved.

In November, Beyond The Fringe was shortlisted for a prestigious Evening Standard award. The difficulty of categorising the show can be seen in the fact that its nomination was in the "Best Musical" category. While it certainly contained several original numbers, it was hardly a musical in anything like the sense that, for example, the previous year's winner Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be was. Nevertheless, Beyond The Fringe won the award, and the cast got to hobnob at the awards ceremony with the like of Peter Sellers.

With Peter Sellers at the Evening Standard awards

On 28 February 1962, the premise of the "Royal Box" sketch took a knock when the show received a visit from the Queen herself, though since the Fortune Theatre in fact has no boxes, Her Majesty sat in the stalls, and improbable as it sounds, a report in The Times the following day claimed that most of the audience were unaware of the VIP in their midst. One (quite possibly apocryphal) tale told by Bennett has it that he was asked to omit the word "erection" from his Boring Old Man monologue and refused, later musing "I must be one of the few people who have said "erection" in front of the Queen. I don't suppose either of us profited from the experience." Moore had already experienced a moment of royal embarrassment before the show even began, when he and his group were playing in the orchestra pit. "I looked up and thought, "Oh yes, that's probably where the Queen will sit," and then found myself glazing off. And as I refocussed I realized I was staring straight at the Queen. Not a very good idea."

By this time, Cook was forging ahead in his career as the king of satire. One of the first products of the post-BTF "satire boom" was a magazine called Private Eye, which caused a splash but quickly ran into financial difficulties - until Cook stepped in to become the new proprietor. Under his direction, the magazine enjoyed a rapid reversal of fortunes, and flourishes to this day. Cook remained the major shareholder and an occasional contributor (and perhaps most importantly, a figurehead and mentor to the staff) until his death. Meanwhile, on 27 May 1962, The Observer launched a new satirical page, Almost The End. Written by Michael Frayn, it also featured a topical comic strip written by Cook  and illustrated by Roger Law. The cartoons sailed very close to the wind, with the 3 June cartoon, showing the Home Secretary Rab Butler discussing a judicial case with his wife, causing editor David Astor particular concern. Since it was becoming increasingly difficult to cram all of his commitments into the time available, it came as something of a relief to Cook when, after the 29 July strip, Astor decided enough was enough and axed the cartoon.

Also in 1962, Cook and Miller were thrilled to be asked to take part in recording a comedy LP with Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe. The resulting Beyond The Fringe meets The Goons project was Bridge On The River Wye, a parody of the Alec Guinness war flick (legend has it that the album was actually recorded as "Bridge on the River Kwai, before legal concerns led to George Martin editing all the "Kwai" references. On the face of it this sounds unlikely, since calling it "Bridge on the River Kwai" wouldn't even be a joke - and can you imagine this lot missing out on a gag like that? But when you know about the editing, it does sound like you can hear the odd snip, and at one point, when there is music behind the speaker, the word "Kwai" appears not to have been cut, making it the exception that - apparently - proves the rule). The album remains an amusing curio but did not set the charts alight. Maybe it should have included "And The Same To You".

The commercial failure of Bridge On The River Wye aside, life was treating the Beyond The Fringe cast well. Two years on from that first tentative Edinburgh Festival show, the show was, despite its tiny venue, the biggest thing in the West End, its stars recognised as four of the hottest young talents in British comedy. And momentum was still building. Next stop: Broadway.

Read on... Part 7: Home Thoughts From Abroad