Michael Kustow, on the edge
Posted here, the full obituary from the Guardian which concentrates on Michael Kustow’s life in film, theatre and ‘cutting edge culture’, followed by a short extract from the Ham & High, which highlights his politics as a left-wing, dissenting Jew.
Writer, producer and ICA head in the late 60s, he had an instinct for the cutting edge
By Michael Coveney, The Guardian
August 31 / September 01, 2014
Not many people in the arts over the past half-century in Britain had as big an influence behind the scenes – writing, producing, proselytising – as Michael Kustow, who has died aged 74 following a heart attack. For someone who never really felt he belonged, Kustow was nonetheless involved in many of the greatest artistic enterprises of our day. This activity was always pursued under the aegis of some outstanding figure he admired as a creative father figure: Arnold Wesker at Centre 42 at the Roundhouse in London, Peter Hall at the Royal Shakespeare Company (and later the National Theatre), Jeremy Isaacs at Channel 4 and Peter Brook at the RSC and in Paris.
Kustow was always a cardinal, never a pope – except for the period from 1967 to 1970 when he successfully ran the Institute of Contemporary Arts, which moved into its magnificent new home on the Mall, within hailing distance of Buckingham Palace. Even then he was uneasy with his status, worried that he might not catch the new surge of the alternative culture in so palatial a setting. But he did, masterminding, for instance, a fantastic series of plays, events and exhibitions dedicated to the surrealist poet Guillaume Apollinaire, and signing out with a memorable fiesta celebrating comic books, entitled AAARGH!
Kustow’s complicated view of himself – part vanity, part insecurity – was best expressed in his autobiographical memoir, Tank (1975), in which he adopted a third person, K, to describe his youth, his background, his sex life and his cultural enthusiasm. It’s one of the best books of the decade, and a fine example of the sort of radical, intellectual energy that defined the movements of the era.
A brilliant writer and critic, Kustow positioned himself at the heart of cultural politics at home and abroad, a true internationalist with an incredible contacts book. He was equally at home with underground poets, high-ranking television executives, troubadours, actors and alternative comedians. His cultural appetite was voracious. He was the only person I ever encountered jogging on Hampstead Heath who owned up to listening to Harrison Birtwistle on his earphones.
Born and brought up in Golders Green, north-west London, Michael was the son of Mark and Sarah. Mark came from a Russian immigrant family, and sold children’s clothes in a shop in Bermondsey, in the south-east of the city. Sarah came from a Polish immigrant family, worked as a secretary and was very interested in literature. Thus Michael was a second-generation English Jew, and identified from an early age with Kafka, James Joyce and Brecht. He was educated at Haberdashers’ Aske’s school, then in Hampstead, and Wadham College, Oxford, where he read English and was a contemporary of Melvyn Bragg, whom he regarded as a smoother version of himself.
His leftism was at once natural, heartfelt and fashionable: after Oxford, where he was enthralled by the New Left and worked in undergraduate theatre alongside John McGrath, Ken Loach and Michael Billington, he joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and went to Israel to work on a kibbutz.
He took a boat from Haifa to Marseilles and joined Roger Planchon’s Théâtre de la Cité in Lyon, one of the great Brecht-influenced postwar companies, which performed classics in the suburbs. Planchon was Kustow’s first professional father figure. As well as teaching English and translating with the company, he appeared in minor roles in important Planchon productions such as The Three Musketeers, touring in Germany.
Back in Britain, he became a postgraduate in the Bristol University drama department, finding a sympathetic nexus of activity with Harold Pinter’s first play produced there, Charles Wood and Peter Nichols writing in the city and Tom Stoppard working on the local paper. But in 1962 he was drawn to London by Wesker’s Centre 42 project at the Roundhouse, and then the following year by Hall’s RSC. Wesker was Kustow’s ideal of “a messianic Jew”, while Hall was a role model in applying the standards of the literary critic FR Leavis to Shakespeare in developing a militant classicism; against which Brook was busy reacting and churning up controversy.
Some RSC directors disliked Kustow’s intellectual flamboyance, dismissing his influence and that of the American director Charles Marowitz, Brook’s associate on the Theatre of Cruelty season, as pretentious. But Kustow and Marowitz widened the company’s range and, in the RSC magazine Flourish, which Kustow edited, created an invaluable outpost of criticism and debate.
Kustow’s first book, The Book of US (1968), was an account of Brook’s anti-Vietnam war protest play US, which he scripted alongside the poet Adrian Mitchell and the playwright Denis Cannan. After four turbulent years he was ready for the even more volatile world of the visual arts at the ICA, leading his troops into the Mall in April 1968, shortly before Parisian students occupied the Odéon theatre during the May riots; the coincidence was not entirely inappropriate.
When Kustow rejoined Hall as an associate director at the National Theatre in 1973, he took charge of visiting foreign companies, in-house exhibitions and what became known as platform performances, highlighting the work of Brecht, Philip Larkin, Groucho Marx and Robert Lowell. In 1980 he directed Simon Callow in a performance of all Shakespeare’s sonnets; Callow was also involved in performances of Kustow’s new translation of Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale.
And then, ever in search of the new departure, he joined the new Channel 4 in 1981 as commissioning editor for arts programmes, calling in contacts and favours with a dizzying frenzy and, as recounted in his book One in Four (1987), a journal of his penultimate year at the channel, unbounding elation.
Kustow’s programmes tended to shadow the establishment arts world, even record specific events, notably Brook’s Mahabharata epic (the film was completed in 1989), rather than break new ground. But his default setting was the shock of the new and the cutting edge, so he never really invaded Bragg’s South Bank Show territory.
Kustow left Channel 4 and formed his own production company in 1990, working with his former RSC associate John Barton, as well as Hall, on programmes about Shakespeare workshops and the elephantine genesis of Barton’s theatrical epic about the Trojan war, finally filmed as Tantalus: Behind the Mask (2001). Two further books, theatre@risk (2000) and Peter Brook (2005), remain eloquent testimony to a sustained engagement with the performing arts, the first in particular containing astute and vivid critical writing on figures as various as Ariane Mnouchkine, Mark Ravenhill, Ken Campbell, Alan Ayckbourn, Robert Lepage and the brilliant South African satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys.
Kustow’s first marriage, to his Oxford contemporary Liz Leigh, ended in divorce. In 1973 he married Orna Spector, and they divorced in 1998. He later lived with Jane Shallice for more than 10 years, and is survived by his sister, Alexandra, and brother, Lionel.
• Michael David Kustow, producer and writer, born 18 November 1939; died 29 August 2014
Obituary
From the Ham and High,
By Flora Drury
September 11, 2014
EXTRACT
…
After leaving Oxford University in 1961, he became embroiled in left wing politics and theatre, including supporting CND and damning the Vietnam war.
He remained ardently anti-war throughout his life, despite straining relationships.
Speaking to the Ham and High in 2009 after the publication of In Search Of Jerusalem, which is part autobiography, part cancer memoir, and part political/spiritual quest to come to terms with being a “dissenting British Jew”, he revealed “Jewishness comes into [the book] in a profound way. Israel and Palestine dominated because I am a dissenting Jew with all the conflicts that raises with my family and community”.
…
Ham&High editor:
He had a brilliant mind and will be missed as a good friend and neighbour as as well as an intellectual heavyweight.