‘There are times,’ wrote Peter Brook, ‘when I am nauseated by the theatre, when its artificiality appals me, although at the very same moment I recognize that its formality is its strength.’ He was speaking in the context of a play inspired by a distant war in which his own country allegedly had no direct involvement. He, and others, however, ‘quite suddenly felt that Vietnam was more powerful, more acute, more insistent a situation than any drama that already existed between covers’.

It is notable that one of the first plays about Vietnam (US, 1966) was staged not in the United States, and not by a politically radical theatre company, but in England, and by a state-subsidised theatre whose reputation was built on productions of Elizabethan drama, though, under Brook, the Royal Shakespeare Company was in the middle of a period of experimentation in part inspired by the theories of Antonin Artaud. Admittedly, the Open Theatre's Joseph Chaikin was in England for the performance (the Open Theatre which produced Megan Terry's Viet Rock). Admittedly, too, in that same year, the director of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, R.G. Davis, writing in the Tulane Drama Review, called for the creation of what he called ‘Guerrilla Theatre’. The same issue of this journal included a one-page proposed play called Kill Viet Cong, in which a man, apparently a member of the audience, is invited to shoot a Viet Cong soldier. But at that stage the American theatre was only just beginning to respond to the developing war, with the Bread and Puppet Theatre joining public rallies, and the Living Theatre drawing on images from Vietnam in Paradise Now (1968) and Commune (1970).