Beyond the Fringe

Beyond the Fringe was a British comedy stage revue written and performed by Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, and Dudley Moore. It debuted at the 1960 Edinburgh Festival and went on to play in London's West End and then in America, both on tour and on New York's Broadway in the early 1960s. Hugely successful, it is widely regarded as seminal to the "satire boom", the rise of satirical comedy in 1960s Britain.

The idea for Beyond the Fringe came from Robert Ponsonby, who was the director of the Edinburgh International Festival from 1956 to 1960. Ponsonby's idea was to bring together the best parts of the revues staged by the Cambridge Footlights and The Oxford Revue at the Edinburgh Fringe in previous years. He said that the Festival should put on a late-night revue "to beat The Fringe at its own game." By 1960, the Festival was so firmly established that "it required for its health some good-humoured self-mockery."

Ponsonby's assistant, John "Johnny" Bassett, recommended Dudley Moore, who had played with Bassett in a jazz band while at university in Oxford. Moore in turn recommended Alan Bennett, who had had a hit at the Fringe a few years earlier. Bassett also chose Jonathan Miller, who had been a Footlights star in 1957. Miller recommended Cook.

Bennett and Miller were already pursuing careers in academia and medicine respectively, but Cook had an agent, having written a West End revue for Kenneth Williams. Cook's agent negotiated a higher weekly fee for him, but by the time the agent's fee was deducted Cook actually earned less than the others from the initial run.

The majority of the sketches were by Cook and were largely based on material written for other revues. Among the entirely new material were "The End of the World", "TVPM" and "The Great Train Robbery". Cook and Moore revived some of the sketches on their later television and stage shows, most famously the two-hander "One Leg Too Few". Miller told the press in March 1960 that the show would "be anti-establishment, anti-capital punishment, anti-colour bar and anti-1960. But it will be all very serious stuff, sharp, bitter and to the point."

The show's run in Edinburgh was immensely successful. Before beginning its run in the West End, the show had great success at the Cambridge Arts Theatre, but a brief run in Brighton garnered a lukewarm response. When the revue transferred to the Fortune Theatre in London, opening in early May 1961, in a revised production by Donald Albery and William Donaldson and directed by Eleanor Fazan, it became a true sensation. This was helped in large part by a favourable review by Kenneth Tynan.

In 1962, the show transferred to the John Golden Theatre in New York, with its original cast. President John F. Kennedy attended a performance on 10 February 1963. The show continued in New York, with most of the original cast, until 1964, when Paxton Whitehead replaced Miller, while the London version continued with a different cast until 1966.

The revue was widely considered to be ahead of its time, both in its unapologetic willingness to debunk figures of authority, and by virtue of its inherently surrealistic comedic vein. Humiliation of authority was something only previously delved into in The Goon Show and, arguably, Hancock's Half Hour, with such parliamentarians as Sir Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan coming under special scrutiny—although the BBC were predisposed to frown upon it. Macmillan—according to Cook—was not particularly fond of the slurred caricature and charade of senile forgetfulness (marked by a failure to pronounce 'Conservative Party' coherently) handed down on him in Cook's impersonation. Since Beyond the Fringe was not owned by the BBC, however, the quartet enjoyed relative carte blanche. The only protocol they were obliged to adhere to was that, by law, their scripts for theatrical performances had to be sent to the Lord Chamberlain for approval prior to performance, a requirement abolished by the Theatres Act in 1968.