The British Council and the Marat/Sade Controversy

<p>  </p> <p>The British Council has been a prime mover in facilitating tours of UK theatre productions across the world since its founding in 1934 in the service of the British state’s “soft power” agenda in the export of its major cultural assets. While there were many successes in this endeavour, one conspicuous failure was the attempt to send Peter Brook’s <em>Marat/Sade </em>to Paris in 1965-6, which fell foul of a mixture of political wrangling, legal complications, and bureaucratic sclerosis following misgivings over the suitability of sending a play featuring the Marquis de Sade at the same time as the ‘Moors Murders’ trials were achieving worldwide prominence. This article uses the archival records of the British Council and the UK MP Maurice Edelman to reconstruct an account of the contretemps, offering new insights into the British Council’s role as a nexus between culture and politics, the protocols that informed its selection of work for export, and the relationship between contemporary perceptions of national culture, theatrical culture, and the convergence of the two in the service of promoting British interests abroad in the Cold War period. </p>