ABSTRACT
When Arden and D’Arcy arrived in the USA in 1967, it was a country at war in Vietnam and in turmoil at home. Sit-ins, strikes and other forms of dissent raged across the country, especially on college campuses. In March, Martin Luther King led a huge protest in Chicago, and in April protesters temporarily halted the New York Stock Exchange. Arden had been invited to New York University’s Humanities Faculty by Professor Conor Cruise O’Brien, to whom he had dedicated Armstrong’s Last Goodnight, to lecture on ‘Theatre and Politics’. Arden was provided with an office on the fifth floor of an air-conditioned sky scraper. He was, apparently, ‘slim, logical, articulate and sometimes bearded’. Arden and D’Arcy left New York in June 1967, just at the start of America’s ‘long hot summer’ of race riots and disturbances.
