Joan Littlewood

by Peter Rankin

  She didn’t think the teaching at La Retraite was as good as at the Practising School; it wasn’t strict enough. However she enjoyed the airy rooms, the small classes and the atmosphere of learning. As for the Roman Catholic ritual, it didn’t frighten her as it does some. She liked it. This started with the girls having to put on soft shoes before entering the school. Perhaps that’s what Joan partly had in mind when later she insisted that her actors wear soft shoes at rehearsals. Yes, anyone taking movement seriously wears soft shoes or takes off their shoes altogether, but Joan regarded the stage as sacred. Why else was there a rush of that deep anger whenever she saw a classic play done badly? For her, the perpetrators were blasphemers.

  Another memory of convent days that projected forward was that of silence. In the early years of Theatre Workshop, the actors were expected to sit quietly in their dressing rooms for an hour before the performance. ‘Our lives were monastic,’ said Max Shaw, one of those actors, and he was not merely referring to poverty. La Retraite was called La Retraite for a reason. Joan learned about long periods of silence. People may think this boring or frightening, but this was a silence that could be both comforting and enlightening. Boisterousness may have been a characteristic of Joan’s productions, but here we find her quiet, serious side; not a confining seriousness but a releasing one.

  The silence of retreat was certainly her only comfort after the death of Carrie, her much-loved aunt, from tuberculosis at the age of 39. Carrie had a caustic wit that amused Joan. Having to watch relatives at the funeral, who hardly knew Carrie, crying or ‘blubbering’, the word Carrie used to use, merely annoyed her.

  She preferred to attend Mass at La Retraite, the first Mass she had ever sat right through. She thought it beautiful and, another day went up for communion but, being neither Catholic nor baptised, was turned away. Mass was far better than listening to the C of E hymns sung around the cenotaph, ones like ‘Abide with Me’, which she poked fun at all her life.

  The Stations of the Cross, she really liked. As with the Mass, there was theatre about it. The influence it had on her came to the surface in the 1960s when she wanted to do a play about the Ronan Point disaster. She saw it being performed like the Stations of the Cross, promenade theatre before promenade theatre.

  Mother St Teresa, the headmistress at La Retraite, seeing Joan’s thoughtful as well as argumentative side, suggested she become a nun. Joan dismissed the idea because she didn’t consider Mother St Teresa clever enough to make a good case, but the idea did attract her.

  Besides, other ideas to do with her future were already forming in her head. She had an art teacher, Miss Nicholson, who believed in her and took her to art galleries. Far and away the most important was the one closest to Stockwell, the Tate (now Tate Britain). As soon as Joan discovered it, she knew that she could get there by herself, and did. The number 88 bus came from Clapham to Stockwell station where she jumped on. It then crossed Vauxhall Bridge and arrived at the gallery, the whole journey taking eight minutes. It’s a short journey and yet for the rest of Joan’s family, it might have been the other side of the world. This was the end of pushing a pram to Clapham Common. Joan had found something much better.

  Once in the gallery, she hurried along, twisting her head sideways to avoid seeing the Turners. She had to go past them because her goal was in the gallery beyond, the Constables. She loved those. In the few steps she took to get from the one to the other, you can see the violence of Joan’s likes and dislikes. Because he’s so modern, Turner fascinates many; not Joan. All she noticed was that he couldn’t draw. It is true that his human figures are not great and indeed you don’t find them in his most famous paintings but is that a reason to write him off? For Joan it was. On the other hand, one Constable could hold her attention for an hour, an escape and a retreat at the same time. However, despite painting being a passion for her, it was mixed with one even stronger.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE SPARK CATCHES FIRE

  The spark was struck at the Practising School. One afternoon, Miss Barnes took her class to see The Merchant of Venice at the Brixton Theatre. As you would expect of a young person whose life would be taken up with theatre, Joan was spellbound. Yet it was not to the point that she was entirely uncritical. She didn’t think much of Antonio or Portia but Shylock, she hung on his every word. Back at school, she looked out the play and learned his speech, ‘I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes?’ going so far as to put on a big coat, draw a beard on her face using burnt cork, and perform it for her grandparents at evening reading time.

  At La Retraite, another school trip took her to a matinee at the Old Vic. The play was to be Hamlet. This visit would be the start of a relationship with the Old Vic that takes a bit of understanding. At rehearsals, in later years, Joan did nothing but mock the name. When ticking off her company, it became a shorthand for bad acting, while her imitations had actors doubled up but that is not the whole story.

  When, as a child, she told her family that she was going to this matinee, her aunt Fan, whom she insisted wasn’t really her aunt, said: ‘That blood tub.’ It annoyed her. Once upon a time Bill Sykes, it is true, had dragged Nancy by the hair round the stage gauging the number of times he could do it by the amount of booing he was hearing, but those days were over. Emma Cons, a social reformer, had taken it over in 1880 and turned it into the Royal Victoria Coffee Music Hall where no alcohol was drunk and entertainment was decent, if not always interesting. On Tuesday evenings there would be a science lecture. This led to lessons being given to poor would-be students in the dressing rooms and subsequently at the Morley College, an offshoot specially founded by Cons to help working-class people further themselves. It was one of the first adult education colleges in the country. Although this happened before Joan’s time, when she reached her Theatre Workshop years, classes were something she too organised. They were for people not necessarily in theatre; the neighbourhood children living near to the Theatre Royal Stratford East, for example. This was part of something bigger she wanted to achieve; but that is yet to come.

  In 1898, Cons’ niece, Lilian Baylis, joined her aunt to help run the Coffee Music Hall and, when Emma died in 1912, took over the reins entirely. Aware that the Hall’s nightly fare was less than thrilling, she cast around to find something that would not only edify but hold the interest. After much prayer, she received her answer: Shakespeare. And though she knew little about the playwright, she instructed the director, Ben Greet, to create a company and set to work, which he did in 1914, the year of Joan’s birth. Between then and 1923, all Shakespeare’s plays in the First Folio were performed. This had never been attempted before. That is why Joan did not want her ignorant aunt Fan abusing Lilian Baylis’s efforts.

  At that matinee, the actor she saw playing Hamlet was the Old Vic’s first home-grown leading player, the 25-year-old John Gielgud. The cast also included Donald Wolfit, Martita Hunt and Robert Speaight. That was the list she gave when writing about it, one of the rare occasions Joan gave a list of actors we may have heard of. The play had her on the edge of her seat and from then on she went on foot to every new production. Only by queuing up for late door and being prepared to run up to the gallery at the last minute was she able to afford the five pence ticket price. That waiting and longing, sometimes in the rain, was a scene that in 1967 she put into the musical, The Marie Lloyd Story. One audience member, Alan Strachan, the director, was so haunted by it, despite it being only a fleeting moment, that 35 years later, he was able to describe it precisely.

  Throughout her life, Joan damned most of the theatre actors who were considered our stars. She did not damn John Gielgud or Donald Wolfit. Gielgud she called Edwardian and, like everybody else, imitated him, but there was none of her usual scorn. As for Wolfit, she never said a bad word about him. Maybe this was to do with those two actors being wrapped up in an experience that cast the die for her life.

  She went home and once again looked up the play, this time learning ‘O what a ro
gue and peasant slave am I!’ Like the Shylock speech, it was spoken by a man. Whether consciously or unconsciously, this marked the beginning of how she meant to carry on: she was always happier with men and was often accused of not liking women, and being particularly tough on actresses. She denied it but said so many things against women, often things she saw in herself and disliked, that one could think there was truth in that accusation. ‘Bring back boy actors for the women’s parts,’ was one, along with: ‘The reason why there are fewer funny women than funny men is that women can’t be objective.’ Another was: ‘Women are drawn to directing. They like arranging things and making pretty patterns’ – all the while, denying she was ever a director herself.

  As for her desire to play men, it would not have seemed peculiar at the time she was acquainting herself with Shakespeare. At the Old Vic, Sibyl Thorndike had played Prince Hal and King Lear’s Fool. Admittedly that was more to do with the shortage of actors during the First World War than any idolising of the male sex.

  Another production at the Old Vic did not impress her so much but it was the one to inspire her to put on a Shakespeare play at La Retraite. This was Macbeth. Gielgud, who was playing him, she described as too decorative but it was that very feeling that she could do better that was her inspiration. A good Hamlet would be overwhelming but a not-so-hot Macbeth? There’s more action and murders in that one, which Joan of course noticed, and it was shorter.

  Having decided that she herself would play Macbeth, not to mention Third Murderer and the Old Man at the end of Act Two, she approached her favourite teacher at La Retraite, Mother St Vincent. Not only did Mother St Vincent give her consent, she organised rehearsal space. This left Joan to dragoon the girls she thought would be right into giving up their time to be in the play. She succeeded. As for her, it was no sacrifice. Rehearsals were in the evening and during the holidays. In other words, it was more time away from home and household chores.

  ‘I was the producer and my word was law.’ When Joan said that, she was letting slip how things were going to be from then onwards. ‘I’ve never told any actor what to do,’ is what she usually said and, while there was truth in it, nothing got on to any stage if she didn’t want it to.

  Once she had the go-ahead, she had to think about how she was going to do it. At the Old Vic, the productions she saw still had different sets for every scene, and, to cover the big changes, some scenes were played in front of a cloth. Most teenagers wanting to do a play, having been to one in the professional theatre, tend to copy what they have seen. Having done that, they react against themselves and do something else. Joan skipped that stage. She already knew that the Old Vic’s productions were heavy and slow. In three years’ time, Tyrone Guthrie, would take over as director at the Old Vic and go for a permanent set that would keep the action flowing. It would be the latest thing, in the 1930s anyway. It wasn’t, of course, as it was based on the Elizabethan theatre. Many years later, as a seasoned director, Joan wrote that she was comfortable with the Elizabethan layout too. In fact, only a permanent set made her happy. In the Assembly Hall at La Retraite, necessity began to teach her what she would always prefer. There would be no scenery, just the banqueting table.

  Of the production, her accounts diverge. When describing it in conversation, she said that she forgot to put stools out, only to realise it worked much better that way. From then onwards, she rarely had chairs on any stage. When writing about it, she said that she made the decision about not having the stools in advance. Instead, she directed the diners to dip down to make it look as if they were sitting. This is a device she used many years later. It worked because, at the end of the scene, you went quickly to the next one. Time was saved because there was no need to clear the chairs. Either way, her desire for speed and flow was already revealing itself.

  When it came to her account of the performance, there was no divergence. That was always the same. Before an audience of nuns and schoolfellows, it went like wildfire. Next morning, the headmistress summoned Joan to her study. She thought she was for the high jump but not at all. Mother St Nicholas wanted an extra performance to present to the Mother Superior, who was coming over from France. Joan was thrilled, partly because of the special guest’s importance and partly because it gave her the chance to improve the production. This time, the music took most of her attention. At Hamlet she had heard ‘Fingal’s Cave’ on a gramophone. It had not been thrilling. For her Macbeth, she would have real drums and a real choir. Again, she was beginning as she meant to go on. ‘You can’t start a play without music,’ she would say, ‘and it must be live.’ This time, parents were allowed to come but only the parents of the performers. Among them were James and Kate. They sat at the back.

  When, at the point in the play Banquo was murdered and Joan, as Third Murderer, was stabbing a concealed piece of meat and squirting jets of cochineal, there was a cry from the audience. The Mother Superior from France had fainted. Joan, at first delighted, was soon disappointed. Mother Mary Agnes hurried round during the interval to tell her and the rest of the cast to go easy. Joan’s mind began to roam.

  After Aunt Carrie’s death, insurance money came through. It was to pay for the one and only family holiday Joan was taken on. Ramsgate was the resort. For the occasion, Kate dressed herself in black and walked around with Carrie’s little daughter, Marie, saying to anyone that stared: ‘She’s lost her mother.’ Joan, repelled, wandered away along the beach. She found a pierrot show. Because you had to pay to see it, palings surrounded the performing area but even from behind them, she could see enough. The little songs the pierrots sang to introduce themselves and the black and white costumes that seemed to come from no particular period but went right back to commedia dell’arte enchanted her. Three performances a day were given. She watched every one. In the evening, coloured fairy lights were turned on and a talent competition was announced. Joan volunteered. ‘My Mother’s Arms’ was the song she sang but all confidence drained away when, to her mind, came the picture of her own mother’s arms. The idea of being in them was revolting. Only one person voted for her.

  Back at school, Joan tumbled into one of those moods people round her in later years would dread. It was an angry ‘I don’t know what I’m doing, but, boy, is everybody else going to pay for it,’ mood.

  She wrote a beautiful letter to the Old Vic offering her services, signing with her father’s surname. Kate intercepted the reply. Catching sight of the envelope was all it took to provoke a cold fury.

  In central London, Joan joined a march demanding independence for India. Gandhi came out on a balcony at the Dorchester Hotel to watch. Back at school, she organised her own march. It was on behalf of a dead rat. Mother St Teresa warned her that she could be up for expulsion and was risking her chance of going to university. Joan replied that university students were scabs. She had seen students from Oxford and Cambridge driving buses during the National Strike in 1926. She was already aware, because James had told her, that the miners were always stuck out on their own with no one prepared to support them. She was not expelled. She had just won another scholarship. What for or where to, she didn’t say.

  In the middle of this turmoil Miss Nicholson, her art mistress, showed some of Joan’s paintings to the young Barnet Freedman, who was teaching at the Royal College of Art. He would, in 1940, become a war artist. Back in the late 1920s, he foretold a distinguished career for Joan as a painter.

  Actually, Miss Nicholson was afraid Joan was taking seriously the idea that she should become a nun. Joan told her not to worry. She was over that. Miss Nicholson, known to Joan as Nick, suggested a little holiday. Joan, caring little either way, accepted. At least she would be away from home. In point of fact, she was not planning on becoming a painter either. She had secretly written for an audition at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

  The test pieces arrived. There were two. The first was from Tamburlaine by Christopher Marlowe and the second was from Hindle Wakes by Stanley Houghton of the
Manchester School and, in that, prophetic, given how much that town would feature in her life and work. Both suited Joan. The speech from Tamburlaine was Tamburlaine himself speaking, another man, and Marlowe, together with Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, was one of her favourite playwrights. The Hindle Wakes speech was the spirited heroine rejecting a proposal of marriage from a dutiful boyfriend who has made her pregnant. He’s nice enough but nothing special. She can do better. Joan could easily understand her attitude. All very well, except that the day of the RADA exam was right in the middle of her school exams, known in those days as matriculation.

  To be precise, it clashed with a chemistry exam. Unconcerned, Joan set off for Gower Street, where you can still find RADA. One of the judges depressed her by referring to the gap in her teeth, but another judge, by simply saying ‘Good luck,’ encouraged her. The audition was for a London County Council scholarship, and she won it. Only two were given each year, one to a girl and one to a boy. The boy who won in the same year as her was John Bailey, who went on to a career as a solid, if slightly eerie, stalwart in B-films and television.

  Back at the convent, the nuns were not best pleased with Joan’s jaunt to RADA. They wanted her to go to university. Miss Nicholson wasn’t pleased either. She thought Joan should have taken her chemistry exam and matriculated, which was needed to get into art school. Still, it didn’t stop Mother St Teresa from boasting of this scholarship to the Schools Inspector.