by Peter Rankin
Hindsight reveals that this was typical of Joan. On the one hand, fear and wilfulness nearly blew her chances. On the other, talent and determination saw her through. Joan tended to disguise fear with anger, so it could have been nerves about university that made her come up with the scabs accusation, even though some students had indeed been scabs. After all, she knew as little about what would happen at RADA as she did about what would happen at university.
What of the little holiday? Was that off? No, it was still on nor was it anywhere like Ramsgate. It was Paris. Nick, with her maps and guidebooks, knew all the works of art they had to see, but Paris itself made the biggest impression on Joan. It enchanted her.
The trip was tinged with wistfulness, though, because Joan had reached the moment when she had to decide on her future. Once back in London, she would not be returning to school and her father’s six shillings a week would stop. That was certain. She had the RADA scholarship and would probably be leaving home. That was up to her. Nobody was forcing her to take up the scholarship, or to leave home. A temptation was to hide in the cloak of comfort Nick offered, and keep painting.
Many years later, when recalling this moment, Joan told of a balcony overlooking Paris where she and Nick sat one evening, Nick pointing out the repetitiveness of long runs in the theatre. This was one of her arguments for keeping Joan at an easel. However, it feels as if Joan was attributing those words to her in the way that a playwright, instead of writing a monologue, bounces thoughts round different characters. To know what a long run feels like requires an old hand at theatre and Nick was not an old hand. Nor, for that matter, was Joan. Long afterwards, she seemed to be dramatising the scene.
Joan continued by responding to this argument with her dream for the future. With Nick cast as the sympathetic listener, she launched into what this time was, not dialogue bounced around, but a monologue:
Space, light and shelter, a place that would change with the seasons, where all knowledge would be available and new discovery made clear, a place to play and learn and do what you will. I know that work is the only solution to life’s problems, creative work with some manual labour thrown in. The inborn hatred, murderous feelings, the hate and aggression that are part of us, even our petty feelings can be transformed by creativity.
[Joan’s Book]
This still sounds like Joan, the playwright, at work. The speech divides into two halves. In the first half, just as Ibsen plants two pistols in the first act of Hedda Gabler, one of which will kill Hedda in the last, so Joan plants an idea in the 1930s which would mean a lot to her in the 1960s, but would also cause public confusion and private disruption. ‘Space light and shelter . . . a place to play and learn,’ was an exact description of the Fun Palace which Joan tried to make happen in the 1960s. It’s as if she wanted the reader to be aware of it early to show that its roots were deep. If she employed Ibsen’s technique, it’s because she admired his craftsmanship. After the success of A Taste of Honey, she told its author, Shelagh Delaney, to analyse him as a lesson in structure.
In the second half of the monologue, the manual labour bit is slightly funny. To keep afloat, Theatre Workshop did do manual labour but the person who did the least was Joan. She always had an excuse you couldn’t argue with: her need to work on the play, whatever that was, and, to be fair, at that she did work phenomenally hard.
‘The hate and aggression that are part of us . . . even our petty feelings,’ does sound a likely thought, if too well-formed. It would have come from those flesh-rending rows at home and is borne out later on by her dislike of the family unit in plays. Here, rather than in the Fun Palace idea, is where the design for living began, a reaction against everything around her that she hated.
An answer could have been for Nick to adopt her. She offered to, but Kate turned that down and for once Joan was in agreement with her mother. Something told her that, nice as Nick and painting were, this was not the way for her.
‘That dyke who took you to Paris,’ someone said to Joan of Nick a few years before she died. This did not go down well. It chimed neither with her past innocence, when ‘dyke’ would have been an unknown word, nor her deep-down primness that was always there.
So, you have Joan giving herself sophisticated thoughts at the age of fifteen that you suspect she had much later, but at the same time not caring to admit to what may have been a simple if crudely put truth: Nick was a lesbian. This would seem to be corroborated by Nick persuading Joan, before they went to Paris, to have her hair cut short, saying that she had a well-shaped head. If you see Nick’s painting of Joan at that time, for a split second you are puzzled because you think you are looking at a boy. Only after that do you see the school tunic.
In her indecision – Joan hated making decisions – she needed that click moment that would let her chuck Nick. In Paris, she found it when Nick referred to her illegitimacy. She did it by saying to Joan that a nice boy might not want a girl like her, so she was probably better off with her, Nick. And that was it. Joan was on her way to find her design for living by herself.
CHAPTER THREE
TIME TO GET OUT
She did not find it at RADA. Still, the weeks before going were fun. Joan made up her mind and did leave home. Or as her half-brother, Jim, seven decades later, put it, ‘You fucked off.’ ‘Yes, I did,’ answered Joan, neither adding nor subtracting a word. She crossed the Thames, staying near to the Tate Gallery, and went to lodge with a French woman who would turn out to be quite a figure in her own right.
Brixton, down the road from Stockwell, produced Violette Szabo. Pimlico, near the Tate, produced Yvonne Rudellat. When the Second World War came, both joined Special Operations Executive. Both worked undercover in France and both, for their efforts, lost their lives.
At the time Joan knew her, Yvonne was a dressmaker who took in lodgers. Joan’s billet was her big bathroom in which a camp bed was erected. Yvonne herself lived in the basement with her Italian husband and their daughter. Upstairs, the rooms were let out to a Hungarian chef and his wife, and a bookmaker. It was all rather lively, and turned even livelier when Yvonne’s French lover came over from Paris. Joan went to collect him from Victoria Station dressed as Yvonne so as to be recognised. Once back at the house, she had the job of hiding him from Yvonne’s jealous husband.
RADA wasn’t like that. Before Joan set off, Yvonne, using her sewing skills, transformed Joan’s school uniform into something that was appropriate for drama school, but as soon as Joan arrived at Gower Street she saw that none of the other female students had to make that effort. Without trying, they had the right clothes and, of course, thought nothing of it, as you do when things are handed to you on a plate. When you don’t have something because you can’t afford it, you ache. ‘It must be awful being poor,’ said one of the girls to Joan. And who were these girls? Americans wanting to have an English accent, and debutantes, mostly. It was the days when RADA was thought of as an alternative to finishing school. The idea of grants from local authorities was far in the future, so most of the students were sons and daughters of middle-class parents, like doctors and lawyers, and they could afford the fees. Others came from theatre families. Joan remembered, in particular, a boy called Dance, whom she described as a blob with no talent whatsoever. His father managed a theatre. He had pulled strings. Joan was convinced of it. Other students included Winston Churchill’s daughter, Sarah, and Ida Lupino, who, from a dynasty of entertainers, went to Hollywood where she not only acted but became one of the very few female film directors. Joan, knowing her only for her time at RADA, thought her untalented. She soon thought the place was a waste of time and talked little of it thereafter. However, bits came out over the years.
In Joan’s first term, Patience Collier, Renée Richter then, had reached her last term. Before leaving, she was in Epicoene, the Silent Woman, by Ben Jonson. Joan saw that and, from it, remembered Patience, who would go on to play Charlotta in The Cherry Orchard for the Russian director, Theodore K
omisarjevsky, alongside John Gielgud and Peggy Ashcroft. She was to come into Joan’s life three times later on.
The only subjects for which Joan thought RADA was any use were French, because she wanted to learn it, and movement. French was taught by Alice Gachet, the daughter of Dr Paul Gachet, who had treated Van Gogh in the last months of his life. Van Gogh had lived briefly in Brixton, so there was a link for Joan. The actor Anthony Quayle, during an interview, spoke of being taught by Madame Gachet. He was a year older than Joan and, sure enough, was trained at RADA. Although Joan occasionally mentioned his wife, Dorothy Hyson, whom she always prefaced with the description, ‘Very pretty,’ she never mentioned Anthony Quayle himself. As for Madame Gachet’s classes, Joan could not afford them. They were extra, a guinea a term.
For Annie Fligg, the movement teacher, Joan only needed a pair of tights. Yvonne Rudellat stitched a pair of school stockings to a swimsuit and Joan was in, even if there was an embarrassing twang when she got carried away. She loved those classes, particularly as she had attended ballet classes at the academy and not liked those at all; she never would like classical ballet. ‘It’s not movement,’ she said, ‘It’s a series of poses.’ Nureyev, to her, was a wobbly bottom and crash landings.
The reason why Annie Fligg was of interest to Joan was the system she taught. It was that of Rudolf Laban who was to become one of the most important influences in her life. This system came from observing and analysing every movement a human being can make. It could be applied in many ways, from how to use the body most effectively in factory work, through dance and on, in Joan’s case, to drama.
It allowed you to use your imagination too, which obviously would have appealed to Joan. What she also enjoyed was moving out of the limited number of planes most people use in everyday life, such as standing up and facing front. Classical ballet, she thought, took place only in one plane and that’s why for her it was not movement.
When it comes to influences, Joan’s lack of dogmatism should be made clear. Over the years, many people would influence her but no one ruled her entirely. Theatre professors, who write about her but didn’t know her, are inclined to stress one influence as if it totally dominated her. None of them did. Laban was the most important influence, but he didn’t stop Joan looking at Renaissance art and the commedia dell’arte figures of Callot, which, by the twisting and intertwining of bodies, also suggested the kind of movement that attracted her.
When George Bernard Shaw appeared at RADA, Joan wondered why he should bother with such a place. In fact, she was shocked – but then Joan, when it came to events that challenged her view of things, was rather good at being shocked. For a start, it was well known that Shaw was financing RADA. He gave the academy the rights to his play, Pygmalion, which it still has and that includes the musical made from it, My Fair Lady.
Shaw didn’t teach but he directed a scene from his play, Heartbreak House. Joan played Ellie Dunn. Telling her not to copy him, he read the part. Joan was nearly in tears but the next moment was laughing when he read the cockney burglar. She liked his accent. It still wasn’t enough to convince her that RADA was a good thing.
Sybil Thorndike gave a talk. Joan thought she was a shocking actress but a good woman and so paid attention when she recommended that actresses should find an occupation other than acting to keep them sane. What that was didn’t matter. This did not make Joan take up gardening or petit point, but as she already had so many other interests, like politics and painting, she had, in her own way, already taken Sybil Thorndike’s advice.
Joan’s scholarship money was eleven shillings a week, five of which had to go to Yvonne Rudellat. That, however, was only for term time. During the holidays there was nothing and, for those periods, Joan took a job at a knitting factory in Tooting. She said that she spent so much time making the other girls laugh that she got the sack. That sounds like she only worked there once but in fact, during her time at RADA, she worked there on more than one occasion.
Extra money was needed in term time too and so she took an early morning job as a cleaner. The story is picked up by Frith Banbury, a fellow student, who went on to be become an archetypal West End figure, directing Terence Rattigan’s play, The Deep Blue Sea for HM Tennent, the most ‘West End’ of West End managements. Frith, himself, challenged this establishment image by pointing to the play, The Pink Room, which he directed. It was by Rodney Ackland, a playwright who, unlike Rattigan and Noël Coward, did not know on which side his bread was buttered. All three were gay but only he was frank about homosexuality in his writing. The other two, wanting West End success and money, knew that it was best to veil it. Perhaps they had a point. The Pink Room, when first produced, was a failure.
So there was the young Frith Banbury noticing that Joan always arrived late for class in the morning. ‘When we understood that she had this cleaning job first,’ he said, ‘we took her under our wing.’ Doubtless he and the other students meant well but attention of this kind would still have made her uncomfortable.
Another way to make money was to enter competitions. At first Joan was put off. Her voice teacher told her that her voice was too low, so she went around trilling away until she realised how ridiculous this was. The voice that you have is the voice that you have. You can work on it but you can’t swap it. Having realised this, Joan entered competitions vigorously. She had a natural talent for verse speaking and used it. The actress, Rachel Kempson, soon to marry Michael Redgrave and eventually become the mother of Vanessa, Corin and Lynn, recalls in her autobiography tying for first prize in a verse-speaking competition with a small, dark-haired fellow student called Joan Littlewood. Joan, when recalling Rachel Kempson, said: ‘She had a face like a scraped bone.’
One of the judges who awarded Joan a verse-speaking prize was the radio director, Archie Harding. He set her to performing Shakespeare on the World Service at three in the morning. She did an excerpt from Antony and Cleopatra, playing Cleopatra. The actor who played the clown bringing the asp was Robert Speaight. So there was Joan, still in her teens, acting opposite the actor whom she had seen as Laertes at the Old Vic with John Gielgud only a couple of years earlier. Archie Harding, being to the left politically, was sent into internal exile at BBC Manchester, but not before saying to Joan, ‘if you’re ever up Manchester way, drop by.’
A teacher of Joan’s was established West End actress Marda Vanne. She lived in Gower Street with Gwen Frangçon Davies, the actress who had been John Gielgud’s Juliet at the Old Vic. Both were intrigued by Joan, whose low voice would have been most appealing.
‘What’s a beautiful voice?’ Joan used to ask, but then she was thinking of radio actors ‘wanking their voices against the microphone.’ If it wasn’t that, it was the singing of Shakespeare. There’s a recording of Peggy Ashcroft as Juliet and Edith Evans as the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet. Hearing that, one understands what Joan was reacting against. They coo the words as if to say: ‘Don’t I sound lovely?’ Joan wanted actors to sound as if they were really talking to each other.
For all that, to other people’s ears, Joan did have a beautiful voice, and a commanding one too. As early as these RADA days, the actress, Julia Neilson Terry, of the family that produced John Gielgud, said that Joan had a voice full of tragedy. She said it whilst clasping Joan to her scented bosom, which left the teenage girl less pleased than bemused. It all depended on what you were doing with your voice, was Joan’s attitude. Still, in later years, her voice, by turns, impressed and charmed people as different as Patience Collier and the man who was to become Ewan MacColl. What’s certain is that she liked good, round vowel sounds. In later years, speakers on the radio saying: ‘Gerd,’ and ‘Berk,’ instead of ‘Good,’ and ‘Book,’ got on her nerves.
Still, whatever it was in Joan that fascinated Marda Vanne and Gwen Frangçon Davies, she wasn’t having it. ‘I was not going to be drawn into their Sapphic circle.’
Joan fancied men and that was it, and at least at RADA she had a little roman
ce. Gerry Raffles used to tease her about it. ‘Your first boyfriend,’ he said, ‘Stephen Haggard.’ This was the actor-writer nephew of the adventure story author, Rider Haggard. During the Second World War, he was posted to the Balkans where he found himself alongside RD (Reggie) Smith, who was to become a radio producer at the BBC but, before that, the character, Guy Pringle, in Olivia Manning’s Balkan trilogy, The Fortunes of War. Olivia Manning was Reggie’s wife.
As part of his job working for the British Council in the Balkans, Reggie Smith used to put Stephen Haggard into productions of the classics and so he too turned up in The Fortunes of War. Aidan Sheridan was his character. Haggard, while still posted abroad but already married and a father, fell in love with an Egyptian woman. It was a disaster. Burnt out at 31, he shot himself. Joan didn’t talk about this but was later to know both Reggie Smith, a communist, and Olivia Manning, in her opinion, a cold fish.
Joan didn’t sleep with Stephen Haggard but, at the age of sixteen, she did have sex with a white Russian who seemed to be merely on hand, not fancied at all. Joan allowed him to do what he wanted as if she were ticking off a to-do list. She referred to the act as the breaking of her hymen, a technical business with no joy in it at all, and not for a long time did she do it again.
At RADA a student could occasionally find him or herself being handed a free ticket to a West End play. Marda Vanne gave Joan a ticket to Somerset Maugham’s latest, For Services Rendered (1932). Given that the cast included Flora Robson, Cedric Hardwicke and Ralph Richardson, she must have thought that Joan would be impressed. She wasn’t. She was appalled. Characters in present-day clothes walked on, poured drinks, sat down, talked and that was it. Was this what she was supposed to be studying for? At least the Old Vic gave you poetry, action and colour.
A year later, Joan saw Flora Robson playing Isabella in Measure for Measure opposite Charles Laughton as Angelo. That was at the Old Vic. In her opinion the casting was wrong, but she didn’t mind. As it happens, that was also the opinion of its director, Tyrone Guthrie. It gives actors hope to think that if Joan didn’t care for Flora Robson in the Somerset Maugham, she could admire her in the Shakespeare. ‘I wouldn’t pay him in washers,’ Joan could say of an actor she’d never seen before, but on seeing him in a different play two weeks later, consider him gifted.