by Peter Rankin
One production did impress her but it wasn’t English. La Compagnie des Quinze (The Company of Fifteen) influenced by the work of the director, Jacques Copeau, a lover of beauty and simplicity and a hater of naturalism, came over from France to London. It brought André Obey’s play, The Rape of Lucrece, and Joan was so struck by its use of two narrators that she was determined to use the idea herself one day. She was also struck by the idea of a company of fifteen that trained to work in a certain style.
Although most of Joan’s talk about RADA was dismissive, one remark, made not long before she died, struck home. She said that she felt so apart from the other students that she used to eat her lunchtime sandwiches in the lavatory.
Before the course finished, she began to pull away from it. Up the road was the Slade School of Fine Art and, having an entrée there, probably that extra scholarship she won at the convent, she used to sneak into drawing classes. She made a friend, a Swedish girl called Sonja Mortensen.
At weekends, she attended a literary circle run by a friend of Miss Nicholson’s who was known by the one word: Bailey. Joan, by her own admission, was an opportunist. She may have been in the process of dropping Nick but if a colleague of hers did something that was useful to her, then he or she stayed on the list. Actually, there was more to it than opportunism. When Joan said that she wrote Nick off during that evening on the balcony in Paris, it was the 1980s, long after the event. In 1931, while she was at RADA and later at the Slade, she wrote to Nick two of the most affectionate letters she ever wrote to anyone. In the first she has mixed up the days and missed a rendezvous:
I went to the theatre in the afternoon as the Superintendent of the RADA said we could get a stall at the Phoenix for the matinee. We could have both gone though I should have preferred just to have wandered if I had been with you. It was Little Catherine with Marie Tempest, a play about Catherine and Elizabeth of Russia. A perfectly rotten play (I suppose that’s why we got the unlimited number of seats). I do wish I could have seen you. Brixton Market looked perfectly lovely and I read Le Temps in the library and dried my eyes and thought us back to Paris reading that old newspaper . . . I would give anything I have to be with you now.
She goes on to say that she has been reading Dostoyevsky’s ‘House of Death’ which we would know as The House of the Dead, and comes up with some colourful if outlandish theories about it. She finishes:
I really think old Dosto would have felt an affinity with Jane Austen who was essentially fiercely progressive tho’ she progressed in a way that made people think her a gentle soul.
I expect you are awfully excited (no that’s silly) I expect you are looking forward to showing Tonks your stuff. I think the best of it will be that he will give you a good deal of precious encouragement.
Firstly, here’s some background information. Marie Tempest was a big stage star of the time. In 1925, she had originated the part of Judith Bliss in Nöel Coward’s play, Hay Fever. Henry Tonks was Slade Professor of Fine Art, stern and influential. Secondly, here are some details:
1.
Joan uses ‘perfectly’ twice in a way that is unwittingly more RADA than Brixton.
2.
She plays with Dostoyevsky’s name, something she did to nearly everyone’s. Her mother, for example, was Mumski. Often she did this because she didn’t like a name and if she didn’t like anything, she changed it.
3.
In mid-life, Joan dismissed Jane Austen as weak tea, saying that nobody could like both Austen and Smollett, writers who had both set scenes in eighteenth-century Bath. Smollett, much more rumbustious, she loved. However, in her 80s, while working with an actor who was going to play Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, she discovered that she admired Jane Austen’s talent again.
In the second letter, we learn Joan has been to art class, drawn a head which she didn’t think much of, and then got caught in the rain waiting at a bus stop by Waterloo station:
It would be glorious wouldn’t it if I could see you for a little longer on Thursdays you wouldn’t believe how I look forward to it, how from the quagmire of awful people I live with I look up to this (what do you have in the middle of a quagmire?) which is you. I’ve just had some grub isn’t eating a waste of time and now I’ve no time to write anymore which is perhaps rather a good thing.
I am, dear lady, yours while this carcass is
to her Joan Littlewood.
Good night, all my love – Bless you.
Dearest Nick
While directing in later years Joan often said to her actors: ‘Take out the full stops. Well, this second letter shows that she certainly practised what she preached – and started early too – though I don’t think people thought she meant when writing.
The difference between the tone of these letters and what Joan would write about Nick many years later regarding the dismissing of her in Paris, reveals what Joan would go on to do both in her life and her work: edit and shape to make the clean line she wanted audiences or readers to have. It’s rather like rubbing out the hesitant early marks in a drawing to reveal one simple, flowing line.
How come Joan had those letters in her possession? They weren’t hers, they were Nick’s. Nor were they roughs. The second still has its envelope and stamp on it, three halfpence. It would seem that Nick, for some unknown reason, gave them back.
So, there was Joan in Bailey’s literary circle. At these gatherings, members read out their compositions for appraisal. They couldn’t have kept much of a flow going. Bailey was an artist, not a writer, and she’d interrupt to make the others hold a pose.
This period of doing a bit here and doing a bit there came to a climax when Sonja, then studying in Paris, suggested that Joan join her and carry on drawing there. Ever since that first trip with Nick, Joan had been bursting to go and, with her savings of nine pounds, set off for Victoria Station and the boat train.
Paris was not the same this time. It was cold and yet the smell of state rottenness hung in the air. Joan had some letters of introduction – Jacques Copeau, with his love of Molière, interested her in particular – but they did no good. One evening, she found herself in the middle of a riot. Stones were thrown. Guns were fired and that night people were killed. It was a popular uprising against an attempted coup by the right wing, and it didn’t stop there. Sonja moved on to Italy. Joan thought it was time to make a move too but she didn’t want to go back to London.
The little Joan said of her time at RADA and what can be picked up here and there are shards of information that give some context for those who weren’t there. Joan was usually strict about the need for context, but not on this occasion. It was a period that she cared little for and what she didn’t care for, she, as usual, edited out.
What becomes clear from all those names she was so reluctant to mention is that Joan was not outside establishment mainstream theatre pressing her nose against the window. She was slap bang in the middle of it and could easily have stayed there for the rest of her life, if she had chosen to. To put it another way, inside herself, she was an outsider. Outside herself, she was an insider.
And then there are the names of Archie Harding and Reggie Smith. They give a tiny taste of a time when educated middle-class people turned to communism. The reason was simple: if you were intelligent and kept your eyes open, you had no choice. Conditions in those times were so obviously unfair. What later became of those people who were communists in the 1930s – it frequently involved a turn to the right – would provoke Joan’s scorn. ‘Thirties communists,’ was an insult.
No ‘design for living’ was found at RADA but maybe Joan was not quite at the stage she wanted people to think she was. Rather than having fully formed ideas about the design for living or a fun palace, it’s easier to understand that she hadn’t found what she wanted and was beginning to discover that she would have to make it for herself, whatever that was.
At least she was armed. She had a classless accent – no Herry, no Jeck – which, entert
ainingly, would puzzle people pretty much forever, while the mere fact that she had been at RADA impressed others, if not herself.
After her friend, Sonja, left for Italy, Joan had to ask herself where she could go. Her answer came from her Stockwell childhood. The most famous person in the twentieth century to come from south London before Joan was Charlie Chaplin. Many don’t consider him funny today but he was graceful and beautiful, and that appealed to Joan from an early age. Later, while watching television in the 1980s, one of his shorts came on. She fell silent and, when it was over, said: ‘Those coffee stalls, those little courtyards, they’re not America. They’re Stockwell.’ At the age of nineteen, Chaplin set sail for America. Joan, also nineteen, decided to do the same.
CHAPTER FOUR
A BREATH OF FRESH AIR
The only way Joan could get to America was to stow away on a ship leaving from Liverpool. She set off on foot. Sensibly she took Archie Harding’s BBC Manchester address. Perhaps he would give her a job. It would help her on her way.
Having travelled for a while, she found it best to confront night fears by walking in the darkness, leaving the daylight hours for sleep. When tired but not worried, she could sleep almost anywhere, and soundly too. That was how, one morning, an out-of-work couple in Burton-upon-Trent found a teenage girl lying on the grass, spark out. When they had established that she was not dead, they took her into their house and gave her a cup of tea. The wife, Beattie, went further: she rummaged through Joan’s knapsack and found the piece of paper with Archie Harding’s name and address on it. She wrote at once.
Over the next few days, Joan, unusual for her, made herself useful. She took a cleaning job as she needed to pay her way. Beattie’s letter soon stopped that. At the end of the week, came a reply. It was from Archie Harding himself. He had sent a contract for Joan to write and read a short talk about her journey. It would be broadcast on the In Manchester Tonight programme. With the contract, came her train fare.
Sometimes, even as the train pulls into the station, you know you’re going to be all right and that is how it felt for Joan arriving in Manchester. Noticing that landmarks were comfortingly closer to each other than they were in London, she made her way to Broadcasting House on Oxford Road.
There the doorman, instead of frightening her, made her feel welcome and in no time she was in front of a microphone with Archie Harding telling her to recite, by way of introduction, a few lines from Antony and Cleopatra, as she had done in London. After that, she could give her talk.
It worked. A handful of journalists, lured to the BBC by Archie Harding, most of them from The Manchester Guardian, were immediately taken by Joan. This mysterious girl with the classless voice was someone they could lionise, well, at least for a couple of weeks. Useful stories appeared in the papers about ‘The Girl Tramp’. However, these stories were also annoying, because they told of her eating turnips and being frightened by cows. This was not true. This was the kind of journalism, with its constant need to spice things up, of which she would remain suspicious.
She was a bit suspicious of Archie Harding and the Guardian lot too. They presented themselves as left-leaning and relaxed about sex, but was that really the case? Their conversation was informed, dry, slightly camp – a new sound for Joan – but it didn’t take long for her to start wondering. Archie Harding, so Oxford in his conduct, a revolutionary? Was he really going to man the barricades? Journalist, Jack Dillon, married, with a reputation for sleeping around, was that well-earned? ‘Tanya’s silence is her strength,’ she heard one of this lot say of a friend. ‘How about Tanya hasn’t got anything to say?’ she thought.
Joan could live simply enough, if all about her was clean, but the room she had found was frowsty, so when Jack Dillon offered her the run of his house while he and his wife were away, she accepted. It was a kind of heaven, particularly as raspberries grew in the back garden and raspberries were a fruit Joan would love all her life. Idly she fancied being relaxed about sex like her new acquaintances appeared to be, but it was no good. She knew that her prim Stockwell background would get in the way and, just as she was thinking that, what should happen? Beattie’s husband from Burton-upon-Trent appeared. He had cycled all the way to make sure Joan was safe. He left convinced she was a kept woman.
However she may have imagined herself, and however fiery she could be, Joan was still caught out by shyness. Invitations to lunches at restaurants came from one or other of the Guardian/BBC lot. The menus daunted her. She invariably ordered an omelette.
Just as her BBC fee, roughly two guineas, was running out, and getting to America seemed essential, a message arrived from somebody called Alison Bailey. She had heard the radio programme and wanted to meet up. Joan went along, and Alison, after reminding Joan that they had been at RADA together, told her that she had a job at Manchester Rep. That was interesting. Joan needed a job too. How had Alison managed it? Her father was a director. String pulling again, it was everything Joan hated about RADA.
Even so, it was not long before she was invited to an interview with Carol Sax, an American producer, who was big at the Rep. His lodgings at the time were the Midland Hotel, the poshest in town. As Joan entered his suite, she heard him praising her instinct for publicity – the radio talk and the newspaper article had got around – but this only annoyed her. She did not think of herself as calculating. A straightforward audition was more her style, Lady Macbeth in this case, and, that way, she found herself with a job at the Rep.
It was far from any dream of theatre she had. Lady Macbeth she could act all right, but who was going to offer her the part? Not the Rep. She wasn’t the correct type. Maids and comic aunts were her staple and, by means of pebble glasses, jodphurs and riding crops, she attracted plenty of attention. It was a merriment that belied what was going on backstage. Careless rehearsals and showbiz tittle-tattle irritated her and she could not hide her feelings. In the 1980s, she referred to the actor Alfred Marks as, ‘One of the lice on the pubic hair of show business.’ In the Manchester of 1934, she was already exercising her talent for abuse. ‘Dry cankers on the arse of a great art form,’ was her description of the actors.
Typically of Joan, that was not the entire story. In 1958, at Stratford East, she cast one of the Rep actresses, Eileen Draycott, as La Celestina, the Spanish procuress, in her adaptation of that novel. However, back at the Rep where the 1935 season was to include Shaw, Priestley, Elmer Rice, Dickens and a Baroness Orczy for Christmas, Joan was not popular. Still, that gave her something to react against, which does speed things up.
One Sunday evening, on the lookout for a fresh stimulus and with America still on the cards, she went with Jack Dillon to a gathering at no 111A Grosvenor Street. Somebody to do with a different kind of theatre was going to be present, and he thought they ought to meet. It was very dark in there. Joan, wondering why she had bothered to come, peered into the gloom. Standing by the fire, wearing a big sweater and short shorts was a teenager her own age, Jimmie Miller. The moment he spoke, she recognised his voice. She’d heard it over the tannoy at the BBC, intoning statistics for a feature about the building of the Mersey tunnel.
Jimmie has a different account of their first meeting. Coming to a rehearsal of Tunnel – the title of the feature – he heard, as he approached the studio, a warm, velvety voice that made him ask Archie Harding who it belonged to, i.e. according to his memory, Joan was in Tunnel too. Either way, they met and, if Joan had a dream, this was the start of making it happen.
Back in Joan’s version, once she had established that the shorts were not an affectation but had been put on for a recent camping expedition, she and Jimmie began to talk. Yes, he told her, he did do the occasional radio programme for Archie Harding who had discovered him busking and, indeed, he was, when required, Archie’s voice of the Mancunian working man. However, what really interested him was this company he was part of that used 111A Grosvenor Street as its base. How had he come that far, though?
He was the
fourth child of parents who had lost the first three. Consequently, his mother, despite extreme poverty, had done everything she could for him. At fourteen, he had left school but his father had bought him carefully chosen books, and in that way he had continued his education. This he had plenty of time to do, because although he was supposed to be a motor mechanic, most of the time he was unemployed. Once he’d signed on which he had to do every morning, the rest of the day was his and thus it was he had the time to become interested in agitprop.
It worked like this. Little groups of young people, unable to stay silent in the face of unemployment and poverty, rife in the 1930s all around the world, found any platform they could – backs of lorries, say, or steps in front of a big building – and jump on to them and perform short sketches full of information that urgently needed to be heard. You had to be quick because, after a few minutes, the police would be on to you. This was what Jimmie had done with a group called the Red Megaphones.
Their title came from Germany where a group had given itself that name and, what’s more, did agitprop extremely well. Jimmie had found this out via a worldwide network along whose threads ran information and material. You didn’t have to go anywhere. Stuff came to you, as long as you were interested. In this way he had become familiar with the writings of Bertolt Brecht and the composer, Hanns Eisler, neither of whom would become known widely until after the Second World War.