by Peter Rankin
While talking to Joan, Jimmie described sketches he and the Red Megaphones had performed, like the Meerut one about Indian railworkers wrongly imprisoned. Joan found herself drawn in. It was the way these sketches were performed that did it. Different hats told you what kind of person was talking. A couple of wooden poles gave you prison bars. This style came from a lack of money and the need to get out fast, necessity in other words, but it was what Joan liked anyway. However, this was only the first part of Jimmie’ story.
If anything he had been impatient with these efforts. The Megaphones’ way of working had been too crude. It was little more than chanting, or plain shouting. He knew that his German counterparts in Berlin were doing better and he’d wanted some of that, sketches that were rounded out and deepened and he’d wanted better acting too; actually, any acting as he didn’t think he and his group had been acting at all. The trouble was, he and his group had known nothing about it.
He started a new group, Theatre of Action, which quickly became the theatre of inaction as it wasn’t making any headway. Lack of skill at writing and performing meant that lots of energy and effort were going nowhere.
All this had happened before Joan’s arrival in Manchester but, hearing about it from Jimmie who, as she often said, sounded as if he could knock a person down with his talk, struck a spark. In turn, for him, her appearance in Manchester was just the ticket. There she was at this difficult transitional moment, and she was a professional on his wavelength. Along the threads of the worldwide network had come a script from America, Newsboy. Perhaps she could sort that out and the group as well. It wouldn’t be plain sailing because she had to hold down that job at the Rep. Sundays were the only days she had off.
Here’s what Jimmie had been trying to tackle and Joan took on. Right from the start of the play, a newsboy cries out headlines and carries on until the end while characters with names like Young Man, Young Lady, 1st Voice, 2nd Voice, and Unemployed, act out tiny scenes illustrating the injustice of life in the 1930s, first at home and then across the world, ending up with: ‘TIME TO REVOLT! TIME TO REVOLT!’, as did a lot of agitprop.
It was non-naturalistic; you can tell that already: no sofas, no cocktail shakers. What you can’t tell is that it had dance and, vital to its success were rhythm and precision, both of movement and of timing: right up Joan’s street.
Alf Armitt helped. He was Jimmie’s friend. By day, he worked as a lens grinder but, in his spare time, he studied the work of the Swiss set and lighting designer, Adolphe Appia. That way, he’d been able to try out his ideas on some of the Megaphones’ sketches, which the Theatre of Action had brought indoors. Newsboy required lighting that could switch the audience’s attention quickly from one part of the stage to the other. Alf made some lights that could light precisely what he wanted lit and nothing else. They could change colour too. Theatre of Action was at last able to present something new to the public, which it did on the outskirts of Manchester at the Hyde Socialist Church – and it worked. More people wanted to join Theatre of Action.
In London, the central committee of the Workers’ Theatre Movement had a problem. It called a meeting. Joan and Jimmie, representing Theatre of Action, went. Both hated London: Joan, because she knew it; Jimmie, because he didn’t.
The problem to be tackled was this. Delegates of the Workers’ Theatre Movement had been to the Olympiad of Workers’ Theatre in Moscow and had come away with an inferiority complex. The Russians, the Germans and the Czechs were better at agitprop, much better. Joan and Jimmie, not realising what was going to happen, thought the answer was simple. Be better yourself. Write better material. Perform it better. It was so clear to them; they gave it no further thought.
What they found in London was a big majority wanting to do something quite different. Its argument was that agitprop, even when rounded out and deepened, was not good enough because nobody liked it in the first place. Not only was it an idiom the English were unfamiliar with but all that haranguing and chanting of facts and figures was alienating. Consequently there was no point in doing it. Joan and Jimmie were shocked and unprepared. They had not worked out a good counter-argument.
The majority wanted ‘proper’ plays like people were used to. Then and there, an example, ‘Curtain Theatre’ they called it, was presented to the assembly. Simply hearing the word ‘curtain’ was enough to put Joan off. As its three acts went on, she and Jimmie sank lower and lower in their seats. There, once more, were the sofa and the cocktail shaker and there again were the exquisitely artificial hesitations that were considered good acting. Joan and Jimmie couldn’t get back to Manchester fast enough. They decided – and this gives an idea of their future relationship with the Communist Party – that they would have to go it alone.
Through all this, Joan was still at the Rep, and those goings on in London could not have improved her feelings about it. In fact, she was on the verge of handing in her cards when Dominic Roche, the director – he’d taken over from Carol Sax, whom Joan regarded as mad – announced, as the next production, Draw the Fires by the German left-wing playwright, Ernst Toller. This was a writer that Joan admired and Toller, by then exiled from Germany and on his uppers, was going to direct it himself. So, she couldn’t leave and, what’s more, she had a good idea.
The play required men who could pick up a shovel and look as if they meant business. The actors at the Rep, all middle class, couldn’t do that. Joan suggested that members of Theatre of Action could, and they did. However, when the production went to the Cambridge Theatre in London for a Sunday-nighter and the management would not make a contribution to Theatre of Action, Theatre of Action would no longer make a contribution to Draw the Fires. It walked out. ‘Zat young man,’ said Toller of Jimmie, ‘He sinks he is everybody and he is nobody!’. Joan was caught in the middle and embarrassed, particularly as, by the time they arrived in London, the prompt script of the play had gone missing and Joan was the prompter. To cover for someone else, she patched a script together from memory but it was too much. She’d had enough. She resigned.
With no regular income – odd jobs still cropped up at the BBC – she moved into Jimmie’s home, 37 Cobourg Street, Salford, where he lived with his mother, Betsy and his father, Bill. Yes, it was for practicality but putting it flatly like that, as Joan did, was also her way of not talking about her feelings for Jimmie. There was a meeting of minds – that was clear – and they knew that they were special people, but about love she was silent. As for the family, both Jimmie’s parents were Scots. Jimmie, himself, had been born in Salford. Bill, because his lungs had been wrecked by his job, steel moulding, spoke hardly at all. Betsy, forced to take any job that came up – she was a cleaner – was filled with a bitterness that spilled out on to anyone who came near her beloved only son. Joan, having not long left the tempestuous Kate, found herself having to face the termagant Betsy.
In love with Jimmie or not, she became pregnant. Decades later, she said: ‘I would rather stab my belly than have a child.’ It would seem that that thought had already come to her in Cobourg Street because, at once, she set about dealing with the problem, though it wasn’t she who solved it. It was Kate who fixed Joan up with a back-street abortion in Stockwell.
To take her mind off her troubles, Joan took with her on the train to London a script that Jimmie had thrown at her. Hammer it was called, and it was, of all things, the boring Curtain Theatre play the two of them had seen in London. With war a constant threat and peace being spoken of but never achieved, rich people watch the market go through the roof and buy more shares in products to do with killing. By the time Joan got back to Manchester, she had worked out how to do it. Her ability to push unpleasantness away by means of concentration was both ruthless and enviable. What had been her process?
Alf Armitt was not the only one to read books for his theatre work. It was a Theatre of Action thing and it would be a Theatre Anything thing as long as Joan and Jimmie were involved, and even without Jimmie. They never
stopped reading, mostly at the Central Library in Manchester’s St Peter’s Square.
One of the influences that Joan had discovered there and which would help to focus her thoughts for Hammer were the exciting years for art, theatre and film Russia lived through just after the revolution. A movement sprung up called Constructivism. Its inspiration came from factories, machinery, what you could do with metal, everyday street life and the stylisation of posters. You weren’t so much a spectator, you were in it and active. The most famous example was Tatlin’s tower, an influence on Anish Kapoor’s Orbit tower in today’s Olympic Park at Stratford. Theatre directors were influenced by this Constructivism like the German, Piscator, with his travelling walkways, and the Russian, Meyerhold, whose characters’ psychology was translated straight into movement. Joan was particularly interested in him.
Even so, it is simplest to say that Joan – whether influenced by any of the above, or Chaplin, Laban, Callot, or all of them – was determined to get her actors off those sofas, on to their feet and into action. Her new show which she and Jimmie adapted together, still in the agitprop vein, would not only have a Constructivist set, it would be a kind of ballet.
The thought of this did not go down well with the other members of the company. Jimmie’s early Theatre of Action work had been arty enough. Joan’s ideas – a banker dressed in rubber rings like the Michelin man, bathing belles in gas masks, a newspanel listing the serious and the trivial and, on top of that, lots of movement – made Curtain Theatre seem surprisingly appealing. Someone asked for a vote. That was a mistake. A Joan put-down was a whiplash and this one was no exception. ‘You don’t take a vote on art.’
She could back herself up too. If anyone was able to take what they had read in a book and make it work on stage, it was Joan. Thirty years later, the news panel with the serious and the trivial, good for breaking up agitprop facts and figures, went straight into Oh What a Lovely War. Back then, the result was John Bullion which played at the Round House, Ancoats, Joan’s favourite space and where many came to see it. ‘The nearest thing to Meyerhold the British theatre has got,’ said The Manchester Guardian. More people applied to join the company.
Even more people applied after Waiting for Lefty, the Clifford Odets play, which came next. It has to be said that Lefty is more naturalistic and therefore of an idiom more familiar to audiences, but at the same time, with its public meeting and its use of the auditorium for the actors to roam around in, it has the flavour of agitprop. Its success meant that Theatre of Action had so many members that some of them, new recruits, thought it ought to be better organised. Up until then, it had been merrily chaotic. The people who were pushing for this organisation were middle class and not in sympathy with Jimmie and Joan’s ideas. However, they were powerful and, all at once, Jimmie and Joan found themselves branded as prima donnas, and chucked out.
A letter saved their face. It was an invitation for them to become students at the Moscow School of Cinema and Theatre. With it came a covering note from André van Gyseghem, who wrote that all they had to do was pick up a visa from the Soviet Embassy in London and be on their way. Van Gyseghem was an actor whose early career, it should be explained, was more interesting than his later one because, as a young man, he went to Russia and, having studied the work of the director, Nikolai Okhlopkov, wrote a book about it. One of the most vivid scenes he described was that of actors running past spectators, softly brushing them with branches to give the impression of rushing downhill on a sledge. Joan would remember that and Okhlopkov. Van Gyseghem, as did a good handful of actors who were to become absorbed into the mainstream, became a communist, only, like the others, to shun it later. The pushy types who pushed Joan and Jimmie out of Theatre of Action were like that.
Jimmie, before setting off, wanted Joan to marry him. He knew that the Communist Party, not wishing to give hostages to fortune, preferred respectability. Joan, caring neither for the institution of marriage nor for the opinion of the Communist Party, which was beginning to bore her anyway, said no (though probably more vividly). With £12 raised by the Theatre of Action minority that had supported them, the two, not married, set off for London.
CHAPTER FIVE
OUT OF THE ASHES
Obtaining the visa was not going to happen as quickly as André van Gyseghem had told them, so they had to find somewhere to stay. Joan, in a whimsical mood, said that she’d always fancied living in Cheyne Walk, so there they went and, simply by knocking on doors, Joan found shelter. Explaining that she and Jimmie were writers who needed somewhere quiet to work did the trick. An elderly, bohémienne said: ‘God never made a woman without protection!’ and invited them in. She was Mrs Algernon Newton, the mother of Robert Newton, the actor best remembered for playing Long John Silver, as well as for his drinking.
Mrs Newton had a story she wanted turning into a film script, and Joan and Jimmie would be just the people to do it. Neither knew how to write a screenplay, and the story was absurd but, as you would expect, they had read a book, Pudovkin’s Film Technique. Pudovkin was a director from that exciting post-Russian revolution period. With that and some more books they borrowed from the local library they set to, adapting this story in the morning and going to the Soviet Embassy in the afternoon. That was a painful chore because they always felt they were not smartly dressed enough and feared being moved on by the police. Even when they did get to the door of the Embassy, they never got any further. A hand would come out and take the invitation, which Joan and Jimmie couldn’t read because it was in Russian, and later handed back with no guarantee of anything. They just had to return another day. This went on for so long that Joan and Jimmie took up giving lessons in movement and drama which they held in the basement of Mrs Newton’s house; this despite her vetoing any guests. By accident, a friend of hers from upstairs found them at it and gave them away. Mrs Newton’s bohemianism did not stretch to leaving the young ones be. They were out on their ear.
Over the river, in Battersea, they found a room and started again, only to be joined by Jimmie’s mother, Betsy, who was convinced the young couple could not look after itself.
Despite their ejection from Cheyne Walk, they finished the screenplay and presented it. They needed the ten pound fee. Only five pounds were forthcoming. Before the rest could be handed over, there had to be a reading. This was held before twenty people, including the film director, Anthony Asquith, at Algernon’s studio in St John’s Wood. Algernon was a painter. Absurd though Mrs Newton’s story was, Joan and Jimmie acted up their screenplay a storm. It was a great success. Taking the other five pounds, and trying not to laugh, they left, never to hear about the screenplay again.
That still left the problem of the continued silence from the Soviet Embassy. Weeks had gone by and nothing. Another letter arrived, but this time not pie in the sky. Would Joan and Jimmie produce Hans Chlumberg’s play Miracle at Verdun, the Manchester branch of the Peace Pledge Union wanted to know. They would, so it was not with their tails between their legs that they went home. Like they had always done, they would have to carry on learning by teaching themselves, but the prospect didn’t make them gloomy at all.
Miracle at Verdun, in which the dead of the First World War rise up to find out what their sacrifice has achieved, was serious and important, so serious and so important that the Nazis had already murdered the author. It required a large international cast, but Joan and Jimmie got that because the Peace Pledge Union could call on those kinds of resources. University students were drafted in and they became useful contacts for the future.
During rehearsals Jimmie, after a flaming row with Joan – marriage and children not being one of her dreams – persuaded her to marry him all the same. The wedding took place at a registry office in Salford on 2 November 1935. Joan was 21, but only just. Jimmie would be 21 in two months’ time.
Although they privately admitted that Miracle at Verdun was not their best work (too static), it played at the Lesser Free Trade Hall to packed house
s and so improved their mood enough to give themselves a new name: Theatre Union. A meeting was called to discuss what enthusiasts regarded as the crisis in theatre.
The first thing Joan said was that there’s always a crisis in theatre: ‘It’s out of touch with life.’ André van Gyseghem, also present, added a softener: ‘The English do love theatre but they haven’t been theatrically educated. Amateurs do that.’ The last bit was true. Amateur companies, such as John Wardle’s in Bolton, did better plays than the professionals. They were putting on Ibsen and Chekhov, while the commercial theatre was taken up with froth, and not good froth at that.
‘We are watching the decay of an outdated social system. The arts decay with it,’ Joan continued. Less solemnly, she quoted from a light comedy, totally forgotten today, that she had seen while at RADA:
Oh just a minute, dear. I must put my hair straight. I had the most sickening hairdresser the other day. Nothing so sickening as a sickening hairdresser, don’t you think? Nobody has any idea of the agony I endure through my hair. It won’t stay set. You know these beads aren’t Chanel really.
Now, at this point, if someone had piped up: ‘What about Love on the Dole?’ as an example of the right sort of thing to be doing, Joan’s response would have confused them, but then Joan was good at that. Here was a novel written by Walter Greenwood, a man whose upbringing was identical to Jimmie’s. It spoke about unemployment in Manchester. The year before, it had been turned into a play starring Wendy Hiller. ‘What was not to like?’ we might say nowadays. Plenty, according to Joan. She thought its attitude was like someone saying: ‘Oh dear, look at these poor, downtrodden working-class people. Isn’t it awful?’ That was not for her. She wanted spirit.
‘The conflicts of life,’ she continued:
. . . are more tremendous today than they have ever been. We need a new technique, not naturalistic, as in Ibsen, Shaw and Strindberg . . . Destruction of the four walls. The actual floor space, instead of being uselessly flat, is to be broken up into planes on which the actors move and act in different rhythms, expressing the significant complexities of a modern orchestra.