Joan Littlewood

by Peter Rankin

  For the play to work, the audience needed to see both the inside and the outside of a house in quick succession. Joan was in the middle of tackling the problem when a character called Bill Davidson appeared. Bill was not a set designer, nor was he, for that matter, an actor. He was an engineer. He knew about the making of aeroplanes. Joan simply threw the problem at him which he was quite happy to solve as long as he could have some wood. Joan got on to her friend, Hilary Barchard, who worked at the BBC and whose father was a timber merchant. In no time, there was the wood. That set the pattern for how Theatre Workshop would survive: the lucky arrival of the right person at the right moment and the good will of those who believed in its aims.

  Using high-tension wires to keep it in position, Bill built a wall with a window in it and set it on a little revolve. The result was light, looked good and didn’t go wrong. Jimmie was especially proud of that last bit. He may have been fascinated by Piscator but he knew that his lifts and travelling walkways got stuck. Bill remained with the company and became an actor. He was an example of someone dropping in to see what’s buzzing and staying.

  Jimmie chose the music. It wasn’t Lully, Molière’s unloved contemporary, but the mock-heroic Háry János by the Hungarian composer, Kodály, another piece Joan would turn off when, in later years, she heard it on the radio.

  During the rehearsals of both shows which, to begin with, took place in Manchester, Joan received a telephone call. John Coatman wanted to see her. She met him at the restaurant away from the BBC where, four years earlier, he had told her and Jimmie that he would sort out the barring problem.

  It was to do with the re-establishing of BBC Home Service North Region, Nan Macdonald had told Joan about, three months earlier. Coatman wanted Joan to head its features department. All that plugging away at the freelance jobs had paid off. She was back in triumph, if she wanted to be.

  She didn’t want to be, but it meant a lot to her, that offer. Forever afterwards, she could say: ‘When I started Theatre Workshop, I wasn’t a nobody.’ Coatman was disappointed at her turning the job down, even though she was sensible enough to suggest that she and her company could keep up some kind of relationship with the BBC. She didn’t know that the man sitting opposite her was the one whose memo had brought about her ejection from it. Nor would she ever.

  The next day, news came that Howie’s Rooms were off. In fact, they’d never been on. The Ministry of Defence had not once intimated they would let them go. For Joan, the BBC must have looked very tempting. The company went to Kendal anyway and carried on rehearsing in the upstairs rooms of the local Conservative Club.

  On 26 July 1945, before the war was completely over and much to the excitement of the company, Labour gained a landslide victory. Kendal was not part of it. Lieutenant Colonel Vane, Conservative, held his seat. His agent, Miss Hilary Overy, interrupted rehearsals to put up a Union Jack outside the window. It was upside down.

  The two plays opened at Kendal Girls’ High School on 13 August 1945. Joan looked on as various types, Kendal locals, old Theatre Union fans, Fred ‘You’d have a reet good time’ Fairclough and John Trevelyan, took their seats. The Flying Doctor came first. That was the curtain-raiser. The big event was Johnny Noble.

  Its story turns on exactly the point – women of Hull being hit twice – that Joan had made in her radio programme. Young Mary’s mother loses her husband to fishing and forbids her daughter to have anything to do with Johnny, a merchant seaman. Johnny looks for work elsewhere but it’s the 1930s and there are no jobs. He joins a Barcelona-bound ship to give aid to the fighters in the Spanish Civil War. He survives, only to find himself still at sea in the Second World War. He survives that too but, when peace comes, he’s confronted by The Roaring Boys who want everyone to forget about the war and get back to business, the kind of dodgy, selfish business that was going on when the play started. What will Johnny do?

  As the performance progressed, Joan noticed that the audience was not reacting to moments she thought would get them going and, when it came to an issue she felt really strongly about, the black market, it was downright complaisant. What, she asked herself, was going on?

  The show was undoubtedly topical but the answer to what Johnny was going to do, i.e. what the audience, in easy going Conservative Kendal was going to do, turned out to be: ‘We’re not bothered.’

  That is not the whole story. The many sound, lighting and music cues, the cinematic cuts and dissolves, the precise miming of complicated actions, would have given the audience something interesting to look at or listen to all the time, while a restrained farewell scene: ‘Don’t forget your sandwiches, Jim, I’ve put them at the top of your case. And let me know your address as soon as you get there,’ would have worked in any old play.

  So, the reception, though not ecstatic, was OK, and Fred Fairclough definitely enjoying himself, along with John Trevelyan, was cheering, but then they were already friends of the company and knowledgeable about theatre. That was an omen.

  Two days later, America dropped the atom bomb. Three days after that, the war completely over, Theatre Workshop finished its run in Kendal, with total takings of 55 pounds, 18 shillings and 6 pence, neatly typed on Fred ‘the mug’ Wilson’s paper, and started a tour by moving to Victoria Hall, Grange-over-Sands, ten miles away. The kitty was so empty that only a friend, driving backwards and forwards in his Lagonda, got the company there.

  It came back to Kendal in October to rehearse and perform Lorca’s The Love of Don Perlimplin for Belisa in his Garden: an ugly old man (Howard Goorney) woos a beautiful woman (Kristin Lind, there she was), by pretending to be young. As exquisitely right as it was for Joan, it was exquisitely wrong for Kendal. Audiences, unable to comprehend, scorned it as filth.

  The company returned to Kendal only one more time. It was for three performances in May the following year and it never went there again. That was it. There was no school, no more John Trevelyan and no more Fred Wilson. They were the rocket fuel that dropped away.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BUT HOW TO KEEP GOING?

  Joan’s aim was to create a commedia dell’ arte company, a glowing microcosm that would travel round, setting an example for the rest of the world. People would learn how to live by watching the way Theatre Workshop lived. Inside it, she could be like her heroine, Isabella Andreini, who headed one of the most famous commedia troupes. Not only did Isabella act, she was witty. She had a brain. Her actors could come from any class. Talent was all they needed. This commedia structure, however, was not just an aim, it was protection, as Joan had to have a shield.

  One thing the company already knew was who did what. It was simple: everybody did everything. When David Scase was onstage, Ruth Brandes, whose main job was making costumes, turned her hand to sound. David himself learned to become a stage manager. The job of setting up before a show and packing away afterwards was divided into tasks that could be allotted to each member of the company. The more he or she performed it, the quicker they became. This flexibility and lightness would make heavyweight companies look on aghast. It was hard work but it would be a major part of surviving.

  For all that, the outside world still had to be dealt with, the bit that Joan didn’t like. Immediately worrying was the lack of money. Gerry’s compensation from his mining accident, £225, and a loan of £100 from Rosalie Williams’ father, plus some other bits and bobs, had provided £400 but that wasn’t going to go far. The money from Kendal was ridiculous. Grange-over-Sands, which held out little hope, was surprisingly better but this was haphazard, as was the reaction to the shows. Wigan was terrific but then Gerry, to achieve all the show’s effects, plugged into the town’s electricity supply and blacked out the streets. No more Wigan.

  As quickly as it could, Theatre Workshop had to teach itself business: the booking of tours, the selling of shows. It was already on the road and, given that its wares were less accessible than Joan and Jimmie had expected, it was not going to be easy.

  Prob
lems of art and problems of business were intertwined. If the company went to a proper theatre with a tradition of theatre-going, it was all right, but these were hard to get into because the nature of the shows puzzled theatre managers. If it went to some hall that hadn’t seen a show in a while, it might have little trouble booking it but big trouble filling it.

  Johnny Noble and The Flying Doctor were easy to understand, once you were sitting there, but they were hard to sell in advance because there was nothing for a potential audience to grab hold of. Good reviews at regional theatres were no use because they didn’t appear until it was time to move on. Then, some parts of the country understood Johnny Noble better than others. It was usually to do with what kind of war the town in question had been through.

  Even before the company arrived, there could be a problem. Staff of some halls were deeply suspicious of Theatre Workshop, considering it to be nothing but a bunch of reds, whatever ‘red’ meant to them, and so hackles were already raised. When any company arrives at any new place, it must have co-operation. That’s where David Scase scored. He had the necessary charm and energy to put life into time-serving old codgers.

  Reactions of people outside the company give the spectrum of what was going on. John Trevelyan, Fred Fairclough and others like them across the country, people who were used to theatre could be immediately responsive. A middle-aged woman living in Kendal found herself struggling. While turning down a request for a donation, she wrote: ‘I’m not an intellectual. That makes it easier for me to feel the attitude of the ordinary provincial audience. You must reach their hearts before their heads’ [Joan’s papers]. For this woman, Johnny Noble was high-brow, and there were Joan and Jimmie simply wanting the people of this country to wake up to what they already owned: their heritage.

  Another person who regarded Theatre Workshop as highbrow, surprisingly, was Michael Macowan of CEMA. Joan, knowing that Trevelyan had put in a word with him, sent an invitation to CEMA which, at that moment, was turning into the Arts Council. Michael Macowan, its Drama Director, an actor and director himself, sent another actor, Walter Hudd. He, like André van Gyseghem, was a Thirties communist, well established in mainstream theatre and, according to Joan, mediocre. Having seen Don Perlimplin, he went off expressing delight, but it was hard to tell what that really meant.

  Some weeks later, Howard, who at the time was business manager, went, together with Joan, to see Macowan in London. That’s when he said that Theatre Workshop was highbrow. As he hadn’t seen any of the shows, he can only have been using the word as a means of escape, but then he appeared to have no desire to see them anyway.

  He looked at the accounts and pointed out that the figures were unrealistic. A company could not operate like that. He wanted to back a venture that was already a going concern. Financially, Theatre Workshop was nothing of the sort. He recommended a change of repertoire and suggested a couple of authors he thought audiences would be more at ease with. Joan pointed out that they were hardly right for Kendal either. Macowan said that a shorter rehearsal period would be more economical. That did not suit Joan. As she had written to Fred Wilson: ‘I’ve all sorts of ambitions for our theatre and never want it to be an ordinary little touring repertory company’ [Joan’s correspondence].

  Even the manager of the People’s Theatre, Newcastle, Martin Trower, who was really looking forward to Theatre Workshop’s visit, showed how the plays were really perceived. He wrote saying that Johnny Noble and The Flying Doctor were exempt from tax because they were ‘partly educational.’ Don Perlimplin wasn’t, but then nobody had heard of it.

  To continue on the theme of education, Joan, despite saying that she didn’t want to be a teacher, did teach, but at least it was on the move. Sometimes, part of Theatre Workshop’s deal, say when it went to Liverpool, would be to give Saturday drama classes. The trouble was, no extra pay came its way.

  On her own, Joan gave a talk at Manchester’s International Club. Her scribbled notes give an indication of her interests:

  1. What is theatre? Theatre as an art, a social art

  2. THEATRE & THE PEOPLE

  The projection of an experience into an illusion – primitive people and magic – the magic of words – of an illusion made real

  The dream of a child in a back street

  Where is the outlet for the creativeness of people –

  3. Ballads, songs, poetry of the people, of the world Dancing

  4. Industrial Revolution Sheridan – polished comedy/the people in the mines and mills Vocal tradition dies in England, dancing dies

  5. Outlets for the emotions of people are football matches, pub arguments – and at their worst, in the lumpen sections of the people, hooliganism.

  6. The creativeness of the people not dead – RILKE – or we could give up and leave the world to barbarism

  7. Laban – the movement choirs of Germany

  Lorca – his poetry in the theatre

  MacDiarmid

  8. The theatre as the microcosm of the future

  NO PLACE FOR ART TODAY?

  WITHOUT THE DREAM OF THE BETTER FUTURE THERE CAN BE NO FUTURE

  SUCH A THEATRE, ONLY A DREAM AS YET.

  9. WHAT ARE THE TASKS OF THIS NEW THEATRE?

  I. THEMES

  II. FORM

  III. LANGUAGE

  ARTISTS WILL ONLY BE CREATED BY THE LIVING THEATRE

  ART MUST GET BACK TO THE LIVES OF THE PEOPLE

  Joan was shy and thought little of her ability to speak in public but she could, on occasion, become possessed by it. In fact, she was sometimes so mesmerising that listeners, when she came to the end of a speech, said: ‘Wow!’ whether they had understood her or not. She had a unique way of propelling ideas outwards adding lots of excitement, like she did with Fred Wilson. Practical ways of implementing those ideas, she did not come up with.

  This particular speech, the wanting to get back to the lives of the people, to the right kind of singing and dancing and the richness of the English language, would have thrilled those leaning towards her anyway. It was so pure. Whether it would have thrilled the football lovers and the people who enjoyed arguments in pubs, assuming any were International Club members in the first place, is less certain.

  It comes down to Joan’s ambivalence. On being told, once, by Archie Harding at the BBC that she was working class, she responded: ‘I was born among them. I was never of them.’ Shame got to her later for saying that but it lurks throughout her life. The trouble was, there were ‘The lives of the people’ and there were the actual people, the individuals, like the ones who loved football. She hated football.

  As Theatre Workshop toured England, Wales and Scotland, this uneasiness was in the background, the good and the unpopular mixed together. As yet unasked was the question of how to discard the unpopular while keeping the good.

  Still, this was long-term. More immediate was Jimmie’s impatience with the delicacies Joan so loved, The Flying Doctor and Don Perlimplin. Fine as they were, enough was enough. He wanted to tackle the atom bomb. Theatre Workshop could not ignore that. He had a problem, though, a lack of scientific knowledge, having left school at fourteen. Then again, to hand were Bill Davidson and the company electrician, Alf Smith. Alf had a degree in physics and could explain how the atom was split.

  Even before it was written, Joan knew that whatever emerged would lean towards history and lecture rather than drama, but she also knew that it was important and, therefore, worth the hard work to make the science entertaining. The history established, splitting the atom could become a ballet with dancing protons and neutrons.

  Uranium 235 was ready before negotiations with Martin Trower in Newcastle were completed. The company was due there in February 1946. To get a tax exemption right across the board, he had to prove that not only was Don Perlimplin ‘partly educational’ but that The Bomb Show, as he’d been calling Uranium 235, was also in with a good chance.

  The person who discovered that Newcastle and the North East
in general was of more use to Theatre Workshop than the North West was Gerry. Knowing that the boss of the People’s Theatre, Alf Simpson, was an old friend of the company, he simply went there to fix it. That instinct to go out and get something was not in any other member of Theatre Workshop. It did take on a guy called Mike Thompson but the dates he found weren’t much cop. His were the halls nobody went to, whatever show was on. ‘Piddling,’ one company member called them. Nor could Mike avoid: ‘Today, Land’s End, tomorrow, John O’Groats.’ To explain: when a company books a tour, it tries to make the next town fairly near to where it was before. That’s often not possible. The next town can be far away. This problem was exacerbated in Theatre Workshop’s case by poverty. Company members couldn’t afford the fares and had to become adept at hitchhiking.

  Gerry was also the one who actually spotted that the best bets were likely to be the proper theatres such as the People’s or the Empire, Dewsbury. He got that as well, a coup in itself. The house was not great but it gave the company the feeling it was doing better.

  The People’s Theatre actually was better. Although it was amateur – still is – it had an auditorium and, like other amateur groups in the north at the time, had a reputation for choosing better plays than the West End. What’s more, audiences went to them.

  While keeping going in this chancy way, the company did have strokes of luck or maybe, if you believe luck comes to those who keep trying, they weren’t really. Fifteen years after Joan had been introduced to Laban’s system, the man himself, as in a Dickens plot, turned up in Manchester. Joan was at the station ready to meet him.

  The look of the company, despite Laban’s life partner, Lisa Ullmann regarding theatre as risky, appealed to him. It gave him enough confidence to suggest that one of his students, Jean Newlove, join Theatre Workshop. The company that taught itself at last had a trained teacher from outside and Jean became the only person to teach Laban’s system in drama. Other Laban teachers choreographed actors. Jean taught actors to use Laban, not only for dance, but for all movement. It was a way to make a character.