Joan Littlewood

by Peter Rankin

  Bill Davidson wrote that putting on a one-off production of Jimmie’s unknown play was Theatre Workshop at its maddest, music to Gerry’s ears until he read on. Bill was off to Dundee Rep and, by the way, he’d seen a play called The Gorbals Story at Glasgow Unity Theatre which he’d thought was excellent. Glasgow Unity may have had links with the Communist Party, but Joan despised it. She thought it was amateurish and that she could do better. Had the Party not been demanding naturalism since the late 1930s but had not Joan and Jimmie rejected it?

  Bill then read Jimmie’s play and wrote him a letter. Although he, like Guthrie, couldn’t work out the meaning, he thought it was good.

  It was while these half-baked opinions were whirling around and The Other Animals had, to Gerry’s annoyance, gone ahead that he disappeared. For a start, his own thinking needed sharpening. The David Lewis plan had indeed been vague. Here, a glance into the future is worthwhile. The David Lewis plan was not dissimilar to Joan’s 1961 dream, the Fun Palace. Vagueness didn’t help there either. Gerry was learning that lesson, only thirteen years earlier. His immediate aim was to keep Theatre Workshop alive by going off on his own to find it tours and eventually a base. He would be doing something important, far away from The Other Animals.

  London was his first stop. He went to talk to Tom Driberg. Despite the inevitable price he had to pay, that of fighting off Tom’s advances, he did enjoy a talk with him. Apart from Joan, there was no one in the company he liked talking to that much. They spoke about Czechoslovakia. After the war, there had been a coalition government which included the Communist Party but, at the start of 1948, the Communist Party had taken over altogether and, as part of a move to spread art across the country, was inviting artists from elsewhere to come and liven things up; contrast and compare, so to speak. Tom knew about this but was doubtful. Gerry merely saw an opportunity. Visas usually took weeks to obtain. He got one in minutes. Being young, good looking and in love with Joan helped. With 30 quid nicked from the kitty in Manchester, he went to Victoria station and caught the boat train to Paris.

  Nobody in the company moved in the kind of circles where you had a contact in Paris, except Gerry. A family friend, David Rothman, put him up while he worked on the next step. He needed a military permit to travel through Germany, another three-week job. He didn’t have it at midday but he did have it by the evening, and off he set for Prague.

  When he arrived it was at the start of a sunny weekend in July, which was frustrating. Gerry loved holidays – he was trying to teach Joan the importance of them – but there, in Prague, with everyone else on holiday, he wasn’t. On the Saturday morning, he went to the Ministry of Information. At least it wasn’t shut. However, except for a Madame Hortova, everyone had gone away for the weekend. Her English was not good but it was good enough to say that all the people he needed to talk to had left, not just for the weekend but for the summer. He would have to come back in the autumn. ‘Gerry gets into scrapes,’ Rosalie Williams had said. For a moment his trip across Europe must have seemed like folly but then Madame Hortova went on: perhaps it would be worth Gerry coming back on Monday to see the Minister himself.

  The rest of Saturday and the whole of Sunday spread out before Gerry with nothing to do. Instead of kicking his heels, he went to the Poets, Essayists, Novelists Centre (PEN) and there he found an ally in Jirina Lumovà, PEN’s secretary. She introduced him to theatre people, took him round Prague and told him to write an article about Theatre Workshop that she would translate and circulate. He wrote it overnight, so that the next morning he and Jirina could carry on sightseeing. He found Prague even more beautiful than he expected. That evening Jirina made the translation and had it delivered to the newspapers.

  On Monday morning the Minister of Information, Loewenbach, told Gerry that an autumn tour was out of the question. Disagreeable though he was, he took Gerry to lunch. Sitting at the next table was a leading theatre critic. It was only after an hour that Loewenbach introduced Gerry to him. In spite of the language problem, Gerry’s description of Theatre Workshop excited him. Alec Clunes, in a production from the Arts Theatre in London, had not. Theatre Workshop had to be better. What’s more, four important theatre directors were returning to Prague the next day. It was worth Gerry staying on and, indeed it was. By Tuesday night, a whole tour was booked and somehow, during that day, he had obtained a visa to travel through Poland. He needed that because he had to get to Stockholm.

  Poland would fascinate Gerry in a few months’ time but, on that Wednesday, all he saw from the train window was devastation. By Thursday, he was on a boat heading for the southernmost point of Sweden, Trelleborg.

  Sweden was not quite such a shot in the dark as Czechoslovakia. Straight after the tour of West Germany, Kristin Lind had returned home and prepared the ground. Definite interest was there and even the money for the fares. The country itself was a shock. As Sweden had been neutral during the war, not only was there was no devastation, there was no shortage of food in the shops. Gerry took an immediate dislike to it. Food there may have been but it was cripplingly expensive, as was the accommodation, while the people, so unlike those of Czechoslovakia, were discourteous. On top of that, it was the weekend again. In a letter to Joan, he begged her not to mention any of this to the company. The trouble was, he’d mentioned it to Joan and, when an opinion came from someone she liked, she was impressionable.

  Despite Gerry, more organised this time, having informed the tour organiser, Emwall, of his arrival, Emwall was not there. He was there the next day but it still annoyed Gerry, who thought he was being treated like a tourist. It was only after four more days of heat, frustration and having to wash up in a restaurant that he was able to get away to England. The tour was confirmed, though.

  When it came to the tour itself, Czechoslovakia and Sweden, one straight after the other, Gerry’s short experience of those countries, proved, over the weeks, to be the same for the company.

  Joan was nervous at first. In her head was prime minister Neville Chamberlain talking in 1938 about: ‘a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.’ With those words, he had betrayed Czechoslovakia and it could have been a bitter memory. She need not have worried. The welcome was immediate and generous and, as the company moved around the different parts of Czechoslovakia, that is the way it stayed. If anything the huge number of dumpling-laden meals, despite rationing, plus the meetings and the greetings, were too much. The company wanted more time to itself to make sure the shows were in good shape each night.

  Jimmie became the old Jimmie and made up songs to sing on the bus, much to Joan’s delight. The two female interpreters took a fancy to Gerry, and then an old colleague of Joan’s from pre-war radio days appeared, Vladimir Tosek. When Vladimir had failed to deliver a script about Christmas in Prague, Joan, never having been there, had written it instead, shown it to the BBC censors and got Vladimir to read it at the last minute. Gerry was convinced that Joan and Vladimir were having an affair or pretended he was convinced: ‘What a bitch you are to make me so mad with jealousy.’ Similarly Joan was convinced that Gerry was having flings with the two interpreters: ‘You don’t expect me to believe that you didn’t taste Miss Bedworthy’s charms,’ and again that could have been pretence too. A sort of fun sulking was going on.

  It wasn’t fun, though, when Gerry discovered that Joan had brought The Other Animals. He was hoping it would be left behind. In the meantime, his own work was having good effect. His translated article had not only been printed in newspapers, it had aroused the interest of readers. How does Theatre Workshop go about things, they wanted to know.

  When Joan set out for the first theatre, she was full of idealism. It was a dream of hers that communists took art seriously. The running of the building would be tiptop and the productions exciting. What she found backstage were several stagehands, wearing Communist Party badges, loafing around doing nothing but clogging up the wings. Snobbishly, if anything, they watched as the compa
ny members did everything themselves. Communists were as capable of slacking as anyone else, Joan was to discover. One evening, when the company was not performing, it was taken to see a show. What it saw was long, slow, boring, heavy and, as it turned out, unrecognisable. It was Twelfth Night but then it was to counteract this stodginess that the Czech government had invited in companies from other countries. After years under Nazism, it was time to look outwards.

  The Other Animals opened and Gerry was vindicated. Jimmie thinking about his girlfriends but talking about concentration camps, interwoven with Mahler, annoyed the critics. The same thing happened in England when Noël Coward wrote Post Mortem, a play set in the First World War. What did either of these authors know about their subjects? They weren’t there. In Jimmie’s case, the Czechs knew about concentration camps only too well. Joan wondered if she’d made a bad mistake. The next night, the double bill, Johnny Noble and The Flying Doctor, put things into a brighter light. The appeal of the songs and the action was immediate and the company went on to a tour, happy if perhaps overburdened by functions, that lasted over five weeks, playing sometimes in big theatres and to large houses. If it wasn’t for all Czech currency having to be spent or left in Czechoslovakia, it would have made good money. Joan fell for the Czechs and promised herself that when she got home she would do a new Schweik using her first-hand experience.

  Six days ahead of the company’s departure, Gerry, revelling as he was in the attention of the interpreters, tore himself away. He had to double-check Stockholm. This time, though, he did not have to hurry through Poland. He stopped off, went to the theatre and liked what he saw. It stayed in his mind. This was an odd time for him. He was uncomfortable, short of money, so lonely he wished he could be back in Johnny Noble, and yet he was doing what he wanted although, once again, he was away from the company. His energy and determination, as always, came from Joan, and a little bit from Benzedrine. Many years later Joan found a prescription that he had kept. She thought it was the start of him losing his health for Theatre Workshop’s sake and as Theatre Workshop, in his eyes, was Joan, she thought he had done it for her.

  When he arrived in Sweden, Kristin Lind was already there. With her knowledge, she was going to act as the hostess for that part of the tour. As Gerry was not in any of the shows and didn’t know Sweden, his function there lasted only a few days. If he was going to keep making himself useful – there were no dates for the company’s return – he had to get back to England as soon as possible. If he had budgeted correctly he could have stayed for a couple of days more and so overlapped with Joan. It wasn’t to be. His figures had come from Kristin and she had forgotten the last leg of the journey. ‘She certainly is a cretin,’ he wrote. In years to come, Joan would talk only of Kristin’s beauty and resourcefulness. She had put a golden glow round her. It was not there during this tour in 1948.

  It was hardly likely to be. Although Sweden was to give Theatre Workshop and Joan in particular some of the best reviews of their lives, Joan, either picking up on Gerry’s letter or all by herself, took violently against the country, the people and the tour. ‘I have never seen such terrible architecture, such ugly people, such bad taste in clothes.’

  The hospitality was not nearly so generous as it had been in Czechoslovakia. There were plenty of the usual unwanted functions – that was the one similarity between the two countries – but there were gaps in between when the few kronor David Scase, the treasurer, doled out did not go far, certainly not as far as afters. That was Joan’s word for dessert or pudding, which she needed to take away the taste of the main course. Once, at a station café, she ordered ‘the cheapest dish, boiled mutton which everyone took with milk. I ate the revolting food but all afternoon I was as sick as a dog. I cannot bear the sight of milk and only drink black coffee now.’ Given that Joan never liked mutton stew or milk, no matter where she was, she really was in the wrong country. The others, who regarded milk at the very least as nourishing, did not complain.

  Joan did not stop complaining. When she wasn’t eating food she didn’t like, she was fainting with hunger, and when she went to a restaurant alone to think things through, she was turned away. Restaurants did not approve of women on their own. The best place for her was a fisherman’s caff where she ate what appeared on the menu as ‘bifsteak’. She felt better after that.

  Milk and her dislike of it did not go away. She had to travel overnight on a train with bunks:

  In the dim light, I saw three huge female arses, no faces or arms attached to them apparently . . . The air burnt me so I took off nearly all my clothes to try to sleep but the arse near me quivered. It was huge in front of my eyes, looming up bigger than the biggest hill I’ve seen in Sweden and, as it quivered, a long drawn-out, wet, fluttering fart was emitted, redolent of years of milk and grease.

  Sometimes the company played to good houses in big theatres. Sometimes it was well received, but again there were gaps. Performances were cancelled. Money was lost. ‘The places we have played have been fantastically bad. We wouldn’t have looked at them in England. This tour could have paid and brought us in money.’ Joan was going off Kristin: ‘Kristin is hopeless, works hard but is quite unable to comprehend a simple objective first. It’s a form of neurosis and peculiar egotism.’ A particular niggle was the translation of the reviews. Gerry needed them badly for publicity in England but Kristin somehow couldn’t get around to it and when she did, according to Joan, she mistranslated them. Providing somebody with exactly what they want does mean suppressing your own ego, not that Joan was very good at that either, but she was the one with the talent.

  Sweden sent Joan into a fugue. Twice, either through oversleeping or just sitting in a café for too long, she missed trains that were to take the company to its next destination. It was as if, for a while, she stepped out of life and vanished. Actually, it wasn’t just in Sweden. At any time in her life, you could arrange to meet her at a certain spot but you couldn’t see her because, though she was under your nose, she was not looking out for you. She was somewhere else, usually lost in a book. For the company, this was exasperating. It didn’t know about fugues. It just thought Joan didn’t care. At least she was aware enough of that to feel guilty. It wouldn’t have been any good if they’d had a go at her, though. She would have thought they were being utterly unreasonable.

  Towards the end of the tour, Joan, becoming a little more generous in her opinion of Kristin, allowed herself the thought that she had pulled off quite a coup but added that she probably didn’t do so well because she didn’t look like a professional tour organiser.

  Howard Goorney, on the other hand, thought that Kristin had done a superb job and, knowing Gerry shared Joan’s opinion of her, was preparing to fall out with him when he got home. It didn’t happen. When the tour finished, Kristin stayed in Sweden, annoying for Joan who’d had no notice, but Kristin was to have her uses in years to come. Poland, where Gerry wanted to settle with Joan, would not happen and, more sadly, neither would Czechoslovakia. Joan and Gerry were keen to go back there, so much so that Joan was already writing to Ota Ornest, head of Art for the People, while she was in Sweden, but her only answer was silence. At first she blamed herself. The Other Animals must have done it. ‘I curse the day I decided to make do on settling for that play.’ Later, news came through that the parting of the clouds in 1948 which allowed Theatre Workshop to bask in Czech sunshine was only brief. The clouds came back together again.

  Joan may have written of Sweden: ‘I have never known a country where there are so many artists and so little art,’ and, shortly before she left, ‘I still hate Sweden!!! Christ, another four hours to Göteborg and the bloody show tonight and I have a head like a cinder track with ball bearings on it.’ But it would be Sweden the company returned to.

  During this cursing of Sweden’s ungracious, stingy people and the ups and downs of the tour, which the rest of the company was not nearly so troubled by, Joan did one thing that was nothing to do with the compa
ny and everything to do with her as a human being. It went back to those limbo days after RADA and even to her childhood. She set off in search of Sonja Mortensen.

  Sonja was the girl alongside whom Joan had drawn and painted and with whom she’d gone to Paris the second time. She had been encouraging and Joan hadn’t forgotten. A six-hour train journey northwards took her to Ljusdal where she found Sonja living in a farmhouse. It didn’t belong to her. The farmer tolerated her, or rather he was given money to keep an eye on her. She actually came from a rich family who thought she was mad and that this was the best they could do for her. Joan was appalled. It was freezing there and Sonja was so thin and had so little, and didn’t seem mad at all. If only she could have some paints and brushes, but by then it was too late for Joan to buy them for her. The farm was out in the middle of nowhere. ‘This is the final symbol of the Swedish bourgeois attitude,’ she wrote to Gerry, ‘cruelty and grossness.’ Sonja herself didn’t seem that bothered. Smilingly, she accepted the life she had been given. It moved Joan even more when, back in the village, people twigged who she was simply because Sonja never stopped talking about her.

  The Mortensen family was annoyed by Joan’s description of this scene which she put on paper in the 1990s. Sonja was perfectly well looked after, they insisted. She lacked for nothing. Joan did not retract. Whatever the accuracy of the depiction, in Sonja, she saw, as she saw in her half-sister, Betty, that withdrawn child who found so much of life too painful to bear, the child she thought she too could have been when describing herself as autistic. The difference was Joan had resilience. Sometimes she wrote letters to friends warning them of what appeared to be her imminent suicide. These friends, barely able to speak with fear, would ring her, only to discover that she was sitting in the front of the television happily eating bangers and mash. All her misery had gone into the letter.