Joan Littlewood

by Peter Rankin

  Joan’s attitude to Sweden so dominated her thoughts while she was there that the company and the performances took second place. If it wasn’t that, it was what Gerry was up to in England.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  KEEPING THE HOME FIRES BURNING

  Gerry started to write Joan letters even before he reached Sweden. Knowing that she would be setting sail for Trelleborg from Odraport on the Polish-German border, he left a note at the buffet there. It was stuck in the mirror behind the bar and, a few days later, one of the actors saw it and gave it to her.

  By then, Gerry, his task in Sweden over, brimming with frustration at not seeing Joan, was sailing third class from Gothenberg to Tilbury. Sitting in first class, the only place with a flat surface, he wrote again, using M/S Saga paper, Saga being the name of the ship. While he was travelling, he wrote, he was in a limbo, whereas his destination held nothing good for him. ‘Everything is grey.’ He wanted an England of ‘belief and revolution’.

  Joan, he continued to insist, had definitely been having an affair with Vladimir Tosek and so he, Gerry, evidently, was de trop. When he wasn’t acting the wronged lover, a performance Joan, later, took great pleasure in mocking, he made sensible suggestions about what she should do when she, in turn, sailed on the M/S Saga in a month’s time, that is, where to put her luggage, where to sit, where to go to in order to disembark the first. At the same time, he fretted about her getting enough to eat and keeping warm. This he did throughout his life and, though it was a constant subject for teasing, it was absolutely what she wanted, as were the practical tips, ‘Cheapest cigarettes Robin Hood, also Blue Master.’

  Gerry had a point. Joan was hopeless at looking after herself and was often cold and hungry. You can add chesty coughs, toothache, back ache and period pains to her troubles. She seemed to suffer from one or the other all the time. Underneath, though, she was a survivor and that was the difference between her and Gerry. He was strong, but that’s not the same thing.

  Affairs were different. When Joan had the few she had, Gerry would be cross and sulky. When Gerry had them, chiefly as a holiday from Joan – she being, as she well knew, extremely demanding – then she would be devastated.

  What was happening in Gerry’s letters and the ones he would receive from Joan during the Swedish tour, what with Czech Beatrice fancying him, and Swedish Torsten madly in love with her, was something else. Given that it amused both of them to invent torrid affairs for members of the company, it might be safe to assume the same thing was going on here, i.e. not much, if anything at all. It was a way of stirring up long-distance desire.

  What made their agony more exquisite was the gap between letters. Each thought, or at least wrote, that the other no longer loved them because they had heard nothing for ages. The truth was not so dramatic. Letters simply took five days to arrive, which, in Europe, was rather a long time. Still, the separation, both spiritually and physically, did make them, occasionally, lose heart for real.

  All the letters were long, as sometimes the writing of them was just for writing’s sake. While the pen moved across the paper, there was a connection. Lifting the pen broke the connection, and that was unbearable. Their positions were different, though. During the four weeks of the tour, Joan was doing a pre-arranged job that she only fitfully enjoyed. Gerry was improvising.

  Having nowhere else to live, he was basing himself at his father’s house in Higher Crumpsall, an immediate example of things really not being great for him. His brother Ralph was there, and they had little in common. If they weren’t arguing about politics, Ralph would fall into a sullen silence. For Gerry, it was like being with Jimmie and when he wrote about this to Joan he hoped, in turn, that she didn’t have to spend too much time in the company of Jimmie and his Jean. Joan begged him not to hate Jimmie and to get on with him as a comrade.

  There was more from Joan along the lines of setting personal feelings aside for the sake of the cause. As there was no person less capable of setting personal feelings aside, these passages are good for a laugh, if only a rueful one.

  Breaking off from his usual Manchester work, of trying to find a base for the company and a flat for Joan and himself, Gerry cadged a lift from his other brother, Eric, and came to London. He had high hopes of the People’s Entertainments Society which he thought might be the equivalent of Czechoslovakia’s Art for the People, if it could be stirred up. Eric installed himself at the Dorchester. Gerry, having nowhere to stay, sat in Lyon’s Corner House where he wrote to Joan for as long as he could. She was not pleased. It looked like his lack of a bed for the night was her fault because he was doing this on her behalf.

  Breakfast for Gerry was at the Dorchester with his brother, price six shillings and sixpence, but it was bad. He didn’t think much of Eric’s room either, which cost two pounds and fifteen shillings a night. Czechoslovakia had better for less.

  Mr Hoskins of the People’s Entertainments Society, after all that, was not available, but Gerry, despite having to go back to Manchester, didn’t stop trying. He’d try anyone, even commercial managements like Howard and Wyndhams, or Jack Hylton who usually produced The Crazy Gang. To be fair, the play Bill Davidson had written about, The Gorbals Story, had also been put on by Jack Hylton. It went to the West End and was made into a film, so it’s understandable that he was worth a shot.

  Howard Goorney and Jean Newlove, on hearing of this, thought Gerry was ignoring old contacts, like Laban, and that his churlishness would lose allies. The impression Gerry gave, not by what he said but by what he did, was that he was slightly bored with these allies and wanted to find people who really had money and could really make things happen, even if they were less sympathetic.

  Simultaneously, on went his dance with the Arts Council. Drama Director at the time was a character actor known for playing judges, Llewellyn Rees. Given that Gerry got the same old reaction, it could have been anybody. Either Llewellyn Rees, like Mr Hoskins, was unavailable, or Theatre Workshop had no show on for him to see.

  As in the letters during the German tour, the ‘Who shall we get rid of?’ game carried on. Jimmie, because he’d gone off a woman in the company, chipped in by asking for her to go. Joan made a note to keep her on. In fact, during those early days what actually happened was less to do with actors being sacked than actors simply leaving. It’s not that they were going for a more exciting life, merely to make a little money or start a family, a reminder of Shaw writing, in his preface to Heartbreak House, that theatre is a young person’s game. These departing actors, even when Joan thought little of them, were usually damned as traitors, mad or mother-fixated.

  Because living ‘en masse’ at the Parrot House had depressed Gerry, he was working extra hard to find that home for him and Joan. She needed to live in comfort and privacy, away from the company. Anything else threatened to lower the standard of work. That was his thinking, though the desire to have Joan to himself would have come into it as well. However, he was hampered in his efforts by not knowing where the base was to be. He wanted this home to be near it.

  Encouragement came when he found out that All Saints, the church where he had nearly been entombed during the Blitz, was available for a change of purpose. What with Manchester Council saying that it had a plan to encourage the arts, the signs looked good. Impatient to get a reaction – without one he could do nothing – he asked for an immediate decision from the company, enclosing the cost of converting the church to a theatre. It wasn’t low. Jean Newlove became worried that the need to put on plays quickly one after the other to make money would eat into choreographing time.

  There was another worry. It wouldn’t have been a worry for any other group but it was for Theatre Workshop. Grosvenor Square, Manchester, in the middle of which sat All Saints, was comfortably middle class. To be more precise, it was near the town centre, off Oxford Road where the BBC was, and just before you got to the university. Perfect, if you weren’t trying to align yourself with the working class. Gerry would have
preferred to be near a factory, but no space near a factory was forthcoming. All Saints would have to do, assuming of course he got it.

  Such was the fervour of Gerry’s dream, and it must have been of Joan’s too, because she never commented, that both were blind to All Saints’ look. Its position, surrounded by its own land, may have been excellent but the actual building, a nineteenth-century structure with a disproportionately tall and consequently daunting tower, was ugly. Still, it was early days and Joan wasn’t back from Sweden yet.

  Although Gerry’s work while Joan was away could not have been more urgent – there was nowhere to live and nowhere to work – it was his writing about the company’s aims which turned out to be more important. He had heard Aneurin Bevan patting himself on the back by saying that his suggestion of touring Greek tragedy had, contrary to expectation, worked well: ‘How can anyone,’ wrote Gerry, ‘possibly say that English workers want tragedy in the theatre or comedy, for that matter? No one knows. A football match, yes, a circus with wild animals, yes, and singing in the pub, yes. That has to be in a popular theatre to attract a working-class audience. It could be comedy or tragedy.’

  Much as he liked Czechoslovakia, that one day in Poland seemed to make an even greater impression:

  The acting I saw in Warsaw, which impressed me so much, gained its effect through the immense sparkle and life of each character. They were 100% alive, nothing of their action came from “outside” despite the stylisation [he doesn’t say what this is]. Although, offstage the actors seemed fairly ordinary, onstage they had tremendous personality. There was no holding back at all, and so, in the audience, you couldn’t help going along with them.

  We don’t want naturalistic acting but there is no excuse for indulging in bad 19th-century ham. Phoney emotion, vocal pyrotechnics could be admired – by anyone given that way – but can never have an audience. Like all forms of “cleverness” it precludes the audience from joining in and taking part emotionally: and that is what the job of acting is – to create an intense participation between all factors of a production – this includes the audience. That is why you are so right when you say we must have “humanity” in our work. Cleverness is sufficient for an audience of blasé socialites and would-be-blasé and petty [sic] bourgeois types, but they are the only audience it will attract.

  The job of a theatre is to play to an audience, and unless the audience can feel the warmth and love of life underlying each production, we will never have an audience that I, for one, want to play to.

  Unless you are prepared to exercise as critical an appreciation of the script as you apply to every other aspect of a production, I feel your own great creative gifts will always go awry.

  So there was Gerry’s dream, and it’s not a bad description of what Theatre Workshop was to become.

  At the end of the Swedish tour, disappointment at not being able to stay a few days longer revealed the gap between the company and Joan. The company had been happy. Joan had been miserable. The thought of England brought them together. What did it hold for them when they got back? It was a worry.

  The first and obvious thing to do was bang the drum, have the Lady Mayoress of Manchester hold a big reception with all the press there. It didn’t happen. For a start, the Lady Mayoress ignored Gerry’s request, so no reception, and then what press did turn up for the conference he organised couldn’t make that vital all at once splash. It was as if the company hadn’t been away. There was one good thing. Joan had a place to live. Gerry had found a flat.

  The All Saints project was a big one requiring architects’ drawings which Gerry went ahead and commissioned. In the meantime, the company began a tour of schools around Manchester with Twelfth Night. It was the same as today: do a Shakespeare that’s on the syllabus; that way, you keep going.

  Tom Driberg tried to help the company’s fortunes by writing to backbench Labour peer and former cabinet minister, William Wedgewood Benn, Tony’s father.

  ‘I’m sure he’s a poet,’ he answered, writing of Jimmie’s play that he’d just read, ‘and I think he’s a dramatist,’ but there were:

  . . . lapses from both poetry and drama – the latter more frequent and prolonged. The Arts Council should give a hand but this is where the violent divergence of opinion begins. Three and possibly four from the Arts Council have seen performances and unanimously found them terrible! Respectable outside opinion, however, such as your own, is enthusiastic and that is why we decided to send emissaries from the Drama Panel itself the next time Theatre Workshop is performing within call.

  It hasn’t happened yet because the company hasn’t performed in England since it went to Prague. As soon as word comes . . . some of us will duly attend.

  There, in black and white, was what Joan and Gerry, and probably Jimmie too, had long been suspecting. What was to be made of it? One has to bear in mind that this judgment was made by people who were used to actors enunciating without moving their lips, leading ladies pouring half cups of tea, drama students being taught how to talk on the telephone and the way Laurence Olivier delivered ‘Once more unto the breach,’ which nowadays sounds embarrassingly artificial. On the other hand, Joan, Gerry and Jimmie, though sticking up for themselves in the face of a hostile Establishment, were always complaining of a lack of talent.

  While the company kept going either at the Library, Manchester, or on the Edinburgh Fringe before it was the Fringe, performing plays it had been doing for a long time, Gerry received a letter from Henry Elder, the architect who had been sending him the drawings for converting All Saints into a theatre. It contained a quote from the Ministry of Works. ‘I regret to inform you that a building license for the construction of a new theatre in Grosvenor Square, Manchester cannot be granted at the present time in view of other high-priority work which must be fitted into the Building Programme.’

  The company may have had its reservations about All Saints but Gerry, nagged by the thought that nothing would be right, until a base hove into view, had single-mindedly been working on this project for a year.

  With this lack of good news, a way to cheer up the company, after several revivals, was to do something brand new. Joan wanted to do Cock-a-Doodle Dandy and wrote to its author, Sean O’Casey. He, having seen none of Theare Workshop’s productions, decided that he didn’t trust her and turned her down. This was a shame, because in 1954, she would do what she regarded as one of her best pieces of work, Red Roses for Me, an earlier play of his. O’Casey needed an ally in British theatre and throwing in his lot with Bernard Miles at the Mermaid, which he later did, was not the right decision. It lacked an extraordinary talent.

  Joan had to make do with Irwin Shaw’s The Gentle People, a good production but hardly Theatre Workshop, or so the company thought, as it was not experimental enough. While it was on, one of her actors, Peter Varley, a discovery of Tyrone Guthrie’s, a link like GBS that she never gave up, walked out. It was most inconvenient, until she remembered a fellow who had asked to join the company not long before but had been turned away because there was no room. He’d seemed a likely lad, and so he was summoned.

  This was George Cooper, a 24-year-old Yorkshireman, not long out of the army and, at that time, a draughtsman for a firm that made concrete. As soon as he arrived, Joan sent him on in a part that had no lines – Uranium 235 was that evening’s show – and then took him through Peter Varley’s part in The Gentle People, and that was it. He was in; and throwing himself merrily into whatever chore needed doing helped too. It marked him out as the right kind of actor for Theatre Workshop. As, on Equity’s books, there was another George Cooper, he became George A. Cooper.

  His arrival was significant. Joan and Gerry had been complaining of a lack of talent in their different ways; it was George who began the change. For Gerry, he brought strength. For Joan, he brought invention. His only problem was that yesterday’s invention would be today’s, ‘I can’t remember.’ Joan, usually keen to chuck stuff out, had to remind him of some delightfu
l thing he’d done, yesterday, just before lunch.

  It was nearly Christmas and the idea came to the company to be hard-headedly commercial and put on a Christmas show. Money would roll in, they were sure of it, but what show would do the trick? Alice in Wonderland. Joan adapted. John Bury, using a gauze, something he had never done before, designed, while a character called José Christopherson came up with some surprisingly elaborate costumes. Best of all, in true Theatre Workshop style, Jack Evans, a school friend of Jimmie’s who’d spent the previous seventeen years in Russia, re-appeared just when he was needed. He could write music and so, he did.

  They opened in Barnsley. It seems almost cruel to go on, but pennies were thrown. It was a disaster. Taking the show off, though, was not possible. A tour was already booked. One of the dates – and this slightly spoils the story of Theatre Workship going to Stratford East for the first time in 1953 – was the Theatre Royal, Stratford. The ‘East’ was added later to distinguish it from Stratford-upon-Avon. Gabriel Toyne, an ex-actor Joan remembered from her Manchester Rep days, ran it. He tried to get his hands on the company’s tax exemption money. As at the People’s Newcastle, this was still proving a help. Gerry put him firmly in his place but it was the last good thing about that date. The backstage crew took no care over the lighting and the audience could hardly see a thing. If it had been some tawdry drag revue, it would have been all right, thought Joan, who was a good deal less vulgar than she made out.

  The seventeen years Jack Evans had been in Russia had been spent studying music and earning his living by interpreting. What he told Joan and Gerry over dinner one night was the start of an education. Thinking he had gone too far, he wrote to them the next day:

  As you know I had a very good position in Moscow which took me about ten years to build up. I had my own little flat there and I thought I could settle there for many years . . . Somebody seems to have turned the Russians against me although I worked for the Russian government for many years as a translator and I have never written anti-Soviet stuff, nor do I intend to. The Russians did not refuse to give me a return visa. They just left it hanging in the air.