by Peter Rankin
So to this day, I feel ‘up-rooted’ and sometimes it gets me down.
The gist of his letter was that he utterly believed in the aims of Soviet Russia and could see that, surrounded by powerful and hostile neighbours like Germany and Japan during the war, it was not surprising that the authorities had been tightening the screws. However, fearful as Russia was of attack from America or its satellites after the war, this tightening had continued, and it was not pleasant. Distinguished Russians, known to all, would be held up while a junior soldier would scrutinise their passes for minutes on end, knowing perfectly well who the holder was.
From all this, you can imagine that the atmosphere for stage people and musicians and other intellectuals is not very healthy. People like Shostakovich and Prokofiev don’t matter two hoots. Meyerhold was picked up by the NKVD one night. The next day bandits (and there are still bandits in Moscow) broke into his house and slaughtered his wife and servant.
My memory of Moscow is full of horrible stories and sometimes those horrible stories make me depressed. That is why I behave so strangely and rottenly sometimes . . . The theatre today is so bad in Moscow that I think you would die of a stroke if you saw any of these filthy rotten plays written by tired and scared little men.
It later seemed that it was Russia’s fear that had made Jack a victim, and that is why he had not been allowed back. It was a case of ‘rather a million thrown out than one spy left in.’ Even before he had left, though, he had written to Joan saying that Russia was snobbish. ‘They only want people who are a bourgeois success.’ He then listed people like Bernard Shaw, HG Wells and André Gide.
Joan and Gerry’s friend, Hugh MacDiarmid/Chris Grieve, had only recently flown to Russia, cheered on by them. These first-hand accounts were disappointing. Joan, Jimmie and Chris, all, as it happened, thrown out of the Communist Party for not doing as they were told, were idealists, as was Gerry. Each one of them so wanted Russia to succeed. In 1957, Joan would find out herself about that snob thing but, even so, like Gerry, she still hated to hear any chipping away, whether true or not.
Nevertheless, Jack’s story chimed with Czechoslovakia and Poland going quiet when either Joan or Gerry wrote to them. Gerry, using the tours in Europe as leverage, was by then trying for Berlin and Tel-Aviv. Encouraging answers came from them but there was always a catch, like they couldn’t provide the money for the fare or the person writing the letter didn’t have the authority to say yes. Another target was Paris. Gerry went once without telling Joan. Another time, he did take her. Joan, having watched Sartre’s new play, Le Diable et le Bon Dieu, at the Théâtre Antoine, spotted the author in a café talking to Jean Genet. Of the play, she wrote: ‘No real conflict’; of the author, ‘He should have married Genet for a while instead of playing the French genius and boring himself and the poor Beauvoir with their famous intellectual affair . . . the French take the cake for hypocrisy. Gide never had the courage to admit who he was.’ About Camus she felt differently. She admired him. Her only regret was that, though he wrote plays, the company he worked with was not distinguished. If he had worked with her, things could have been different.
Paris didn’t happen, not then at least, and it looked as if Gerry was failing left, right and centre. In fact he resigned from the job of manager and Howard Goorney took over. Muscle flexing is a better way of seeing Gerry’s efforts at that time. He wanted Theatre Workshop to be the best company in the world and to be that you needed to get out there and you weren’t going to get out there if you didn’t try. He’d been trying.
While he looked outwards towards other countries of Europe, so Jimmie looked more and more towards Scotland. Much as Joan loved its songs and poetry, she didn’t care for nationalism, and that is what she saw in Jimmie. Hugh MacDiarmid used to say that one Scot was worth two Englishmen. It was that kind of talk Joan found unhelpful and when Jean Newlove taught the company the Highland fling, she, Jean, having previously sniffed at it, Joan was disappointed. It was a dead end and, anyway, there was a risk of Jean forgetting her Laban. Saying that it was an accident when she told Hugh MacDiarmid that Jimmie was born in Salford, thus reducing Jimmie to tears of rage, is not easy to believe of Joan. If she thought someone was out of line, her instinct was to slap them back in again so that it stung. You can tell how much it hurt if you consider that, in Jimmie’s 1990 autobiography, packed with well-remembered names, the name Jimmie Miller appears not once.
There was time for this reflectiveness about Europe, Sartre and Scotland, because in 1950 there was another big gap. Just before it, the company had given some performances in London including a Sunday night at the Adelphi Theatre. Perhaps the British Council would come and then finance a tour abroad? No, the British Council, along with the Arts Council, stayed away. John Moody of the Arts Council did slip in one evening but, while enjoying the physicality of The Flying Doctor, thought that the actors were still not up to much and that Theatre Workshop should, therefore, re-apply in two or three years’ time. How on earth did he expect it to survive with no help for three years?
He didn’t bank on Theatre Workshop’s phenomenal optimism. For fifteen pounds, Gerry bought a second-hand lorry, painted the names of the countries that the company had visited on its sides and, after twice failing his driving test, obtained a licence. Sets, costumes, props and the company would all go in this lorry and, to raise money, the company went out into the country, picked tomatoes and sold them at a profit in town. Accompanied by Joan, Gerry then set out with all their contacts and quickly booked a series of one-night stands across South Wales. Until the end of 1950, the company performed a zingier Uranium 235 – Joan never left anything alone – while in early 1951 it was Jimmie’s new play, Landscape with Chimneys, a story of squatters and their eviction. It needed a song to cover a scene change. He wrote ‘Dirty Old Town’.
The tour ran through a freezing cold winter. The lorry broke down. Fog sometimes stopped them altogether. Performances had to be cancelled. Digs included a pub where the other guests had, in merry mood, gathered for a hanging. Why did the company bother? Perhaps the answer to this question was that, despite periods of no money, no food, no heat, nowhere to live, rehearse or perform and lots of debts, life was lived at a higher level of excitement than it would have been in any other job. Gerry’s inside info from visits to commercial managements would have helped. There was not much other acting work about anyway.
When the going was at its toughest, Gerry, on spotting a gap, would, very occasionally, whisk Joan off to the Strand Palace Hotel near Piccadilly Circus, where they would spend a couple of nights. Joan was more capable than most of sleeping on a floor, but she revelled in comfort too, and Gerry seeing to that made it even better.
After that, it was back to the one-night stands and, with still no base in view, the company was, yet again, wondering what would happen next.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
COMING IN TO LAND
Kristin Lind, on the tour of Sweden, may have given Joan the pip but it didn’t stop Joan writing affectionate letters to her that gave no indication of how irritated she’d been. They worked because, straight after the one-night stands in South Wales, the company found itself on a ship in the North Sea again. Theatre Workshop was off on a tour of Scandinavia, first stop Norway, where Joan was able to discover that – putting it in simple terms – Norway is not Sweden. The landscape was not the same and consequently neither were the people. It made a difference, for the better.
When the company did eventually fetch up in Sweden, the critic Sven Stahl wrote: ‘Joan Littlewood is worth the entire Old Vic. Her name should be written in letters of fire until the blinkers are burned off the eyes of the English theatre public.’ Later on, this helped Joan put round Sweden the same sort of golden glow that she put round Kristin Lind.
On the company’s return, there were more one-night stands but this time they were in the North East of England, familiar and happier stamping grounds. It was spring too.
If ther
e was one person for whom things were not that great, it was Gerry. Still uncertain about his role as manager – the return to Sweden was more to do with Joan – and goaded by Jimmie’s put-downs of his acting, he got fed up and started an affair. It was only a fling, but that’s when Joan was devastated. Setting aside her personal feelings for the cause not one jot and, in fact, out of plain jealousy, she sacked the girl, using the excuse of lateness. The girl, a vivid personality who is very much around today, and friends with everyone, didn’t actually go but hovered in the shadows.
Joan stopped eating, lived on black coffee and attempted suicide. What she saw as the falseness of Jimmie’s marriage to Jean and of David Scase’s to Rosalie – the husband playing the field, the wife shutting up – was not for her. In any relationship she had, there would be two and that was all. Gerry did not take this attempt seriously. If anything, their roles were reversed. Usually it was Joan ticking off the wayward son. This time, it was Gerry reproving the tempestuous daughter. Recalling the event, and back on form, Joan said that the room she tried to gas herself in was so large, to fill it would have taken a month.
It was while the company was once more at the People’s Theatre in Newcastle that Alan Lomax appeared. He was the son of John Lomax, the discoverer of Lead Belly, the black American folk and blues musician who had come up with the song ‘Goodnight Irene’. Both father and son collected folk songs. Alan was looking for Jimmie, but Jimmie was off giving a talk up the road in Berwick-upon-Tweed.
Alan stayed to see the show and, afterwards, beguiled the company with songs. It was slightly different with Joan. He both teased and annoyed her. He said that there was no carelessness in her production. This suggests that she was still in her Kurt Jooss, ‘Gerry catches the movement from Graham and counterpoints it by a downward movement,’ period. This, in turn, accounts for those hard-to-understand – ‘brilliant production, shame about the actors’ – reviews the company had been receiving.
There was just enough in Alan Lomax’s teasing for her to let him have sex with her, though other thoughts were going through her mind as well. She remembered those Guardian types from before the war, like Jack Dillon. They were in open marriages, and even at that time she wondered whether that was the cool thing to do. Here was an opportunity to find out, and there was also a touch of revenge in it for what Gerry had just done. Annoy Joan at any time in her life and, a day or two later, something unpleasant would happen to you.
She didn’t enjoy the experience. For a start, Gerry was much better at sex than Alan. It made her conclude that ‘cool’ was not for her. Back from this jaunt, she was confronted by Gerry who pulled her into his lap and had sex with her crossly; not romantic, no, but the relationship was back on.
On the artistic side, Gerry wrote a play, The Long Shift. It was based on his experience of working down the Pendleton mine during the war. It’s not a bad play, and the set, a narrow tunnel seen from the side, was as claustrophobic as you could want it to be. And there the company was, in the north-east, with all its mining towns. It seemed perfect. It wasn’t. The last thing miners wanted in the evening was to watch a play about what they had been doing all day. It was, however, an important lesson which Joan remembered for the future. If you are faced with a tough subject, don’t go at it head on. Come from an angle and don’t forget to entertain.
‘Are you Reds?’ asked a figure in a shabby, camel-hair coat who was hanging round one day. This young man, an actor from Chorlton-cum-Hardy Rep, south of Manchester town centre, joined the company. His name was Harry Corbett but, because of Sooty, the glove puppet on TV whose operator was also called Harry Corbett, he became Harry H. Corbett.
His question has some bearing because, in pretty quick succession, he was joined by his girlfriend, Avis Bunnage, who had been at the same rep. Neither shared Joan and Gerry’s politics. However, they brought conventional but useful theatre experience. Far more than that, though, they brought talent. What with the arrival of George Cooper, a gradual change was occurring. Gerry was beginning to get what he wanted. Avis, as well as Harry, was to become important to Theatre Workshop and Gerry never stopped admiring her because he always valued people who could do their job. To put her in her place politically, though, he and Joan always referred to her as ‘petty’ bourgeois but that was in private.
In turn, Harry and, in particular, Avis, would stay on because Joan would give them good work, a kind of work they would not have been given elsewhere because, elsewhere, they would have been typecast: when they were not with Theatre Workshop, that is what happened. Avis, for example, always played someone’s mum, despite never being a mother herself.
Harry used to say that she was better than he was. Certainly, there aren’t stories of Joan torturing Avis in rehearsal. There is one of Joan torturing Harry. All his early performances were imitations of film stars. Joan had to break that. She did it during one of those school tours of Twelfth Night. Harry was playing Sir Andrew Aguecheek. The easy way to play him is to adopt a funny walk and put on a funny voice and, indeed, for some audiences, that sort of performance can work.
Joan went through her usual process. Who is Sir Andrew? He has a title, so he doesn’t work, but he has no fortune. Olivia’s family tolerate him but it doesn’t want him. Even Olivia’s uncle, Sir Toby, who brought him in, only has him there to patronise. He is a sad fellow. Just before Harry was about to face a crowd of rough schoolchildren, Joan pressed this idea on to him. He was furious but he took it. He kept Sir Andrew utterly lost and it worked. The children found him even funnier.
This donnish side to Joan had another purpose. It was to do with building up, not breaking down. Talented actors came to her with little in the way of education and, because of that, had an inferiority complex. She too knew – her RADA days had done it – what it was like to feel small and so she wanted her actors to feel big. Reading the history behind and around the play, then analysing the lines to see what they really meant, began to arm them against the Establishment artifice of the Old Vic and Stratford-upon-Avon.
The tour of the north-east was fine enough and Joan had collected three durable actors. However, the company had been touring for six years and still there was no sign of a base. She became so convinced that it was time to throw in the towel that when Jimmie told her there was a date in Scotland coming up, and that Uranium 235 would be the show, she wasn’t interested. Jimmie could do that by himself. This was something she often did, push work that bored her on to someone else, even when that person was unsuitable.
Jimmie wrote her a letter:
You will accuse me of selfishness if I say I could no more produce Uranium than I could conduct a symphony and St Andrew’s will present tremendous problems. I can drill crowd scenes, but when it comes to revealing the organic rhythms of the play, I’m lost. Uranium needs a producer of genius if it is to be anything more than a cabaret.
Joan thought Jimmie was being chicken and reneging on his duty. That was another thing she did, mistaking someone’s intention so that she could turn them into an enemy. Another person reading that letter could interpret it quite differently, particularly if they had read all of it. Jimmie bows before Joan’s talent as deeply as Gerry did, only, being a writer, more gracefully.
A few days before setting off for Glasgow the company was about to go for a run-through when Gerry told Joan that he’d invited Sam Wanamaker along. It was 1952 and Sam had recently arrived from Broadway to direct and appear in Clifford Odets’ play The Country Wife, known in the UK as The Winter Journey. In America, where he was well established, he had been subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Committee, and he wasn’t going back. Others in the same boat, like the film directors Joseph Losey and Cy Endfield, also headed for Theatre Workshop. Their politics were sympathetic.
For all that, Joan was unhappy about this intrusion. Anything like that made her angry. Eventually she would admit to what others had long suspected. Underneath the anger was fear.
Gerry bringing
Sam along is an example of what he would do repeatedly to Joan. Yes, he was an organiser, and like no other in the company, but the way he did it could be roughshod. For a start, he didn’t consult. Whatever he planned would be a fait accompli once it was presented. Of course, if he had told Joan there would have been time for her to say no or walk away. He wasn’t chancing it. No sooner had he told Joan about Sam than Sam walked in.
This particular incident is an early illustration of Gerry’s willingness to talk to people Theatre Workshop was wary of because, a moment later, in walked Sam’s costar, Michael Redgrave. Years before, Redgrave, unlike any other Establishment theatre star, had moved towards Theatre Workshop but had backed away from it because of its politics. His association with the company was not good for his career. However, here he was, back again, so Joan was even less pleased. From her RADA days (Joan Kempson) until her death (Vanessa Redgrave) she would reserve her harshest judgment for the Redgrave family: ‘How do these untalented people make it?’
Pulling back from all this, and to be absolutely fair to Joan, inviting guests to watch an early run-through is dangerous, however sympathetic those guests may be. Actors who should be feeling their way through the play start to perform and, if it’s a comedy, strain for laughs. It’s irresistible but it’s wrong.
Still, there they were, Sam and Michael, and throwing them out had become too difficult. They stayed. The run-through went ahead and both admired it immensely.
The company went off to Glasgow and, just as things had been when it started out in 1945, friends made things go with a swing. The friends, this time, were Norman Buchan, not yet a Labour MP, and his wife Janey Buchan, not yet a Labour MEP and a champion of gay rights.