Joan Littlewood

by Peter Rankin

  It was all very jolly until Joan remembered that the company lorry had been driven up not by Gerry, but by Harry Greene, a recruit from Wales and the only other person who knew how to drive it. Fine, but where was Gerry? A telegram arrived. He was down south in hospital with a torn bowel. As always, when Gerry got ill, so unlike Joan, he really got ill.

  For Gerry to get better, the two went to Cassis in the south of France. Gerry loved the sun and would love it even more when worse was to come in later years. Joan, who didn’t like the sun, was happy to stay in the shade cooled by a sea breeze.

  A telegram arrived. It was from Sam Wanamaker. He and Michael Redgrave wanted to present Uranium 235 at the Embassy Theatre in London in two weeks’ time.

  Nowadays, the Embassy, which is near Swiss Cottage underground station, belongs to the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Back in 1952 it was run by Oscar Lewenstein who had come from Glasgow Unity, the company Joan thought was amateurish. Sam Wanamaker was a friend of Oscar’s and that is how Oscar had become involved. It was the start of a relationship with Joan and Gerry that would manage to be both fractious and long-lasting. Only after Joan gave up theatre did it become harmonious. She never lost her love of books and, at his home in Hove, Oscar had a library. It became a refuge and, when Joan was not there, she could always amuse herself by imitating his hoarse, squeaky voice.

  Uranium 235 was admired by the few, which got it a run at the Comedy Theatre, but remained unseen by the many, which meant that the run was short. The critic Kenneth Tynan saw it and wrote that Joan kept her actors in chains, which echoes Alan Lomax teasing her about the lack of carelessness. Both Jimmie and Joan had always been suspicious of London and its theatre critics. This visit only confirmed their suspicion. Gerry was different. Like it or not, he suspected, those critics would have to be faced. If you want to be the greatest company in the world, people have to know you’re there. For the rest of their working lives, this opinion would cause conflict between him and Joan.

  As for Oscar, he remained in London, working first with the writer, Wolf Mankowitz, and later at the Royal Court, producing plays both in subsidised and West End theatre. He had a relationship with Jack Hylton, the producer in the commercial world, whose interest Gerry had tried to engage. Oscar’s politics were to the left and he put on many plays which broadly reflected that. However, he worked with directors and actors whose methods were both conventional and accepted, so for him life was easier than it was for Joan. She rejected those methods.

  Broke again, the company pitched tents that summer in the grounds of Tom Driberg’s home, Bradwell Lodge in Essex, a part-Tudor, part-Adam house, where he lived on and off with his new wife, Ena. What with his interest in sturdy young men of the kind Gerry was, Tom had had some close shaves with the law. The marriage had been arranged by John Freeman, who seven years later would become the interviewer on Face to Face, the popular BBC TV programme.

  The company earned money by stooking wheat and when it wasn’t busy doing that, Joan rehearsed a political thriller of Jimmie’s called The Travellers. It was booked for Edinburgh that August. There was just about enough money for the fares, but there wasn’t for the set. With only a bag of nails, Harry Greene set off with another company member and, right across the Oddfellows Hall in Edinburgh, spread a series of train seats, the essentials of which, wood and metal, he had managed to scrounge. That was the set. It was not for nothing that he became king of DIY on television in the 1970s and 1980s.

  The travellers who made the journey in the play were symbolic. They represented the countries of Europe rushing towards war. ‘Propaganda thinly disguised as experimental drama,’ wrote the critic of the Spectator. He admired the production, though. Joan considered it one of the most exciting pieces of staging (with the audience being almost on the train too) she had ever done.

  Scotland seemed to be turning into the company’s base, which would have suited Jimmie fine, because soon there was Glasgow again, this time doing Joan’s new version of Molière’s Le Malade Imaginaire called The Imaginary Invalid. As it happens, the person who found the place for the company to live was Gerry. It was a big house in Belmont Street owned by an eccentric millionaire who allowed them to have it for a peppercorn rent which Gerry paid in farthings.

  Would have suited Jimmie, if he had been there. By then he was increasingly away on singing dates. Meanwhile, Joan got on with her Molière production. She commissioned a translation especially for the occasion by the Scottish teacher, and writer of political songs, Morris Blythman. Joan found it heavy-going and made her own. Morris didn’t know about this until he saw the first performance. He was not pleased. The hall being almost empty didn’t help. There were no laughs. He left saying, more prophetically than either he or the company realised, that it would be better off in London.

  Here was an example of something Joan would do more than once. Maybe that translation was heavy-handed, but her utter conviction that she was right and that her version was better, considered from another angle, was riding roughshod over Morris Blythman.

  The houses picked up, and with them came the laughs. Howard Goorney, George Cooper, Harry Corbett, that girl Gerry fancied, and Avis Bunnage, in particular, as Toinette, the mocking, down-to-earth maid, came together to make a proper company, at last. The Glasgow Herald critic was able to praise not only the production but the actors. Of the translation, he wrote: ‘The dialogue . . . had the great merit of propelling the theme fluently, wittily and with dramatic bite.’ That’s exactly what Joan could do: propel fluently. She was right but it’s difficult not to feel sorry for Morris Blythman and the others whom she brushed aside as time went by.

  The translator’s name on the programme was Thurso Berwick, which Joan would imply, in conversation, was a name she had invented for herself to get out of a tricky situation. It was easy to believe, too, as she often used funny pseudonyms, like Eleanor Griswold and Jeanne Petitbois. However, it was not the case. Thurso Berwick was the name Morris Blythman adopted when he was writing poetry.

  It was in the middle of winter with nothing much on the cards when Gerry told the company that the Theatre Royal Stratford had fallen empty. They could go there, not for the usual night or week, but for a season and, when he said empty, he meant empty. Gabriel Toyne and a useless backstage crew were no longer a problem because they weren’t there. The company would run the place themselves. A meeting was called.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  A BASE AT LAST

  They were only talking about a season of six weeks but the company took it seriously. Joan said that Jimmie didn’t attend. Whether he did or not, his feelings were already clear. As for the others, what could they anticipate even before leaving Glasgow?

  The pros were: at last some kind of base, one that was in a working-class area too, a real theatre, not an all-purpose hall that audiences didn’t go to; an end to one-night stands; an end to the lorry breaking down; and the possibility of living in the same place from night to night.

  The cons were: leaving the north where all that had been good for Theatre Workshop had happened; going down south to the hated London where nothing good had happened; a possible dependence on the critics of the national papers; and having to pay overheads, rent, gas, electricity and telephone.

  Jimmie was suspicious of London because he didn’t know it. Joan was suspicious of London because she did. In Lancashire, she loved the brusqueness that hid warmth. In London, she hated the sentimental and meaningless ‘Aaah’ that cockneys came out with when they were told of something sad. She was torn, though, because at the back of her mind she knew, like Gerry, that right then, principles or no principles, there was not much else in the offing. They almost had to go and so the decision was made.

  Jimmie’s decision was to leave Theatre Workshop. Joan talked about this, employing a tone that seemed to say it was a pity, as if he could have stayed. George Cooper, remembering the rows between Jimmie and Gerry and the tension that they had created in the
company, said that there was a feeling of relief. There had been factions. Company members were either pro-Jimmie or pro-Gerry. Howard Goorney, David Scase, Rosalie Williams and Jean Newlove, had been pro-Jimmie. George had been pro-Gerry. By then, David and Rosalie had left the company to have children, so Jimmie was feeling that there was less reason for him to stay. His own view was that he was frozen out.

  Joan, when not being officially regretful, sounded quite different. Jimmie, as might be expected, given his many absences to sing folk songs, went off to do hootenannies, informal gatherings by folk singers. Joan, drawing on the silly and childish sound of the word, had the same sort of fun playing with it as Edith Evans had with ‘A handbag?’ She also poked fun at folk singers’ bleating tones and the hand over the ear, which was supposed to be so genuine but which she regarded as an affectation. What she really regretted was Jimmie setting aside his enormous knowledge of classical music which, along with his own songs, had so helped the company.

  There were a couple more remarks she made. First, let us remember, ‘Once upon a time, Jimmie was the genius, while I was the handmaiden at his knee.’ She finished it with: ‘Turned out the other way round really, didn’t it?’ Then there was: ‘Jimmie wanted to be the Great Writer instead of just writing.’ The tougher remarks may sound cruel but they sound more genuine than those in which she claimed he didn’t have to go.

  About Gerry there was no ambiguity. From all those letters that he wrote to Joan, it is clear that he thought that Theatre Workshop would get nowhere as long as Jimmie was the company’s writer. In his eyes, Jimmie/Ewan MacColl, was anti-popular.

  Howard Goorney would stay on but not lose touch with Jimmie, whose writing he continued to believe in.

  It was a Sunday night when, having either hitchhiked or crammed into Gerry’s car – he had an old Alvis by then – the company arrived at the theatre. Apart from it being on a corner, it didn’t have a special position like All Saints in Manchester. It was simply tucked in among houses. However, along one side, not the entrance side, was Angel Lane, which had little shops in it and a market. The theatre itself was Victorian and the auditorium was decorated with gilded cherubs and curlicues, or rather gilded is what they should have been, as the place was in a bad way. It stank of drains, unwashed clothes, stale make-up, cat’s piss and scented disinfectant. The previous show had been Jane of the Daily Mirror, a striptease revue based on a cartoon character devised for the same reason as page three in the Sun, everything that Joan hated.

  That night there was nothing else for the company to do – there being no food – but to make homes for themselves in dressing rooms and go to sleep.

  The next day, they spent the morning cleaning the place to make it bearable and printing posters using their own printing machine. Had it been any other company, it’s difficult to see that their efforts would have been successful enough to allow for a performance that evening, but then Theatre Workshop was used to it. It even had a name for the cleaning team: The Black Squad.

  Not many people came to that performance – it was Twelfth Night – and George Cooper, who was playing Malvolio, remembered, during the run, pennies being thrown at him, and being called Big Head because of his tall Elizabethan hat. A local critic thought the show was rather good but a bit highbrow for Stratford.

  Instantly it was clear that the usual Theatre Workshop way of going about things, i.e. long rehearsal periods and a small number of shows, would have to change drastically and quickly. A new play would have to be put on every two weeks. This wasn’t so bad because the present company had been together for a while and was, in Joan’s words, ‘tuned up’. It could work fast without standards dropping. In any case, the next two plays were The Imaginary Invalid, and Landscape with Chimneys, which had a new name, Paradise Street. Those had already been done. Wasn’t that last one a play of Jimmie’s? It was, and Jimmie, while carping at Theatre Workshop’s activities, came back to give Sunday evening concerts. Three months later, Joan mounted his adaptation of Lysistrata and eight months later, The Travellers. The end of the road for Jimmie at Theatre Workshop it wasn’t, not entirely. Jean Newlove popped back too to give movement classes and to choreograph.

  Immediate problems, once the company had arrived, were accommodation, the state of the theatre, and the lack of money.

  The dressing rooms would remain the company’s home until such time as it could afford to move out. Considering that the takings, which they shared out among each other, were minute, that day would not be speedy in coming. Living in the theatre was strictly illegal too.

  Whenever the fire inspector paid a visit, a code name ‘Walter Plinge’ would be sent out and Gerry had to describe any mattress not pushed into a cupboard, as a day bed for relaxation purposes. Any gadget that indicated someone was living there, like a gas ring, had to be stowed away pronto.

  For meals, ingredients were bought in the market costing pennies and, after a better week at the box office, there might just be enough to eat at the Café L’Ange in Angel Lane, where Bert and May Scagnelli cured their own hams and made their own apple pie. At first, the stall owners were a bit suspicious of the actors: ‘Why don’t you get a proper job?’ but Bert and May took the company to their hearts and became part of Theatre Workshop history.

  As well as rehearsing, the company had to mend seats, unblock drains, put out buckets to catch raindrops, and fix the boiler that kept going out. Even so, heating could only be switched on just before the audience arrived and the auditorium was often freezing, as the regulars – there were some – were to find out. It was best to come well wrapped-up.

  Camel, realising that he could no longer fall back on black material and lighting, beautiful as the latter may have been, knew that there had to be sets for every production and minimal as they were (his style anyway), they still had to be built.

  The working day was eighteen hours long. If the stall holders and Equity had realised how much hard work was going on, they would have been respectively impressed and horrified, except that Equity didn’t have much to do with Theatre Workshop in those days because none of the actors were receiving a minimum wage. As it happened, Joan and Gerry’s relationship with trade unions (Equity and later on, ACTT, the film technicians’ union), was never comfortable. Theatre Workshop had its own way of doing things and this way did not coincide with fixed hours and demarcation. If it had paid attention to those, nothing would ever have been achieved. Howard Goorney did believe in Equity and remained a prominent member for as long as he was able to.

  Referring to the hard work as well as those periods of silence, Max Shaw, who joined the company at Stratford, said: ‘Our lives were monastic but it didn’t matter because we didn’t have any money to go out anyway. There was nothing else to do but get on with work.’

  The Theatre Royal had an office and Gerry settled into it, there to have, if you go by his correspondence, a gruelling time. Not only the future had to be coped with, but the past too. He was dealing with a firm called Theatres and Music Halls [South] Ltd., run by one Rowland Sales, and he wanted to sort out the dirt and dilapidation Mr Sales had allowed, not to mention an unpaid telephone bill. Mr Sales aggressively tried to push everything on to Gerry and, while he was at it, insisted that advertisements be projected on to the safety curtain at each performance, as agreed. Gerry projected them just before the audience arrived, until he was found out.

  Behind all these orders was bluster. You could tell because Mr Sales wanted his cheques made out, not to Music Halls [South] Ltd. but to himself. It was 1953, Coronation year. Everyone was buying a television set. Variety was dying. Rowland Sales was desperate to get out, and Gerry, awkward as he was to deal with, could provide him with an exit. He asked if Gerry wanted to stay on. He did, and signed for another few months. It was the start of Gerry gradually taking control of the whole building, a job that would take years because different parts of the theatre belonged to different people. However, because of his belief in a base, he kept at it.
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  While trying to cope with Rowland Sales, he was writing to Newham, the borough where the theatre was situated, and all the surrounding boroughs asking for that sixpence from the rates he had learned about when trying for the David Lewis Centre five years earlier. Things hadn’t changed. They all thought it was a cheek. So, when Gerry wrote to those same old names at the Arts Council, John Moody and Jo Hodgkinson, and the answer was if he could raise £1,000 locally they’d match it, the situation was still a ‘no go’.

  Before that, Gerry tried to get a grant for a new play, The Colour Guard by George Styles. Such grants did exist. Gerry had done his homework but plays had to be read by a committee and that took time. Gerry didn’t have time. It was opening next month.

  The first ever grant from the Arts Council didn’t come until the following year. It was £150 to help pay for audiences to travel home at night if it was difficult for them. No sooner had Gerry received it than he was asked to account for it. That was a constant bugbear, accounts. The Arts Council never stopped asking for them but, as we know today, accounts don’t come cheap and Gerry couldn’t always afford them. In any case, given his buccaneering spirit, it wouldn’t be surprising if that £150 went on whatever debt needed paying most. If ever there was a time when he needed to believe in what he was doing, it was then.

  Down on the stage, that satisfyingly deep stage, things were quite different. Joan was having a whale of a time. For the next three years, it was a national theatre. In fact, Joan was sometimes heard to say: ‘We were the National Theatre.’ It was as if the list of plays Gerry had drawn up for his humiliating David Lewis Centre meeting, had been lengthened and then performed. At the Theatre Royal, there was plenty to complain about, like hunger, poverty and the cold, but no one complained about the plays.