Joan Littlewood

by Peter Rankin

  The only problem was that not many people were coming to see them. Joan sat in the gallery delighted by her actors, but she could often find herself alone. Actually, there was one actress who annoyed her: ‘The silly born bitch, she’s missed her entrance. Oh, it’s me.’ This was a sign of Joan wanting to pull away from acting.

  Even today people like to scoff. Theatre for the working class? They were never interested. If Theatre Workshop had an audience, it came from elsewhere. It didn’t know what sort of play it should be putting on. Things weren’t that simple. One play, Van Call, written by a local author, kept audiences away. The Good Soldier Schweik, the production Joan had promised herself in Czechoslovakia, though not obviously relevant, was discussed enthusiastically on the bus home. That last comment came from one of the Soundy sisters. Doris and Peggy Soundy, after seeing Paradise Street, formed a supporters club all by themselves. Nobody told them to. They had two thousand members at one point.

  In her diary, Joan offered some of her own views on what she liked and didn’t like. It happened during the rehearsals of The Troublemakers, a play by an American writer which was brought to her by an agent, Leslie Linder. The company performed it after the summer break in 1953. In the entry is a comment from an actress called Jean Shepherd, who, recommended by Nelson Illingworth, the voice man, had joined the company. She didn’t last long as it was all too intense. The comment wouldn’t have done her much good either. Joan wrote:

  Leslie Linder comes to look and help. There’s a violence scene that has to be physically “real”. So I let him take over. Don’t like it. Prefer stylisation like the Chinese – much more effective – anyway Jean Shepherd looks at me and says: “Isn’t it nice to have a man take over?” It was such a surprising thing to hear her say.

  This play was dealing with a contemporary theme but really it’s not worth it. People can get their news in the papers. Theatre must give them much more. I don’t mind direct agitation – agitprop – but when it comes to all this real-life “political” American drama – Miller + school – one is really bored. Drama sustains like poetry and reflects society profoundly when it is poetry (Jonson). Do these plays do this? They are better done in the cinema anyway and even then one comes out yawning – head aching, if one sat it out.

  It would seem that George Bellak took notice because he spent the rest of his long career in television.

  At Christmas time, despite thinking RL Stevenson’s position vis-à-vis the English was on the cringing side, Joan directed Treasure Island. George Cooper was Long John Silver and the production packed the place out with school children. Here Joan relishes her idea of violence:

  Marvellous changes of set. Have made adaptation like a film in one shot – we have a fight in the rigging on just ropes – a bit of sail – and Harry Greene prepared to break his neck – Harry rigs this work of art and contrives a fall that takes your breath away – ACROBATICS necessary in any company that wants exciting theatre.

  When Joan was young, she wasn’t used to holidays. Work was all she wanted. It was Gerry who taught her the importance of stepping away from it. By 1953 she was so used to holidays that she thought everyone else ought to have one as well, so she invited Harry Corbett and Avis Bunnage to go with her and Gerry in his car to France. Joan was exhaustingly full of bright ideas. As for Gerry, he believed strongly in people going abroad, so that was OK. It was to be a camping holiday and Avis, who had never left the UK in her life, was a little nervous. Harry had served abroad but not in Europe.

  The holiday wasn’t totally bad but there was an echo of Joan insisting that her grandparents come up to Hyde during the Blitz. She thought she knew what was best for people, but people didn’t always react the way she wanted them to. The principle of the holiday was excellent and being with Joan and Gerry could be exhilarating. It could also be disorientating. You were entering their world, the one in which Gerry charged about taking risks and Joan would enthuse everyone with an idea and then go off it. You could land with a thump.

  It rained all the way to the south of France and Gerry, always a fast driver, drove even faster to get through it. Harry thought Gerry had been drinking and was frightened by this crazy speed. ‘Gerry, you shouldn’t,’ Joan would say, though tickled that he did. In any case, Harry and Avis’s demand for English cups of tea was getting on her nerves. The blue of the Mediterranean, when they got there, was great, but the lack of money for café stops on the way home made Harry irritable. Joan thought he was ungrateful. Had not Gerry spent all his money on their transport?

  Anyone tempted to look down on Harry and Avis, as Joan and Gerry did, should have first tasted Life with Joan and Gerry. They would then feel sympathy for them too. Once home, Joan immediately caught a cold.

  These early years at Stratford were an explosion of Joan’s taste and it was then that she was able to explore her very favourites, the Elizabethans. In 1953 she tackled, for the first time, her absolute favourite, Ben Jonson. The play was The Alchemist. Howard Goorney was Subtle, Harry Corbett played Face, and Avis Bunnage was Dol Common. George Cooper as Sir Epicure Mammon, pushed on in a wheelchair, was nearly killed when the iron curtain hurtled down all by itself. Only Harry Greene pulling him backwards in the nick of time saved his life. That was another mark against Rowland Sales. The theatre was a death-trap. Aside from that, Joan thought it was one of her best productions and loved her actors for their performances. It was socially she was less keen on them, as the trip to France showed.

  From time to time, she would say: ‘I’m rich,’ and you’d wonder why because you could see no evidence of money in large amounts. On this occasion, it was because of Ben Jonson. It was his words that made her rich. Woe betide anyone else having a go at him, though. If she had met them, she would have killed them.

  Shakespeare she wasn’t quite so keen on. For her, he was too politically middle-of-the-road but, like many people, she loved the poetry of Richard II and, in 1954, that is what she started with. Poetry still meant finding the sense and the right energy, though. ‘We are getting so much physical excitement from just playing what is written.’

  When acting herself, Joan was said by Theatre Workshop members to have been a bit of a ham, not Theatre Workshop at all, but she was good at verse speaking. It sounded so natural. Using this talent, she spent night after night working with Howard Goorney on John of Gaunt’s dying speech, most of which is one long sentence. In those days, it was common to make it elegiac so that the actor could show off his voice. Joan heard something else: anger.

  In any case, whatever the speech, she wasn’t interested in ‘voice wanking’ and what a perfect opportunity arose, in those weeks, to contrast that with her way. Richard II was also being done by the Old Vic. John Neville, tipped to be Gielgud’s successor, was playing the king. Joan sent along a new recruit, Canadian George Luscombe, to see it. He came back mightily cheered and spent the rest of the day sending up the sound of the Old Vic actors. There, quite specifically, was an example of Joan setting out to cure an actor of an inferiority complex.

  Her Richard was Harry Corbett, who found the right energy for ‘I wasted time, and now doth time waste me,’ by having one ankle tethered to a stake, so that he could only walk in a circle. Joan was very proud of his performance.

  Van Call came next, the play that despite a local author, Anthony Nicholson, did not attract an audience. Gerry commissioned it. No longer was he commenting on what he thought was wrong, he was actively trying to make what he thought was right. This is the first occasion he can be seen doing that.

  The play was set in a market and in her staging Joan brought the outside market inside. You can hardly think of a better way to involve the community and yet the play failed. Peggy Soundy of the Supporters’ Club said: ‘In Van Call, you were trying to put across a line and you could feel it. If it doesn’t come from someone’s gut, in a real sort of way, it shows, and I think the locals saw this.’ Gerry still had a way to go, but it wouldn’t be long now. The wheels were
turning.

  Joan carried on with her Elizabethans. The author of Arden of Faversham may not be known but the play was published when Shakespeare was 28. It doesn’t have his poetry, but being based on a true murder story of the time, it has a documentary excitement.

  As feared by Joan and Jimmie, but wanted by Gerry, the national critics were beginning to come and Ken Tynan, writing in the Observer was taking a tentative interest in Theatre Workshop. ‘The climax,’ he wrote, ‘with Arden stabbed and dragged out into the fields tingles with grimness.’ He was disappointed that there wasn’t a set for the last act and that cuts had to be made to accommodate this, but then: ‘the rampant Bovarysme of Barbara Brown’s Alice [in real life Barbara was mouse-like] could hardly be bettered and Harry Corbett plays Mosbie with a dark, cringing bravura which recalls the Olivier of Richard III.’ The Harry/Olivier comparison would not have gone down well with Joan, had she read it, because she’d seen that performance at a matinee and thought Olivier was not trying. In her eyes, that damned him forever.

  As for reading the critics in general, Joan said she never did, which no one believed. When, towards the end of her life, she gave the reason, you could think otherwise. ‘I never read the critics because, if I had, I might have given up.’ Gerry read all of them: ‘It’s my job.’ Whether this new attention was what Joan wanted or not, you can sense the outside world, the one that, so far, had taken no notice, edging towards Theatre Workshop.

  Towards the end of its run, Gerry shot off to Paris again, taking a load of photos with him. A few days later, he returned. The very next year, Theatre Workshop was to be the official British entry for the Paris Festival of International Drama. At last, he’d done it.

  This festival had only started the previous year but it was already important. The Berliner Ensemble had brought Mother Courage. Great Britain had brought TS Eliot’s The Confidential Clerk, which in comparison had seemed thin gruel.

  Running the festival, which in 1956 would be known as the Théâtre des Nations, was Monsieur Julien, boss of the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt (now the Théâtre de La Ville) and he’d been worrying about what the British would be able to send the next time. So too had Ken Tynan. After grumbling, in one of his articles, that Mother Courage had been ‘acclaimed everywhere in Europe save in London’ he went on to pose the question: ‘Where, in the absence of a national playhouse, is our best to be sought?’ Hardly had he asked this than fans of the Old Vic were appalled to discover that it was at Theatre Workshop. That’s what France thought, anyway.

  The man Gerry had actually spoken to was Julien’s assistant, Claude Planson. Gerry’s romantic enthusiasm had charmed him. ‘You must love her very much,’ he said of Joan. It was the start of a long relationship between him, Gerry and Joan. Soon, he would take over from Julien and, as the director of the Théâtre des Nations, he would ask them back many times, even when they didn’t have anything to bring.

  The show to go was Arden of Faversham plus something else. ‘Volpone,’ said Joan, fired up. She couldn’t resist another Ben Jonson. It didn’t happen at once, though. On a roll, she did her new Czech-flavoured Schweik. The tunes she’d picked up there were what made the difference. As Peggy Soundy said, the locals loved it. This made someone think that the middle European residents of Swiss Cottage would love it too. Off the show went to the Embassy Theatre. They didn’t love it. Even more annoying, Joan was without a company. She had to put together a scratch one in order to do Dickens’ The Chimes. This she adapted herself as she had done Balzac’s Père Goriot the previous month, and would Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper the next month. Again, Joan was simply writing, rather than being the Great Writer. In the cast of The Chimes were Thelma Barlow who, six years later, would play Mavis Wilton in Coronation Street, and the young Michael Caine.

  Joan said that Caine couldn’t use his arms. They hung limply by his sides, like Michael Redgrave’s. If you look at a long shot of Redgrave in the The Quiet American (1958), you notice that Joan’s observation is right. After The Chimes, Joan said to Caine: ‘You can’t act, so you might as well fuck off up to the West End or get a job in films.’ ‘Best bit of advice I ever had,’ said Caine once he was a star. By coincidence, in the remake of The Quiet American (2002), he played the same part as Michael Redgrave.

  ‘Probably the best show we ever did,’ said Joan of Volpone, ‘and without changing the name we got them in.’ Nobody in the UK wanted to pay the fare for the production to go to Paris, though, except for one commercial theatre producer. ‘We haven’t worked all these years for him to put his name at the top,’ was the company’s attitude and so they put on their costumes, picked up the set, trees for Arden, pillars for Volpone, and at Calais, called them personal luggage. They didn’t go to the Sarah Bernhardt – that would come later – but to the Hébertot, a smaller theatre, nearer to the size of the Theatre Royal, in the north of Paris. Camus had worked there.

  The company from the Theatre Royal, Stratford, representing England at the festival, opened their double programme with the anonymous Elizabethan play, Arden of Faversham. The effect upon both the public and the press was one of immense and unqualified success. The critiques, spread frequently over two or three columns, were unanimous in acclaiming the company as a revelation. Even M. Jean-Jacques Gautier (the critic of Figaro who cultivates a flourishing reputation for severity) enveloped the whole cast with one broad flourish: “All the actors are excellent,” and went on to eulogise several members in particular. Paul Gordeaux, writing in France-Soir, said, with reference to criticisms published in England concerning the choice of Theatre Workshop, that “the English theatre could not have been better represented.” Arts et Spectacles, frequently given to uncontrolled outbursts of enthusiasm, stated with wild abandon that Theatre Workshop was the best acting troupe in England.

  That came from the Spectator in 1955. Even so, Claude Planson still had to find the fare for the company to go home and there was no time or money to have fun while they were there. During the day, the company was too busy thinking of what came next. What actually came next, at this climactic point with Gerry triumphant, was, in more ways than one, the end of Theatre Workshop. Firstly, a woman called Mavis Clavering who had joined the company many years before, given it £100, trained, left and wanted her £100 back, was making Theatre Workshop bankrupt. Secondly, Harry Corbett and George Cooper resigned.

  The bankruptcy problem was solved by Theatre Workshop Ltd., starting up again as Pioneer Theatres Ltd. The Harry/George problem, the way Joan saw it, was never solved. It was not, however, the end of the story of Joan and Gerry. For Gerry, it was a new beginning.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  END OF/BEGINNING OF AN ERA?

  What led to Harry and George announcing their resignation? Something must have been going on. It seems their reasons were not entirely the same. Both wanted to earn more, or rather something. However George, under pressure from his new wife, Shirley, who’d been working in wardrobe, wanted a quieter life, while Harry wanted to spread his wings.

  George, who never liked the idea of long runs – he only did one, Billy Liar – continued acting mainly in television, so that he could be at home in the evenings. Strongly featuring in his post-Joan career were Lindsay Anderson and Ken Loach. They were the only two other directors he respected.

  Harry’s outlook was not so straightforward. He had been noticing changes in Theatre Workshop for a long time. At first, it was a co-operative with everyone having a say, and it was also anonymous. No one had billing on posters. Gerry was not that interested in either of those principles. At company meetings, he puffed on his pipe, listened, first to Joan saying, ‘No meeting should last longer than an hour,’ before going on to talk for ages, and then to the actors complaining. After that, he went away and did what he wanted to do.

  One of things he wanted to do was to promote Joan, hanging the whole of Theatre Workshop on her name alone. Consequently, it started to appear on posters, growing bigger and bigger, w
hile the actors’ names didn’t appear at all. To be fair, neither did Gerry’s, not for quite a while anyway.

  Joan was not totally at ease with this but when Harry pointed it out to her, said that she hadn’t really noticed. What Gerry was doing was single-minded or, if you prefer, ruthless, but you could argue that he was right. Joan had the greatest talent, and his plan worked. Democracy is slow. Gerry and Joan were, by nature, benevolent despots. That’s fine in theatre: if you don’t like it, you can go. Harry went. The tin lid, Joan thought, was Paris; all that success but not a penny coming in, and no time for fun, only work.

  Neither Harry nor George left at once. Something important had come up and they were needed.

  Ken Tynan complained about Mother Courage not being acclaimed in the UK. Gerry had been doing something about it. During 1954, he was in contact with Eric Bentley, Brecht’s best-known translator into English. Bentley, an American, first wanted to get rid of some Americanisms in the text and then he wanted to come over to co-direct with Joan. Gerry, while pointing out that Theatre Workshop had a special way of working, didn’t actually say no. Being the first British company to do Mother Courage would be quite a coup and Gerry was not unaware of the publicity value. Staying open to any suggestion, or appearing to, he agreed to consider casting actresses like Marie Löhr and Peggy Ashcroft who were nothing to do with Theatre Workshop. Thinking he had the rights – he did, from Eric Bentley – he told Oscar Lewenstein, who suggested that he, himself, and Wolf Mankowitz should present it, together with Richard II, at the Taw and Torridge Festival in Devon the following year.

  A problem arose. Gerry didn’t have the rights from Brecht. Oscar, who knew Brecht, went to Berlin to sort something out and succeeded. The result was a contract, in which it said that Harry Corbett and George Cooper would be in the production and that Joan would direct and play Mother Courage. Brecht had seen photos of her in a play called Haben (The Midwife) by Julius Hay. She was playing the eponymous midwife, a woman who provided poison to wives who wanted to get rid of tiresome husbands, and according to Brecht, she looked just right for his lead. Gerry, optimistically, was happy to go along with this.