by Peter Rankin
A little thought would have told him that it wasn’t a very good idea. Mother Courage is a huge part, and whoever plays her shouldn’t have to worry about directing. Brecht suggested he send a young assistant, Karl Weber, to help out. Gerry and Joan accepted this, but then rehearsals hadn’t started yet.
On the first day, Joan told Karl not to hold back but to say anything, absolutely anything. By the end of the week, he was out. It appeared he was trying to impose a carbon copy of Brecht’s production on her. There are letters from Karl and Brecht about this time. Neither was angry, more regretful. Joan was difficult but they recognised that she was talented. The letter from Brecht was typed by Elizabeth Hauptmann who, these days, is credited with writing more of The Threepenny Opera than Brecht cared to admit.
What made everyone, including Oscar, put their foot down was what Joan was up to with the part of Mother Courage. She wasn’t playing it. She’d put Katherine Parr, an actress whom she probably remembered from her rep days, into the part. This would not do. Oscar reminded her of the contract, and Joan had to learn her lines on the train to Devon.
The first night was a disaster. Harry Corbett and George Cooper were fine, as was Barbara Brown, but Joan, under-rehearsed and unable to sing Paul Dessau’s songs, was firmly reminded of this by Ken Tynan in his review. She had another problem, one which the audience was not aware of. Mother Courage plucks a chicken and the chicken that night, was off. Joan was trying not to be sick. Exactly the same thing happened to Diana Rigg at the National Theatre in 1995.
This is when Harry and George left. The next year, George played Tiger Brown in Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, produced by Oscar Lewenstein. In it too was Jimmie Miller/Ewan MacColl. Harry, introduced to Peter Brook by Ken Tynan, played First Gravedigger in Hamlet with Paul Scofield at the Phoenix Theatre later that same year, in December 1955. He complained to Joan that, when he asked about doing the usual text analysis he’d done with her, Peter Brook said that he expected him to do that alone at home.
This production went to Russia. After it, Harry invited Joan and Gerry to lunch at the White Tower, a Greek restaurant off Charlotte Street. Avis came too. She was ill at ease. Of Hamlet going to Russia, Harry said:
‘It should have been us.’
‘But Harry, there is no us now,’ said Joan.
She was utterly downcast and so was Howard Goorney. Plays still had to be put on at top speed. New actors had to be brought in and, of course, they hadn’t had all those years of training. That is what they, Joan and Howard, meant by the end of Theatre Workshop.
‘Not at all,’ said Gerry. ‘It’s merely the end of an era.’
‘Some hope of conquering England now,’ said Joan.
‘We will,’ said Gerry.
Nevertheless, he was fretful too, but for a different reason. He was worried about the number of classics and revivals Theatre Workshop was doing. They made Joan happy and they were good but something – that explosion, whatever it might be – wasn’t happening. As usual, there was no money either. He wrote to Kristin Lind. She could at least help with another tour of Scandinavia to keep the company afloat. She did. Arden of Faversham could go early in 1956. No later, said Gerry, or Theatre Workshop would go bust.
Before going, Joan did Big Rock Candy Mountain, a show for children using the songs of Woody Guthrie. Alan Lomax co-wrote it, and came over from America. Afterwards, he sent a letter to her, once more having a dig at the exquisiteness of her production. Joan could have taken it as a compliment but she didn’t. She was rather annoyed.
She wasn’t particularly thrilled about Scandinavia either. Her new Arden company, she thought, was not nearly as good as the old one. Scandinavia didn’t notice.
Theatre Workshop’s tours of Europe, in retrospect, were feathers in its cap. At the time, they were survival. On this occasion, Gerry’s efforts were not rewarded but punished. There he was, still plugging away trying to get bits and bobs out of the Arts Council, when all Jo Hodgkinson could ask was: how can the Arts Council finance Theatre Workshop if it isn’t there? At least the bankruptcy was discharged. Joan treated herself to Edward II. She’d been promising herself that since her first go at Richard II. No worries about middle-of-the-road politics with Marlowe. Simply being himself was subversive.
During rehearsals of Edward, a play that made Joan happy, came something that would, at last, make Gerry happy and, in so doing, change the course of Theatre Workshop’s history. It came via an odd route, the Scottish folk scene that Jimmie favoured. While the company was performing in Edinburgh, and hanging around with Scots poets, a songwriter from Ireland had introduced himself. His name was Dominic Behan. Joan, smelling phoney, had taken an instant dislike to him, a dislike that would remain for the rest of her life. Nevertheless, a link had been formed because, when the Abbey Theatre turned down The Quare Fellow, a play written by Dominic’s brother, Brendan, Brendan, having also read about Schweik in The Worker, sent it to Jimmie, and Jimmie sent it to Joan.
Her description of its messy manuscript is cheerily colourful. What she didn’t convey, because she didn’t need to, was what the Abbey Theatre would have found: a full-length play in three acts. This should be made clear because there’s a Theatre Workshop legend that Joan invariably made hits out of a few pages.
On reading a couple of scenes, though, the reader at the Abbey would have felt their heart sinking. There was no shortage of funny stories and funny lines, but nothing happened. A bunch of prisoners and a bunch of warders in a jail either stood or sat there talking. It wasn’t a play. If left as it was, it would have become boring. This disappointment for the Abbey Theatre and, as it happened, Howard Goorney, was, for Joan, a challenge. It is what separates her from the others. Howard’s disappointment was not quite the same as the Abbey’s because he knew Joan; maybe she could make something of it, he thought, but it would be hard work and, at that moment, he couldn’t face it. He got a job in a rep company where all he had to do was learn the lines.
The rehearsals of The Quare Fellow took place during the run of Edward II. That gave Joan and the company four weeks. Even to do a play not requiring script work, four weeks is hardly long, though theatre managers would disagree. Joan used to complain of herself that she was lazy and could only work in bursts. They were some bursts. That furious concentration she’d developed when reading books as a child was part of it. Sometimes she would go to bed as late as three and get up at six to work on a script. Gerry would then drive her to the theatre where she would give her rewrites to a secretary for them to be typed up by the time the actors arrived at ten.
Brendan Behan wasn’t there to start with, so Joan worked on, making changes by herself, wishing he’d hurry up and come. Gerry attempted twice to get Brendan over by sending the price of the fare. Brendan spent it, maybe on drink, though not necessarily; the dangerous drinking had not yet started. He didn’t have the money for it. The third attempt worked: Gerry had sent a ticket. Brendan arrived, stuttering with shyness, as he hadn’t been in England since his three-year stint in Borstal as a teenager for bringing over explosives from Dublin.
In his script, he gave almost no indication of what his characters were up to while they were talking, so Joan set her actors to creating an ordinary day in a prison. That meant slopping out, cleaning cells and walking round in a circle during association, which was the prisoners’ free time and exercise. As the actors didn’t know what was going to happen next, they were driven crazy walking round and round on the theatre’s roof, a place strictly out of bounds when Rowland Sales was in charge.
Once they settled down to work on the actual play, all was revealed. The work they had been doing gave the play little gear changes and punctuation. The dialogue could then be floated in over the top.
When not with the actors, Joan looked at the different stories and flows of thought, which some today call units, and, seeing that a unit on this page would have more impact on that page, moved it. For example, inside Act One, Brendan had put a suici
de. Joan moved it to the end of Act One. Some units gave away too much or repeated what had already been said. The former could be moved. The latter could be cut. Two characters could be made one, while a chunk of dialogue given to one person could be shared out among other characters who had nothing to do. Individual lines could be sharpened by being shortened. Individual funny lines could be moved to where they would be funnier. Discussions about the pros and cons of hanging were brought right down. It was better for the audience to work those out for itself as the play went along.
What did happen in Brendan’s script – and here he was providing one big dramatic muscle – was a hanging at the end. Given that capital punishment had not yet been abolished, it made the play not only new but topical and relevant, and that is what would have made Gerry happy. Joan had to carry on working. In the play, it soon becomes clear that, firstly, the audience is not going to see the quare fellow, and secondly, that he is guilty – there’s no doubt he’s committed murder, what’s more a brutal one – and that therefore no reprieve is possible, so no tension can be built up that way.
Without adding any plot at all but by continuing to tweak in order to keep the dialogue rippling along and the changes of thought or mood coming just at the right moment, Joan was eventually able to hold the audience’s attention, while not allowing it to forget what was going to happen. The tension was not the usual. The characters didn’t feel it. The audience did. By this jigging around of existing material and not adding lots of new dialogue, Joan was also being faithful to Brendan’s intention. On other plays where the plot was OK but the dialogue not so hot, Joan took other measures.
Songs, carefully placed, as Shakespeare knew, were useful too. Brendan had provided one, the ‘Old Triangle’, and was usually a great source of song, but he wasn’t there. Joan, in her own script, wrote the name Ewan, thinking she would have to be in touch with Jimmie. Her faith in his songs hadn’t wavered.
In the end, the result could not have looked simpler but to come up with that kind of simplicity requires quite a gift.
Brendan said that he knew of no convict who was hanged who didn’t thoroughly deserve it. What he was getting at was the effect it had on all those people around the execution. The audience, while laughing at the many funny lines in the play, becomes one of those people, which is why Ken Tynan wrote: ‘I left the theatre feeling overwhelmed and thanking all the powers that be for Sydney Silverman.’ Silverman was the MP campaigning at the time for the abolition of capital punishment.
This was the moment when Tynan unequivocally took to Theatre Workshop and in particular Joan; Gerry’s work coming to fruition, one might say. His review finished: ‘The Quare Fellow will belong, not only in such transient records as this, but in theatrical history.’ Another well-known critic of the time, Bernard Levin wrote: ‘Brendan Behan has, at one bound, achieved immortality.’ In 1965, Silverman succeeded.
The Quare Fellow opened sixteen days after Look Back in Anger and, were you only to have read the reviews, it seemed much more important, but it’s John Osborne’s play that is regarded as the big gear change in British drama. Maybe it’s because Brendan was Irish, while Look Back in Anger was giving younger English audiences, for the first time, the sound of their own voices, their own tune. Of John Osborne, Brendan said: ‘Angry Young Man? He’s about as angry as Mrs Dale’s Diary.’ Mrs D was a radio soap opera of the time.
So there was Gerry, the closest he’d ever been to his ambition, the greatest company in the world, and there was Joan at the beginning of a period which she dismissed as not being Theatre Workshop but just writing jobs. Howard Goorney who came back and took over a role in The Quare Fellow, thought the same.
Brendan, arriving on time for the first run-through said: ‘Christ, I’m a bloody genius,’ and, on the first night, standing on the stage: ‘Miss Littlewood’s company has performed a better play than I wrote.’
Joan regarded The Quare Fellow as Brendan’s one proper play and his greatest. What a relief the Abbey turned it down.
Until that autumn The Quare Fellow and Schweik took on their own lives. Both went to the West End, while The Quare Fellow also went on tour. Claude Planson, by then Director-General of the Théâtre des Nations, invited Schweik to Paris, this time not to the Hébertot, but to the bigger, more central Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt, a building Joan was happy to be in. Actually, the actor playing Schweik was wrong. Max Shaw, taking over from George Cooper, was too lean, too obviously clever. It’s an indication of how Theatre Workshop, still with no grant, was under constant pressure. Problems had to be solved overnight and that led to compromises. Max as Schweik was not the worst, because he found his way through it.
When autumn came, Gerry, thinking it was time for a holiday, put Joan in the Alvis with some sleeping bags and set off for Italy. Seeing Eduardo de Filippo’s company in Naples was all Joan hoped it would be. That’s unusual. Often she would imagine something wonderful in a far-off place, only to be disappointed when she actually saw it. De Filippo had a theatre in the poor quarter of Naples, where he wrote and put on plays that were about the people who lived round about.
On the way home – in Florence, to be specific – Joan noticed Gerry stopping to drink at every drinking fountain. They headed on north – Gerry was keen to make it to Ljubljana in Slovenia, then part of Yugoslavia – but the rain came down so heavily they had to forgo camping and find a hotel. It was there that Joan saw Gerry in the shower. He had lost a lot of weight. Joan, when she first told this story, said that she was shocked but later the word ‘shocked’ was omitted. People would be asking, ‘Hadn’t you noticed before?’
Joan’s first school and in her words, the best.
The portrait ‘Nick’ painted of Joan.
For the Spanish Civil War;
Joan in her radio days.
Kristin Lind as Lysistrata.
John Bury (Camel) pointing.
The Travellers. Ewan MacColl (Jimmie Miller) in the background wearing glasses, Harry H Corbett clutching a briefcase, Avis Bunnage, eying a soldier;
Uranium 235. Gerry as Energy.
Theatre Workshop in Czechoslovakia;
Twelfth Night. John Blanshard, Avis Bunnage, Harry H Corbett (Theatre Royal Stratford East).
The Alchemist (Theatre Royal Stratford East);
The Dutch Courtesan. Howard Goorney with slashed sleeves (Theatre Royal Stratford East).
Amphitryon 38 (Theatre Royal Stratford East);
Red Roses for Me. Avis Bunnage on the left, Margaret Greenwood with the basket (Theatre Royal Stratford East).
Arden of Faversham. Israel Price, Barbara Brown, Howard Goorney (Theatre Royal Stratford East);
The Good Soldier Schweik. Harry H Corbett, George A Cooper, Barry Clayton (Theatre Royal Stratford East).
Arden of Faversham. George A Cooper kneeling, Barbara Brown, Maxwell Shaw, Harry H Corbett (Theatre Royal Stratford East);
The Good Soldier Schweik. Maxwell Shaw in bed furthest left, Howard Goorney next to him, George A Cooper, fourth bed in, Gerard Dynevor next to him and John Blanshard next to Gerard (Theatre Royal Stratford East).
The Prince and the Pauper (Theatre Royal Stratford East);
Volpone. Barry Clayton, George A Cooper, Maxwell Shaw (Theatre Royal Stratford East).
Volpone (Theatre Royal Stratford East);
The Midwife (Haben) Avis Bunnage, kneeling (Theatre Royal Stratford East).
Mother Courage with Joan as Mother Courage, Barbara Brown, in cart (Taw and Torridge Festival, Devon);
Joan and Gerry, Paris Festival of International Drama.
The Sheepwell. Howard Goorney in the middle (Theatre Royal Stratford East);
Edward II. Peter Smallwood in the centre (Theatre Royal Stratford East).
Edward II. Peter Smallwood, Maxwell Shaw (Theatre Royal Stratford East);
The Quare Fellow. Glynn Edwards, second from left, Brian Murphy, fourth from left (Theatre Royal Stratford East).
You Won’t Always be on
Top. Stephen Lewis, Dudley Sutton, Brian Murphy, Murray Melvin, Richard Harris holding can, George Eugeniou (Theatre Royal Stratford East);
Unternehmung Ölzweig (Operation Olive Branch) (Maxim Gorki Theatre, East Berlin).
The Maxim Gorki Theatre welcomes Joan and Camel at Berlin’s Tempelhof airport;
The Hostage. Glynn Edwards, Murray Melvin, Margaret Greenwood standing on stair, Eileen Kennally, Robin Chapman, James Booth, Celia Salkeld (Theatre Royal Stratford East).
In the same way that Joan could step out of life and disappear, she could, sometimes, not see what others could. It was an instinct that kept her away from what would upset her. Throughout her life, when something bad happened, she was often not there. The news would have to be brought to her. It linked up with her retiring side that could also be seen in her sister, Betty. Very serious problems had to be dealt with by someone else, usually Gerry. This time the problem was Gerry.