by Peter Rankin
As to her losing her temper, this was often manufactured. ‘Denouncing,’ she called it, calculated to humiliate the actor in front of the others and send out a warning. The actor’s ego, only there, in her opinion, to serve the actor’s interest, no one else’s, was to be crushed. However, on this occasion, she simply lost it.
Avis, ‘Bunn’ had been with the company for over five years and, after her man, Harry Corbett, had left, had stayed on. Murray Melvin, who had not long joined, found her sitting on the long bench in the foyer in a state of shock. So was he when she told him what had happened – as was Gerry. Avis was too valuable to the company. This time, unable to go along with Joan, Gerry became the go-between. Shock wasn’t the only thing, though. When Joan turned against someone she had known for years, it was as if she hadn’t known them at all. It was frightening. Three months later, Avis was back.
During a Celestina rehearsal – a struggle to find the style – ‘Eileen Draycott, hammy; the young ones, nowhere near it’ wrote Joan – two plain clothes policemen appeared and took her to one side. They spoke about You Won’t Always be on Top which puzzled her as she’d already forgotten it. Notes they’d taken at performances showed the dialogue to have been no longer what the Lord Chamberlain had approved. As the run had gone on, changes had been made, on top of which actors had ad-libbed.
Given that the play’s only strengths were honesty and immediacy, the continuing work Joan and the actors had done seems to us now to have been essential. In those days, it was breaking the law. One particular moment had got to the policemen. It was when Richard Harris had peed into a hole in the ground while impersonating Winston Churchill. Joan, Gerry, Richard and the author, Henry Chapman, were summonsed. A heavy fine, if imposed, would close the theatre.
Déja vu springs to mind. Had not the same thing happened before the war during the run of Last Edition, even down to the note taking, which, when the case came to court, proved to be equally incompetent? More than that, Harold Lever, who had helped all those years before, became involved again. He brought in Gerald Gardiner as barrister, later to be Harold Wilson’s Lord High Chancellor. Both took the case for free. Also offering support was Wayland Young, the journalist who campaigned to bring an end to theatre censorship. Two years later, he became Lord Kennet. It was a further example of enlightened Establishment figures and Joan coming together.
The case itself, with the policemen trying very correctly to read out building site slang and getting it hopelessly wrong, had the magistrate contorting himself trying not to laugh. All the accused got off scot-free, so, this time, no fine at all.
A photo appeared in the papers of Joan, Gerry and Richard, smiling and waving. They look a jolly lot, thought the nineteen-year-old Shelagh Delaney in Salford; I’ll send my play to them.
CHAPTER SEVEN TEEN
SHELAGH
Only a few weeks prior to the photo in the paper, a friend of Shelagh’s, a young man, had taken her into Manchester to see Margaret Leighton in a pre-West End performance of Terence Rattigan’s play, Variations on a Theme. Fascinated as she was by Margaret Leighton’s height – Shelagh was tall too – she did not allow it to cloud her judgement of the play, which turned out to be the same as the national critics’ when it arrived in the West End. It was no good. Actually, Shelagh’s immediate reaction was that she could do better than that.
She sent the play to the theatre with a covering letter addressed to Joan. The envelope was opened by Gerry. Like reading the critics, which Joan didn’t do, script reading was one of the jobs he had taken on. It’s an important one, but most of the time it’s not much fun. Many people, working in theatre and film, try to get out of it. Gerry didn’t.
In the letter, Shelagh tells Joan how the young man, who was trying to improve her mind, took her to the Opera House in Manchester and that she came away after the performance realising that, after nineteen years of life, she had discovered something that meant more to her than her life.
The next day, she’d bought a packet of paper, borrowed a typewriter and ‘produced this little epic.’ It took her two weeks. ‘I should be extremely grateful for your criticism – though I hate criticism of any kind.’ She tells Joan about knowing nothing of the theatre but the script, 67 foolscap pages – another arrow in the five pages legend – is divided into acts and scenes and is not that badly typed. ‘The End. Thank God!’ it finishes. Almost as a postscript to the letter Shelagh writes: ‘I don’t really know who you are or what you do – I just caught sight of your name in the West Ham magistrates’ proceedings.’ Earlier she had written: ‘No matter what sort of atrocity it might be, it isn’t valueless so far as I’m concerned.’
Gerry did not return it. He sent a telegram to Shelagh asking her to come at once. He then sent her the fare. ‘Dear Mr Raffles,’ she answered, ‘I’m catching the 12 o’clock train from London Road station on Saturday afternoon . . . Would it be possible to meet me – or somebody else – at the London station? I daresay I could find my way to Stratford alone – but that might involve my utilising the entire resources of the London constabulary.’
Joan and Gerry were supposed to be putting on Bernard Kops’ play The Hamlet of Stepney Green – the best thing about it was the title, wrote Joan – but it was swept aside and so was the author, whom Gerry requested leave the building. A Taste of Honey was on the stage of the Theatre Royal the very next month, which would have pleased the director, Ken Campbell, who used to complain of ‘brochure theatre’. It was posted in April and put on in May.
Nearly everything that happens in the play that Shelagh sent happens in the published version, but not necessarily in that order. That is one of a few general observations that can be made. Jo, the girl, Helen, the mother, Jimmie, the black sailor who gets Jo pregnant, Peter, Helen’s boyfriend with the missing eye who is to become her husband, Geof, the gay art student; they’re all there and talking pretty much as they always would. If there was a problem, it was the ending. In the original, Jo is taken to hospital by two ambulance men, while Helen and Geof are left in the flat talking in a desultory way about the baby which is soon to be born. Joan, in a version that she wrote, had Helen, sometimes using words that had been cut from Peter and Jo, throw Geof out. Then, on hearing that the baby was going to be black, she too had gone, and for good. Jo was left alone.
This was performed briefly and some in the audience were immensely affected by it. Others were puzzled and so that version was re-written, thus annoying the people who had seen Joan’s first version when they came back to see it again. The published version has Jo, alone but with the possibility of her mother coming back, singing a nursery rhyme which Shelagh had included earlier. It came as a sort of reprise with a hint of uplift.
Before that, Helen returns to Jo because Peter has kicked her out. That was not in the original. Shelagh has Helen simply turn up.
About halfway through the original, Helen and Peter, having talked outside the flat, drop in on Jo and Geof and talk some more. During this scene, Peter takes Geof for a ride in his new Lagonda. Joan had Helen and Peter burst into the flat – no chat outside – Peter drunk, aggressive and unpleasant to Geof. It’s a quartet that builds to an angry climax. Even so, Helen and Peter leave Jo and Geof alone at the end of it.
In an earlier scene, Shelagh had Jo go off to bed leaving Geof standing alone. In the published version, Geof too gets ready for bed and lies down on the couch, always talking, which means that he can call to Jo in that particular voice people use when they’re in bed in different rooms; no new plot, just a gear change.
Before leaving the general observations, you can see that Joan, herself an awkward character with a mother she rowed with, could, with her experience of fast writing in radio, write dialogue for Helen and Jo until the cows came home, though not quite as quirky as Shelagh’s. Avis Bunnage, a Manchester girl, with an extraordinary flair for ad-libbing tart remarks that kept inside the play as well the character, added little stings all the way through, like: ‘Can
you cut the bread on it?’ when talking of the baby inside Jo. Avis, back after the sacking, played Helen. ‘Thank God,’ to quote Shelagh, who was not only talented but lucky.
As to Shelagh’s dialogue, she wrote sentences which had a tendency, in terms of rhythm, to go on a few syllables too long. Sometimes that was funny. Sometimes it was clumsy, and Joan cut those ones to make the dialogue bounce more. A line that was completely cut was: ‘You couldn’t chain yourself to that impersonation of a man forever more till kingdom come.’
When Geof first appears in the original, he states that he has been thrown out of his flat and thinks he’ll be sleeping under the arches. To add muscle, Joan turned those statements into questions asked by Jo. ‘Has your landlady thrown you out?’ ‘You didn’t fancy sleeping under the arches, did you?’
In the original, Geof tells Jo some drawings she’s done are good. In the published version, he taunts her with them. ‘There’s no design, rhythm or purpose.’
In the published version Geof, worried that Helen will not be on hand for the birth of the baby, asks Jo if she has her mother’s address. He doesn’t in the original.
Helen, in the original, is Irish. Avis was from Lancashire and, on stage, turned outwards to speak to the audience as if she was in variety. She loved variety.
When it came to production, Camel designed a set that gave the essentials leaving plenty of air. It was not a box set. To lift the play out of kitchen-sink realism which didn’t interest her – poetry did – Joan had John Wallbank, who was working backstage, go up into the stage-right box and play jazz with a small combo. It covered passages of time, marked the end of one scene and the beginning of another and set the tempo for that scene. ‘I think it’s going to be all right,’ said Shelagh after a run-through.
Joan was under the impression, when the play opened, that the critics didn’t like it, but Ken Tynan, still at the Observer, did:
Miss Delaney brings real people on to her stage, joking and flaring and scuffling, and eventually, out of the zest for life she gives them, surviving . . . There is plenty of time for her to worry over words like “form” which mean something, and concepts like “vulgarity” which don’t. She is nineteen years old and a portent.
Graham Greene bought her a typewriter.
Between Shelagh, Joan, and Gerry there evolved a parent-daughter relationship, Joan growing ever crosser with her disobedient child.
Once the play was a hit and running in the West End, Shelagh rang Gerry, who was holding the purse strings, to tell him that she wanted to buy a sports car, despite not being able to drive. His answer provoked a letter from Shelagh to Joan:
I had a very interesting telephone conversation with Gerry the other week but as he started to speak to me in a language, that was arrogant, pompous, witless and hamfisted I soon cut the cackle short on that one and tried to contact you . . . I have never liked being told what to do and I’ve no intention of starting to like it now.
As well as having a go at Gerry, Shelagh was having a go at Joan for not liking her new play, The Lion in Love. ‘I didn’t expect a word like ARTY . . . I thought you were above that sort of thing.’ Anyway, was Joan going to do it or not? ‘Lots of love, Shelagh.’
Joan replied:
I cannot imagine what you expect from me with inferior backyard abuse aimed at someone else . . . Your sense of grievance and self-pity is very disturbing, so is the fact that you still seem to think that plays can be written and sent to theatres to put on. Whether it was Aristophanes, Molière, Shakespeare and his colleagues or Chekhov or Strindberg or any other dramatist worth their salt, half of their work was done alone. The rest must be done actively, in co-operation with the group of artists who are to bring that play to physical life. The rubbish I hear secondhand through Una [Collins, Joan’s costume designer and friend of Shelagh’s] about “Joan writing your work” appals me. Your work, like anybody else’s, had to stand the test of production. In fact, you should know yourself, you have not written “a play”, you have produced a good deal of raw material from which you, and, or a group of actors may or may not produce a good play. If you want any sort of talk from me which is any use at all, you’ll have to work with me.
This letter was written in 1960 which explains Joan’s reference to The Hostage in the next part:
You must know that to work on somebody’s play as I did on “Honey” or “Hostage” you must love the authors very much. You must love and understand their work more than you love yourself. It is a tremendously hard task to “form” a play. Without feeling very near to the author you cannot do it.
The letter went on. Joan was not letting Shelagh get away with any of the points she had made. The next section was on Shelagh’s inability to get through to Joan, and it’s true: in those days, when Joan was at the height of her fame, seeing her was like seeing a rare bird. You counted yourself lucky. Joan, nevertheless, answered:
Some little while ago, when I wanted very much to talk to you during a couple of days’ rest from theatre in Manchester, I missed you. You are equally fatuous in turning up and expecting to grab me at Wyndham’s when I had just managed to snatch a few hours there to to make up for lost time on Hostage problems. The truth is that neither of us are good at planned encounters. I hate them.
Joan returned to the plays which means there was something other than The Lion in Love.
The first one you sent me which I’m extremely sorry I returned to you – was vivid. It had good writing. I loved a lot of it as I had “Honey” but it was too full of incidents. It hadn’t enough development and needed a tremendous amount of technical work done on it. This would have been done. You took it back, lost it and, eventually sent me another. Now I’m not a reader of plays but at the first attempt I found it very difficult. Any honest person of average intelligence would tell you the work is “arty”. If you haven’t a slang dictionary, read “schematic” . . . I have lived a long time in theatre and I have seen too many people go that way not to be very upset about it. My first husband [Joan was not married to Gerry], another brilliant Salford writer, went wrong like that. To me, it’s a tragedy when this happens. So what was I to say to you. What on earth can I do.
You haven’t bothered to send me the rest of the first play. You never felt it was worth your while to work with me at Stratford while this job of forming plays was going on. You must learn yourself. No one can teach you anything. If you want to work at Stratford, let me know.
It was at this time that Joan told Shelagh to study Ibsen in order to learn about structure, as Ken Tynan had mentioned in his review. ‘There is plenty of time for her to worry over words like “form”’. Bright, lazy and wayward, Shelagh never really did. What she did do was carry on making laconic remarks – to chic French film director, Roger Vadim: ‘How long does it take you to tousle your hair like that in the morning?’ – and writing quirky dialogue that was always her own. Anyway, Joan’s good instructions were really a roundabout way of turning A Lion in Love down. While hating to say ‘No’ outright, she had no intention of putting it on. Wolf Mankowitz did, though. He put it on at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry from where it transferred to the Royal Court, Oscar Lewenstein back on the scene again. Clive Barker, one of Joan’s actors, directed it and Una Collins designed it. However, the run was short and Shelagh was badly hurt. It was exactly what Joan and Gerry, in their autocratic way, perhaps, were trying to protect her from.
There’s something else in that letter of Joan’s, the tiniest hint of her sense of humour evaporating as it did with her exasperating half-sister, Betty.
As the years went by, Shelagh could often be seen at Mill House, so at least the friendship carried on, and Joan would not have said: ‘Shelagh can drag you down to a point where you think you will never come up again,’ if she hadn’t been very fond of her.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
SUCCESS, FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH
One morning at Blackheath, not long after A Taste of Honey had opened (May 1958), Jo
an and Gerry were breakfasting on bacon, eggs and mugs of tea, not because they wanted to but because Beatrice Behan, Brendan’s wife, had made it for them. She and Brendan were staying at Mill House and, having been brought up in Ireland, she would have presented the dish as ‘Rashers and eggs’. The tea, unless it had been taken from Gerry’s selection of exotic teas, would have been even less popular, as both Joan and Gerry preferred coffee.
The scene set, they turned to the morning papers: ‘British soldier found dead in Nicosia,’ was the headline and, when they read on, they saw that he was only eighteen years old and had been taken hostage. Was there a play in that? It rang a bell in Brendan’s mind. He had once taken a hostage out on a pub crawl round Dublin.
This was the story that Joan always told when asked about the origins of Brendan’s play, The Hostage. Until the late 1990s, that is, when a Guardian journalist, wanting to speak to her, rang up and told a different story. It annoyed her no end. Only a few months before The Hostage opened at the Theatre Royal Stratford in May 1958, Brendan’s An Giall, a one-act play written in Irish, had been put on in Dublin, and its plot was the taking of a hostage.
After the breakfast at Blackheath, Brendan went abroad, wrote to Joan and Gerry that he was sober and busy, but came back to Blackheath with nothing. Joan knew because she looked in his room while he was down the road in the pub. The next morning, Gerry, on seeing Brendan and realising that he had not been home all night, jumped out of the shower and, naked, chased him across Blackheath. Joan began to wonder what other play she could do. The trouble was it needed to be something new because, by then, Theatre Workshop was famous for the new. Even Joan, with her love of the classics, was admitting that.