by Peter Rankin
Brendan appeared with a sheaf of papers saying how well the character, Monsewer, sounded in English, which suggests that all he had done was translate An Giall, particularly as that sheaf came to one act. From then on, it was bits of paper and postcards sent from different places, songs sung over the telephone and Gerry theatening Brendan with his service revolver. Beatrice said that Gerry never understood Brendan, adding: ‘Yer man has to have his drink,’ which is hard to understand given that ‘yer man’ died at 41. Or 39, if you were listening to Joan, who took years off people she liked and added them on to people she didn’t.
Perhaps, if Brendan had been inarticulate, things might have been different but, with a drink inside him, he could entertain people very well by simply talking, and so the discipline of sitting down with a piece of paper faded.
Three acts or no three acts, it was time to start rehearsals. Joan assembled the company. Brendan came. A crate of Guinness was brought and, for one afternoon, he told story after story, Joan and the actors memorising them. In Joan, this was a well-developed muscle. During her time in radio she had been listening to people’s stories for years. As rehearsals continued, Brendan rang in with more funny lines and snatches of song. These allowed Joan and the company to reach the end of Act Two. Her specific task had been, ever so casually, to keep the audience laughing at the stories and yet thinking about the hostage at the same time. In The Quare Fellow, the audience knows what’s going to happen. In The Hostage, it doesn’t.
It was the Saturday before the show opened and there was no Act Three. The idea came to create an instant climax with a mad raid. ‘I’m a secret policeman and I don’t care who knows it!’ During it, the hostage, the eighteen-year-old British soldier, is accidentally shot and killed. However, he’s not down for long because, a moment later, he’s on his feet singing ‘The Bells of Hell go Ting-a-Linga-Ling’, with which the rest of the company joins in. What really makes this scene work, though, and here we’re back to rhythm, is the scene that comes before it. At night, an otherworldly dreaminess takes over the characters as if they were not quite the people we knew, then ‘Bang!’ we’re off again.
The Hostage was much more successful than The Quare Fellow but Joan did not regard it as Brendan’s best work. That would always be The Quare Fellow, and for her The Hostage was just another of her ‘writing jobs’. It went to Paris and New York where Brendan was good value on chat shows, talking again, not writing. A woman called Rae Jeffs, for whom Joan had no time, recorded Brendan and made a book from the tapes. It was not the same as Brendan writing. Nevertheless, when Joan was desperate to extract another play from him, Richard’s Cork Leg, she too tried recording, but neither she nor Brendan could work the machine. They ended up in a tangle and stopped.
Eight years later, a director, Alan Simpson, having finished the text which Brendan had started, mounted a production in Dublin. As with So Long at the Fair, Joan insisted that this couldn’t have been possible. There was not enough there. More quietly, she said that she didn’t like it anyway because it showed a dark side of Brendan which repelled her.
When Joan remembered Brendan at his best, she described him as an alchemist because he took a horrifying subject, hanging, and turned it into gold. She also said that he taught her tolerance. Her actors were grateful to him for another reason. It was his influence that eased the monastic atmosphere backstage before each show. Joan used to insist on one hour’s silence in the dressing rooms. Brendan going round, during that period and chatting to the actors, broke this silence but did no harm. Max Shaw, the one who remembered this, added that he once saw Brendan standing behind an usherette who was leaning over a freezer to take out some ice creams. Said he: ‘What’s it to be? Fucked or frozen?’
The Hostage was the next play to open at the Theatre Royal after A Taste of Honey. Only four months separated them. Four months later, came Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be, which means that three of the five shows Theatre Workshop was most famous for were first performed inside ten months.
Frank Norman, who wrote the play which became Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be, was the writer who suffered most from the breezy ‘only five pages,’ assertion. In fact, he typed 48 foolscap pages, which were divided into three acts with scenes inside the acts. What had led up to it?
It started with the 27-year-old Frank, after an early release from a three-year stretch at Camp Hill prison on the Isle of Wight, writing his account of prison life, Bang to Rights. Not only did it find a publisher, but Raymond Chandler wrote the foreword. It got Frank known.
The poet, Stephen Spender, having accepted an article on slang from him for the magazine, Encounter, of which he was the editor, suggested he write a play. Frank, barely knowing what a play was, tapped out those 48 pages on his 1904 Olympia typewriter, then put them away. Only when Penelope Gilliatt, features editor at Vogue, also suggested he write a play, did those pages see the light of day again. They were based on Frank’s time as a teenager laying about at No 86, a café in Soho, or ‘kayf’ as he would have written it, where he started his stealing and burgling career. He gave the pages to Penelope Gilliatt.
The next thing he knew, a letter arrived from Gerry. He and Joan were keen on this play and wanted him to come down to Stratford for a talk. The tune Joan had heard in the dialogue had got to her.
In the pages of Fings Ain’t Like They Used T’Be, the play Joan had read, razor king Fred Cochran in his Soho spieler mourned past glories. Lily, his old woman, though not his wife, complained of having to do all the chores with no reward. Redhot, the burglar, in his heavy coat, having just left jail, dropped in and sold Fred a posh stolen jacket. Tosher, the cowardly pimp, urged the prostitutes, Rosey and Betty, to get out on the streets, which they didn’t want to do because a new law has made soliciting almost impossible. Fred had a win on the horses and summoned a decorator to have the spieler done up ready for a grand re-opening that night. Rival villain, Meatface, heard about it and came round to carve up Fred but not before the Honourable Percy Fortescue and his girl, Myrtle, had appeared to add the touch of class Fred wanted, and also to recognise his jacket. Sergeant Collins, the bent copper, dropped in for his dropsy. All that was also in the hit show that packed the Theatre Royal Stratford for fourteen weeks and, what’s more, packed it with locals, and then went to the Garrick Theatre in the West End where it ran for two years. That needs saying before looking at how this success was achieved.
What went from Frank’s original were Effel, Fred’s off-stage wife, and the moment when Lily, at the end, ran out into the street waving a gun to fend off any villains who wanted to harm her man Fred. It was melodramatic and inconclusive. What came into the revised script was logical.
Sergeant Collins was an ever-present threat, so he was made ever-present. He didn’t just come on at the end. Instead of the prostitutes merely talking about what they did, they were seen at the beginning of the show, out in the street, trying to solicit for custom, with Sergeant Collins doing nothing about it. He was going to collect his backhander later. The decorating scene in Frank’s version went for little. Making the decorator decisive and flamboyantly camp, injected energy. A prostitute who worked upstairs was only mentioned in the original. In the performed show, she appeared but hardly spoke. Fred and Lily weren’t married, so as a climax they got married on stage. Fizz was added, as the play went along, by telephone conversations held between Tosher, played by James Booth, and a character James had invented called Wozzo Newman.
Some people believe that most of the play was casually ad libbed by the actors during rehearsals. That is not the case. Across Frank’s 48 pages, Joan scribbled, in pencil, notes like ‘needs extending’ and ‘needs developing’ and that is what the actors did. Although you could not have put Frank’s play on the stage as it was, those improvisations and ad libs, guided by Joan, were driving towards one thing, which was to make what Frank had written work. Even James Booth’s telephone conversations were contained units like lazzi in commedia dell’ar
te.
It went further. When Joan and Gerry, with their belief in the power of song, brought in Lionel Bart, whose contribution was probably what made the show the hit it was, the process still carried on. Lionel reacted to what he saw at rehearsals. Fred Cochran was always going on about the good old days, so it was logical and concise to turn his complaining into a song, ‘Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be’. Nobody could be bothered to get up and do any work; it was just a mood, but it became ‘Layin’ Abaht’. Redhot was always cold, so his dream – it was Lionel’s too – was to go ‘Where it’s Hot’. One single word in Frank’s script, ‘contemporary’, became a production number, ‘Contempery’. With only minor changes in plot, Frank’s original play was utterly transformed, but it was transformed from the inside. Joan’s letter to Shelagh about having to love the author comes to mind.
However, Joan’s faithfulness to Frank’s intent meant that Fings remained slight, or ‘froth’, as she called it, and keeping froth frothy is tough. It was symptomatic of what was going on all around Joan at that time. Between May 1958 and May 1960, she was almost completely taken up with not only creating Honey, The Hostage and Fings, but looking after them as well. She managed to do revivals of her Christmas Carol and Marston’s Dutch Courtesan but, though she liked them well enough, she didn’t think they were as good as her original productions. Her actors in those earlier ones had benefited from years of in-depth Theatre Workshop training.
Looking after shows included taking them off at Stratford, putting them on there again to be ready for either another visit to Paris, or a transfer to the West End or Broadway, shifting her actors, like Avis Bunnage and Murray Melvin, from one show to another, re-casting with actors she hadn’t worked with before and refreshing the parts of shows where once joyous ad libs had become fixed and tired. ‘The audience reacts to the moment of invention, not the actual ad lib,’ she used to say. It was work that was making her, in this country, phenomenally successful – four shows in the West End at once, taxi drivers recognising her – and internationally famous. None of that kind of work, did she like. She was spinning plates and yet she wasn’t actually doing anything, which is one of the reasons why she accepted an unusual job, directing the musical, Make Me An Offer. A fast buck was another.
Unusual, because it was a ready-made. Oscar Lewenstein and Wolf Mankowitz brought it to her. Wolf had adapted a novel he’d written about selling Wedgewood and Spode in the Portobello Road. Monty Norman, who would compose the James Bond theme, and David Heneker, later of Half a Sixpence fame, had written the songs. The designer, Voytek, had been chosen. The principal casting had been done. It was all ready to go. Joan just had to rehearse it at Stratford and send it to the New Theatre (now the Noël Coward) in St Martin’s Lane.
Wolf, whose real name was Cyril but had turned himself into Wolf because it sounded more imposing, was not a great writer. He was, however, a professional, so the nuts and bolts were already in working order. That kind of writer, though, tends not to like changes that haven’t been written by them. Consequently he was not pleased when he overheard Joan telling the actor Wally Patch to alter a line to suit himself, if he found it hard to say.
Joan, in turn, was not pleased at having Wolf sitting next to her at rehearsals making judgmental remarks about the actors. Having suggested, in her thunderous denouncing voice, that he try getting up on the stage and doing it himself, she put her arm round his shoulders and walked him out into the foyer. She was throwing him out of the rehearsals of his own show. Unlike her sacking of Avis Bunnage, this was Joan doing her usual – erupting, but not really. Moments later, she was back rehearsing and laughing. You can’t do that if you’ve genuinely lost your temper. Anyway, the show arrived safely at the New Theatre and won the Evening Standard Award for Best Musical of 1959.
With all this fast work going on and no time for training, Joan, when searching for new actors, discovered a shorthand: cabaret performers. These were people who sang, danced and played comedy, sometimes to tough audiences, and who could bring an energy and a directness to the stage that a drama-school trained actor couldn’t. It accounted for Barbara Windsor and Toni Palmer, who played Rosey and Betty in the West End production of Fings, and Victor Spinetti who was in Make Me An Offer, though not playing the part Joan wanted him to, Charlie, the lead. Wolf had already booked Daniel Massey, whom she regarded as a dud. Sheila Hancock, who was also in Make Me An Offer, was a special case. She had been to drama school but, like other actors arriving at that time, had felt, as had Joan all those years before, that they didn’t fit in because they didn’t have the right look, the right shape, the right voice, but also felt there had to be something out there for them somewhere. That something turned out to be Theatre Workshop.
Victor, who in the space of eighteen months went from Make Me An Offer to Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour at Stratford East, to The Hostage on Broadway and to Fings at the Garrick, never mind being twice miscast, enjoyed working with Joan because, as he said, she set him free. Barbara and Toni tended to disapprove. They had only auditioned because they knew they were coming to the West End, and their training, mainly in dance, had taught them to learn their lines and do exactly as they were told. However, their antipathy so amused Joan that they became her teacher’s pets. After all, they could deliver the goods. Barbara, Toni and Victor were all working in cabaret with Danny La Rue.
Gerry, who was spending much of his time ferrying Joan round in his pale blue Buick with soft suspension, protecting her from importuning journalists and stardom-seeking actors, while supervising contracts and changing the telephone number at Blackheath, had sort of got what he wanted, recognition for Joan. Of that he could have hardly got more, but things weren’t really right. The Arts Council was still proving difficult, this time in a different way. Jo Hodgkinson was extremely interested in all this money that was coming, or supposedly coming in. Where was the Arts Council’s cut? Gerry, after fifteen years of the Arts Council not being interested in Theatre Workshop, and still not providing the kind of grant that would put an end to Joan having to spin plates, was in turn not very interested in Theatre Workshop being helpful to the Arts Council. He wanted the money for new plays, and so the dance of dysfunction went on. Still, his belief in Joan’s talent and in the Theatre Royal as a base for new and relevant work was solid. Joan did not feel like that.
For her, the Theatre Royal was old-fashioned and limiting, while scrambling for hits and losing actors was giving her the pip. Her aims and Gerry’s aims were taking the two of them in different directions.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
AN OLD DREAM REVIVED,
OR JUST BUGGERING ABOUT?
It would be wrong to have the idea that Joan’s aims were as clear as Gerry’s. It’s safer to say that she was entering another ‘I don’t know what I’m doing but, boy, is everybody else going to pay for it’ period like she had in her teens. And people did pay because the energy she could bring to not knowing what she was doing was dangerous. The build-up to this period had begun ages before but, by 1960, it was accelerating.
Claude Planson asked her to bring an English classic to the Théâtre des Nations, but quickly. Not too confident, she mounted a production of Ben Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour, the one that had Victor Spinetti in it, in London, that is. He couldn’t make it to Paris. The money he was earning in cabaret with Danny La Rue was vital to him and his boss there, Bruce Brace, would not let him off, not even for four nights. Instead, Murray Melvin, free of Geof in A Taste of Honey, had to take over Brainworm, Victor’s character. Bob Grant was also in the play and he won the Théâtre des Nations’ Best Performance award playing the merchant, Kitely. It was gratifying but Joan did like to get things right for Paris and the feeling persisted that she hadn’t.
John Bury’s set for Every Man, covered in real bricks, became the set for Sparrers Can’t Sing, which was Joan’s next production. Stephen Lewis’s play was another example of her taking work that would never have been accept
ed by anyone else and making something of it. What Steve wrote was almost entirely a monologue spoken by Gran, an amusingly loquacious character based on his own gran. There was almost nothing there and yet a feeling came off the page that was golden. Joan broke up the monologue and, by means of lots of comings and goings, managed to pull the wool over the audience’s eyes, while preserving the golden feeling. It ran for ten weeks at Stratford and the following year, 1961, was revived in order to go to the Wyndham’s Theatre. Looked at on its own, there would seem to have been nothing wrong. It was teaching Gerry that, as with Fings, characters who talked like people who lived near the Theatre Royal but didn’t lecture them, would draw a local audience. As far as Joan was concerned, though, it was a play that had to be taken off, put back on and then transferred.
Hal Prince came over from America with a new play by James Goldman, They Might be Giants, that he wanted to try out at Stratford East. It was about a mad man who thought he was Sherlock Holmes. Joan’s actors liked the play. Joan liked the play. James Goldman liked Joan. Joan liked James Goldman. Hal teased Joan because he saw her being driven round London in a Rolls-Royce. Harry Corbett came back to play the mad Sherlock Holmes character. The mood was not bad. There was more money than usual for the set and Camel and Joan were pleased with their idea for periaktoi, quick scene changes. These are prisms, usually three-sided, with a different scene drawn or painted on each side. You line them up, so that they create a flat surface but when you turn a handle that connects them all, the prisms revolve to give you another picture. Although the word periaktoi is Greek, they came into their own during Renaissance times. They don’t always work. ‘When they all turn together it is magical but that is seldom,’ Joan wrote. ‘Better still when all the bloody screens are gone for that last mad “theatre scene” and the whole stage is open. Really and fundamentally dislike “set changes”, prefer the Elizabethan and Greek permanent.’