Joan Littlewood

by Peter Rankin

  ‘You and Ted don’t know what you’re saying,’ she said.

  That evening Gerry had a bad attack of hypoglycaemia. He was crying and confused. Joan sent for the doctor. Sugar was needed, not food. Balance was restored, but Gerry was very cold in bed that night. Once more, Joan chastised herself. It was her fault.

  The next day Ted Allen came for lunch. Joan didn’t have a go at him, because there was no bust-up. In the afternoon, Raymond Fletcher, the military adviser, dropped round. He suggested that Gerry contact Basil Liddell Hart for help (Liddell Hart was an admired military historian). More immediately, Gerry spoke to John Bury, who was by then working at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Joan wasn’t pleased. She resented his attitude to Gerry. ‘Trying to act superior to his rejected father figure. So now his new dad is Peter Hall.’

  That was the weekend over. On Monday, Joan couldn’t face ‘Ted’s awful play.’ ‘Why go on?’ she thought, ‘Why shouldn’t Gerry just be happy? He enjoys this house! He says he loves it. He says he hasn’t long to live! I reject that! It needn’t be.’

  ‘Bloody film again,’ was Joan’s next entry in her diary. She was ringing Harold Lever to see if she could have her name taken off Sparrers. It didn’t happen. In the evening, she went to see the play, Semi-Detached by David Turner: ‘Author wants me! IT’S AWFUL,’ she wrote, while, at the stage door, she bumped into the play’s star, Laurence Olivier.

  The following evening, for half an hour, she looked at Ted Allen’s play before John Bury came round for a meeting. At the meeting, she said her piece. ‘It’s anti-German. Haig must be presented as a hero. It’s pro-gun, pro-bomb.’ Haig was Field Marshal Douglas Haig, commander-in-chief on the Western Front during the First World War. His tactics brought about huge losses on the British side.

  The next day was the beginning of another weekend and, with it, came another ailment. Joan had a bad chest. Those of her actors, who are still alive, will remember that this happened almost invariably during the last few days of rehearsals, and Gerry always did the same thing: he brought mugs of hot milk down to the stage. Joan, as she had made plain in Sweden, hated milk and hid the mugs behind the proscenium arch.

  There were no mugs of milk when she and Gerry, that Saturday, had another think about the dilemma they were in. Joan suggested using press cuttings of the period, material from Shaw’s play O’Flaherty VC, and dances of the time. Shaw is often criticised for arguing so well on behalf of both sides, that no one knows where he stands. O’Flaherty VC is a short play that is not like that. It is Shaw at his most outspoken. It was also Joan looking to the classics again when in a jam. That afternoon, she went to the Tate Gallery, the one place she could be sure, when she was a little girl, of being happy.

  ‘Sunday 3rd Feb,’ wrote Joan:

  THE DAY. YES! GERRY bullied me to work on WAR PLAY. So to front room and dictated idea to Gerry till 3 p.m. Took white wine, nuts and olives. Felt great, ENERGETIC AT LAST! Made lunch, finished script idea. Then wrote analysis of Semi-Detached. Gerry to T.R. [Theatre Royal] to show Camel my idea. Camel likes it. When Gerry back, tell him I’m sad.

  But why she was sad she didn’t say. What she had been dictating was the skeleton, which, with its flesh on, would become Oh What a Lovely War.

  During the week she had to go back to cutting Sparrers Can’t Sing. Work went very slowly. Charles Chilton, whose name Joan kept spelling wrongly – Chiltern, she always wrote – came to Blackheath with his arranger, Alfie Ralston. ‘Boring cronies,’ Joan wrote, which was all very well, given they were going to be with the show for quite some time; Alfie especially.

  Monday, 11 February: the first day of rehearsals for the war play. Assembled were Victor Spinetti, Ann Beach, Brian Murphy, Murray Melvin, Griffith Davies, Fanny Carby, Myvanwy Jenn, Stephen Lewis, Larry Dann, Bob Stevenson who was going to choreograph and some BBC singers off Charles Chilton’s radio show. Avis Bunnage would not be involved until much later.

  Gerry played Charles’s programme on a tape recorder. Joan was revolted by the sentimentality of the singing. Victor, with childhood memories of Remembrance Sunday in Wales, was revolted by the songs themselves. The company read O’Flaherty VC, had a look at Ted Allen’s script and talked about the research they were all going to have to do. Stephen Lewis, having said that he could do better himself, walked out, as did most of the BBC singers. The opinions of the others, assuming they had any, did not impress Joan.

  The next day, Joan went back to working on Sparrers, leaving the company to get by on its own. Some afternoons, that week, Joan popped in to rehearse. Saturday was the first day she could settle down again to the script. Gerry brought her a bunch of flowers.

  On Sunday, Joan had the idea of the pierrots, ‘girls swathed in tulle.’ It was, in other words, more thinking about an approach to this big subject. It wouldn’t be head-on but oblique, through stylisation. At one stroke, the pierrots would take away khaki – Joan hated brown on stage – blood, realistic deaths and real guns. The idea came, of course, from the pierrots she’d seen on that one holiday she’d had as a child in Ramsgate. She was pleased with herself.

  Back and forth Joan went between the cutting rooms in Soho and the stage of the Theatre Royal until she reached the end of the week, which allowed her to do some more work on the script. It wasn’t Shaw that went into it, but Schweik. The walk in the park and the beer stall scene at the beginning were a straight lift. Joan grabbed anything when she was in a hurry.

  The next day, the company read what she’d written. Gerry had the problem of dealing with the screaming Ted Allen. It was the discarding of Morris Blythman all over again. Joan had to have the spur of something that didn’t work in order to make something that did. Ted Allen’s play was a hectic fantasy that didn’t allow an audience in to understand what was going on. He’d used some of the songs but only because Gerry had told him to. He did mention profiteering and he did ask for a gadget that gave the casualty figures but, there, all resemblance to the show known as Oh What a Lovely War ended. As to the gadget, Joan had used information on placards before the war in her agitprop days. From this bad play, she saw that telling the story in simple scenes, allowing the songs full prominence to further the action, was her way forward. Even so, she did begin to wonder if she could pull it off but, a day later, felt that she was at last getting down to some real work.

  Two days after that, she got up early to read Barbara Tuchman’s book, The Guns of August, which influenced her greatly, and Alan Clark’s The Donkeys, which, she said, didn’t. Alan Clark later sued, claiming the unauthorised use of his material and, when the film rights were sold, got a piece of the action. That evening Joan went with Tom Driberg to the Kentucky Club, a haunt of the Kray twins. Both Tom and his friend, Bob Boothby, the politician and TV personality, were involved with the Krays. Joan knew them because they had helped with traffic organisation on the film. Gerry, when he heard about this visit, was furious. Joan was complaisant. Her sympathies lay with the working class who loathed the police and preferred to deal with the mafia.

  That Sunday the title of the song, ‘Oh it’s a Lovely War’, became the title of the show except ‘it’s’ was changed to ‘what’. Ted Allen claimed that this was his idea and, to this day, he is credited with it.

  On Monday, Joan spent the day with the company ‘learning to sing the songs as if they were making them up, as if they were in those circumstances not just BLOODY SINGING!’

  ‘GERRY GETTING A NEWSPANEL FOR ME! ! !’ This, in Joan’s diary, stands all on its own, not on any particular day. It was very important. Joan had seen one going round the side of the Friedrichstrasse station when she was working in East Berlin and had fancied having one ever since. This would relay both trivia and the number of battle casualties. Way back on Last Edition, Joan had been doing something similar but then, altogether, the experience she had gained in agitprop days and on radio features were a huge influence on the show that was to come.

  The actors may have been rehearsing
all day on Tuesday 26 February but that evening they piled off to the première of Sparrers Can’t Sing at the ABC cinema in Stepney. After all, Victor Spinetti, George Sewell, Griffith Davies, Murray Melvin, Brian Murphy and Fanny Carby, all in the Lovely War company, were all in the film too. Joan rang the Krays to ask what they were doing. ‘We’re blowing up balloons.’ It was irresistible. Gerry drove Joan past the Kentucky Club. The balloons said ‘Welcome to Princess Margaret from the KENTUCKY’.

  Princess Margaret didn’t show, but the evening went well and the reviews the following day were not that bad. Slight as it was, this, for Joan, was a relief.

  Gerry, who could not have been more behind Joan on Lovely War, sent for an army sergeant to teach the boys in the company rifle drill. When he arrived, he immediately ordered the women off the stage. Joan and some of the others hid in the gallery. There were no rifles to rehearse with, which annoyed the sergeant, but the walking sticks and umbrellas that the actors picked up were not far off what really happened at the start of the First World War. There weren’t rifles available then, either. ‘It is so obscene, it’s funny,’ wrote Joan. Murray Melvin, who, contrary to what the others thought, had done his national service, got the giggles, which only made the sergeant crosser. Joan kept that bit in.

  Because of the sergeant’s obscene language, which would have been impossible on a stage in 1963, with the Lord Chamberlain still active, Victor Spinetti, who was playing the drill sergeant, came up with a gibberish version. It was simply something he could do. French, Welsh, neither of which he knew, and the sound of famous actors, he could do them all and as Joan wrote: ‘It’s screamingly funny.’ That same night, she also wrote: ‘This show will be the making of Victor Spinetti.’

  Of course, the next day, the run-through was flat. Joan told Victor to drop out and watch George Sewell play his part in the first half. According to Joan, Victor immediately spotted the flat bits and knew what to do. Victor, himself, couldn’t remember this happening at all.

  Either way, the company entered that period when you’ve been at it a while and the whole thing feels as if it’s going to be a catastrophe. This was particularly true of Joan’s shows because there was always so much on-the-spot invention and writing going on. Ann Beach burst into tears because she couldn’t see where they were going. Joan said: ‘Yes, it’s hell when you’re working properly.’ And off she went to give hell to Colin Kemball, one of the BBC singers who had stayed. His tenor voice would soon be praised by the critics for his singing of ‘Silent Night’ and ‘When this Lousy War is Over’. The hell was over his way of walking. It was more of a waddle. By the next Saturday, ‘Everybody up to their neck in the suffering,’ wrote Joan.

  Sunday 10 March. ‘Work all the difficult bits. Vic great V.G.!’

  Monday 11 March. ‘I love the company and the work we are doing. Charles Chiltern doesn’t go for it. Where’s the tragedy!’ When, in the months and years to come there were arguments about billing and who did what, Joan held this against Charles.

  Wednesday 13 March. Surprise, surprise: ‘We were to open but Gerry has agreed to postpone. HE HATES DOING THIS. Always thinks I will stretch it more and more – HE IS RIGHT.’ The fact is, there was hardly a single show of Joan’s, the opening night of which, she did not try to postpone because there was always more work she wanted to do, which, in turn, would keep the critics away.

  During those days of grace, Gerry was ‘working like a demon on photos, nightly sessions, painstaking detail, writing the announcements for the newspanel.’ What Joan didn’t say was that she would change her mind about those announcements and, for those who had to re-do them by pricking holes in strips of paper, it was a laborious task.

  Saturday 16 March. ‘Camel too wants blood + death in slides. NO, no dead bodies. NO! Only live soldiers. THIS IS ABOUT LIFE – I will use some stylisation – in gas attack etc.’

  Sunday 17 March. ‘Work all day. Bribe Co. with booze, anything.’ ‘Booze, anything’ was champagne and smoked salmon sandwiches which Victor Spinetti later remembered, during a break, when filming with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Richard Burton was quite surprised.

  Tuesday 19 March. ‘3 p.m. Dry run with band and I knew it would be all right.’

  Opening night of O.W.A.L.W. GERRY’S BELOVED SHOW

  Perhaps, my darling Gerry, I can, with this, pay you back for some of the hurt and distress I cause you “beloved one”. We go to Boulestin with Tom and his friend. I am too rushed and tired to change – and escaping too [on first nights, Gerry always drove Joan to a restaurant where they would dine without any of the company but often Tom] so, still wearing striped cutting jacket.

  Joan’s striped jackets and blue and white checked trousers came from the chef’s outfitters, Denny’s, in Soho.

  In all, conceiving, researching, writing, and rehearsing Oh What a Lovely War, if you include Joan’s Sunday for the skeleton, took 38 days, but you could add a lifetime.

  That Sunday, in the Observer, Ken Tynan wrote: ‘Littlewood returns in triumph,’ and went on: ‘Miss Littlewood’s passion has invaded one’s bloodstream, and after the final scene, in which a line of reluctant heroes advances on the audience, bleating like sheep in a slaughterhouse, one is ready to storm Buckingham Palace and burn down Knightsbridge barracks.’

  Monday 25 March. ‘Gerry has had fourteen West End offers.’ One of them was from Hugh (Binkie) Beaumont, the epitome of West End but also Bertolt Brecht’s choice of producer for Mother Courage, if, all those years before, Brecht had had his way. Gerry stuck with Donald Albery who had already (sometimes with Oscar Lewenstein) brought A Taste of Honey, The Hostage, Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be and Make Me an Offer, to town. Gerry didn’t like Albery but his attitude was one of ‘Better the devil you know.’ Then again, Albery was not himself crazy about Theatre Workshop. Brian Murphy was convinced that Albery breathed a sigh of relief whenever a Theatre Workshop show closed at one of his theatres.

  A week after Oh What a Lovely War opened, Joan was back looking for Cedric and back on the Fun Palace trail. ‘Am I mad? It’s impractical. It’s an intellectual game,’ but she didn’t stop. She made a short film to advertise it. Some of her actors were in it and Walter Lassally, who had lit The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, was her director of photography. Not only that, Jeremy Isaacs of The World at War gave her studio space and Ken Adam, the James Bond set designer, helped out. Here was an example of film people she could get on with, but they came too late for Sparrers.

  The rest of that year, which should have been happy but wasn’t, Joan went back to rackety living, ‘drinking too much brandy.’ Work consisted of getting Lovely War ready for the West End, which meant dropping one actress, Bettina Dickson, and replacing her with Avis Bunnage, who was by then available. Later, Joan was approached by an angry Bettina in a restaurant. Joan couldn’t understand what was the matter with her.

  Gerry, who was describing the Fun Palace as a ‘flirting, time-wasting killer’ was taken up with trying to quash an injunction brought by Ted Allen threatening to close the show if he couldn’t get recognition. Gerry succeeded but Ted simmered on, which is how he eventually obtained that credit.

  That year, Gerry and Cedric had something else in common. They both proposed to Joan. In the case of Cedric, Joan did not think he was being very serious. Actually, she thought he was queer, like all other men who had been to Cambridge.

  In June Lovely War went to Paris and shared the top award with Peter Brook’s production of King Lear. That did make Gerry happy. Doing well in Paris was always important to him.

  The Earl of Harewood, who was running the Edinburgh Festival, invited Joan to bring a production up for 1964. Arrière-pensée or no, Joan said yes and chose the Two Henrys. The Festival she already knew well and she wouldn’t have Peter Hall checking to see if the verse was being spoken the way he liked it. He and Joan had argued about that.

  Before Christmas, Joan thought the Lovely War company needed some exercise
and put on a show for children, The Merry Roosters’ Panto. It would be performed in the afternoon. Barry Humphries joined the cast as a fairy godfather riding on a sparkling ultra-fashionable Moulton folding bike. Victor Spinetti and Brian Murphy were the ugly sisters, Eartha and Dumpy, and Peter Shaffer, an old friend of Victor’s, wrote the script. You might have thought that Peter, so apparently West End, and Joan would not have got on, but they did. Peter’s way of working wasn’t that different from Joan’s. He watched rehearsals and came back the following morning with re-writes.

  Although the show, once set before an audience was great fun, Joan got fed up before the end of rehearsals and went to Brussels, leaving Gerry behind, in the show, playing the spoilsport theatre manager, Red Socks.

  On 31 December, she wrote:

  What a HELL OF A HELL, JAY YEAR. And I thought she had given Gerry something this year – O W A L W but at what a price.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  AN INVITATION TO EDINBURGH

  It wasn’t actually Henry IV, 1 and 2 that Joan took to Edinburgh. It was Henry the Fourth. Nothing to do with Pirandello, it was an adaptation Joan had made using both parts of Shakespeare’s Henrys. Easily her favourite was Part One. She liked its full-bloodedness, fired by the passion of the character Hotspur. Part Two, with the death of the old King, and the rejection of Falstaff, is more melancholy, dealing as it does with old age. However, it has Mistress Quickly’s farewell to Falstaff as he goes away to war, and a cynical recruiting scene. Those two were what Joan added to her Henry the Fourth, which ended, as Part One does, with the death of Hotspur.

  The timing of the production was handy. That autumn Oh What a Lovely War was going to Broadway. The simple thing to do was take it off in the West End before it had faded away, rehearse and perform Henry with much the same company during the summer, and then set off for America. Barbara Windsor was going with them, so she could be in it. Richard Harris had started out with Joan, so he could be in it too.