Joan Littlewood

by Peter Rankin

  Joan had long before stopped doing drawings and minute stage directions. All that was inside her head by now, so this is an opportunity to see how she was working in later days.

  As there was no play being performed at the Theatre Royal, the first part of rehearsals began on its deep stage, a black floor that slanted up to a brick wall at the back. On it were two benches and some chairs, facing not the auditorium, but the other side of the stage. Joan and the actors were simply in a space. The proscenium arch was being ignored.

  Like schoolchildren, the actors sat on the benches, while Joan was perched on a stool in front of them, smoking a Gauloise and sipping cold, black coffee from a shallow glass cup. Things didn’t stay that way for long. Joan got up, rubbed her woolly hat backwards and forwards on her head, took a puff from her cigarette and began pacing up and down.

  The moment she started talking, anyone who had done English Literature at school knew that they were going to have to leave ‘Lit. Crit.’ in the classroom. A professor can speak knowledgeably to actors and the actors can nod wisely. They can also get up and carry on acting badly. Joan, in her own words, was a ‘shit shifter’. Having described Henry IV as not so much red as white hot, and told the company that there would be no ‘daffodils up arses,’ she quickly got the actors to their feet.

  The script was neither a Penguin nor an Arden edition. It had been specially typed out with lots of cuts – Joan making sure it was going to be white hot – and with the verse printed as prose – Joan making sure about the daffodils, or lack of them, rather.

  She didn’t start at the beginning. She jumped into a tavern scene. The actors didn’t read it or shuffle about with their noses in their scripts. Joan thought of a situation in the present day with a parallel to what was going on in the scene. 1964 was the time of Mods and Rockers: Mods, cool, chic and ‘today’; Rockers, hot-blooded, unfashionable and ‘yesterday’. Suddenly Victor Spinetti and Murray Melvin were improvising two bored Mods on a street corner. However, as soon as the point was made, Joan stopped them which is what happened with all other games. She didn’t let them trail on. In addition, the reason for these games was always clear to the actors.

  When Joan did get around to some reading, the wrong actors read. Barbara Windsor was Falstaff, Brian Murphy was Doll Tearsheet. Joan wanted to maintain an atmosphere of shared discovery to avoid actors thinking, ‘This is my bit,’ and then pre-planning what they were going to do.

  Getting the right stylised rhythm for a battle cry became a problem. Joan insisted on something like a football chant. Standing in the middle of the actors, she asked each one in turn, without thinking, to say the words and suddenly an actor got it.

  This intelligent mucking about went on for a few days and you might have thought, with everyone having a go at lots of characters, that the play hadn’t been cast and that Joan had simply assembled a bunch of nice actors with no idea about what they were going to do. That may have been the case for some but, after a while, it became clear that George Cooper, back after a long time away, was going to be Falstaff, Avis Bunnage was to be Mistress Quickly and Julian Glover, a newcomer from Stratford-upon-Avon, was going to be Hotspur. That was pretty straight-forward. Other casting wasn’t.

  The newspapers had indeed announced that Richard Harris was going to be in it. He wasn’t. Jeremy Spenser, a famous child actor in the Fifties and a recent Marchbanks to Dulcie Gray’s Candida, might have been expected to be playing Hal. He didn’t; he wound up as Francis, the potboy. Joan gave Hal to Frank Coda, a cockney Italian, who’d been in the play Sparrers Can’t Sing. Barbara Windsor was going to be Doll Tearsheet which is what anyone would expect. She left at the end of the week. ‘Personal problems,’ Joan said, but, years later, Barbara said it was Joan getting her to be Falstaff that put her off.

  Yes, Barbara had worked with Joan before in Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be and the film version of Sparrers. However, she came into Fings after it had been rehearsed and put on at Stratford East. Having worked in the West End as a child and then in nightclubs, she had not been interested in experiment. She had just wanted to be in a West End hit.

  As it happened, Barbara was intelligent and gifted and, at her audition, had ad libbed the dialogue of a prostitute very well. Other games made her impatient and now Falstaff was the last straw. Perhaps, she realised, decades later, that the company was going through a freewheeling, exploring stage. It intrigued Joan to hear Barbara speak the words because what came out was absolutely fresh. Doll would not have been a problem. For a start, she speaks in prose.

  Each time Joan started a new scene, she didn’t tell the actors what to do. She gave them jobs, or even told them to think of a job, and it was up to them to get on with it. As she didn’t like people sitting and watching, ‘No judges, no critics,’ she made anyone sitting there join in. One such person found himself as a regular at the Boar’s Head tavern. Thinking it was acting and yet also a way of being invisible, he came on bent double. Joan stopped the rehearsal. ‘Think of Elizabethan portraits, how four square the people stand and yet, at any moment, those very same people could be stabbed in the back or have their heads chopped off. All this hunching up and turning in on yourself is post-Freudian.’

  One evening, Joan was working on the scene in which Hotspur reads the message that propels him to go off to war. She wanted to show what a wrench it would be for him to leave hearth and home. She made two people, not in the show, sit at his feet. One became a child, the other a huge hound. Myvanwy Jenn, who was playing Lady Percy, Hotspur’s wife, could then exploit them in her desperate fight to keep Hotspur away from a battle, the outcome of which was already looking dodgy. Thus, Julian Glover as Hotspur had physical things to react to, rather than having to produce something by thinking about it. What Howard Goorney, as the stable lad who has to fetch the horse, was getting up to at the back of the deep stage, was another matter. He was tugging at the imaginary reins of an imaginary horse in a vain attempt to get the nag out of the stable. During those days, work was a mixture of invention and flights of imaginative clowning.

  Occasionally, when a proper actor went to the lavatory, Joan would ask a non-actor to stand in. The response would be swift. ‘No, drop out. That’s acting.’ Joan was attacking a particular sound bad actors make. ‘Acting in the past tense,’ she called it. This means it’s evident the actor has had time to read the speech and decide on how he’s going to say it, colouring words as he goes along. It’s unspontaneous and the result is that any fool watching is bound to think: ‘I know he’s acting.’

  Once, two actors brushed past each other and ignored the accident. ‘Stop,’ said Joan, ‘You’re both dead.’ Instantly, she restaged that moment with herself and Brian Murphy. At the moment they touched, they stepped lightly apart, doffed imaginary hats, made apologetic movements and went their separate ways. It was a tiny everyday incident, but it was alive, and something good had come out of something unpleasant. ‘You must acknowledge each other,’ continued Joan, ‘or you’re dead.’

  In the recruiting scene from Part Two, where Falstaff recruits the most hapless bunch of men you’re ever likely to see, Murray Melvin was playing the thin, pathetic Shadow. Joan, to convey an idea to him, did something she strictly forbade, as a rule. Falstaff tries some drill and you’re expecting Shadow to ass around and get it wrong. At the back of your mind, you’re also expecting it to be not very funny. Joan wanted the opposite. She had seen a piece of film of a concentration camp prisoner coming out to greet liberating soldiers, trying desperately to look and walk as if nothing were the matter. So she took a rifle and demonstrated. That’s what directors are not supposed to do. She tried very, very hard to do the drill correctly but failed because she had no strength. The rifle, being so heavy, took over. It was a devasting piece of clowning as it was both sad and funny.

  An exercise that may sound funny but was serious, proved to be useful when a certain problem blew up. The scene was Act Five, Scene One, where the Earl of Worcester go
es to the King’s camp to express Hotspur’s purpose. It’s the last chance to put off the battle and starts with the King saying:

  How bloodily the sun begins to peer

  Above yon bosky hill!

  Worcester enters. The King chides him. Worcester puts his point of view. The King dismisses it. Hal offers to take on Hotspur in single combat. The King sends Worcester off to get an answer. The actors had got bogged down in detail. The central thrust wasn’t there. Joan asked Howard Goorney, who was playing the King, and Brian Murphy, who was playing Worcester, to do the scene in gibberish. This is quite a feat in itself. It forces you to listen very hard, but Howard and Brian were old hands, and there immediately was the urgent rhythm of argument and counter-argument.

  On the last day of rehearsals in London, Joan assembled the actors to give a little summing up talk. ‘The critics are going to think it looks like something put together on a drunken afternoon and then thrown on the stage missing it. Well, we’ve sweated blood to achieve that effect but don’t expect approval.’

  During those Theatre Royal days, Murray Melvin would tell anyone interested in the set to look in dressing room number seven. There, they would find John Bury’s model. Camel, though working with Peter Hall by then, was still Joan’s designer – just. It was a long catwalk made of wood. If anyone said that it was an impressive set, Murray would respond: ‘But it’s not a set. It’s a nothing.’ That was kind of true, but set or nothing, few people had the faintest idea of where it was going or how it would work. Nor, because of the way Joan worked, did they find out during the Stratford weeks. She wasn’t bothered. Nobody was told where to go. The actors simply acted the scene and it could be at any angle on the stage.

  You realised how things were going to work on that first Monday morning in Edinburgh. You walked past John Knox’s disapproving bust into the Assembly Hall. The space was square with a balcony that ran right round it. John Bury’s catwalk leapt from one side to the other with entrances at either end. If you were sitting down in the main area, this stage was just above eye level with sets of steps at certain points that went from the auditorium floor up to it. The court scenes were played at one end and the Eastcheap scenes at the other. In any scene, there was never more than one chair and perhaps a stool. The exception was the meeting with Owen Glendower. He had huge cushions which, of course, put his guests at a disadvantage. And that was it. The recruiting scene took place in the middle, and the battle used the whole stage. Joan’s ‘white hot’ theory was being put into practice. One scene could easily overlap with the next. No need for pauses.

  ‘Tyrone Guthrie had a thrust but I’ve gone further,’ said Joan. Sixteen years earlier, Guthrie had directed Sir David Lindsay’s play, The Three Estates in the Assembly Hall. For it, his designer, Molly McEwen, had built a thrust stage that projected halfway across the hall. At the time this was innovative, but Camel’s stage went right across.

  Joan carried on rehearsing as she had done at Stratford. She didn’t place anyone and yet everyone was in the right place. John Bury simultaneously walked quietly round the stage in between the actors, pressing on the floor to find any creaks that needed fixing. He may have done the lighting too but you would have had trouble noticing. There were no lighting sessions. It was the Theatre Workshop way of working.

  A few sweet middle-aged Edinburgh women were employed to swell the scene. They would make their main contribution in the battle. Right from the start, Joan had said she didn’t fancy doing a big battle scene with lots of carefully rehearsed fights. She’d had another idea: refugees. Clutching their belongings, and led by Fanny Carby who was in the company, these women were to run the full length of the catwalk. It was dead simple but it told the story.

  At their first rehearsal, these ladies couldn’t resist casting panic-stricken glances behind them and wailing. Joan cut the acting at once. She told them to concentrate on not losing their bags and getting from A to B. If you’re under that much pressure, you don’t have have any excess energy for pulling faces and making noises.

  Actors started to appear in costumes. These were a mixture of made and borrowed, absolutely not to look designed, despite Una Collins, who had done the Oh What a Lovely War costumes, being on hand. Hal and Poins, Frank Coda and Victor Spinetti had tight, slinky petrol-green trousers made of cotton with a slight sheen to it. This picked up on the Mod idea from that first Stratford afternoon. Murray Melvin got himself a pair of these too, but he was playing the Earl of March. What he really wanted was a cloak. On their feet were soft suede boots with rubbered soles. Joan was adamant about that. She hated the sound of footsteps and always wanted shoes that allowed actors to stay in control of their feet. In the same way, she didn’t want Falstaff to have a lot of padding. She had once seen a Falstaff costume that stood up all by itself and thought it utterly wrong because the actor didn’t have control. George Cooper had one breastplate of padding under his jerkin and that was it.

  Doll Tearsheet, now being played by Myvanwy Jenn, wore a dress made of ribbons and sweet papers as if she had picked up glittering bits of trash she’d found in the street and threaded them together. Sir Walter Blunt played by George Sewell, had Tom Fleming’s cloak from Peter Brook’s production of King Lear. Texture was all the rage in those days – to be fair it was John Bury who had started it – so it was interesting to see what had been applied to the leather, tiny bits of latex, dyed brown to look like mud.

  Make-up was not allowed. ‘That went out with gaslight,’ said Joan. The girls, however, were allowed to wear street make-up.

  Joan got fed up with the parchment scroll Julian Glover had for the letter that provokes Hotspur to join battle. ‘Spies are everywhere. They’d have got hold of a bloody great thing like that,’ and so a gofer nipped out to a seller of antiques in the Grassmarket and bought a little leather-bound book. The message was contained in that.

  Even if you’ve only been in a school play, you know that tension mounts during the last days of rehearsal. You might even know that it’s the most trivial detail, often to do with a costume, that can trigger an explosion.

  One afternoon, Joan was onstage with some of her actors going quickly through notes to be in time for an imminent run-through. This was not Joan just sitting reading. Sometimes she would leap to her feet and act the note or get the actors in question to do it, right there and then. Into this semi-charged atmosphere flounced Victor Spinetti wearing his Owen Glendower costume, a heavy blue djellaba thing. He wasn’t happy. ‘I look like a G-Plan sofa!’ Funny but badly timed. Joan, furious at being interrupted and aware of how overworked Una Collins was, let rip. Most people’s voices go up when they lose their tempers. Joan’s went down. She thundered at Victor for his selfishness. He swept off to the dressing rooms.

  Joan losing her temper was frightening but this was probably one of her artifical eruptions, that one crack of the whip you sometimes need to pull the actors together. You could also speculate on what was really in her mind at this point. A director knows by then which actors are not going to be any good but it’s too late to do anything about it, so feelings have to be bottled up. Victor, as it happens, was going to be very funny as Owen Glendower and glitteringly suave as Poins, but he was the one who got it in the neck.

  Before the show opened there were previews. Large audiences came and enjoyed it. Peter Shaffer came to a matinee and took Victor out for tea. Apart from him, that’s Victor, and also Avis Bunnage, Peter had been unable to hear any of the cast. Victor, never able to keep anything to himself, came back and told the other actors. Peter may have been right. The catwalk had about it a tremendous energy, but with audience on either side life was not made easy when it came to being heard. Nevertheless, saying something like this to actors, rather than the director, before the show opens, can be very damaging.

  The opening night came. There were no hitches, but then there shouldn’t have been. It was, technically, a very simple production, utterly reliant on the actors. Mistress Quickly’s farewel
l to Falstaff was heart-stopping. As Avis Bunnage watched and waved the old knight stomp off to war, using the full length of the stage, it was a tough job not to cry.

  The next morning, all the notices were stinkers. Frothing at the mouth the critics were, so angry that they made mistakes about Shakespeare, never mind the production. What was the big deal? Well, it would seem that even in swinging 1964, the critics wanted the actors playing posh parts to talk posh, or rather their idea of posh. George Cooper’s slight Yorkshire accent and Frank Coda’s cockney twang were, for them, unbearable. Alone among the actors, Julian Glover, who had been at Stratford-upon-Avon, was exempt.

  When critics in the 1960s pontificated about verse speaking, they were often remembering what they had heard as children and were assuming it was correct. However, it is that very singing sound, which ignores sense, coupled with a slight vibrato, that puts off people not brought up on Shakespeare. For them, the more they hear sense, the better. Joan had offended the critics’ idea of Shakespeare, not Shakespeare. Her prediction had proved right. If only the critics had come to the rehearsals.

  Fortunately, and it was typical of what happened to Joan, the press was so intrigued by the critics’ rage that it demanded an immediate conference. Joan, Vic and Avis went and, to demonstate what Joan didn’t want, impersonated famous actors doing Shakespeare. Joan did Vanessa Redgrave in As You Like It and brought the house down. The press conference, at least, was a smash. A comfort to the actors over the ensuing days was the sight of full houses which lasted for the rest of the three weeks.

  When the show was up and running, an old Scottish friend of Theatre Workshop’s, Bill McLennan, asked Joan to some kind of launch at his office where his latest venture was publishing the Urdu Times on different coloured paper for each day of the week. Bill had pale blue eyes with a faraway look, and invariably wore a kilt. Also invariably, he had some new project on the go and would pin you into a corner with those eyes and tell you about it. In other words, he belonged to that small band of longstanding, loyal Theatre Workshop supporters that Joan would do anything, hide under a table even, to avoid. This time she couldn’t get out of it. However, people at the launch, were unexpectedly handed a piece of folded card. When they opened it out, they saw that it was the design for the Fun Palace by Cedric Price, the architect.