by Peter Rankin
At one side of the stage, Barbara Windsor fussed over a silver chatelaine that hung down over her flouncy aquamarine dress and then looked slyly out front. ‘I love it really.’ Meanwhile James Booth bounded about in a pair of Lincoln green tights and not much else. It would have been more to the point if he’d had his tunic, but James was the kind of actor who never seemed to have the whole of his costume when it was needed. Costumes, make-up and props don’t interest such an actor, only comfort. A ‘little boy lost’ look at a pretty wardrobe assistant was the best he could manage. Joan stared at the tights and said: ‘Go and put on your codpiece. What I can see is far too interesting.’
The showgirls came gliding on to the stage in floor-length medieval gowns with the waist just under the breasts. These dresses were made of silk and each one was a different soft colour. Body was given to them by several layers of underskirts, each of them lined and each of them in a different colour. Careful handling was needed to show them off. The same went for the men’s cloaks. Fold after fold fell gracefully to the floor.
Into this courtly picture bounced a couple of tumblers, wearing special tunics that looked like giant string vests but knobbly. ‘Handwoven by Miki Sekers himself,’ murmured Bob Grant. Handwoven may have been an exaggeration but Miki Sekers was indeed famous for making sumptuous materials at sumptuous prices.
During rehearsals, the actors had frequently been obliged to go off, causing a scheduling problem Joan didn’t normally have to face. This is what they and Bermans’, the costumiers, and Oliver Messel had been up to and very beautiful it was too.
The afternoon was a bitty one, so Lionel who hadn’t been around for ages, took the showgirls through the words of a song. Their Ts were indistinct, so he told them to sound deliberately common by adding an S after the final T. Thus, if you take ‘Indistinct’ as your example, you would sing: ‘Indistinc-tser.’ Lionel liked attending to this kind of detail, something small he could fix there and then. It took his mind off something big that was much harder to fix.
Next day, the curtain was down and the band was in the pit. The musicians were learning the arrangements. That means a first performance is very close. They didn’t half sound brassy, those arrangements. Glissandos and wah-wahings may have been right for all that thumping the dancers had been doing. They certainly weren’t for what Joan had been doing. There had been no boo-boom gags in her rehearsals.
Nevertheless, eveything that had happened so far had been private, as it should have been. Sensational fallings out in front of the company had not occurred. It was just another show, if a rather expensive one.
Days later, all that changed. Simply by reading the papers, everyone in the country could find out what was happening. Twang opened in Manchester to terrible reviews. Joan walked out. Burt Shevelove, American director and co-writer of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, took over. Birmingham was cancelled. Articles appeared in the newspapers. Penelope Gilliatt wrote a sympathetic piece listing all the good things that should have made the show a hit, chief among them, Joan, whom she described as the linchpin.
The revised show opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre just before Christmas. As you would expect, a starry first night audience rolled up but it was not long before the performance turned into every nightmare an actor could have, only there was no waking up. All that had so far not gone wrong, went wrong: the sets, the lighting, the sound, the lot and, in the auditorium, someone opened a door to the street and let in a mob of boo-ers.
The next day, Jak’s daily cartoon in the Evening Standard was captioned: ‘Twang goes Thud,’ Toni Palmer, the actress, was invited on to Late Night Line-Up, a TV arts programme, to give her opinion. Despite having been in Fings and therefore a friend of nearly the entire company, she couldn’t hold back. It was no good.
As the twenty-first century is well into its stride, it can safely be said that Twang was one of the most notorious flops of the twentieth century, rivalled only by Peter O’Toole’s Macbeth.
What would you see if you booked a seat at the Shaftesbury? For a start, against Joan’s usual instruction, the men were plastered in make-up, bright orange. Then there were Max Shaw’s desperate eyes darting about the house. Was he counting? The song ‘Twang’ or ‘Ter-wang’ was out of the show, and so was George Cooper. A smaller actor in a smaller part jigged about in his place. The dancing girls had no underskirts. Their legs protruded jazzily where a panel of material had been cut away altogether. Unfunny gags were sold out front. Roger the Ugly was a Gonk, a novelty doll of the time: thick fringe, big nose, nothing else. Amusing for a moment but what was Phil Newman expected to do afterwards? Any gossamer, any charm was long gone, blown away by the brass.
Very little time went by before the show closed. Shockwaves rippled outwards, rocking Lionel violently. In the meantime, bits of information about Manchester started to filter through. It began with Kent Baker, who had played Mutch, giving his account of the show, which he had rechristened Twinge.
Bernard Delfont who was behind the show, very far behind, as nobody had seen him, had asked Joan to make changes. As they were not the kind she wished to make, ‘I’m not here as an Assistant Stage Manager,’ she said that someone else would have to. Burt Shevelove, play doctor, had come in with sheaves of new material, announcing in a wheezy, husky voice Kent imitated with glee, ‘These are the gags, kids.’ Each day, more gags appeared, so many that the cast had been forced to pin them to the backs of the trees in Sherwood Forest, having had no time to learn them.
The heavy make-up had been demanded in order to sell the characters. It’s like, when writing, we sometimes underline words for emphasis. Yes, we’re not supposed to do that either. Paddy Stone, who hadn’t been on hand for the costume parade, had glanced once at the showgirls and said: ‘My gurrls kee-ant dee-ance in those.’ He’d then given instructions for the front panels to be removed along with the underskirts. George Cooper had seen his part shrink to less than his contract specified and, for that reason, had gone.
£70,000 the show had cost; so much money but no co-ordination. That’s why there was that shocking contrast between Joan’s work and the musical arrangements. And Paddy Stone can’t have seen Oliver Messel’s designs for the showgirls. If he had, he’d have spoken up earlier. How ironic that Joan had made fun of the different departments on an American musical. Twang had been neither fish nor fowl, neither Theatre Workshop nor Broadway.
More bits came out over the years. Joan recalled reporters milling about the lobby of the Midland Hotel in Manchester. She wasn’t angry. ‘After all, it beat trudging across the moors looking for more bodies.’ This was the time of Brady and Hindley and the Moors Murders. ‘At least the Midland lobby was warm.’
Bernard Delfont, funnily enough, she had liked. He had said his piece and there was no rancour. Paddy Stone, master of zip and pzazz, was another matter. Joan had never been happy with what he was doing. One day she had found George Cooper rehearsing a routine laid out on the floor with a chorus girl’s foot on his neck. ‘You don’t treat a friar like that,’ she said and then went on to encourage the dancers to rebel and think for themselves. Barbara Windsor referred to this in a TV interview. ‘She told the dancers to do their own thing. Well, of course, they didn’t know what she was on about.’ Barbara knew from experience that dancers in hardnosed commercial musicals have been disciplined from childhood to do exactly as they are told. They know nothing else.
Bob Grant, who had been got up to look like Edith Sitwell, remembered Oliver Messel going round the dressing-rooms with make-up charts, things he had never seen before. ‘I’ve still got mine,’ he said, ‘It’s lovely.’ Had he actually used it? ‘Good heavens, no.’
Twang was the last West End show Oliver Messel designed. In fact, it was the last show he ever designed. Chronic arthritis sent him back to his home in the Carribean where he found a new lease of life designing the interiors of rich people’s houses. ‘Messelina,’ Joan called him affectionately.
When talking about Lionel, Joan said that he had been impossible. The essential teamwork had not been there. Lionel, on the other hand, said he thought that his fault was being too co-operative. ‘I never wrote more songs than I did for Twang.’
What he also did for Twang, it emerged, was attempt to save it by selling his rights to Oliver! only to watch the show and all his money – by then the show had cost £100,000 – go down the Swanee.
After Twang closed, the press went back to the usual Lionel-type stories; stories about his exciting future projects. First, there was going to be a stage musical of Fellini’s film, La Strada, then there was going to be a spectacular production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame for Broadway, both shows one might expect of Lionel. There was no sign that there was anything wrong, except that neither show happened. In the first half of the Sixties, four of Lionel’s musicals had bounced into the West End, one after the other. From then on, not one.
‘Joan laid a curse on me,’ Lionel sighed. ‘She’s a witch. She said that Twang would be my end.’ That, however, was not the end of Joan and Lionel but seven years had to pass and Lionel had to be bankrupted before they came back together again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
TUNIS PART TWO,
INDIA PART ONE
The following year, 1966, Joan, much less harmed than Lionel Bart, returned, with Gerry, to Hammamet where she, together with the students from the year before, took the previous summer’s games and made them into a play, Who is Pepito? It was a picaresque adventure satire about a young Arab boy travelling to Paris in the hope of a better life, but finding only a bidonville. A bidonville was a kind of shanty town that could be found on the outskirts of Paris. A bidon, itself, is a jerrycan and that’s what these shanty towns were made of.
For this international drama course in Hammamet, a theatre had been built specially; René Allio, set designer for the director, Roger Planchon, had been the architect. Planchon was the nearest France had to Joan, both in politics and style. He had a theatre in a factory-dominated suburb of Lyons and had done a Henry IV rather similar to hers. However, as Joan was trying to steer her students away from the influence of French culture, she would have nothing to do with this theatre. She said it was ugly. Her show would be performed all over the place, she so wanted her Arab children to reawaken their own culture, a subversive, long-hidden one of storytelling.
One of the moments she liked best was a Lebanese student, Sarah Salem, playing Madame Pillule, giving a patronising lecture about the pill to a crowd of women who hadn’t a clue what she was on about.
Ronald Bryden, the Observer theatre critic, having got wind of some fun on the go, wanted to come. Joan did not want him to come. He did and when he arrived was treated by Joan with deep suspicion. Not that you would have known from his article. Firstly, it was huge and, secondly, he was having a whale of a time simply taking in the whole scene. One of Joan’s students, another Lebanese, Nidal Achkar, who had been to RADA and learned to be terribly British, merrily told him how Joan had shifted all that. As for the show itself, Bryden said it was one of the best pieces of work Joan had ever done, possibly the best. But what a pyrrhic victory, he went on, because nobody would see it.
There was the rub, so like those early Stratford East years: Joan, happy up in the gallery watching her shows, shows that were playing to nearly empty houses. Perhaps Ronald Bryden, though barely knowing Joan, spotted this reclusive side when he described her as very shy. She loved her work but dreaded the judge’s pointing finger. A judge can kill not only a show but a spirit. There, in Hammamet, Joan could work with no finger pointing at either her or her children who, if they were not to end up carbon copies of the Comédie-Française, needed all the encouragement they could get. It was, for her, ideal, if not for others.
However, it couldn’t and didn’t last. She and Gerry had to return to England to pick up their still diverging threads: Joan to chase up the Fun Palace, Gerry to concern himself with the Theatre Royal. For Gerry, leaving Tunis must have been a particularly wistful moment. It had been an oasis of sunshine and swimming, so good for his health, and the food had been good too. Unlike Joan, who loved only the names of exotic food, Gerry was adventurous when it came to grub. The pretty young female students fussing over him – ‘Gerry, Gerry, je t’adore,’ they sang – would have been welcome too.
Before leaving, Joan told the students to keep up the good work. They tried but things quickly fell apart, and that’s something else to do with Joan. Often she was disappointed that no one seized the torch and carried on but her natural dominance had a way of putting a stop to anything that wasn’t her.
Back in the UK, she found herself invited by an Indian arts organisation, to a theatre seminar. She went and was proudly presented with a production of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade, made famous by Peter Brook in London two years earlier. Energetically biting the hand that fed her, Joan denounced it. Why were they putting on to their stage this calcified turd?
As usual, she still made friends. She always did. It was Hammamet all over again, this steering of ex-colonies away from their ex-bosses and urging them to revive their own culture. A denunciation from Joan was more invigorating than praise from a lesser artist. Writing home, on Air India paper, she said that India was revolting but she was going back any minute to make a film.
It didn’t take long before it appeared to be off.
Home again, Joan did not manage to pick up her Fun Palace thread. Dare to say that, however, and you could be sure of a rocket. If only she could have been boring because that’s what the authorities wanted, the boring details, like where do young mothers, wanting to study, put their babies, but Joan found that hard to tackle. You could also ask how things would have turned out if, behind the project, had been Gerry.
Gerry did succeed in picking up his thread. Early the next year, 1967, he put an announcement in the paper. Theatre Workshop was to start up again. This was something of an event, as there had been no Theatre Workshop productions since 1964. However, during those four years, Gerry had not let the theatre go. He’d rented it out. His guiding rule was shove anything in, absolutely anything, but don’t let the theatre go dark and that is what he had done. It was fortuitous that the company he’d handed the theatre to, had, after four years, gone bust.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
THE FUN PALACE COMES TO STRATFORD EAST
The play Gerry decided to open with had recently caused a sensation in New York. This and its topicality is what interested him. It was Barbara Garson’s Macbird, a blackly comic verse drama using the plot of Macbeth to satirise President Lyndon Johnson and the assassination of Jack Kennedy.
For it, Brian Murphy, Howard Goorney, Myvanwy Jenn, Bob Grant, Fanny Carby, Frank Coda and Toni Palmer, the actress who had slated Twang, returned to the fold. Joining them were Nidal Achkar, the student from Hammamet, and Sarah Salem, Nidal’s best friend.
When Barbara Garson gave permission for Theatre Workshop to put on her play, she could have had little idea what would hit her. The first thing Joan objected to was the iambic pentameters, and most of the play had been written in those. They may have been fine for university students in America but they would not do for her. Their clumsiness offended her ear for verse. In fact, as far as she was concerned, the whole thing was shrill, ugly and amateurish. So, during rehearsals, she built up dialogue written by herself at night based on the actors’ improvisations during the day, plus the reading of history books. To this, she added snatches of genuine Shakespeare and, in between, the occasional song like: WAY SOUTH IN TENNESSEE / THAT’S WHERE I LONG TO BE / DOWN WHERE A MAN’S A MAN / HOME OF THE KU KLUX KLAN which was not by Barbara Garson but Tom Lehrer. Whenever Barbara Garson objected, and in New York her script had known nothing but success, Joan said that the show, as written, would not work for Stratford East.
A charismatic director can turn actors against a writer and that’s what Joan was doing. The company trusted her, not Barbara Garson who soon came to be kno
wn as Barbara Ghastly. Granted, Garson was charmless but once Joan took against a person, he or she would, before your eyes, become talentless too, whether they were or not. When that happened it was best if the victim left as soon as possible. Soon after her arrival, Barbara Garson left. Perhaps she would have been happier at the Royal Court.
For anybody unaccustomed to working with Joan, all this may seem difficult to understand. If she didn’t like the play, why was she doing it? Well, it was that topicality Gerry needed and she knew it. As the Vietnam war was still on, the subject was hot, so hot that the theatre had to become a club for the show to go ahead. In turn, Gerry would have trusted Joan, with her experience of political satire, to simply take the idea and turn it into a show, which she did in a way.
What she ended up with exuded warmth and flowed along entertainingly. It was not what the critics were expecting and they didn’t like it. Among them was Ken Tynan who had seen the New York production and objected to Joan turning this scabrous satire into a jolly vaudeville. Joan merely said: ‘What else could I do?’ One critic enjoyed it, Tariq Ali who, at the time, was theatre critic for a fashionable magazine called Town. But then, he was perceptive enough to spot something Joan was up to, which nobody else had noticed.
The Fun Palace, though not built, was still in her head. Her aim was to bring ideas from it to Stratford East. To that purpose, she had approached the Arts Council with a plan to transform the theatre into a Fun Palace. Nothing had come of that because it did not regard the realising of her ideas as part of its function. Wanting to take the seats out of the stalls to make way for tables and chairs, she had asked Gerry. Nothing came of that either. He said it was impractical. You had to have so many seats in a theatre or you had no chance of making money. Tables would have lessened that number.