Joan Littlewood

by Peter Rankin

  What Joan did achieve, very much a Fun Palace idea, was rolling entertainment.

  If you turned up at the theatre early and wandered into the auditorium, you found the actor/writer Stephen Lewis onstage, holding Dr Lewis’s Surgery. If you asked him a question about your health, he would give you a funny answer. At eight o’clock, came Macbird, the main event, in which he also appeared. After that, when you’d had a drink, you could come back and watch a tiny French farce. Joan found beginnings and endings hard to do. Rolling entertainment solved her problem: there weren’t any. Tariq Ali was the only critic who saw all three events and, by experiencing the total effect, found his evening enjoyable.

  Other details helped. During the interval, if an actor needed to set a prop the other side of the stage, he or she was encouraged by Joan to cross over the stage – there was no curtain – rather than go underneath. This sounds simple enough but there was a catch. As she or he crossed, the actor had to turn to anyone still in the auditorium, smile and wave. It had to be done sincerely and that is not as easy as it sounds. Joan, therefore, left things up to the actor. She didn’t say that everyone had to cross over the stage, only those who felt like it. This is where she differs from other directors. Other directors occasionally dragoon their actors to go out front. Some years later, it happened at Nicholas Nickleby when the RSC performed it in 1980. Before the show started, the actors mingled with members of the audience for a chat. The stiffness of their conversation told you how they longed for their dressing rooms. Joan knew that talking to an audience as yourself – even walking across the stage as yourself – is hard. That’s why she didn’t force it.

  The actor playing the sheriff of Dallas, Pat Tull, was a bustling extrovert by nature, so when the interval was over, his job was to go into the bar and round up the audience. Because the summons was made by a human being who was actually present, this was friendlier than the sharp bell which we still have 46 years later, or even the voice of the stage manager which was introduced in the mid-1970s.

  It has to be said, Dr Lewis’s Surgery and the little French farce weren’t easy either. For the surgery to work, plenty of questions had to be thrown at Steve. However, as audiences were tiny and as those few sitting in the auditorium were shy, not many questions were coming at him. So he had to plant actors out front with questions he’d written; not ideal. Today, with audiences keener to join in than sit quietly, Dr Lewis’s Surgery would be quite in tune with the times.

  As for the farce, it was fine as long as Bob Grant, Howard Goorney and Brian Murphy were performing it. Firstly, there was the pleasure of seeing Bob, who had been Lyndon Johnson in Macbird, now playing a stuffy department head in a French ministry. Secondly there was the combined accomplishment of all three actors. They were expert farceurs. The next French farce which accompanied the next main show, performed by less expert farceurs, taught you that rolling entertainment made heavy demands.

  Occasionally, for this late spot, Joan invited The People Show to perform. ‘Amateurs! They shouldn’t be allowed,’ said some of the company as it looked down from the gallery. The titles for the The People Show’s events were simply numbers. At Stratford East they were in single figures. Today, they’re at 126, which suggests it was worth taking the risk.

  Theatre Workshop, right from the beginning, had been proud of its lighting. West End lighting had made Joan say ‘Pastel-coloured air,’ and John Bury, with a few lamps, had evolved a style that moulded but didn’t decorate. In 1967, Joan was bored with all that. ‘Light the audience,’ she instructed, ‘Make them look good.’ It didn’t happen right away but one can see that this too was a Fun Palace idea. She wanted its visitors to feel good about themselves.

  The set for Macbird couldn’t have been simpler. It was a silver rail that continued the curve of the dress circle right round the stage to meet up with the other side of the dress circle. Suspended above the stage, was a chandelier that mirrored the chandelier hanging above the stalls. In other words, it wasn’t a set but a device for making the audience feel included. Inside the semi-circle, the stage was grey. Beyond, it was black. There were no wing pieces – that’s curtains or flats at the side – and no borders, bits of material to hide the lights, nothing. As there was a good chance you could be seen when you weren’t officially on, this required even more sensitivity from the actors than usual. The older ones longed for wings, or masking as they called it.

  There was a designer, a recommendation of John Bury’s. Gerry, who adored John, had brought him down from Nottingham. This chap had wanted to do something with rags but Joan had scotched that. The no-set set was her idea and the silver rail was the idea of a young student who didn’t work in theatre, Martin O’Shea. He dreamed of the rail lighting up, which would have been good fun, but it didn’t. Neither the will nor the money was there to help him. Theatre professionals would have been resentful.

  Joan may have been bored with lighting but she loved gadgets. At the Fun Palace there would have been lots. Even in Oh What a Lovely War you had the newspanel with its travelling lights. So, having frozen out the designer – he could never get the hang of Joan anyway, who wanted everything feather light – she asked Martin O’Shea, whose speciality was gadget making, to take over. He built a three-sided computer on wheels, each face with differently arranged flashing lights. Turning it between scenes to denote scene changes was not easy for the turners because they had to dance a jig at the same time. One of them was Kent Baker from Twang. He had joined the company well into rehearsals, something that often happened with actors at Stratford East. Despite the computer’s tendency to wander where it wasn’t wanted, it was the first example of lights flashing in time with music. This has been a disco commonplace ever since but it was yet another example of Stratford East audiences seeing something for the first time.

  Joan didn’t want a conventional programme, so she asked Anna Lovell, an artist friend she knew from the Fun Palace side of things, to come up with an idea. This was one sheet of card with all the necessary information on it, plus dotted lines. You could fold it into a dart and throw it, which is what the audience did. Each morning, the cleaners had even more to sweep up in the stalls than usual. Gerry did not regard those programmes as a success.

  During rehearsals it emerged that that neither Nidal Achkar nor Sarah Salem were allowed to speak on a British stage as they weren’t Equity members. This may seem a small detail but Joan’s drive to make things international, mix things up, meant so much to her. Years later, actors from all over the world became an important feature of Peter Brook’s work in Paris. Nidal left but Sarah stayed. In June her anxiety for her family during the Six-Day War was clear to everyone. At least, here was a theatre that was in touch with what was going on in other countries.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  THE SUMMER OF ’67

  Shortly after Macbird opened, the company was invited to the green room for a reading of Mrs Wilson’s Diary, a play with songs made from the popular column that was appearing every fortnight in the satirical magazine, Private Eye. John Wells and Richard Ingrams were the authors (Richard at the time, was the Eye’s editor). The boys’ inspiration had been The Diary of a Nobody in which, Mr Pooter, a Victorian city clerk makes his entries, failing to see what the reader can see. John and Richard’s diarist was Mary, the wife of the then prime minister, Harold Wilson.

  Joan rarely allowed ordinary readings, the kind at which the actors read the parts they’re going to play. At her readings, you could find a single actor reading everything for a while and then handing over to someone else. It kept things fluid, Joan, as she sometimes did, not casting until rehearsals were well under way. In the case of Mrs W, John and Richard took turns in reading the whole play themselves, laughing at their own jokes while failing to notice Stephen Lewis handing round toffees from a noisy paper bag.

  The trouble was, what the company was hearing from John and Richard sounded literary: wodges of cleverness that simply sat there. Actors use the phrase
‘The dialogue comes off the page.’ At this reading, it stayed on it. A bedtime bossa nova for Harold and Mary, Cocoa Time, had charm but, after the reading, nobody said much and when Joan muttered: ‘That took them all of an afternoon to write,’ nobody said anything.

  ‘Vanbrugh,’ replied Joan to Tony Shaffer’s question, ‘What’s next?’ as the two of them sat in the empty theatre after a performance of Macbird. Tony, later the author of Sleuth, knew Joan because his production company, Hardy Shaffer, had made some egg commercials with her four years earlier. That’s when she had been reunited with the cameraman, David Watkin. ‘Silk and silver,’ Joan went on, instantly conjuring up a world of lightness and elegance. ‘There’s nothing like a classic for separating the sheep from the goats,’ she added and so set about adapting Vanbrugh’s The Provok’d Wife, which she placed mainly by the Thames because she loved rivers, and which she called Intrigues and Amours. Adapting, in this case, meant cutting dialogue from some scenes while adding a card playing scene from Journey to London, another of Vanbrugh’s plays. Being full of double entendres, this scene provided Lady Brute, the female lead and her lover, Constant, a sexy tête-à-tête after a rowdy moment involving lots of characters.

  Peter Snow, the artist, appeared at the theatre. In 1959 he had designed The Dutch Courtesan for Joan but was best known for the set of Waiting for Godot when it was first performed in the UK at the Arts Theatre in 1955. He brought a model of what he proposed to build. Despite Joan disliking those, preferring the gradual but noiseless appearance of the set round the actors during rehearsals, she didn’t complain. She merely simplified what Peter had done and, together, they came up with a shape with which she was always happy.

  This was Restoration doorways at either side of the stage, balconies above them, and, beyond those, the full depth of the stage where, at the furthest point ascending as far as the eye could see, was an enormous blow-up of an engraving that depicted Greenwich Hill. To one side and halfway back, was a gazebo with room in it for a little band of harpsichord, cello and flute. When the time came, at the end of rehearsals, all sorts of people turned up one Sunday morning to paint fine black lines, hatchings, to create squares over both the steps, which led down into the auditorium, and the stage itself, now pale grey. The steps, as was the entire production, were a present to Joan from Gerry. They covered the pit and their effect was to spread the play out into the auditorium and provide new entrances and exits. That was all fine.

  Costumes were more of a problem. Joan didn’t want full period but a kind of lightweight version as you might find at the Folies Bergère. The costume designer, Cuthbert Jackson, had a go but couldn’t make it work. Joan wrote to Jean-Louis Barrault to see if he had anything spare. Marie-Hélène Dasté, one of his most senior actresses, responded with a selection of cloaks and tricornes and, most graceful of all, a dress of the palest pearl grey that, under certain lights, turned pink. Lady Brute wore it. To be honest, it was of the wrong period as it came from a Marivaux play – think of Watteau – but no questions were asked. The rest of the costumes came from all over the place, including a very 1960s shop called I was Lord Kitchener’s Valet. There, you could buy bright red military tunics with gold epaulettes, a fashion started by the Beatles in their Sergeant Pepper phase. Although this sounds muddled, by the time Joan had edited the colours, it looked, under the lighting designed by Gerry himself, beautiful.

  When talking about colour in general, Joan said: ‘If you have no money, stick to black and white with splashes of red.’ There was quite a lot of that in this show. The silver she had first mentioned, was, in the end, confined to the colour of Lady Brute’s hair.

  ‘Light the audience,’ Joan had said weeks before. Well, Restoration comedy was precisely the right time to do it. During the show, the lights were only half dimmed, which gave the same look as in Restoration times.

  Through all this, Joan was still dreaming of the Fun Palace that she also wanted to place by the Thames. You could see the overlaps. Part of the play is set in Spring Gardens, pleasure gardens where people used to go in order to become what they secretly desired to be. This is also what Joan wanted for the Fun Palace. Vanbrugh’s main job in life was architect. Joan was still very much in contact with Cedric Price. In fact, she took the company to his office so that he could give it a slide lecture on Vanbrugh and his buildings; Castle Howard, Blenheim Palace and Seaton Delaval.

  ‘Usually I make plays out of nothing. Now you’ll see me take a classic and make it look like nothing,’ said Joan before rehearsals started. ‘Nothing,’ meaning it would seem not heavy and produced but light and spontaneous. There was still, however, the question of the sheep and the goats. She was right on that point, only too right. A couple of actors caught the style. The rest could not and the play didn’t run. At matinees, the actors were sometimes performing to two rows. During rehearsals, Joan made her actresses – untypically, it was the women who were weakest – go over and over their dialogue, smoothing out the bumps to achieve the merry, rippling flow that was Vanbrugh’s.

  That merriment was vital to Joan. She reminded her actors that the lives of the characters in the play were short, requiring them to pack in as much fun as they could, while they could. So, when Lady Brute’s niece, Bellinda, enters saying: ‘Drown husbands! for yours is a provoking fellow,’ her voice had to be filled with joy. Half a morning was spent making these entrances, with the actresses playing Lady Brute, Bellinda and Lady Fancyfull coming on individually, saying ‘Good morning’ and improvising to the audience what they had been up to the night before, good or bad as it may have been but always with that underlying merriment. Over and over they had to do it until it seemed almost cruel. It would only be when you saw other actresses in other productions that you would understand what that effort had been for. All the bumps would be back. All lines would be said as if the characters meant them, and there would be no merriment. The play would seem heavy and slow.

  At this stage in her life, Joan never directly referred, during rehearsals, to any of her early influences. These simply came out in the games of imagination she invented as and when they were needed. However, when she said that the dialogue was a stream into which you could throw sticks but which you must never stem, you could see that she was stretching the gliding and sliding efforts from Laban into the way characters spoke. It was the same when she talked of characters moving on bubbles. Laban wasn’t mentioned, but he was there. It took a classic to do it, though. Good education as these rehearsals were, they were, sadly, nothing to do with what was going on at the box office.

  Gerry assembled the company in the green room, told it that he had run out of money, and was taking the play off. ‘And when we open again, it’ll be with something contemporary and relevant.’ Evidently he wished the play had never been put on. The Fun Palace subtext and talk of architects, bearing in mind Joan’s relationship with Cedric Price, could not have helped. Nearly four years later, what Gerry had implied was confirmed. He looked over the shoulder of the person who was writing out Joan’s CV for some programme notes and crossed out Intrigues and Amours. He also crossed out Macbird; so he hadn’t liked Joan’s adaptation either.

  When he finished his green room announcement, Joan said that she was staying put and anyone wishing to do the same was welcome. A handful, Stephen Lewis, Myvanwy Jenn, Johnny Lyons, Pat Tull, Kent Baker, Sandra Caron and Sarah Salem, did. They sang songs and performed sketches, sometimes in the theatre bar, sometimes in the upstairs room of The Red Lion pub over the road. They were The Buskers.

  To advertise this show, a girl who worked at the post office, dipped a tiger’s foot cut out of sponge into a pot of paint and dabbed the sponge all along Angel Lane right up to the bar door. She got into trouble but it was the kind of initiative Joan admired and so Christine Jackson, nicknamed by Joan, ‘The Tigress’, left the post office and started a new career.

  Strictly speaking, as far as the theatre was concerned, what with no proper show on, things were at a lo
w point but when you had Joan’s restless mind and energy there, it didn’t feel like it.

  The Buskers was not all Joan got up to. Plans for the redevelopment of Stratford had been drawn up after the war but since then nothing had happened. Joan was convinced that children were finding things worse in 1967 than at any time she could remember. At the far end of the road in which the theatre stood was an unofficial rubbish dump. She decided to clear it and make it a playground. She may not have had her Fun Palace but she could try out some more Fun Palace ideas.

  On a Sunday in July, she and a team of helpers, including Christine Jackson, cleared that rubbish dump. Gerry helped too. He could see that there was no harm in strengthening the theatre’s relationship with the surrounding area and, after Joan going off in 1961, he probably thought it better to indulge rather than lose her.

  There wasn’t actually much on the playground. It gave Christine Jackson another opportunity to show her talent. She rang up local firms and asked for donations. ‘Conning,’ Joan called it. Christine talked different surfacing firms into providing samples of their wares and that is how the playground was covered, with a patchwork.

  Some of the locals, most of them old, did not take to Joan’s efforts. ‘This was a nice area,’ they said, a remark that took one’s breath away as anyone could see that the truth was the exact opposite. It had been a filthy area and shamefully so. Nevertheless, from a story in the local paper, ‘Joan gives Stratford the blues’ (a pun on the colour of the playground’s wall), the Daily Express heard of these objections. Down came a reporter who wrote an anti-Joan story. This explains why, some time later, on spotting the journalist, Sandy Fawkes, Joan chased her down the length of the foyer shouting: ‘Bugger off! It’s not my fault you work for a bloody awful rag like the Express!’ It was ‘my theatre’ not ‘dump’ when she was under attack.