Joan Littlewood

by Peter Rankin

  One afternoon, a middle-aged man, all fired up, came over to complain about the children’s language. He started off with: ‘I’m only a common docker,’ which had Joan and the children falling about for weeks – well, in Joan’s case, for years. Still, the common docker, who it turned out was unemployed, dock work being hard to find in 1967, ended up working in the bar of the theatre, thus fulfilling one of Joan’s ideas, the figure of eight: the theatre pushes energy out into the world and energy from the world comes back into the theatre, and round and round it goes.

  Like the Fun Palace, the playground was not just for fun. A teacher, Michael Holt, provided some coloured blocks of different shapes. Shifting them around and making patterns seemed like a game. In fact, it was maths.

  One afternoon, it was possible to hear something going on in the theatre and, if you were a ghost, you could put your head round the gallery door and look down. The auditorium was dark but the stage was lit. Teenagers were doing some kind of play. ‘When did they rehearse this?’ you might wonder; ‘How did they learn all those lines?’ Out of the darkness walked Joan. She asked the teenagers a question and, from that, you would have found out what was going on. Too old for the playground, but wanting something for themselves, they had been invited by Joan to improvise on the stage. Their subject matter was their own lives: rows at home, getting into cinemas through lavatory doors, starting dead-end jobs, crossing the police. This was much better than Joan’s real actors.

  As the summer wore on, The Buskers drifted away. They’d had fun of sorts – Wole Soyinka had been along to recite some of his poems – but they needed properly paid work. The children on the playground stayed and so did the teenagers. Their improvisations took place every evening on the stage. It was quickly discovered that it was no use having the girls and the boys at the same time. When mixed, they just fooled around to the point where one of the girls said, ‘We’re boring ourselves.’ But then concentration was always a problem. At school it had not been learned and that is the most damaging part of a poor education because, very soon, as early as seventeen, the ability to concentrate and absorb, if you’ve had no practice, starts to fade. So far, most of these teenagers’ ingenuity had gone into pranks, like locking the chemistry master in the stinks cupboard. You can see more and more why Joan wanted that Fun Palace.

  Anyway, one night, it would be the girls’ turn and another night it would be the boys’. It sounds stereotypical but the girls were good at over the garden wall stuff, the slummocky neighbour who is always calling round for a cup of sugar and the gossipy one who is known as ‘A proper little Stratford Express.’ The boys, who soon came to be known as The Nutters, were good at breaking and entering and the subsequent clashes with the law. Sometimes this would end up in a Bundle, a silly fight in which everyone joined but in which nobody got hurt. Sometimes things would end up with a court scene. The jury and the sentence would always be much tougher than they would have been in real life.

  Less funny was a first day at work. Suddenly a sixteen-year-old boy would realise he was condemned to a noisy, repetitive job that would put callouses on his hands. Quarrels with the boss often ensued and instant sacking. Joan, who was there the night a boy had been sacked, got him to play the boss. One of the most intelligent of the girls, Liz Langan, pointed out that it was those dull jobs that tempted the brighter boys to crime. And what’s more, the reason she was attracted to such boys. Joan, more down to earth, said: ‘Cockneys. Thieving goes in with the mother’s milk.’

  Friday night was Posh Night when The Nutters, using the theatre’s costumes, stored underneath the stage, indulged their fantasies. Doug Quant, a compact, powerful presence, a good actor if ever there was, wanted to stay in bed and have Jayne Mansfield come round. His girlfriend arrives but he turns her away. Jayne Mansfield comes with her agent but turns Doug down. He orders fried rice. His mother appears and reprimands him for staying in bed and removes all his literature.

  Roy Haywood, gentler than Doug but one of the most inventive, ordered grapes that had to be dropped into his mouth by a nubile girl. At the same time, another luscious beauty gave him a manicure. This soon bores him and he goes out in his gold Rolls-Royce to the Hilton Hotel where he tries to procure a girl but she is engaged elsewhere. He orders lobster and a bottle of wine but sends the wine back because it’s the wrong vintage. Cross, he sacks the head waiter and buys the hotel. He goes home. The girls in these improvisations were always played by boys. It worked best that way. Without the girls there, the boys were free to be feminine.

  It also meant they were uninhibited when it came to sex. One evening’s improvisation went like this. Doug Quant and his mate, Sam Shepherd, go to Canvey Island for the day. They see two birds standing by a slot machine. Doug goes up to it. ‘How does this machine work?’ he asks, looking down at the machine but not really. ‘Do you give?’ he said suddenly and the girls tell him their house is empty, which is good. The boys like to have it away with birds they don’t know, so they won’t shout about it. They go to the house, Sam downstairs, Doug upstairs. For a while, things go silent but then Mum comes home and shoos the boys out. Doug finds another bird:

  ‘Where do you come from?’

  ‘Grimsby.’

  ‘In a chalet?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘Dunno, yeah.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Ten quid.’

  ‘You’re only 15.’

  ‘Fully experienced.’

  ‘Do you have to wear a johnny?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘In the raw?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘For ten quid, I want it in the mouth. I’ll pay you when I enter the house.’

  ‘No, now.’

  ‘When I enter the house.’

  ‘No, now.’

  ‘Halfway through?’

  ‘No, now.’

  That would have been impossible with real girls.

  On some nights, attempting these improvisations could be quite disheartening. Either not enough Nutters turned up or the improvisation disintegrated into silliness. Still, Joan, with her vast experience of theatre and life, did not realise, before that first invitation to the stage, what she had opened up.

  During the daytime, when both the children and the teenagers were in school, or supposed to be, Gerry was in the theatre holding auditions. What for, nobody knew. ‘You might as well go out into the street and pick the first ten people you meet.’ Joan was looking down from the gallery at Gerry sitting in the dark at the front of the dress circle. He had just been listening to a young woman sing, ‘I’m jist a gurrrl who cain’t say no,’ out of tune.

  To anyone wondering if Joan had a point, Gerry explained: ‘Yes, you could do what Joan said and what she’d get from those people on the street would be wonderful but that’s not the point. Acting is a sickness. You have to want to do it night after night. People from the street would only do it once.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  A THROWAWAY BECOMES A HIT

  Autumn came. The Times announced that Joan Littlewood was to direct Mrs Wilson’s Diary with a cast including Stephen Lewis, Myvanwy Jenn, Sandra Caron and Johnny Lyons, all of whom had been buskers. So that’s what Gerry had been auditioning for, but then he always played his cards close to his chest. ‘I wanted it to be a ten-minute strip cartoon to start the evening,’ said Joan. ‘We could have changed it every night but the boys wouldn’t have it. They insisted on a full-length show.’

  John Wells sent down Brian Eatwell, a set designer. His enthusiasm did not impress Joan. She took against him and, using the excuse that he failed to measure the stage, dismissed any thought of him designing the show. This taking against someone was an editing out of a person who could block her imagination. Sometimes you’d wonder whether that would have actually been the case. When it happened with someone she knew well, it was alarming. In Brian Eatwell’s case, Joan caught the gleam in his eye that told her he wanted to do a prope
r set-type set, 3D and lovingly detailed. A cosy reproduction of Ten Downing Street, however, was absolutely what she did not want. She wanted that strip cartoon idea. So, Brian Eatwell went off and was next heard of as the designer of a camp horror film called The Abominable Dr Phibes starring Vincent Price. His notices, Brian’s that is, were excellent.

  Joan, instead, turned to Hazel Albarn, the wife of the artist Keith Albarn, whom she already knew. Hazel, herself, was a teacher which was to come in handy. For the idly curious, she and Keith are the parents of Damon Albarn, not that he was born then.

  Rehearsals started with the two Restoration doorways at either side of the stage, left over from the Vanbrugh. The rest: a table, two chairs, a chaise longue and the Oh What a Lovely War screen, arrived gradually during rehearsals, the typical Theatre Workshop way of going about design. Those pieces of furniture were not real. They were jigsawed out of plywood by Guy Hodgkinson, the young propmaker. This was partly to do with style – their two-dimensional quality added to the strip cartoon look – and partly to do with Joan’s age-old hatred of comfy chairs on stage. Not wanting her actors to sit for long, if at all, she made sure all furniture was uncomfortable.

  It was a small, sceptical group of actors that assembled for the first day’s rehearsal, only eight, unusual for Joan. Sensing the mood, she did not start with a reading. She played a game of imagination, an appropriate one. ‘Where would you all rather be?’ The point was, it had the actors thinking and moving right away, even if it was only laying out an imaginary towel on an imaginary beach to sunbathe under an imaginary sun. Reading a scene didn’t seem so bad after that, though Joan did tell Bill Wallis, new to the company and playing Harold Wilson, not to attempt the Wilson voice yet. It’s easy to get bogged down in mimicry.

  In no time, they were doing an improvisation on Inspector Maigret, Simenon’s pipe-smoking French detective. It was a parallel to something Joan had spotted in the script. Again, the actors were on their feet using their heads and enjoying themselves. As with Henry IV, they were not shuffling about the stage with scripts in their hands. This led them into the opening breakfast scene and ‘Shazam!’ Bill Wallis, having found himself a cloak, was on as Harold, convinced he was Superman.

  That was all good fun but when he sat down at the table and started a long speech about why there was no newspaper, you could have been up in the green room again with the authors reading. Joan loved her friends to recount old, familiar stories but when they did, she always interrupted; telling them that they’d missed a bit or got a bit wrong. Anyone who had dinner with her family realised where this came from. They all carried on like that. For the person trying to tell the story, it was hell but, for the listener, it was funny. Joan did that with Harold’s speech. Neither Gladys (Harold’s nickname for Mary) nor Inspector Trimfittering, his bodyguard, wanted him to find the paper and so they kept interrupting with distractions. The scene took on an energy that was not there before. The dialogue came off the page.

  At break time, Gerry came down from his office to tell everyone that they had three weeks’ rehearsal and that they had better not forget it. ‘Why so long, Gerry?’ asked Joan, ‘When we were tuned up, we could put on a classic in eleven days.’ Gerry’s announcement had, of course, been purely for her. Usually he gave Joan five to seven weeks’ rehearsal, a long time by any other theatre’s standards and, even then, Joan, with the first night approaching, would always say: ‘We open Thursday? But you never told me.’

  Gerry’s announcement worked, though. Within a very few days, the actors were able to run a surprisingly large chunk of the play. Richard Ingrams came to watch. He roared with laughter, unaware of what Joan had done, which was to put sedentary dialogue on its feet and make it dance. The effect on him was productive. He went away and had other ideas. The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was in the news and he decided that Wilson should have his own guru.

  The next Monday, Joan asked an assistant to sit cross-legged on the stage and say some lines to Harold, which Richard had brought along. It was as if she was drawing a pencil sketch to see if the idea was worth pursuing. It worked because, suddenly, there was Howard Goorney, back with the company, playing the guru.

  The play had no structure to speak of. There was merely a threat. Because Harold Wilson had spoken out against the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson, the American president, was going to bomb London at midnight. That was it. At the same time, in that morning’s newspaper, Wilson’s popularity had dropped off. That’s why Gladys and Trimfittering didn’t want him to find the paper. They knew what effect it would have, and it did. Ignoring everything else, Harold spent the day trying to think of ways to restore his popularity. It was only near midnight that he realised he had to act fast to stop the bombing. Mrs Wilson, during this day, as well as coping with her husband, had to deal with her neighbour, Audrey Callaghan from number eleven, the delivery of a lewd statue, and Gerald Kaufman’s moods. At the time, Gerald Kaufman was one of the kitchen cabinet. The whole play was just a series of interruptions and when the actors tried them out for the first time, they were very funny. By the end of the second week, they weren’t funny at all and Myvanwy Jenn wasn’t getting Mrs Wilson either. John Wells, now free to attend rehearsals, was suicidal. ‘Rather less than orgasmic,’ he murmured.

  At the same time, other things were going on. Digby Morton, Mrs Wilson’s real-life clothes designer, rather treacherously, you might think, offered to design the clothes for the fictional Mrs Wilson. Joan, however, was sticking to her cartoon idea. Gladys wore a plain cream dress decorated with felt flowers backed with Velcro so that during the show she could move them around.

  Underneath the stage, Hazel Albarn had the children from the playground painting slides to back project on to the Oh What a Lovely War screen. These pictures either acted as a counterpoint to the action on the stage or told you what was happening off it. For example, President Johnson sends the bombers, and that’s what the children painted. Joan’s push outwards on to the playground had found her artists and now their energy was coming back into the theatre: the figure of eight. Hazel, being a teacher, had the experience to supervise their work.

  On stage she took pieces of string and drew them tight across the floor, the furniture and the Restoration doorways. Regardless of logic, but using the strings to create a hard line, she painted everything in bright, shiny, contrasting colours. It was simple. It was cheap, and Joan had her cartoony look.

  Two nights before it opened, the actors thought as little of the show as they did at the first reading but then a preview audience came, quite a big one. They liked it and Myvanwy Jenn, after being told by Joan that she had it in her to be a great light comedienne, found Gladys. She had a comic sweetness that, when something went badly wrong, turned to only the mildest of dismay. It happened in the nick of time.

  On the first night, the actors were still uncertain. As they stood in the wings waiting, Stephen Lewis said to Bob Grant, who was playing George Brown, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if, years from now, we’re being wheeled on in this.’ They weren’t saying it but they badly needed a hit.

  As it happens, they got it. You could tell at the interval. After a riotous first half, Joan came through the pass door from the gallery where she had been taking notes. ‘We were better off busking,’ she muttered grimly. At that moment you knew everything was going to be all right. It was because Joan was so gloriously perverse.

  The next morning, the critics praised the show and, for the next few weeks, the theatre was packed. The run lasted only a few weeks because Donald Albery, the West End theatre manager, wanted the show immediately at the Criterion. The producer, Tony Palmer, then at EMI, even made an LP and, because of the small cast, the show made a profit; the first ever. Gerry said that Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be had packed the theatre for fourteen weeks without making a penny. If there was a problem, it was at the box office. It couldn’t cope or, as Bob Grant put it, ‘The Theatre Royal box office is only geared for failure.’

&n
bsp; What was little known then was what Gerry had been going through with the Lord Chamberlain. In April of that year, 1967, he had sent him the script and, while Joan had been either out on the playground or inside improvising with the teenagers, quite a battle had taken place. In principle, the Lord Chamberlain hadn’t wanted the show to go on at all. The portrayal on a stage of living public figures, in particular cabinet ministers and members of the royal family, as Joan had found out before the war, was still frowned upon, even if it was no longer illegal.

  In the end, it came down to individual lines. Here are three examples:

  One. 1-11 You have agreed to omit from:

  ‘Was meant to be dining’... to and inclusive of ‘......Notting Hill’.

  The full line was ‘He (Lord Goodman) was meant to be dining with some old friends who happen to live in one of the more colourful areas of Notting Hill.’

  Two. 1-16 You have agreed to omit from:

  It’s his poll you see.....’ to and inclusive of ‘.......last few months’.

  The full lines were:

  Gladys: It’s his poll, you see.

  Audrey: Oh Gladys, it hasn’t shown a marked falling off again.

  Gladys: It has. It came as a nasty shock I can tell you, especially as he’s been getting his 56% more than satisfied over the last few months.

  Three. 111-You have agreed to omit ‘I shall never forget the time Audrey Callaghan had that embarrassing moment in the Cumberland Gap.’

  If there is anything shocking about those lines, it’s their mildness. After all, the three BBC satire shows, That Was The Week That Was, Not so Much a Programme, More a Way of Life and BBC 3 had all been and gone. In those, you had send-ups of not one but two prime ministers and a sketch in which religions were compared as if they were products being tested by the consumer’s guide, Which?