Joan Littlewood

by Peter Rankin

  Once the show opened, Colonel Johnston from the Lord Chamberlain’s office came down. Gerry, to put him in a good mood, fed him well. Here’s what arrived a couple of days later:

  Dear Mr Raffles,

  Thank you very much indeed for inviting

  me to the opening performance of ‘Mrs

  Wilson’s Diary’ and for the kind way in

  which you and your staff looked after me.

  I enjoyed the play very much.

  I did notice a few deviations from the

  licensed manuscript due, no doubt, to re-

  quirements which had become apparent during

  final rehearsals. No doubt your running

  order and routines will have settled down in

  the next few days and, if necessary, you will

  be sending me any additional material; after

  which I am sure you will take care to see

  that the licensed version is adhered to.

  Yours sincerely,

  A. Johnston

  The curious thing is that the show never stopped being altered and that meant right through its run at Stratford and afterwards at the Criterion, the biggest change being the resignation of George Brown. It was included that very night and, not long afterwards, Nigel Hawthorne, who had been in another of Joan’s shows, was drafted in to play Roy Jenkins. While Harold was out, he called round to see Gladys, saying as he left: ‘You must drop round to have a look at my Jackson Pollocks.’ To which Gladys replied: ‘And you must pop up and have a peep at my Holman Hunt.’ It all seemed to happen so easily, that is from the censorship point of view. It wasn’t quite so easy for Joan if one reads the following memo, written when she knew the show was going to transfer.

  ‘J.L. to MONSIGNOR WELLS & LORD INGRAMS

  for attention of IMPRESARIO RAFFLÉS

  SUBJECT The Mrs. W. Story.

  PLOTLESS

  NON-PLAY Fun-Mobile

  NON-PRODUCTION

  About to be calcified in some West End A*** Hole.

  AFTER B’Heath P. Mortem chat, intention apparently to take Playwrite job seriously. Why not then do a new one says Jay Hell [Producer’s consultant] since none of this epic would stand up to Kunst analysis. Small wind machines have to be put under such bubbles as this constantly if they are to be kept afloat. This happens at pre-show sessions each night and will have to continue during Mausoleum stay. New jokes and songs are better than firm structure. Also this team “for better or worse” shared the peculiar and unique experience of getting this epic on to a stage.

  To dislodge, re-cast, improve or cast to type will create an entirely different attitude to work. A hierarchy is formed, good “Performers” step into dead men’s clothes, it’s disaster. I know because I’ve made this mistake before.

  This contradicts J.L. yes-chat at B’Heath Meet but HELL so opposed in first place to old world mounting of this show that it didn’t seem to matter anymore what happened as she was on dreary transfer waggon again.

  Also suggest that Prologue and Entr’acte clownerie should go in:-

  “COMMERCIALS”, “LECTURES” with slides. GNOME EDITORIAL, O’BOOZE REPORTS and Theatre should have P. EYE DECOR MOTIF.

  Various points in this memo need picking up. To start with, one can see at first hand some of Joan’s reasons for her leaving theatre six years earlier. Two specific examples she often talked about come to mind.

  When A Taste of Honey was first produced, the part of Peter, Helen’s fancy man, was played by John Bay, a witty American who, during rehearsals, had contributed greatly. Unfortunately, he drank and Donald Albery, the show’s West End producer, regarded him as unreliable. Nigel Davenport, who had never worked for Joan before and never would again, was brought in to replace him. He provided the solidity and safety that producers, looking forward to a long run, required, or ‘Eight performances a week,’ as they put it. For Joan who prized, above all, invention and quick wits, he was the good ‘Performer’ stepping into a dead man’s clothes.

  The second example happened during the run of Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be. James Booth, who had created the role of Tosher – and that meant really created, because he had turned Frank Norman’s old man into a young, Ben Jonson fixer with funny telephone conversations he had made up himself – was leaving. An actor who looked like he could play the part, Maurice Kaufman, was cast. Again, he had not worked for Joan before, and never would again. She was so depressed by his performance that she summoned Victor Spinetti all the way back from Chicago where he was having a perfectly nice time appearing in The Hostage. Victor, Welsh and no cockney spiv, was completely wrong for the part but he had a bounce and presence that Joan badly needed. Maurice Kaufman was typecasting.

  Another point in the memo is the part that goes: ‘This contradicts JL yes-chat at B’Heath Meet’. Like turning against people, Joan changing her mind was something that happened often. Picture John Wells, Richard Ingrams and Joan sitting round the kitchen table at Blackheath, eating lamb that had been slowly roasted by Gerry in his Aga, and drinking Fleurie wine. You would imagine everything was going fine: Joan, John and Richard talking enthusiastically about the transfer as Gerry produced more dishes. For the two boys, a transfer was, after all, a new experience. The next day, they were confronted with that memo. It would have felt like cold water dashed in their faces.

  Gerry, of course, was familiar with the cold water treatment and knew only too well Joan’s attitude to the West End, so his feelings were likely to have been mixed. Mrs Wilson’s Diary was the first hit since the Theatre Royal re-opened in March of that year, so, as its manager, he was bound to have been pleased, while the move to the Criterion was the icing on the cake.

  A West End transfer may have been tedious for Joan but, for many others, it still commanded respect. However, it would have been better, altogether, if Theatre Workshop had been given a proper grant so that it didn’t need to transfer shows. Gerry, by then, knew that but, after all these years, it had still not happened. Referring to the knack for raising money possessed by the actor who ran the Mermaid Theatre in Puddle Dock, he sighed and said: ‘Bernard Miles is better than I am.’

  Finally, there were Joan’s ideas for what ought to be going on around the show at the Criterion. Lord Gnome, it should be explained, was the fictional owner of Private Eye and a send-up of Lord Beaverbrook, the ultimate interfering newspaper owner. Richard wrote that. Lunchtime O’Booze was the Eye’s fictional political columnist. Those ideas were some of Joan’s small wind machines and very much in keeping with her desire for rolling entertainment. But, in the West End, where you didn’t own the bricks and mortar and had to deal with the theatre’s own management, those little wind machines were much harder to switch on, if at all. In the end, there were some Willie Rushton cartoons lining the walls as you descended to the auditorium.

  When it came to the show’s poster, Gerry summoned his regular designer, George Mayhew (posters along with photos and logos being Gerry’s self-imposed responsibility). Understanding that a company had to sell itself, he regarded them as important. In particular, he admired the simple logos adopted by the Berliner Ensemble and the Théâtre National Populaire in Paris. Joan, holding different opinions on the subject of photos and George Mayhew, left Gerry to it. Photos she did not like at all, and posters by George Mayhew she disliked too. Mayhew provided a widely accepted good taste that gave the company a certain respectability. Joan, hot on design herself but, after Gerry’s disapproval of the Macbird dart, offering no alternative, railed at whatever he came up with. In the case of Mrs Wilson’s Diary, it was a rose-tinted vignette of Number Ten Downing Street with the title in copperplate lettering. Cartoony it wasn’t. If anything, the ghost of Brian Eatwell hung about it, but that was typical of the constant tension between Joan and Gerry.

  Another facet of their relationship could be observed three months into the following year, when the cast at the Criterion was told that Mrs Wilson’s Diary was coming off. ‘Oh Gerry
, can’t you keep it on?’ pleaded one of the actors. ‘Yes, Gerry, can’t you?’ chimed Joan adding, the moment that actor’s back was turned, ‘What a bore for you, Gerry. It’s quite obvious the show’s dead on its feet.’

  Nicholas de Jongh, the theatre critic, in his history of British theatre censorship, was amazed at the gentleness of Mrs Wilson’s Diary when he read it. Alistair Beaton’s 2001 play, Feelgood, at the Hampstead Theatre would have seemed to him much harder-hitting. What he couldn’t know, because he hadn’t been there, was how it felt to be in the auditorium at Stratford East in 1967. When Joan was on form, a breathless, warm, what you are seeing is happening now, sensation lifted the audience to the point that it felt impelled to jump on to the stage and join the actors. It’s what kept the show alive and what Joan dreaded having to keep going throughout the run at the Criterion. That kind of lightness and freshness makes great demands. At the Hampstead Theatre, you had a properly made play, no songs and a realistic set. You watched it but you did not think of joining in.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if, in years to come, we were being wheeled on in this.’ There was a follow-on to that remark of Stephen Lewis’s. As a result of him and Bob Grant appearing in Mrs Wilson’s Diary, they were cast in the TV sitcom, On the Buses, which ran for years. Joan hating it, referred to Bob and Steve, from then on, as The Trusses.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  JOAN LOOKS BACK

  The show Joan plucked Nigel Hawthorne from was The Marie Lloyd Story. That spring, a script had been lying about in the green room. It was only too easy for anyone to pick it up and have a read. Three people were responsible. The book and lyrics were by Dan Farson and Harry Moore and the music was by Norman Kay. Dan was a journalist and a friend of Joan’s. Harry Moore was not known in theatre but Norman Kay was familiar from his TV themes. The dialogue, which most people respond to first when reading scripts, was cardboard. Why would Joan do that? If you stick around in theatre and film, particularly film, you will find that a script can have poor dialogue but a good plot, and that something can be done about it so, enter Joan.

  At first, she and Gerry were unsure. For them the problem wasn’t so much the dialogue as the songs. They were angular and, if anything, Kurt Weill-ish. Their answer was to give them to Avis Bunnage to record. If she could make them work, then maybe there was a chance for the show. Avis recorded them and made them work. At that point, she was asked to play Marie. In later years Joan always said: ‘We did Marie Lloyd as a present for Avis,’ which was a distancing device. If Avis had not been able to make anything of the songs, the show would not have been done.

  The reason why Joan accepted the script was because Dan had chosen the most interesting part of Marie Lloyd’s life, the last part. Ned Sherrin and Caryl Brahms had also written a Marie Lloyd musical, Sing A Rude Song, and had also sent it to Joan. This one told of Marie’s rise to fame, not so interesting because there was little conflict. Her rise happened very quickly at the age of nineteen and she stayed at the top for many years. That’s not a story. Stories happen when things go wrong, like taking a violent young lover, clashing with moral guardians, finding yourself in competition with films and dying onstage of mercury poisoning (mercury being used to treat venereal disease). Those were Marie’s last years.

  Joan, though loathing the hypocrisy of the Edwardian era and not liking Marie much either, could make something of this. Scene One was a Monday morning band call in Sheffield. Instead of asking her actors to read the scene, the dialogue being all feeble wisecracks, Joan appointed two or three people to be stage hands and get on with bringing in skips and calling up to the flies to get battens, which were to hold cloths, at the right height and angle. The rest of the company were sent off into the theatre’s scene dock which in the Theatre Royal’s case led to the street and, there, the actors had to form themselves into the various acts, one with a newborn baby, and imagine themselves arriving, either from the station, or their digs on a cold morning. Once on the stage, each act’s task was to get the musical director, in this case the real musical director, Alfie Ralston in the pit, to run through their music. The sooner you had that out of the way the better. Anyone not involved with music went to sort out his or her dressing room. This they did by climbing the stone steps at the other side of the stage to where the real dressing rooms were. If they didn’t like them they could come down and complain. Nobody said anything funny. They just got on with what they had to do.

  Halfway through the morning, Dan Farson walked in and was appalled. Not one word of his dialogue could he hear being spoken. And for the rest of the rehearsals he remained appalled, getting drunk in the bar and attacking the actors for not saying what he had written. Joan often gave the instruction, ‘Don’t be clever. Have the courage to be ordinary.’ This scene was a good example of that and the more perceptive of the critics were impressed by its atmosphere. In the ordinary one can find beauty.

  Drawing on her own memory of theatre and theatre life, Joan continued piecing together scene after scene: Marie’s private life, alternating with music hall scenes performed before a front cloth. That’s when you heard her famous songs like ‘Oh Mr Porter’ and ‘My Old Man Said Follow The Van’. The Norman Kay songs were reserved for telling the backstage story.

  As usual, research went on simultaneously. Avis listened to records of Marie Lloyd singing. What came from that was how small Marie’s voice was and how unemphatic her delivery. She didn’t have an accent either. Georgia Brown, not long before, had recorded ‘My Old Man’, bashing it out in a theatrical cockney, presumably because that’s how we think of music hall performers: loud and unsubtle. Think again. Those acts toured for years and years. It gave the artistes time to refine, polish and add detail that could make the acts really subtle. When, at the end of Act One, Avis quietly sang: ‘We had to move away, for the rent we couldn’t pay. The moving man came round just after dark. There was me and my old man, shoving things inside the van. . .,’ the audience went quiet and listened to the story which was not very happy. The words describe a moonlight flit. In that way, the song became new.

  Joan wanted a tea stall scene with lots of terrible gags. She delegated the writing of that to Jimmy Perry who was playing Marie’s first husband, Alec Hurley:

  Toff: What kind of sandwiches have you got?

  Stallholder: Any kind you like.

  Toff: I’ll have an elephant sandwich.

  Stallholder: I’m not cutting up a new elephant just for you.

  Toff: I’ll have a crocodile sandwich then and make it snappy.

  Upstairs in his dressing room, Jimmy was also writing the first episode of Dad’s Army.

  Joan remembered that music hall artistes only met up on Sundays, often at the Horns pub in south London near where she was born. It was the only day of the week these get-togethers could happen as artistes were working every other day, often away from London. Joan, following this tradition, used to have Sunday lunch parties now and again at Blackheath. Nearly all her actors past and present were invited. In the show, Marie Lloyd gets to throw such a party. The wretched baby from the first scene is there and so is an old bum, played by Nigel Hawthorne, whose main aim is to eat and drink as much as he can because it’s probably the only decent meal he’ll have all week. In this way, Dan Farson’s artifice was replaced by the believable and the charming. If one looks at the script today, one can see that whatever her feelings about the show – ‘a present for Avis’ – Joan put a surprising amount of herself into it.

  As usual, during rehearsals, actors were added to the company. A young man called Jimmy Winston appeared. He’d been with the group, The Small Faces. It was at the end of a day’s rehearsal when he arrived and Joan, right there and then, without going to watch him from the dress circle or even leaving the stage, asked him to mime a champion diver climbing up a ladder and performing a champion dive. Jimmy did this and was given a job on the spot. As he left, Joan said: ‘I just needed someone who could move.’ And yet that was by no
means the only show Jimmy did for Joan.

  The company loved the show. This horrified her but, worse, they loved each other. She sent for Pat Tull who’d been the Sheriff in Macbird. Earlier in the year, he had been unpopular with his fellow actors and that was just what Joan wanted. Unfortunately, Pat, in between times, had found a new girlfriend, Pam Jones, an actress who had been in the Vanbrugh and she had cleaned him up, slimmed him down and softened his aggression. Joan was most disappointed, particularly as Pat loved the show too.

  And The Nutters? Each evening they came in, three quarters of an hour before the company’s warm-up, to carry on their improvisations and, by simply being around a show, they picked up stuff. Bright Liz Langan could put many of the cast to shame by learning all the dialogue and all the songs in double-quick time. As a consequence, she could easily stand in when an actor went for a pee.

  Geoff Wincott, who was always being sent up because he wore glasses, got to play a callboy who summoned Miss Lloyd from her dressing room. The first time he rushed it, and Joan told him not to anticipate but to think through what would really happen in such a situation. It was a lesson in timing but not a technical one. During a gala charity scene, he and Chris Shepherd, Sam’s younger brother, lolloped across the stage as that year’s Derby winner. For this they had to wear pink tights and, although their faces were not seen because they were under a horse blanket, they thought they would never live it down. Joan wanted other Nutters to do that horse on other nights but Pat Tull – he still wasn’t totally lovable – complained to Equity. Nowadays, children alternate all the time. That’s the ruling on their being able to perform.

  As part of the set, right at the back of the stage on a diagonal, was a proscenium arch, so for scenes that took place in the music hall wings, you only had to fly in three little wing pieces downstage, also on a diagonal. There, Marie and other performers could gossip while looking upstage at the act, Jimmy Winston and his non-existent performing seal, for example. Obviously this arch had to have a colour and again Joan clashed with a tasteful designer. She came in to find it painted the colour of the Louis Vuitton LV. ‘Goose turd green,’ she said, and had it painted sparkly silver.