by Peter Rankin
Another example of Joan asking someone to stand in was less of a success than Liz Langan. Max Shaw, playing an important part, was not there. Joan asked an assistant to take his place. The assistant, not wanting to be caught acting, stood absolutely still. No use. ‘What are you doing?’ asked Joan, ‘You’re stuck there like a turd on a blanket.’
What the assistant was at least able to learn was the power of the diagonal. The sparkly upstage arch was also used for a sweeping entrance made by Marie and her entourage as they stepped off a train into the main hall of the station. The angle they came on at through the arch added to the force of the entrance.
When Joan started to rehearse this scene, she first had to establish the comings and goings before Marie’s entrance. She told everyone to go off and work out who they were – a porter, a little family, a late passenger, it didn’t matter, but they had to fix on something. The point was, before they came on, they knew what they had to do so that Joan only had to say: ‘Go,’ and suddenly there was the scene. With Joan’s training in sensitivity, they kept their eyes open as they went. That way, they didn’t bump into each other. John Gielgud, in his writing, refers to beautiful groupings. That’s what he did. He arranged the actors on the stage to make a pleasing effect. Joan never did that and yet everyone was in the right place, and it looked good too.
The show got quite good notices and even won an award for Best New Musical. Some critics rhapsodised over that first scene and also over a little one in which a small, bedraggled group forms a queue in the rain for cheap seats in the gallery. This was the scene that Joan remembered from ‘late door’ at the Old Vic when she was a teenager.
She, herself, sitting in the stalls during a break in rehearsals, said: ‘This one is designed to be jet propelled into the West End,’ which was unusually cynical of her. The cast, uncynically, looked forward to going into a theatre up West and so, by then, did Dan Farson who had become proud of what was now ‘his’ show. At least he was smart enough to recognise what Joan had achieved on his behalf.
Winter came. Little throwaway Mrs Wilson’s Diary was running successfully at the Criterion, and big, commercial Marie Lloyd Story was poised to join it in the West End. There were still The Nutters.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
THE NUTTERS MAKE A FILM
It was during the run of The Marie Lloyd show that Gerry dropped a bombshell. At least, that’s what it felt like to Joan. He rented the theatre out. It was to go to a pantomime starring an old Brothers act that nobody had heard of except Avis Bunnage. Gerry doing the deed without first telling Joan didn’t help. Despite her scorn for the place, she was put out. It may have been old-fashioned but the Theatre Royal, if nothing else, provided a space for activities.
It seemed like Gerry was returning the theatre to the days before Theatre Workshop, when it hosted shows like Soldiers in Skirts. In later months, this feeling was strengthened by such titles as Boys Will be Girls appearing on the billboards. Here was Gerry’s argument again: the last thing a theatre could do was go dark. He had a point because, for all its ups and downs, the theatre is still there, still putting on plays.
At No 48 Martin Street, a few streets away from the theatre, was a light industry factory that was only being used for a bit of storage. Christine Jackson acquired it from Newham Council at a peppercorn rent. There, when it grew dark, the playground children could continue making things and The Nutters could carry on improvising.
Joan’s constant challenge – ways and means – still faced her. In the old days, Theatre Workshop could go into an unappealing hall and with no money but plenty of will, clean it and make it fresh. Its arrival at Stratford East in 1953 was a good example. However, that kind of effort requires a team and every member of that team must know what the aim is. That is how Theatre Workshop had its ways and means. Joan, though it didn’t look like it, was on her own in 1967. It didn’t look like it because she could make things happen by the power of her personality. Her problem was maintaining the necessary level of concentrated stamina.
An example of her being out on her own came with the playground. Yes, Joan did make a team. However, the members of that team had not set out to be play supervisors. It was not their aim. They had other interests and, what’s more, needed to earn a living. Joan could chip in with small sums of her own money, not with Gerry’s approval though, but those sums could never be enough. The team gradually broke up and wandered off in different directions. The one person who stayed was Christine Jackson, but then children and play was her aim.
No 48 Martin Street, dedicated to the children and The Nutters, sounded ideal but as a building it was not that lovely. It needed work. Meetings were held. Reports were made – Joan always insisted on those – and indeed some work was done, like a bit of plumbing, but the place remained shabby and so became a space the children and The Nutters didn’t respect. Good heavens, hadn’t the Theatre Royal, with its strong identity, been broken into often enough? What chance did No 48 have? At the time, though, it was going to be great.
The Theatre Royal with its clear purpose, its hard but exciting work, its discipline, even its glamour, was a better place to be. The children and The Nutters were guests there and had to show respect, well, a bit. At No 48, they were not guests; it was supposed to be theirs. Joan tried to add formality by making it a club with membership but its identity was never strong. What happened next brought things to a head.
One of the many people who visited the playground during the summer was a young man who dreamed of being a film maker, Barney Platts-Mills. While he was there, he got to hear about The Nutters and decided he wanted to make a documentary film about them. No 48 seemed to be the ideal place to make it. There were lots of meetings about that too.
Shooting started early in 1968. However, it was soon obvious that bringing in a crew of ex-public school boys who had never watched the improvisations, had a bad effect. Each time they had a go, the games rapidly disintegrated. Doug Quant turned into a film star, went upstairs and refused to come down to work.
Barney was not getting his film. Joan, sensing that No 48 was one of the problems, sent the crew and The Nutters out to play football that could then be filmed. It was, but it lacked interest. Then, one night, there was a break-in at No 48 and everything inside was smashed to bits. Barney Platts-Mills was shocked, particularly as he could see that his film could no longer be shot there. He drove out to a boys’ club in Essex, taking only a few of The Nutters. It was a dismal place. Even so, the other Nutters followed and the evening fell apart.
Having got very little, Barney and his crew left. He cut together the footage and called it Everybody’s an Actor, Shakespeare Said, a remark made by one of The Nutters. He showed this film to Bryan Forbes, the film director, who then helped him raise the money to make a feature film, Bronco Bullfrog. He cast The Nutters but, except for Roy Haywood and Sam Shepherd, not the really good ones. They had scarpered. In comparison with the improvisations on the theatre stage, which Barney had never seen, the film came across as a bit soppy. But then maybe nobody could see those improvisations. The plays The Nutters came up with existed for themselves.
Shortly after the filming, Joan closed No 48 down, which upset Christine Jackson. Joan found her another playground job elsewhere.
During this unhappy period, some of The Nutters were hailed into court. They didn’t care. They knew they would only be given a warning. Joan did care. She knew that it was still a black mark against their names. If they had to show a clean record in later years when applying for something important, like a mortgage, that black mark could come to haunt them. She paid for a solicitor and went to court with them. She wasn’t allowed in, though, because The Nutters were minors. A few minutes later, the solicitor bounced out with a big smile on his face. He had not only got The Nutters off but seemed genuinely to believe that Joan had done the right thing.
When the playground children, who were between six and ten years old, did something they should not
have, Joan rang the Dean of St Paul’s and said they were coming on a pilgrimage to the cathedral, on foot. He, seeing how imaginative this walk was, said that he would be there on the cathedral steps to greet them. Sometimes Establishment figures did understand Joan but then, perhaps he wasn’t so Establishment, being Australian.
The closing of No 48 brought an end to the children making things and the end of The Nutters. However, if you talk to any of them today – they’re now in their sixties – they will tell you that they have never forgotten 1967 and that, ever so slightly, it changed their lives.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
REACTING TO THE TIMES: RONAN POINT,
BUBBLE CITY & INDIA PART TWO
During this period, Joan’s reputation as a theatre director was still immense and she was still receiving offers. Early in 1968, the Royal Court Theatre asked her to direct the opening production of the Theatre Upstairs. Sam Wanamaker, whom she had known from Uranium 235 days back in the 1950s, asked her to do Bartholomew Fair at the Globe and Oscar Lewenstein – no quitter, he – sent her Joe Orton’s last work, What the Butler Saw, hoping that she would direct it.
The Royal Court job, she turned down. Her excuse was that she was going to make the film in India she had mentioned late in 1966. She did, however, see one of the Theatre Upstairs’s early productions, Christie in Love by Howard Brenton, of which she spoke well. Remarkable, really, as she hardly spoke well of any play she went to. The Globe – that’s when it was a plastic tent – she nearly accepted. That is, until she discovered she couldn’t do the play out in the street.
To Oscar she wrote a letter, written in a playful style she often used when extracting herself from an awkward situation. She disliked saying no and this was a way of avoiding the word.
Dearest Oscar (Actually I only know two Oscars and the other one isn’t dear at all, so it should be just dearer Oscar)
I read the poor Orton’s semi-posthumous right away, but have left time for it to settle; and I still think it’s rather eccentric of you to be keen on it. It has a super opening and some very good jokes, but how can you be so “King Lear”? I didn’t notice any giveaway gestures or the secreting of scented handkerchiefs or suchlike which might have told me that you have gone bent!
Now Oscar the only way to do it is as a TV serial with Lucille Balls and Charlotte Drake and all the men playing women and the women men. One can’t be semi-serious, demi-comic about the sex war. Lysistrata is the only successful comedy on the theme.
She finished the letter talking yet again about the film she wanted to make in India.
And, of course, there was The Marie Lloyd Story. While Gerry dealt with managements, Joan wrote sheets of notes about how to make it better. She sent them to Dan Farson. He tried to put the breaks on. After his early indignation, he thought the show, by its last performance, was not that bad. It went nowhere, though. The Marie Lloyd Story, probably the only show Joan aimed at the West End, never reached it. Talks fell apart over Norman Kay’s songs. Joan and Gerry wanted to junk them and use only the old music hall ones. Norman Kay and Harry Moore weren’t having it. Dan Farson was easy.
Joan did not seem that upset. ‘If you were to do it again,’ she said over dinner at Blackheath, ‘you’d need someone dangerous to play Marie, like Judy Garland.’ So Avis Bunnage was vindicated. During rehearsals, she had joked: ‘I’m only standing in for Barbara Windsor.’ About three years later, Philip Hedley, who was to become Artistic Director of Stratford East, put The Marie Lloyd Story on at Lincoln with Jean Boht in the lead. The Norman Kay songs were not in it.
Really, Joan was still thinking about the Fun Palace and how to adapt it to her circumstances which, right then, were no theatre, no other space, nothing. That April, she set up a meeting at the Architectural Association in Bedford Square.
Present, among others, were Keith Albarn, Hazel’s husband, James Dyson and Bruce Lacey. Bruce and some musical clowns called The Alberts had put on a show at the Comedy Theatre called An Evening of British Rubbish. Joan, when asked to organise a CND rally at the Albert Hall, had sent The Alberts on to interrupt when it grew boring. Among those on the podium that night was JB Priestley and Jolly Jack was rendered a good deal less than jolly. This could have been Joan’s revenge for the crushing letter he had sent Theatre Workshop turning down a request for money in its early days. Bruce Lacey and The Alberts meant anarchy and Joan did love interruptions.
But what were Bruce Lacey and Keith Albarn and the others doing at this meeting? Joan, at first, spoke of her journey from the Fun Palace, via the playground and The Nutters to where she was at that point. She had been remembering how Theatre Workshop started, out on the road. So, that’s what she was planning to do again. The Mobile Fair, as she would call it, would go to various places round the country and Robert Atkins, an assistant stage manager on The Marie Lloyd Story but with much more to give, had found the first space, Woburn Park. Because it had its own strong and commercial identity Joan wasn’t crazy about it. Still, it was available.
After this introduction, talk turned to finance, how to raise money for this fair and how visitors would pay. Would there be a fence round it with punters buying one ticket for the whole thing, or would there be no fence with each event charging separately? It was the kind of practicality Joan was not comfortable with. She hated fences, yet paying for each event seemed fiddly.
More fun was the discussion about the events themselves, particularly Bruce Lacey’s. He wanted to build a body so huge, people could walk around inside it, a humanoid, not a standing figure but laid out across the ground like Gulliver.
When the others had put forward their ideas, which included an audiovisual tower and a soft wall – more of that later – Peter Cook, not the comedian, but a member of Archigram, a group of architects whose ideas, nutty then but influential today, put forward his proposal. He thought that it was important to have an area where people could smash things up. Joan, with the destruction of No 48 fresh in her mind, agreed. Actually, this idea had occurred to her long before.
Woburn, to her relief, didn’t happen. Something better did which got rid of fences, tickets and the dodgy image. The Reverend Eric Saywell of All Hallows, Tower Square sent her an invitation. His church, hard by the Tower of London formed one side of the square, he explained, while office blocks formed the others. The space in the middle, he thought, was deadly dull so, as the City of London Festival was to take place that summer, he wondered if Joan would like to come there with some kind of entertainment. And that is where the fair was to go.
Should Joan not have been directing plays, though? That’s what plenty of people were thinking, but she was too busy reacting to the moment. The Fun Palace, the playground and the fair, forms of education and ways to explore, really, were badly needed sparks. On 16 May, vindication came when a side of an East End tower block collapsed, killing four people. For Joan, tower blocks had long been a symbol of soulless living. Ronan Point, as this one was called, would eventually bring her back to the theatre.
A few days later, though, another disturbance, benevolent this time, stimulated her curiosity. The students at Hornsea School of Art, fed up with its teachers using them as serfs for their own projects, voted for a sit-in. They didn’t stop work. They did what they wanted to do and, to watch them, came all the world and his wife, among them Joan. There, in the garden, she was able to see what Keith Albarn had previously talked about, a series of brightly coloured, interconnected inflatable tubes in which you could walk, a gently disorientating experience that made you laugh. It would go to the fair in Tower Square.
Hornsea’s work-in began on 28 May and lasted over a month. It therefore ran parallel to the events in Paris that had started 25 days earlier. As the Hornsea students, inside their place of learning, used their energy to create, so the Parisian students, locked out of the Sorbonne, used theirs to throw cobblestones, another example of the need to demolish.
The tribunal for Ronan Point to be held at Newham Town
Hall, came up. Joan went.
The hall itself was the kind of hall where you take exams. However, nobody was on trial this time. It was an inquiry but, as the days went by, it felt like a trial.
Gradually those present learned that a Mrs Ivy Hodge on the eighteenth floor had risen one morning, put the kettle on, lit the gas, heard a bang and was knocked out. As a consequence of the bang, the whole side of the tower block where the living rooms were situated, collapsed. It was lucky that most of the residents were still asleep at the time. If the explosion had occurred a little later, they would have been in those living rooms and many more would have died.
Before the inquiry got to this moment, witnesses, who had been out in the street at the time of the explosion, gave evidence. Was it a boom they had heard or a bang and, if it was both, was there a five- or a ten-second gap? The cloud of dust they saw, was it brown or grey? And was it dust or was it smoke? This went on for quite some time but, at the end, no one was any the wiser.
The residents, when questioned, revealed how unpopular the building was. They told of the mysterious bad smells that lingered and of the unexplained heat that caused draughts to slam doors. For them, it was like bad magic. For the barristers, it was a way of making working-class people look too stupid to live in a decent new building. ‘You mean to say, you slept with nothing on and the window shut?’ queried one of these barristers, sounding like Edith Evans and her handbag.
There was one barrister of whom Joan was particularly mistrustful. He started with banal simplicity and curved round to where he wanted to be, or rather where he wanted the witness to be: trapped.