Joan Littlewood

by Peter Rankin

  This hearing was Joan’s theatre, better than anything she saw on a stage, well, someone else’s stage. She didn’t pull her hat down over her eyes. She didn’t fall asleep and she didn’t tear through the paper as she made notes.

  Simply by looking and listening, she picked up what she needed to know and, by being there she also picked up the telltale details, the tones of voice, the comedy, the incompetence and the danger.

  One day, Mr Hopkins, a barrister, speaking in honeyed but poisonous tones for the gas board, was gently pressing Mr Pike to, frankly, admit that he had fitted Mrs Hodge’s stove badly. Life is so much easier if you can pin the blame on one person. The atmosphere was already tense when a trolley was wheeled in, on it the gas pipe in question. Hopkins asked Mr Pike to pick it up. Cobra quick, Justice Griffiths, leant forward. ‘Listen to me,’ he said, ‘Don’t touch that pipe!’ It had not been inspected for fingerprints.

  Actually, all this clever questioning turned out to be irrelevant. What was absolutely relevant was the system by which Ronan Point had been built. Larsen-Nielsen, it was called, prefabricated parts brought to the site, intended for buildings nine storeys high, not 23. Added to that, the work had been slipshod. Some of the concrete was crumbly. Mrs Hodge caused a gas explosion, so what? The kitchen walls should have withstood it. The outward pressure was not that great.

  Some weeks later, by roundabout means, Joan got the transcript from the Stationer’s Office. Roundabout because she didn’t want the Stationer’s Office to know the identity of the real recipient.

  On looking through it, she noticed that she could no longer hear the superior tone of the barristers or sense their tricks. ‘I’m sorry, the sound system doesn’t seem to be working very well. Could you repeat that?’ This was one of them. Rarely did the witness repeat what they said, not exactly. They were too cowed.

  In the transcript, proceedings were smooth. In the hall, they were not. The microphone system really did fail. Witnesses went missing. Those who did appear were sometimes handed the wrong photo or the wrong statement. They still carried on talking, though, until the mistake was discovered.

  That barrister Joan thought could not be trusted, arguably, was only doing his job. However, when you realise that his and Hopkins’ job was to get the builders, Taylor Woodrow Anglian, and the Borough of Newham off the hook when that’s exactly where they belonged, it doesn’t seem so admirable.

  What happened after the inquiry? Ronan Point and the eight other tower blocks built by the same method were strengthened with glue. Epoxy resin, it was called. Comic as that sounds, it was stronger than the buildings it was there to reinforce. Eighteen years later, all nine tower blocks were demolished. Whatever you did to them, you could not make them popular.

  Joan wanted to do a Ronan Point show right away. She even had her eye on a possible performance area, St Paul’s Cathedral. Stations of the Cross was her plan, years before promenade theatre. Then she discovered that, even using the transcripts, she could be accused of libel. There was nothing for it but to bide her time.

  Immediately it was time to get the Mobile Fair going in Tower Square, except that it was no longer called Mobile Fair but Bubble City.

  Bruce Lacey didn’t have enough money for a whole body. He had to settle for a head and a stomach. Nevertheless, his was still the main attraction. You climbed up steps to the mouth, clambered over a lusciously upholstered lip and slid, via the tongue, into the stomach. There you found giant tomatoes, carrots and some of the organs you would find in a stomach, nothing revolting, though, just brightly coloured soft toys. When you had had enough, you walked through a fibreglass maze of inner tubing and out the other end.

  In fact, apart from the audiovisual tower, soft and squushy was the theme that ran through most of the events, including Keith Albarn’s tubes. The soft wall was a row of big, jelly female nudes which you could bounce against as hard as you liked. Who did the bouncing? City gents in their bowler hats, just what Joan wanted.

  Good fun as Bubble City was, it did not revert to Mobile Fair and take to the road. Maybe it was the thought of trying to tour something no one had heard of or, maybe, having achieved something, the team felt less strongly about doing it again. The Festival’s existing structure plus its time limit, two weeks, had been the perfect spur.

  That autumn you could find Joan busy preparing her Indian film. It really looked like it was going to happen. This was a timely satire on shenanigans in India: politicians and businessmen, both American and Russian, moving in to see what they could grab. The story was told in a picaresque way contrasting the old and the new, Smollett with a flavouring of James Bond. Its hero was a Scapino type called Lall. In those days, a Western actor was needed to help raise the finance. Joan mentioned Cliff Richard because he had an Asian antecedent, and Warren Beatty. In fact, for a month, Warren Beatty, a fan of Oh What a Lovely War, was often on the phone. Even so, this batting about of famous names sounded odd because Joan didn’t know much about any of them. Actors had, for so long, come to her, not vice versa.

  She got to India, Gerry too, and met up with their grand and comic producer, Santi Chaudhury. However, once the film was made, no one saw it, certainly not a paying audience. It ended up in a garage, rotting. What’s left of it turned up quite recently. There was no luscious French photography as Santi had dreamed of and no big star. It was shot in 16 mm and Lall was played by Max Shaw. What acting could achieve he did, but film is unkind. Lall should have been in his twenties. Elegant and handsome Max was in his 40s and it showed.

  As for the film itself, it has a distant charm, like the Lumière brothers’ first snatch of film, shot in 1895, the one where you watch passengers getting off a train.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  BARRAULT? THE THÉTRE NATIONAL POPULAIRE? + POWER CUTS

  On their return from India, Joan and Gerry went, in the autumn of 1969, to see the Rabelais show at the Old Vic Theatre which, on this occasion, was acting as host. The Compagnie Renaud-Barrault had brought the show over from Paris.

  It was quite an event because, the year before, during the student uprising, students had occupied and desecrated Jean-Louis Barrault’s theatre in Paris, the Odéon. Despite Barrault talking to them, saying that he was on their side, he still had his company’s costumes pissed on and had to leave. The Compagnie Renaud-Barrault was state subsidised and so represented the Establishment; that was the trouble. It was bad luck that the Odéon was situated on the Left Bank.

  Regardless of politics, though, the Odéon productions had grown tired. What had been bubbly ten years earlier was, by then, flat. So when Barrault opened up for business again in a boxing ring to the north of Paris with a lively adaptation of Rabelais’s works, it really was the phoenix rising from the ashes.

  The Old Vic was obviously not a boxing ring but a special performing area had been constructed that projected into the stalls. Barrault with his slight frame and cawing voice, paced around in brown velvet trousers and soft shoes as the Orator of the Company and when he wasn’t doing that, turned into a horse, a piece of mime he’d doubtless been delighting Paris with for decades but which, for London, was new. After all, what actor knight would you find turning himself into a horse?

  After the performance, Gerry drove Joan in his Buick, now sprayed red, much to the disgust of Joan who compared it to a London bus, over the river to Jack’s Club in Panton Street, a small, dark room where you hardly saw anyone and ate steak and baked potato because there wasn’t anything else. It was very exclusive.

  The evening that Joan and Gerry had experienced, France amusing in a way that England wasn’t, excited them and soon it looked as if Joan was going to direct an English version in London.

  But then, another French team, The Théâtre National Populaire of Paris invited her to direct a show at their theatre. They wanted her to do Entre Chien et Loup by Isaac Babel, a brilliant short story writer and a slightly less brilliant playwright. He wrote about Jews in Odessa circa 1913, naughtier Jews than
the ones in the Sholem Aleichem stories, so more intriguing.

  During the spring of 1970, Joan flew to Paris. After the meeting with Georges Wilson, the artistic director of the TNP, she joined up with one of her students from Hammamet, Alain Guémard. He took Joan to a little restaurant in the rue des Canettes the other side of the Boulevard Saint-Germain. As she walked, Joan was unwilling to discuss her talk with Georges Wilson but eventually said that the place had depressed her and the fact that she wasn’t offered even a sandwich at one o’clock had put her right off the whole thing. ‘A theatre where they rehearse till midnight and don’t eat, only drink whisky and Coca-Cola, I couldn’t stand that.’

  Toward the end of dinner, a large number of noisy fire engines were heard going by but not noticed. For that reason, when the two left the restaurant, the sight of students running down the street by the hundred gave them a shock. They peered round the corner into the Boulevard Saint-Germain. The riots were back on. Thuggish policemen with visors, shields and long truncheons, the CRS (Compagnie Républicaine de Sécurité) were marching down the road as students and bystanders ran before them. The students, when they were at a safe distance, stopped and chanted: ‘Libérez Le Dantec!’

  Joan and Alain found themselves watching and, occasionally, running on, out of the way of the police. As they pressed themselves into a doorway, Alain told Joan what it was about. Two editors of a Maoist magazine, La Cause du Peuple, had been arrested and were on trial, he said. The magazine incited students to violence, advising them to use the same methods as the police.

  Shots rang out.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Joan.

  ‘Gaz lacrymogène.’

  Tear gas. Gradually it drifted their way and their eyes started to sting. ‘In the May 1968 riots, they used nerve gas,’ said Alain, ‘I was sick for a month, couldn’t keep anything down.’ Little pebbles started to fly. It was difficult to tell who was throwing them, the students or the police. Joan cursed and tut-tutted:

  France, the country of reason. It’s worse than anywhere else. Do you see, there are no TV cameras. The police can do what they like. I was here in the 30s during the riots against the Cagoulards, on these streets too, but it was nothing like this. Fuck it. Shit.

  By making a detour, they were eventually able to cross the Boulevard Saint-Germain and return to the Louisiane hotel, haunt of famous low-lifers, where Joan was staying. The Cagoulards, Joan remembered, tried to introduce a Nazi system when Hitler came to power.

  The next morning, she recounted to a friend what had happened afterwards. ‘It went on till dawn,’ she said:

  Alain stayed with me most of the time, telling me his life story. I couldn’t get to sleep. It was going on all around us. They even thought the police were going to come into our hotel. I saw them get hold of a group of people and cudgel them in a corner. I suppose it’s all a game. There was a girl who came in downstairs to hide. Her friend had been hurt and she was making a terrible noise. She was thoroughly enjoying herself. I think that gas kept filtering through because my eyes were stinging all night. I had to give some cotton wool to Alain for his eyes. Well, it was more exciting than a cowboy film.

  Wasting nothing, Joan wrote this up and, the following Sunday, it appeared in the Observer.

  On returning to London, Joan came to the conclusion that she would have difficulty finding enough heavyweight Jewish actors and so, what with one thing and another, that was the end of Entre Chien et Loup.

  Back on the cards was the London version of Jean Louis-Barrault’s Rabelais show. However, things with Joan were never straightforward. Despite that depressing visit to Paris, she decided she wanted to do a play called Murderous Angels by Conor Cruise O’Brien and that the TNP, despite everything, would be the place to do it.

  In this play, O’Brien, Chief of Operations of the UN in Katanga in 1961, says that Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary-General of the United Nations, with whom he worked closely, was responsible for the assassination in 1961 of Patrice Lumumba, prime minister of the Congo. Not only that, the death of Hammarskjöld himself, was planned. In its form, at that time, it was impossible. The speeches were so long they made Shaw seem like Pinter and there were no characters, just information. It would have lasted five hours too. Still, it was good material for Joan to jump into and, from it, make a show.

  In the summer of 1970, Joan went to Avignon to inspect the TNP actors. They were performing in the Palais des Papes, something they did every year. All of them were dreadful, she said, as were the plays, among them Sartre’s Le Diable et Le Bon Dieu. That one again. The design was dreadful too. There was one actor she did like. That was the elderly Marcel D’Orval. Also there was Maria Casarès but everybody said she was impossible. It was Casarès who played Barrault’s wife in the film, Les Enfants du Paradis, and in 1958, on the stage of the TNP under Jean Vilar’s direction, was the firiest, most terrifying Phèdre anyone could remember. Still, that didn’t really matter because it looked as if Joan would, after all, not go to the TNP.

  What about Gerry during all these comings and goings? Every now and again, since Oh What a Lovely War, he would find enough money for a season at Stratford East. How that money accrued, he never explained, but there it would be and there it was in 1970.

  True to form, he wanted to put on something contemporary and relevant. An ex-secretary, Jane McKerron, mentioned a writer, Ken Hill. She thought he could come up with a comedy about local government, and indeed Ken did. This tall, redheaded Brummie had made a comfortable living writing for TV soaps but was bursting to get out. His show was Forward, Up Your End, overlong and packed with gags, too many thought Joan, who was less sympathetic to Ken’s writing than Gerry. Even so, it became clear that she was going to direct it. And where did the Rabelais fit in to all this? That, after all, had not gone away.

  Forward, Up Your End: light, quick and visually inventive – not despite, but because of Joan’s lack of interest – opened to the public. The Sunday Times critic, Harold Hobson, compared Joan to Charlie Chaplin, which was perceptive, but the other critics thought little of the show. The froth was not up on that evening.

  During its short run, Alain Guémard came over. He was in a woeful state. Joan had turned down the Rabelais show which was to be presented at the Roundhouse and, on which, he had hoped to work. To really confirm it, he said that her name was up on TNP posters all over Paris as director of Murderous Angels, which was to open in the spring of the next year, 1971.

  The producer of the Rabelais show was – no surprise – Oscar Lewenstein. Joan’s excuse for not doing it – she had to come up with something – was the translation by Robert Baldick: she didn’t like it. In a letter to her, Oscar made it clear that he thought she had let him down, and not for the first time. Back in 1955, there had been the fiasco of Mother Courage, which he had also produced. Oscar must have thought that he was a glutton for punishment but, in his letter, he added that geniuses could get away with that sort of behaviour.

  The spring of 1971 was still a few months off and there was another show at Stratford East to do. By this time, Joan had worked out how to get round the Ronan Point libel problem. Her idea was a long-lost eighteenth-century comic opera called The Projector, rather like The Beggars’ Opera.

  In it, the projector, a jerry-builder, takes people’s money to put up a building that falls down. The gas explosion at Ronan Point was replaced by a fart. Rufus Chetwood was the author, or so the programme said. In fact, it was John Wells who co-wrote Mrs Wilson’s Diary. His friend, Carl Davis, composed the music and Carl wrote some of the best songs he has ever written and played them in a wig on a twangly piano in the pit. It was a happy coming together of Joan’s love for seeking out a period’s style and of Gerry’s demand for the relevant.

  A subplot contained a flamboyant homosexual, Lord Aimwell, who hides when, in a sad but pretty scene, a cartload of sodomites are dragged, in both senses of the word, ‘drag’, away to be hanged. Soon he is fancying a strapping young lad, Hawth
orne, fancied by various women as well. Their mutual lust comes to a climax when, at the end of Act One, on a moonlit night, Aimwell and the women drape themselves round the young man angelically singing ‘My Hand, Thy Heart’, except it’s not his heart on which they place their hands, but his cock.

  At the back of her mind, in this doodle so typical of Joan, was her old friend, Tom Driberg. He came but didn’t get the point. Tom’s approach to young men did not involve songs.

  During its run, the show was hit by power cuts, so it was lucky that Joan had agreed to direct some commercials for the production company, Signal Films. As it was a friendly company that knew Joan well, it provided some lights and a generator to keep the show going.

  There was talk of it transferring to the West End but on condition that Victor Spinetti play Lord Aimwell. This was grossly unfair to Griffith Davies who had been playing the part. Each night, he had kept Joan in stitches as he’d pranced on to the stage as a milkmaid flinging daffodils in all directions. The daffodils were made of plastic and it was their unromantic clatter to the stage which made Joan’s night.

  Next, Mrs Sylva Stuart Watson, mistress of the Haymarket Theatre’s bricks and mortar, came down. After the performance, she talked to Gerry in the foyer. ‘It’s not really Glyndebourne, is it? One expects to hear singers with voices like Raimund Herincx,’ Raimund Herincx being a bass baritone at Sadler’s Wells. Her patronising ignorance was breathtaking. The point of the show had gone straight over her head. Gerry listened politely and, in that moment, you could catch a glimpse of what Joan had had to cope with as a student at RADA and what Gerry had been obliged to put up with when trying to sell Theatre Workshop in its early days. Still, it explained why the Haymarket, London’s most beautiful playhouse, which Gerry wanted to own, kept putting on the most stuffy of revivals, thereby keeping real theatre lovers away.

  A few days before Christmas 1970, Joan, using actors from The Projector, directed the commercials. They were for Lyons Maid ice cream and, on Shepperton studio’s freezing back lot, had to appear summery. ‘Props! More plastic daffodils.’