by Peter Rankin
At lunch in the canteen, where Ken Tynan was sitting with a team from Playboy magazine, all of them wearing paper hats out of Christmas crackers, Edna O’Brien came shuffling towards Joan, literally on her knees. ‘This’ll be a bad play in the post,’ said Joan. Nevertheless, it reminded her of the translation of Murderous Angels into French. A Monsieur Jean Paris had been assigned the task by the TNP but she was not happy about it.
A couple of weeks later, she and John Wells sat in her freezing private room at the top of the Theatre Royal and combed through every word of the prologue. John was going to Paris too but as an actor, not as a translator. He may have been an established translator into English. Translating out of English was another matter, as he was to find out.
Joan had done an adaptation which had been approved by Conor Cruise O’Brien but M. Paris had restored passages of the old version which Joan had been at pains to remove. Also, apart from some mistranslations, he seemed to be showing a bias, spelling Blacks with a small b and Whites with a capital w. John decided that it would be better to criticise Paris for his bias rather than his French and so drafted a cool letter full of subjunctives which was sent to the administration of the TNP. So much for Jean Paris, but now there was no translation and the start of rehearsals was a few weeks off.
Luckily, Joan remembered that the TNP had given her a straight translation of Conor’s original play. Perhaps the man who did that could translate her adaptation. She looked it out and read it. Yes, it was plain but it was accurate. The French could be improved later. This did not stop Joan adapting her adaptation.
She went to Paris for casting. The TNP had no proper company, she said, and the actors they offered were all much older than they pretended to be. Their hair was badly tinted and they wore corsets.
Auditioning at the theatre was no good. It frightened people off. So Joan alternated between improvisations in a ballet studio and seeing actors individually in a Quartier Latin bar called the Chaye de L’Abbaye. The ballet studio was a scream because often she found lots of little dancing girls who were obliged to join in the improvisations so as not to be spectators.
A well-known actor, Pierre Vaneck, turned up. Joan mistook him for a dancer. No, he couldn’t play Hammarskjöld, he said, because Hammarskjöld was 56 and he, Pierre Vaneck, played 35 at the oldest. This despite him being in his 40s.
Baschia Touré, Paris’s most distinguished black actor, got thrown out because he cut off a young girl in the middle of her improvisation and started to direct her.
One young black actress said she wanted a good part:
‘Good for who?’ asked Joan, ‘You or the public?’
‘Me,’ said the girl.
‘What have you been in?’
‘The Blacks by Genet.’
‘Didn’t you feel cheapened by appearing in that racist play?’ asked Joan.
Back in London, mention of Royal Shakespeare Company actors grumbling because vast amounts were spent on the set and not on them made Joan put an end to the original idea of the TNP set and think of a new one.
At first, there were going to be floating discs, a ramp and a big screen at the back, which would be enveloped in a shiny green jungle. However, Joan didn’t like the idea of a row of ladies sewing a jungle in an ill-lit room the other side of Paris, so she asked for the money to be given to the actors and then asked her designers, Guy Hodgkinson and Mark Pritchard, to come up with a new set. This was merely four screens and a two-tone grey, shiny floor with arches and cubes as props.
More casting news came through. Jean-Pierre Aumont, ex-Hollywood French actor, was going to play Hammarskjöld and Wole Soyinka would definitely be playing Lumumba, though he would be flying over from Nigeria a month late. Bernard Farrell, a second unit film director, son of Françoise Rosay, and on-off boyfriend of Nidal Achkar, the Hammamet student who was not allowed to work with Joan in London, seemed to be doing the casting, as the TNP didn’t have much to offer.
Not long before rehearsals began, arose the problem of the rehearsal room. Joan detested the TNP one because it was underground and the air was bad. She wanted somewhere large, light and airy, with coffee and tea readily available. Gérard Lorin, actor and assistant director, the perfect Dickens clerk – pinched face, bald on top and hair sticking out all round – had been working on this but with no luck. Space was hard to come by in Paris, even harder than in London. A compromise was reached. Joan and the company would rehearse in the theatre foyer which, at least, had a view of the Eiffel Tower.
On one of Joan’s earlier visits, Gérard Lorin took Joan down to the stage. The lift was an enormous, filthy tin box, fit not even for cattle. It had no inside doors. A wall slid upwards before you. As they went down, Gérard explained to Joan that the stage was so far underground the technicians were paid a special miner’s wage and, not only that, the air was so bad that they had to have an extra week’s holiday to recover from it. The stage itself was enormous. Gérard then told Joan that the seating was not much cop because the angles were wrong for good sightlines. She didn’t back out.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
MURDEROUS ANGELS
Part One
On a wet February morning, in the fascist-huge and echoing foyer of the TNP, Joan asked for carpets to be brought and chairs to be arranged in a circle, a magic circle of intimacy and comfort. Tea and coffee were mentioned but not brought.
Conor’s play asked for only a handful of black characters to speak. Most of the dialogue was given to characters who were white. In Joan and Gerry’s youth, communist thinking asked for plays to be about the people, not just kings and queens. It’s fine if you’re doing Fuenteovejuna or Henry IV. The author has done your work for you but sometimes he or she has not, hence productions of Macbeth in which silent peasants, not listed among Shakespeare’s dramatis personae, stare accusingly at audiences. It also accounts for Stephen Daldry’s 1992 production of An Inspector Calls where something similar happened.
With that directive at the back of her mind, Joan saw in Conor’s play a Congo that was under-represented. She had therefore cast several black actors not requested by him. They came from French-speaking African countries like Mali, Dogon, Cameroun, Senegal and the Ivory Coast. One was from Martinique in the West Indies. None were born in France.
As rehearsals proceeded, they would take part in devised interludes and, so, right the balance. Having decided this, Joan was aware that the black actors, as with her Arab students in Hammamet, were likely, faced with their colonisers, to suffer a sense of inferiority. Colonisers, in this case, were not the white actors themselves but the experience white actors had gained through regular employment, even if that experience only meant the staginess of the Comédie-Française. Her solution was apartheid (her word). There would be two companies, a black one and a white one and the two would rehearse separately, only coming together a month into the nine-week rehearsal period. That first morning was to be devoted to the black company.
Once everyone had sat down, Joan said something that she never said back home. ‘I come from the working class.’ In the UK, when she heard the words: ‘Joan Littlewood does theatre for the working class,’ she said: ‘Fuck the working class.’ What she believed in was a bunch of bright people, whatever their class. Here in Paris, she wanted to convey her understanding of what it was like to be squashed or overlooked. Decorating that line of thought, she gave the Comédie-Française two fingers and, indeed, the whole of Europe. ‘A tired old tart,’ she called it. Her strategy for building confidence had begun.
After a hurried snack – saying goodbye to the actors took half an hour – Joan settled the white company down to read, not the whole play, but bits of it. As at home, she was keeping things fluid. Various actors read in a low-key, ‘I’m not acting’ way. Jean-Pierre Aumont stayed out of it. In his skewbald pony coat, he sat and looked serious with his glasses on, just as he does in Truffaut’s film, Day for Night.
Before everyone went their ways, Joan discussed gener
al arrangements. British hours, mornings and afternoons, was how she intended to work. As she had indicated months before, she did not want French hours, which is afternoons and evenings. Marcel D’Orval whom Joan hadn’t forgotten from Avignon, was shocked. ‘All my life I have never worked those hours,’ he said, ‘but for Miss Littlewood, I will.’
Gerry was there and, at the end of the day drove Joan back to the Louisiane Hotel. As he drove, Joan commented on the bad breath of the actors. ‘And they will insist on leaning right over you. It’s Hogarthian. I bet there are blue flames when they fart.’
The next day, before rehearsals, Joan laid books and pictures on a table, just as she did for any show that required research. These were about the Congo. Then came the question of the word rehearsals itself. In French, it’s répétitions but Joan hated repetition. She settled on essais. However, she did use the word improvisation, which she never used to in England.
With the black company, she did fascism parallels, for instance a strict schoolmaster and his class. What does one do to evade the discipline? One has to act subtly. Towards the end of the morning, Joan left parallels and got on to the play. The scene was soldiers coming into a village. How do you react? It appeared the actors had been seeing too many films. They jumped on the soldiers, got themselves shot, jumped up again and had a fearful fight in which one actor twisted his ankle and another grazed his arm, something that had never happened with The Nutters at Stratford East. Joan told them that they were all being very courageous, fighting the soldiers but, in real life, they’d have to be much cleverer if they wanted to stay alive.
In the afternoon, there was more reading with the white actors. The only scene they liked was the last one, which Joan wrote, not the author. There were cinematic dissolves in it that made it go with a whoosh.
A Taste of Honey. Avis Bunnage, Murray Melvin, John Bay, Frances Cuka (Theatre Royal Stratford East);
Brendan Behan on Sean Kenny’s set for The Hostage.
James Booth, Roy Barnett, Frank Norman, Lionel Bart, Dudley Sutton looking at script of Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be;
Joan directing The Hostage at the Wyndham’s Theatre.
Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be. Miriam Karlin, Paddy Joyce, Glynn Edwards, Edward Caddick (Garrick Theatre);
Every Man in his Humour. Griffith Davies, Michael Forrest, Roy Kinnear, Claire Neilson, Brian Murphy, Maurice Good, Ann Beach, Sean Lynch (Theatre Royal Stratford East).
Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be. Edward Caddick, Toni Palmer (Garrick Theatre);
Joan rehearsing at the Theatre Royal Stratford East.
Joan on the stage set of Sparrers Can’t Sing (Theatre Royal Stratford East).
Sparrers Can’t Sing. Griffith Davies, Barbara Ferris (Theatre Royal Stratford East);
Sparrers Can’t Sing. Murray Melvin, Frank Coda, Sean Lynch, Bettina Dickson, Brian Murphy, Bob Grant, Barbara Ferris, Amelia Bayntun, Fanny Carby, Griffith Davies, Barbara Ferris (Theatre Royal Stratford East).
Oh What a Lovely War. Myvanwy Jenn, Larry Dann, second soldier from the left, Brian Murphy, third soldier from the left. (Wyndham’s Theatre);
Victor Spinetti, furthest left, George Sewell, fifth from left, Myvanwy Jenn (Wyndham’s Theatre).
Cedric Price’s plan for the Fun Palace;
Oh What a Lovely War. Victor Spinetti, George Sewell, Murray Melvin, and Brian Murphy behind him (Wyndham’s Theatre).
Gerry in his office at the Theatre Royal Stratford East.
Shy Joan, adventurous Gerry in New York for Oh What a Lovely War;
Mrs Wilson’s Diary. Myvanwy Jenn, Sandra Caron (Theatre Royal Stratford East).
Gerry, Joan, Maxwell Shaw, filming in India;
The Marie Lloyd Story. Gaye Brown, Avis Bunnage, Maxwell Shaw, Valerie Walsh (Theatre Royal Stratford East).
Conor Cruise O’Brien in the rehearsal room at the Théâtre National Populaire for his play, Murderous Angels.
Joan rehearsing Murderous Angels.
Joan in the bar of the Theatre Royal Stratford East;
Ken Hill, Joan and Gerry celebrating twenty years of Theatre Workshop at the Theatre Royal Stratford East;
Lionel Bart, Joan and Peter Rankin rehearsing The Londoners at the Theatre Royal Stratford East.
Joan and Guv.
Presenting Bubble City.
In the evening, as Joan started to work out the schedule for the next day, actors crowded round to say that they wanted days off for TV, radio, visits to the doctors and appearances in court. Stratford East it wasn’t. During rehearsals at the Theatre Royal, Gerry allowed no time off for anybody. Joan suggested drawing up a huge list marking all the actors’ off-days, so that she could work her schedule around it. Would that Gerry had been there that evening.
He returned at the weekend and did what Joan loved. He took her for a drive. They ended up at a restaurant near Versailles, where he said that she had made the right decision in turning down The Rabelais Show because, great though Rabelais was, he was not relevant to England. Gerry was that strict.
Later in London, Oscar Lewenstein announced that the English version would be directed by Jean-Louis Barrault. It went ahead but the poor acoustics of the Roundhouse blew the chic away. Years earlier Arnold Wesker, when he had been running the Roundhouse as Centre 42, had tried to get Joan to take an interest but she had said that it would always be a place for turning round engines and that it would never lose the smell of soot.
After the weekend, Gerry returned to England, anxious that Joan might go unfed at lunchtime. He had a point. There was no canteen at the theatre and getting out to the cafés of the Place du Trocadéro, where the TNP was, took ages. If she was lucky, someone would feed her an orange, pig by pig, as she never left the building while she was working.
During the first weeks of rehearsals, casting continued. Originally Joan had wanted an international cast with the Swedish actor, Per Oscarsson, as Hammarskjöld and British actors for three important roles, Bonham, Tamworth and Sir Henry Large White. Added to that, for smaller parts, she wanted Israelis, Arabs and Australians but that was too expensive. She was allowed John Wells for Tamworth, Henry Livings, playwright and French speaker, for Bonham and Willie Rushton for Sir Henry Large White. She got John Wells.
In the event, Sir Henry was played by a big, jovial actor called Jacques David. Jacques came from Roger Planchon of whom he said: ‘With Planchon, one can breathe.’
One day, while Joan was explaining how she worked, a burly actor called Hervé Sand took up her theme and embroidered upon it. He looked as if he were going to be a discovery. And to him went the part of Bonham.
It’s simplest to say, as far as the play went, that all the white characters were up to no good, except for Hammarskjöld, and even he was ruthless, while many of the black characters, in particular the leaders, were up to no good either, except for Lumumba. The question that always hovered was who was in whose pocket.
During the first week, things went so slowly that Joan cancelled the Saturday walk-through she had planned, convinced she was a week behind schedule.
After a few days of the actors echoing in the Grand Foyer, the administrator, Jean Ruaud – pinstripe suit, nattily coiffed hair, drawn-down face – suggested a move to the foyer of the studio theatre, the Salle Gémier. It was a more manageable space and still had a view of the Eiffel Tower but, even there, the acoustics were bad and not helped by the French actors who did not take easily to listening or shutting up.
Segregation carried on and, in the mornings, Jean Loulendo an actor/student who, some wished had stayed a student, gave history lessons about the Congo. To be fair, those were useful, because, out of them, came ‘The History of the Congo’ song, exposition made entertaining. Actor-singer-composer, Georges Anderson, took it upon himself to write the music and Dane Bellany, all furs and perfume, was going to sing it. Six young Congolese men called the Echos Noirs formed the backing group. Joan thought they were too Europeanised but was convinced that their e
lectric guitars could be tactfully taken away. The real problem with the Echos was that they either never turned up, or some did one day and others another. Added to that, they had a habit of changing their stage names from day to day, which may have been refreshing for them but made life hard for others. After a month, they settled for Titos, Porthos, Gilbert, Sharif and Fantôme.
With the move into the Salle Gémier foyer, Joan started simultaneous rehearsals. The white actors stayed in the foyer, while the black actors, with nowhere else to go, went to the rehearsal room that Joan disliked so much, but only for an hour at a time.
She started to do improvisations with the white actors, beginning with the last scene where all hell was let loose. After Lumumba’s death, the Congo was in chaos. Hervé Sand revealed himself as an inventive improviser as did an actor, who had enjoyed working with the British director, John Blatchley of the RSC, the tall, Jean Mondain. American accents were his thing. Jean-Pierre Aumont stayed out of it.
With Marcel D’Orval and Paul Bonifas, another elderly actor, whom you can see as a stamp collector at the end of the film, Charade, Joan did not force it. They stood there clinging to their scripts and, with actors improvising around them, dropped lines in from the script where they thought it was appropriate.