Joan Littlewood

by Peter Rankin

  In the early stages of rehearsals, it was difficult to do the Lumumba scenes because Wole Soyinka was not there. Even so, Joan started working with an actor who was in those scenes, the fat, Belgian, Fernand Ghiot. He had a great wide, white face, the biggest in the business and was bone from ear to ear. He too loved doing accents, so Joan cast him as a Russian ambassador.

  At an improvisation of a cocktail party, an actor hastily picked up a wide-brimmed straw hat and pretended it was a tray. Every actor understood and mimed taking a drink. Not Fernand Ghiot. He looked puzzled. He looked irritated and finally said: ‘You want me to put it on?’ Or rather he mimed it because it was a silent scene. In his favour, he played Lumumba’s secretary and mistress beautifully with a rose behind his ear.

  Philippe Léotard, with a face like a beat-up angel, read in Lumumba. Philippe came from Ariane Mnouchkine, famous at the time for her French revolution show, 1789. Before that, she had done Wesker’s The Kitchen which Philippe had translated into French. Actually, he was still playing in 1789 because the actor who should have been in it was always drunk. Again, if you want to know what Philippe looks like, he’s the young policeman who, mistakenly, lets the heavily made up Jackal (Edward Fox), through a barrier in the film, The Day of the Jackal. If you’re a fan of French films, you will know that Philippe became a film star but died at no great age.

  After the weekend, Joan and Gerry were walking down the many flights of stairs to the foyer and the Salle Gémier when they were approached by the actor, Roland Bertin. ‘I’m exhausted. I can’t do it. I’m rehearsing with you. I’m doing a play in the evening. I’m doing another play at midnight. It’s too much. I’m leaving.’ Gerry was annoyed. Why did Roland have to inflict all this on Joan? Why didn’t he just tell Ruaud and piss off. Joan was not to have these emotional upheavals on Monday morning. Roland Bertin is today a sociétaire honoraire of the Comédie-Française.

  Joan too was fed up with having snap conferences on the staircases of the TNP. She suddenly found that big decisions were being made as a result of a chance encounter with Ruaud on the staircase. She wanted a proper meeting with all assistants to discuss props and costumes.

  And so, six o’clock meetings were instigated at which props that had come up through the day were listed. At the first one, Joan discussed what was going to happen in the foyer. In her original prologue, she had asked for the TNP and the vestibule to be done up like a UN building with guards, flags and an exhibition. The seats of the theatre were to be divided up among delegates. Everybody would be given questionnaires. Half the questions would be serious, the other half, frivolous. All this was scrapped. Joan asked for coloured lights in the foyer and a tape of Conor Cruise O’Brien giving a lecture on the Congo. That didn’t happen either. In fact, nothing did. The biggest luxury Joan could have was lighting up flags in the auditorium. What a comedown when she had wanted to change the whole environment.

  If your leader is no good then nobody else is any good, right down to the doorman. This held pretty well for the TNP. Even towards the end of the reign of its previous boss, Jean Vilar, the place was on the downhill slope. He was tired. It was so big and unmanageable that you needed a man with fire in his guts to keep it going. Georges Wilson was not that man. Once upon a time, he’d been a good company member but then, as the director of the TNP, nothing. Few saw him. Everyone despised him, including his own secretary, who, when Joan asked where he was, shrugged her shoulders.

  Guy Hodgkinson, the set designer, reported a conversation he had with an alcohol-breathing assistant called Alain Wendling.

  ‘The holes in these bobbins are round and the spigots are square,’ said Guy.

  ‘Ah,’ said Alain.

  ‘Do you think you could get these bobbins changed? Who has them?’

  ‘Monsieur Savaron. I’ll ring him . . . Hallo, could I have Monsieur Savaron’s office . . . He’s not there? Could you put me back to the switchboard? . . . Hallo, could you give me Monsieur Savaron’s home number? . . . You don’t have it? Could you put me through to Madame Fraenkel? She’ll have it . . . Madame Fraenkel isn’t there? Could you put me through to someone else in administration? . . . There’s nobody in administration . . .’

  ‘Who else has his key?’ asked Guy.

  ‘Could you put me through to the doorkeeper? . . . Hallo. Do you have a key to Monsieur Savaron’s office? . . . No? . . . Monsieur Savaron keeps them all himself.’

  ‘But what would happen if the theatre were on fire?’

  ‘That’s what we’re all hoping for.’

  On hearing about this, Joan said: ‘Peter Brook is cannier than I am. The TNP asked him to come here too but he didn’t. He must have known.’

  Gerry, who had kindly said that rehearsals were going fine, told Joan not to fight the system but play it the TNP way. What a way, though.

  Next to the TNP was the Musée de L’Homme. Joan thought a lecture about the Congo woud be a good idea and so a sweet, timid soul who worked there, Madame Ndaye, offered to show a film and give a talk. Her name is misleading, by the way. She was white but married to an African.

  A couple of afternoons later, the actors rolled up. Joan stayed back at the theatre. The film was a rather boring, paternalistic affair made by a Belgian information department. Strictly speaking, not many of the cast needed to see it but a broad view of things is not such a bad idea. Marcel D’Orval didn’t see it that way. A row broke out. The actors used the film as a cover to insult each other about personal things that had been bothering them in rehearsals. Hervé Sand implied that there were anti-Joan people in the company, at which point, Marcel D’Orval walked out saying that he would next see Miss Littlewood at rehearsals.

  Fernand Ghiot bridled at Hervé’s remark but then it was intended for him, as, a few days earlier, he had tried to get Hervé’s part by telling Joan that he would never get out of his contract with Marie Bell, she being a famous classical actress who had become a powerful boulevard theatre manager. This had been carefully relayed back to Hervé by Alain Wendling, who had been asked not to repeat it. Madame Ndaye never got to give her lecture.

  In the play, Hammarskjöld has a black secretary, Diallo. Joan cast an actor called Gérard Essomba. He had authority. However, when he was taken away from the black company, he felt stranded and went downhill. At first, Gerry was convinced that Joan would get a performance out of him but Gérard became more and more tense, acting badly and unable to do what Joan asked for. Admittedly he wasn’t helped a scrap by Jean-Pierre Aumont, who merely put on a pained, weary expression whenever he had to rehearse with him. Jean-Pierre, himself, gave cool, elegant readings in a low voice but nothing else.

  He didn’t take any interest in what Joan was doing with the other actors either. After a month she brought the two companies together and, during the rehearsal of movement scenes involving the black actors, he never looked up. Instead, he perched his spectacles on the end of his nose, put his nose in his script and ignored all else. As it turned out, he was ignoring the script too because whenever his cue came up, he missed it.

  Essomba’s disease spread to the rest of the black actors. In the presence of the white company, they became, what Joan had feared, rigid.

  On that first day of bringing the two groups of actors together, she rehearsed an airport scene in which Hammarskjöld was mobbed by journalists, false tribal chiefs and finally, the president of Katanga, Moïse Tchombé. It was an improvisation, so no worries about holding scripts, and yet Georges Anderson, playing Moïse turned into a marionette. He was imitating bad French habits, Comédie-Française, as Joan called them, rather like she’d say Old Vic when she was in England. She ticked him off and the others too, saying, once again, that Europe was finished and that they were not to copy tired old white acting habits. This was deliberately said in front of the white actors. It had no effect. When you wanted to needle them, you couldn’t.

  From the start, the cast had not been pleased with the translation. It was accurate but flat. They
wanted a beau texte, whatever that meant. Joan simply wanted to do her improvisations and change the script daily. That’s why she had brought John Wells. Philippe Léotard could translate what John wrote and together they would make a team.

  Jean-Paul Sartre had been offered to Joan. She mentioned this to the company. They swooned. Hervé Sand thought he was great. Joan thought he was a bore and not a dramatist. Sartre was nevertheless, the company’s idea of a beau texte. Joan calmed the company, temporarily, though every now and again, you could hear Jean Mondain saying: ‘These improvisations are all great fun but where’s the text?’ Hervé Sand, whose part did seem to be diminishing and making less and less sense said: ‘If in a week’s time, Bonham isn’t properly sorted out, I’ll just play a mercenary.’

  Jean-Pierre Aumont wasn’t happy either. He went for dinner with Joan and subtly ran down the company and the text. Joan pacified him, at least for a while, and then, the author, Conor Cruise O’Brien, arrived.

  Part Two

  Joan had asked him to come with a new version of a scene she was stuck with. He arrived in the evening and out they went for dinner. As, by then, Joan had already altered much of her adaptation, she had to explain this. Attack was the best method, she thought. ‘You didn’t write a Lumumba or a Hammarskjöld,’ she said. Conor bridled. ‘Well, why are you doing the play?’ Joan was going to carry on: ‘However, with our hard work, we’ll make a play,’ but Conor got in first. He had re-written almost the entire play.

  The following morning there was a reading of this new play. When the company was assembled, Conor started chatting away in English to Jean-Pierre Aumont. Joan insisted he speak in French and do an instant translation of what he had brought with him. He did, reading with flourish and satisfaction. All he had done, however, was write a series of flowing new speeches which sounded grand without actually getting anyone anywhere. No more was known about Lumumba and Hammarskjöld than had been known before. The cast thought it was super. Conor was even more pleased with himself.

  This straightforward round the table reading was appreciated by the company because it made them feel secure. So far, Joan, never keen on security, had managed to avoid this. By it, Conor had won the actors over and put Joan out on a limb, the opposite of her and Barbara Garson on Macbird. She had to take a line of defense.

  The TNP’s administration was so slow, she said, that it would be impossible to do his new version. The set would have to be re-designed. Scenes would have to re-rehearsed. The best they could do was incorporate some of his most important new speeches.

  Lunchtime came. John Wells hurriedly whispered to Joan that she should make O’Brien sit down at a tape recorder and do another instant translation. That would keep him out of rehearsals for the next two days and, after that, he had to leave. The three went to lunch. Joan could hardly speak. John did all the work. He flattered Conor, called him ‘Sir’ and dropped names that would please. It did the trick. Conor was a name snob. All Joan could do was needle him by constantly talking of Brendan Behan, implying that he was someone O’Brien could never be. By the end of lunch, Joan had persuaded him to be flexible on the role of Lumumba, quite a triumph considering his intransigence the night before. He also consented to do the tape-recording.

  At a second dinner, Joan hoped to extract from Conor some exciting piece of information about Hammarskjöld that nobody knew. After all, Conor had claimed to have been very close to him. But he just got drunk and pushed Joan’s cap down on her face. The play was an obsession for him because, by his own slowness to act in the Congo men had died, so it was some kind of attempt to exonerate himself and, because of that, he couldn’t reveal what Joan wanted to know about Hammarskjöld, as that would have meant revealing himself.

  There was one new scene, the Congo Club, which explained or purported to explain why Hammarskjöld went to Katanga in the first place but it had a strong and unfortunate resemblance to the last scene where Hammarskjöld sacrificially steps on to the plane that will blow up. So what did that leave you with? A nut, but making a tragedy or, indeed, a conflict out of a madman is not possible. Where was the man?

  Joan told Conor and the company that his new script kept her awake all night. Privately, she said that she fell asleep over it and only finished it when she woke up.

  Conor, unfortunately, got through his taping rather rapidly and was bouncing into rehearsals once more. So instead of rehearsing, there was another round-table conference, this time about Lumumba.

  The black company did not at all appreciate a scene in which Lumumba played around with his secretary and finally went to bed with her, while Hammarskjöld was desperately trying to telephone him to prevent a world war or his own death.

  The first person to object was the actor, James Campbell, regarded by Joan as a voyou, a rascal, a fixer of women and drugs, but necessary for the company. Given his private life, his distaste for the Lumumba/secretary scene struck Joan as hypocritical. Then, Georges Anderson said that he had mourned Lumumba for three weeks wearing black all the time. ‘What boring puritans,’ thought Joan. But they wanted their hero straight and clean, so in the end, she agreed, mainly because the writing of the scene was not too great anyway.

  None of this had been mentioned to Conor. So, Joan took this opportunity to put him in the hot seat by letting the company have a go at him. ‘Franchement je trouve cette scène vulgaire’ (Frankly I find this scene vulgar), said Dane Bellany. Conor was taken aback, so much so that he instantly said that, when Wole Soyinka arrived to play Lumumba, he could change it as he saw fit. ‘Oh, you know Wole?’ asked Joan, but he didn’t. He had just heard of him and thought he was posh.

  The round-table could not go on forever. Rehearsals had to continue. Joan mentioned that Bonham had become French as he was being played by a Frenchman. Also, she didn’t see why the French should go unscathed. ‘No, Bonham is English,’ said Conor. ‘There isn’t time to change him now,’ throwing Joan’s argument back in her face.

  The scene being rehearsed took place in a private enclosure at a racecourse. In fact, it turned into the prologue of the show. Joan set up an improvisation. Conor took part, playing Bonham and he wasn’t bad. The scene was merely one of introductions, getting Bonham known by everyone. It was interesting to see that the way Conor had written the scene made it impossible and he had to admit it. In fact, it was he who discovered the slip-up. One up for Joan and improvisation.

  That evening there was another dinner. Conor got drunk again and, while Joan was paying the bill, made a determined physical advance, which she had to resist. Before leaving, he promised to come back next morning to talk to the company. He didn’t. Most people would have thought: ‘Thank goodness.’ Not Joan. She was furious: ‘Here we are, back in the shit.’

  Actually Conor had caused damage. He had wrecked the little confidence there was in the company. The white actors went back into their tizzy about the script and started to threaten walkouts. This was a feint: nobody walked out; they just pretended to. However, there were times when Joan wished they would.

  The black actors were less affected as few of them had parts, as such. For them, Joan was inventing these interludes which were not in Conor’s play but helped to open it out. ‘Perhaps it’ll be the first black musical,’ she said. ‘Conor puts Hammarskjöld and Lumumba on the stage but he forgets the most important thing, the Congolese people, who were there before the crisis, during the crisis and after it. In fact they’re always there. Lumumba and Hammarskjöld just come and go.’ Send for Shakespeare and the Henrys.

  One of the interludes was ‘Les Nouveaux Riches’ in which the black troupe came swanking on with huge cigars, gold bowlers, gold waistcoats and gold chainmail for the girls. They were supposed to be black nouveaux riches copying whites. At last, black people poking fun at black people, it was an advance on the prim Lumumba scene.

  When Jean-Pierre, who had never looked at anything up until now, saw the first ‘Nouveaux Riches’ improvisation, he was impressed. ‘How l
ong have you been working on this?’ he asked Joan. ‘It’s the first time they’re doing it,’ she answered. Still, after that, his nose was back in his script.

  To get herself shipshape after the Conor débacle, Joan cancelled rehearsals for two days. ‘Altogether he’s lost us a week,’ she maintained, so that was another week lost after that slow one at the beginning of rehearsals, if Joan was to be believed.

  During those two days, not having an office, she tucked herself away, at the furthest end of the Grand Foyer, behind a plastic screen that advertised the plays of the season. She thought this to be the safest place to continue re-writing the script. It wasn’t.

  A chic gorgon with green eyelids, thin red lips and Walt Disney fingernails swooped down. This was Madame Colette Aubriant, Head of Publicity. ‘I have two interviews for you, the Figaro and the Daily Express.’ Joan apologised and said it was impossible because she was too busy. ‘The Daily Express?’ reiterated Colette. Joan stuck two fingers up. ‘Well, never mind the Daily Express,’ said Colette. ‘What about the Figaro?’ ‘Fuck the Figaro,’ said Joan who considered it right wing. Madame Aubriant was vexed but at least she left Joan in peace. Not for ages was she seen again. During the rehearsal period, Joan gave no interviews.

  Other problems, not to do with the actors, bubbled up. Guy Hodgkinson, the set designer, was having a conference with the TNP’s head of design, Jacques Le Marquet. There he was, Le Marquet, in front of a blackboard with Monsieur Van Yen, who supervised all purchases and looked after the budget. Van Yen looked on as Le Marquet leapt backwards and forwards, with a piece of chalk in his hand, making stabs at the blackboard. He was finishing the budget for the set and checking through his figures. When everyone was sitting comfortably, he gave a rapid rundown. He always gave rapid rundowns. It was a way of leaving everybody else behind. In this particular case, he was aiming to make Guy Hodgkinson and Mark Pritchard look silly in the eyes of the rest of the staff.