Joan Littlewood

by Peter Rankin

  ‘Your floor’s going to cost you 5,400 francs,’ said Le Marquet.

  ‘That’s expensive,’ said Guy.

  ‘Your arches are going to cost 142,000 francs (£1,000).’

  ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘Your lighting up flags are going to cost 67,000 francs.’

  ‘That’s impossible.’

  ‘That’s France.’

  ‘I’ll do it myself in a couple of afternoons – for nothing.’

  The reason for this absurd expense was that the TNP farmed out work because their own prop-men were useless. The firms that did these jobs ran what were almost monopolies and, therefore, could charge what they liked. Everybody said Monsieur Van Yen was a toughie who brought the prices down as low as possible but Sarah Hodgkinson, Guy’s wife, said that when she was out shopping and mentioned the TNP, shop girls could hardly suppress their giggles.

  Le Marquet gleefully suggested cutting something big, like the lighting up flags in the auditorium, though, heaven knows, the set was stark enough. Guy suggested a nipping and tucking of each object’s price but that didn’t begin to put the set within budget. An executive decision was needed: Joan would have to be called.

  Having suspected that Le Marquet was a racketeer who took percentages, she entered the office with a deadly smile. Le Marquet went on chattering to his blackboard. Guy explained the situation to Joan. ‘I’ll get Sam Spiegel to do it,’ she laughed. ‘He’s cheaper. I’m changing nothing,’ and wreathed in smiles, walked out. Le Marquet didn’t look particularly perturbed. He merely said that it was time Ruaud was brought in. Ruaud happened to be holidaying in Geneva but that wasn’t going to get in Le Marquet’s way. He was having too much fun.

  The following day, he held a post-mortem on Joan’s little number. ‘There are two words she used which are understandable in any language: racket and Sam Spiegel. I’m not accustomed to being treated like that. It’s a question of standing.’

  Ruaud, furious that Le Marquet had rung him, returned from his holiday and fixed everything in a trice. He put the budget up.

  About this time, Jean-Pierre Aumont decided that ‘Hammarschöltz’ was ‘derl,’ as he pronounced both those words. This was especially annoying of him because he was right. The man had no sense of humour and appeared to have all his decisions made for him by the Americans. ‘A cloud in trousers,’ said Joan. John Wells was put on the job. He and Jean-Pierre went off to work in cafés. Bit by bit, the role of Hammarskjöld was strengthened, though sometimes Joan was not always in the know about what John was doing. As a result, Bonham’s role became weaker until finally Hervé Sand clicked and started insisting on a good text too. As Joan didn’t want to lose Hervé, morning sessions with John and Hervé were instigated, while the afternoons were reserved for John and Jean-Pierre.

  Weeks before the start of rehearsals, Joan announced: ‘It’ll be the first time you see me direct a play. You’ve never seen me direct a play before.’

  Usually she rehearsed using games and parallels, saving production and direction for the last few days. With this lot, the games stopped much earlier than usual. What with spending so much time on creating a text and having to cope with actors who couldn’t improvise, Joan found herself moving on to a high-class rep style. Two steps to the left, lean on the cube, say the line. It was the kind of work that bored Joan into making remarks like: ‘I’ll never work in theatre again.’ As she left the TNP in the evening, she would say: ‘It’s like working in a geriatric ward – one hand on the rail dear, lift your leg over the side, that’s right. Now the other one.’

  Leaving the TNP in the evening was very much a time for post-mortems. Either Mark Pritchard drove Joan home in the back of his van or Gerry did in his hired car when he came over at weekends. It was in these cramped quarters that Mark, Guy and Sarah would talk of their problems with costumes and props. Their chief grumble was slowness. Even the buying of a tassel had to be recorded in quadruplicate and the forms stamped by several different TNP types. When they’d finished their stories, Joan would serve them up with lurid tales about which actor walked out today and who tried to murder whom. It was a sumptuously gloomy ride. When Gerry was around, he would, by his silence, discourage revelling in this morbid talk. In the middle of a tempest of disaster, he would say: ‘Come on, it’s time for tea,’ an interjection which whisked the British team to some kind of well-ordered, non-existent English nursery world. They were very grateful to him and looked forward to his weekend visits.

  Considering all the ‘Où est le beau texte?’ and Gérard Lorin getting in a fluster because he lost the thread of an improvisation, you would have thought that adopting a weekly rep style would make the actors feel more at home. This was not so. Joan gave precise directions and, for the most part, they were precisely forgotten. What were they good at doing, you may well have asked.

  Gérard Essomba, who was paying Diallo, was not getting any better. In these cases, Joan usually cut and cut so that the actor had the minimum to say, but, in this particular case, there was almost nothing left. Certainly any sex or love interest with Hammarskjöld, which Joan wanted to imply, had long been jettisoned. Optimistically, she put him on the morning rota for script strengthening and asked him to come in after work for private exercises. It was like being at school in the 1950s, having Radio Malt in the morning and extra maths in the evening, but Gérard did not want to come in after lessons. It put him on Joan’s no-no list. Jean-Pierre, for his own reasons, didn’t like him either. Nor did he make the slightest attempt to hide his scorn. In private, he said: ‘I have two big scenes where I open my heart and they’re both with him. He has as much right to be on stage as I have to be pope.’ Joan said that opening your heart was bad theatre but she had to admit that Gérard wasn’t too hot as an actor.

  Jean-Pierre didn’t like Hervé, who was playing Bonham, either. ‘I am entirely selfish. Only Hammarschöltz’s – he could never get that right – problems interest me. Once they are resolved the whole play will be resolved.’ He was talking about Bonham’s fast-fading role. ‘Frankly the man bores me. What he says is so vulgar. I cannot understand why Hammarschöltz would employ a man like this who was against him.’ By now, Jean-Pierre was confusing his own feelings with Hammarskjöld’s. He just didn’t like Hervé, who was a good actor. That, however, was not a bad thing. Joan’s answer was that clever men always employ their opposite to get the other point of view.

  When Joan was first dreaming of an international cast, she wanted to bring over, from Lebanon, Nidal Achkar, the student from Hammamet and Stratford East days. Having other commitments, Nidal could not come at once and, for a while, it looked as if she would not come at all. Suddenly she was there, part or no part.

  Joan switched her on to movement. By then, Joan’s own rehearsals were taking place in the theatre. Nidal’s were in the rehearsal room where she did dances for a White House scene and for the ‘Story of the Congo’ song. They seemed to go well but every time she moved the actors from the rehearsal room to the stage, their efforts were dissipated in the vastness of the TNP. This depressed her. Gerry told her that she had to take a firm hand because it was her name out there on the posters as choreographer. He’d fixed it.

  The fun part of the show was that it was multi-media: it had slides, film and closed-circuit TV. Mark and Guy were looking after the slides but Joan had to do the film as it involved the actors. A day was set and everybody got into a lovely fuss about what they were going to wear. Half the day would have to be spent at the airport for Hammarskjöld climbing on and off planes and the other half in the rehearsal room because it had the most neutral background for doing things like close-ups of leaders making speeches, the people’s reactions and an important telephone call where Hammarskjöld, by saying nothing, seals Lumumba’s doom.

  A few days before the shoot, the Gérard Essomba problem came to a head. He had to be replaced, but by whom? Essentially, it had to be someone in the company because it was too late for newcomers and
, if he was a newcomer, he’d have to be considerably superior to the rest, otherwise they wouldn’t take it. Conor had said, before leaving, that he rather fancied James Campbell, the voyou, in the part, which had made everyone hoot with laughter. As Jean-Pierre put it: ‘Hammarschöltz would razzer ferk a goat zan ferk ’im.’

  A princely young actor called Manuel de Kset, who was in the company, looked the part but had a faint voice. Jean-Pierre had liked a young Algerian actor in Tom Paine, the previous TNP production, but Gerry had also seen that and knew he was too soft. It was only then that Jean-Pierre noticed Manuel who had been there all the time. ‘He is the perfect Diallo.’ Joan had to explain the voice problem all over again.

  In order to relieve Gérard Essomba of the tensions of rehearsing his role, Joan used to get other people to read in and he would watch. Alain Wendling, often did it and, even in his lazy way, was better. Anybody who happened to be there was liable to be called and in this way, James Campbell found himself reading in. He was cool, relaxed, and intelligent. It was a relief from all those silly arguments and bad acting Joan had been getting from Essomba. She decided to let James read the whole of the first act at the next Saturday run-through. Somehow or other Gérard Essomba had been relieved of his part without being told he wasn’t playing it. At one point, Joan was going to divide Diallo into two. Gérard could look after the secretary side, while Philippe Léotard could look after the sex side. It wasn’t that you would see Philippe doing anything with Hammarskjöld but the attraction had to be there. It got very confusing, though, and the costume department was in the most trouble because suits had to be made for the filming. There was a moment when everyone was going to be in the play, including Gérard, but not in their proper roles.

  On the day of the shoot, those in the bits to be filmed assembled at the theatre to get ready. No one was late. The girls looked happy in Carmen rollers. One actor came just for the ride and, as they all emerged from the theatre, the sun came out. They got on to a coach with the wardrobe ladies and off they went to Le Bourget airport. It was like a school outing.

  At the airport, an official counted everybody through customs and, in a glass-covered passage, they waited until a suitable plane was available. Suddenly, a ground hostess led everyone out on to the tarmac because it was not a question of finding an old plane that never did anything. Working Caravelles that came and went had to be used. An Iberia plane had just flown in from Spain. The passengers were in the process of getting off.

  The ground hostess climbed the steps and spoke to the Iberia hostess. She was not pleased. This was news to her. In the meantime, the passengers were still getting off but, by now, as they descended, they were posing for the camera and looking for stars in their midst.

  There were 25 minutes to do it in. The actors were hurried on to the empty plane to change their clothes. Jean-Pierre Aumont or no Jean-Pierre Aumont, the cleaners inside were disgruntled. Outside, Joan kept saying they’d never get it. Gerry, there because it was a weekend, told the actors to get a move on.

  John Wells was the pilot and those getting off were Jean-Pierre, Hervé Sand and James Campbell. As he’d only got the part the day before James was in an improvised suit, rather than a proper one. His hair was a problem: he had a ‘rasta’ as the French called it and, in those days, it was not comme il faut for the secretary of the Secretary-General of the United Nations. By every possible means, Magali, the wardrobe girl, pinned it back, so that, from the front, James looked quite respectable, for once.

  It was time to shoot. Everything had to be done four times as on stage there would be four screens. Action! Jean-Pierre came parading down the steps, very dignified. Cut! Back again. They all scrambled back up the steps. Dignified they came down again. As Jean-Pierre made his sixth descent from the front, fresh passengers were climbing in at the back. The 25 minutes were up. Walk, walk, walk, to another plane. There it was, but the steps were very high. Someone suggested focussing the camera on the top few steps so that the actors would walk upwards into the frame but no, the entire flight of steps would be used. This was the scene when Hammarskjöld was ascending to the plane which would blow up. It would be like Katharine Hepburn climbing the scaffold in Mary Queen of Scots; she just goes on for ever and ever.

  Guy Hodgkinson jumped up the steps, covered all the airline signs with Fablon and slapped up UN signs instead. It was quick. It was ingenious. A thundercloud came up behind the plane, just right for Hammarskjöld’s death, if you were into German romanticism. Shoot, shoot, it was all done. Joan was still anxious about all those steps. For safety’s sake, another plane was needed. The company waited in the covered passage again. This was jolly. The fresh air and the speed of work had blown away the TNP blues and, just as Jean-Pierre was impressing everyone by saying that he had once met the Kennedys, another Iberia Caravelle landed.

  Out on to the tarmac went the team once more. Each airhostess, who opened her door to let out her passengers, became, progressively, more fed up with the onslaught of the ground hostess and the actors. None however said ‘No.’ After only an hour, it was a wrap. Back through customs everyone went. Yes, as expected there was a hitch. More were going out than had come in. Who slipped up? No, none of the company had their passports. There was irritation on both sides. ‘You’re the last crew that will film at Le Bourget,’ said the official.

  Part Three

  Parallel to the whirlwind gaiety of filming ran a problem that was becoming increasingly serious: Lumumba, or rather the lack of him. Wole Soyinka was supposed to be arriving on 17 March, already a month late. Joan had given him a big build-up, which was alarming because she had a habit of doing this, only for the person arriving to turn out to be a nice enough person but hardly the Jesus Christ, Napoleon-type genius she had described.

  Two days after the day he was supposed to arrive, Wole was not there. Two days after that, a telegram arrived: his passport had been taken away from him at the airport. Joan rang Gerry in London. Gerry rang Tom Driberg who knocked up the High Commissioner, while Jean Ruaud got on to the Nigerian Embassy in Paris. Every day, calls from the theatre were put through to Lagos or Ibadan but soon these calls felt like a hopeless ritual. Then suddenly one morning during one of these calls, Wole’s voice could be heard. ‘I will know definitely at three o’clock this afternoon whether I can come.’ Shortly after that, he was cut off.

  At five o’clock another call was made to Wole. Two successful calls to Wole in one day, was that asking a bit much? But there he was. ‘I’ve been given back my passport.’ Nidal, who was standing by, took the receiver. She didn’t know Wole but she was very much in on the excitement. To keep the line busy while someone fetched Joan, she chatted him up. On stage, Joan was rehearsing and couldn’t understand why she was being interrupted. When her rehearsing mind was eventually penetrated, she jumped off the stage like a frog. After a few joyful but guarded words with Wole – the lines were always being tapped – Joan put down the receiver, turned and hugged Nidal: ‘And he can’t speak a word of French, but I couldn’t care less.’

  On Thursday, a call from the theatre was put through to Nigeria Airways and British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) but Wole wasn’t on any passenger list. He had said that he would probably be on the Friday plane coming via Rome. On Friday evening, after work, Nidal took a taxi out to Orly airport. Wole did not arrive.

  This looked like serious trouble because there were only three more weeks of rehearsal. That was apart from Wole possibly being in danger. However, Joan had had enough. ‘I give him up. We’ll have to find somebody in the cast.’

  The next morning, Nidal Achkar was on the telephone in search of a copy of the script. Why? Wole had arrived the night before.

  And why was all this going on? Wole was a bright, humorous writer and because of this was considered a threat in Nigeria. He had already been in prison and would have been murdered if literary types in England had not kicked up a fuss. At the time of Murderous Angels he was teaching at the Univers
ity of Ibadan and had recently been on a demonstration with some of his students, three of whom had been shot dead, so he gave evidence at a trial. This did not go down well with certain parties. In fact, it was those parties who removed his passport because they feared he would broadcast in Europe the goings on in Nigeria. It was also they who put him in gaol originally. However, because of Tom Driberg’s pressure on the High Commissioner in England, he was given back his passport

  Finally, the reason for Wole’s late arrival was that he refused to go on a flight which landed on the border of Arab territory. The chances were, he would have mysteriously vanished and the Nigerians would have known nothing about it. So, he took a later direct flight to Rome, got off there and found there wasn’t a connection until the following day. Instead, he took a train which he thought would have him gliding into Paris by morning. He’d slipped up on his geography. It took exactly twice as long and, when he did arrive, went straight to bed. So there was Joan writhing around in her bed wondering what to do about Lumumba and there was Wole sound asleep a floor below.

  When he had recited his poetry with The Buskers at Stratford East four years earlier, Wole was young, slim with the look of a student. In 1971 at the Louisiane, he was an authoritative man in his 30s with a good, strong voice, which was a relief, even if he didn’t speak French. As soon as the script arrived, Joan sent him off with Nidal to study it. This was Joan up to her tricks. Sending Nidal to the airport was also her idea. She detested the influence of Nidal’s current boyfriend, whom she had nicknamed the tapeworm, and thought that Wole would be much better for her.

  With the help of Nidal, Philippe Léotard and a tape recorder, Wole learned his part in a week. The only problem was that he spoke with a posh English accent and tended to use English intonations which made nonsense of the French. Joan was just thrilled that, as a personality, he came over so strongly on the stage.