by Peter Rankin
Still, these thoughts would go round and round in Joan’s head for many years.
What didn’t go round in her head was ‘My only talent is to grow a show.’ When she remembered the image of Gerry alone in his office staring at a newspaper headline, ‘Joan leaves Theatre Workshop,’ she damned herself for her cruelty. If she had remembered ‘My only talent . . .,’ spoken while Gerry was driving her back to their hotel in Paris, she would have realised that from 1961 onwards, she had been kicking, not only against Gerry and the Theatre Royal, but against that talent too. She didn’t stop either. Her return to the playground was only months after Paris.
The trouble was, she couldn’t help her restless mind. Still, at least it was interesting. Ideas she had, like one-off events and rolling entertainment, have filtered through the decades to the present day. A small example came from her scorn and fear of national critics. It made her suggest to Gerry that he invite an authority on the subject of the play, instead of a drama critic. BBC Radio’s Front Row does that today – not always – but from time to time.
This fear came from something she didn’t say until very late. Having spent most of her life pooh-poohing success, she admitted that she wanted it desperately. She absolutely wanted to be the best.
As for Gerry, he’d been stuck holding on to Joan, like Tam Lin holding on to changing and frightening objects, in the hope that she would return to – not so much herself, what on earth was that? – but to what he had believed in all his life, her talent for theatre-making.
When Joan wasn’t writing pages and pages of this self-laceration, she sent sharp letters to the theatre. Why was she not being kept informed? Why were minutes of meetings, either late or badly written? When, in one set of minutes, she read that Clare Venables, whom Max Shaw had appointed Artistic Director, was doing Brecht, she wrote that Brecht, after the war, had returned to Germany, guilt-ridden, to write for a guilt-ridden audience and had consequently produced ‘such masochistic plays’.
Some months later, with the theatre close to losing its Arts Council grant, Joan returned, sympathised with Clare Venables over the difficulties of running a theatre and saw to it that she left her post on the spot. Philip Hedley was at that meeting and Joan asked him to take over the running of the theatre. In truth, she just wanted it off her hands and dreaded that it might come back to her because, by then, she had inherited the bricks and mortar so painstakingly bought by Gerry. Philip succeeded in doing precisely what she wanted. He kept the theatre open. It was a great relief.
From Joan’s correspondence, during this period, you would have had no idea that anything else was going on in her life, but it was. It started with John Wells spotting the predicament of two friends of his – both had lost their life partners – and bringing them together or, rather he told Philippe de Rothschild about Joan Littlewood.
Philipp de Rothschild, a practical man, who knew that he could not spend the rest of his life alone, motored from Paris to Vienne – not a problem, he’d been a racing driver – and, there, met Joan outside a hotel, bringing his secret weapon, the Elizabethans. His excellent English, which he had learned from his British nanny, had enabled him to translate Tamburlaine and the Elizabethan poets into French.
After he and Joan had talked about these, her most-loved writers, he invited her to his country home, Mouton Rothschild. She accepted, eventually, and so she and he found themselves in a coda. Your life’s work is done but, there you are, still alive. You have to find a way of keeping yourself amused.
When writing home, Joan said that her new friend lived in a converted stable, surrounded, like Don Quixote, by books. He made wine and was not a banking Rothschild. This was completely true and completely misleading. He did live in a converted stable but it was some conversion. This stable, where oxen used to live, was huge and his late wife, Pauline, an interior decorator, had done it up to the nines. He did have a library but he didn’t read the books in it. He dipped into whatever was the latest sensation, which his secretary used to put on a low table at the end of his bed. He was the boss of Mouton Rothschild wine but he didn’t make it himself. His particular branch of the Rothschilds were not bankers, no, but his cousins were and his fortune was built on Rothschild money.
Spoilt, selfish and rude, he was all those but clamber past and you could get on with him well enough. Above all, he was energetic. A fortune he may have had but resting on it had not been for him. Taking a nineteenth-century villa, surrounded by tumbledown sheds, and turning it into a place of glamour that people from all round the world came to see, introducing chateau bottling and raising Mouton Rothschild from a deuxième cru to a premier cru were means to make his own mark. He was a man of the theatre – his father had been a playwright – and Mouton was theatre all around. That and the fact that it was a haven where Joan didn’t have to be ON and didn’t have to be JOAN, was what appealed to her. Step away from Mouton and the countryside was gentle and unthreatening. It’s where she took Rajah, the golden retriever, for walks.
Of course the two argued. They argued from first thing in the morning until last thing at night, at which point, they nodded off looking like two owls. It became the arguing of an old married couple. Once, Philippe, whom Joan – nomenclature being so important – called Guv, stuck his fingers in his ears and drummed his heels against his chair and then, when he had calmed down, said: ‘I do sympathise with Gerry Raffles.’ The Franco-Soviet Pact, which had so exercised Joan before the war, caused such a heated exchange – actually the heat was coming more from Joan – that ‘afters’ that evening, remained untouched.
The weight of the Rothschild family and all it entailed did bear down on Joan and, once, after running away, which she did frequently, she wrote to Philippe: ‘We are of two different worlds and have been happiest in neutral territory or when working which makes all territory neutral.’
This was true. On Sundays, with no lunch laid on at Mouton, the two ate at a restaurant called Le Moutchiko, opposite the lake at Lacanau. The food was ordinary but, sitting there, with Rajah looking on, hoping for titbits, they were happy.
Work was mostly whatever came into Guv’s head, a scenario for a ballet, a booklet about one of his lesser wines, the lighting at night of a new statue. It showed that Joan could turn her hand to anything.
Her favourite wine among all the wines Guv owned was Clerc Milon. It came from a small vineyard nearby that she used to enjoy visiting every now and again. The only thing she didn’t like about it was its label. If you looked at it casually, you misread the design. Guv had a wine museum and in it were two little Callot figures. Joan said: ‘Why not use those?’ In this way, an artist Joan had loved all her life provided Clerc Milon’s new label. On her own, she wrote a comedy about a holiday in Italy she and Guv went on together. An old countess says: ‘A lonely woman seeks consolation in beauty.’
For Guv, one of the many novelties about Joan was that she didn’t want anything. He thought he was popular with women. It didn’t occur to him that money might have had something to do with it. Joan never asked for a penny but did complain that he was always borrowing cash off her.
If anything, she thought it was she who owed Guv. Jonathan Cape, the publisher, turned down his autobiography. Joan volunteered to re-write it. The book was billed as ‘The Autobiography of Philippe de Rothschild by Joan Littlewood’. Work on it was not easy. First thing in the morning, Joan would sit on the edge of Guv’s bed to collect stories, only to be interrupted by the cook wanting to go through the menu and Mouton’s managing director wanting his daily business chat.
After Guv had changed his mind once too often about stories, she gave up and had them relayed to her by someone else. The final touches were written in Paris where Guv had a house that looked on to a prison at the back and a morgue at the front. It was August, when all Parisians are out of town, so there really were fewer distractions. When an old girlfriend rang to ask Guv to the pictures, he was able to say: ‘I can’t possibly. I’m far too busy writ
ing my book.’ He wasn’t. Joan was but it showed goodwill because, if anything, having nothing to do, he was a little bored.
In the end, it was the book that caused the split between Joan and Guv. Members of the family objected to some of the stories, so it was not published in France where it might have had a decent readership. Joan who in her diaries had never stopped cursing Guv and cursing herself for being with him, used this as the moment to make the break. If the book did one good thing, it gave her the confidence to write her autobiography. This, what with knocking herself out on a storm-tossed Brittany Ferry to Cork and, later, breaking her collar bone merely by falling off a stool in a kitchen, took seven years.
Two honorary doctorates came to her, one from the Open University which, given that it was a university anyone could go to, echoed the Fun Palace. The other was from Adelaide. To pick them up, she travelled, not only to Belgium for the Open University one, but to Australia. For all her complaining, she did love adventure.
To keep her hand in, she went back to her youth, and radio. She acted in some plays. Surrounded by actors, rather than watching them, she became a different person. In between scenes, she chatted away, encouraging her fellow players, which they adored, and rubbishing directors, which they adored even more.
In 1983, The Society of West End Theatres gave her a Lifetime Achievement Award. Thank goodness they did it when they did because the very next year, the SWET Awards became the Olivier Awards and Joan would have had trouble accepting that. Her opinion of Laurence Olivier was well known.
That evening, she thought it would be good to have some flowers but it was Sunday and all the shops were shut. When the announcement of her award came, she got up from her seat in the stalls, noticed some huge canvas daisies lining the front of the stage, plucked one, ran up on to the stage, looked up at the packed Drury Lane Theatre, forgot everything she was going to say, knelt down, kissed the stage, got up and said:
‘This is the land where no one dies.’
She didn’t have to say any more.
POSTSCRIPT
Of the two promises Joan made, the first, never to set foot inside the Theatre Royal again, the second, never to direct another play, she managed to keep one. Even with the one she broke, she didn’t do badly. It was twenty years after making those promises that she came back to the theatre for a special occasion.
During the rehearsals of his show, Zorro, Ken Hill died. I, who had been working with him for 23 years, took over the last week of the production. A friend of the theatre, Brian Berry, thinking that Joan needed to mark Ken’s death and offer me some support, rang her in Paris where, as Jeanne Petitbois, she was staying in a pied-à-terre leant to her by Philippe de Rothschild who, by then, had been dead fourteen years. Over she came, saw Zorro and hated it. Not for two weeks did I hear the last of that.
Joan died here in London in 2002. She had given instructions that her ashes, together with Gerry’s be sprinkled into the Rhône from a bridge at Vienne. As this was illegal, it turned into a wartime operation. First her ashes had to be smuggled through customs, then Gerry’s had to be collected from the Paris pied-à-terre where they had been kept for several years and, finally, the actual sprinkling, which was from the centre of the bridge, had to take place, with the help of some of Joan’s Vienne friends, after dark when no one was looking. Excitement to the very end.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Correspondence, diaries and playscripts of Joan Littlewood and Gerry Raffles.
de Jongh, Nicholas (2000), Politics, Prudery and Perversions: The Censoring of the English Stage 1901-1968. London: Methuen.
Duchartre, Pierre Louis (1966), The Italian Comedy. New York: Dover Publications Inc.
Goodman, Pearl (2000), More Pearls. Chichester: Belfry Books.
Goorney, Howard (1981), The Theatre Workshop Story. London: Methuen.
Goorney, Howard and MacColl, Ewan (1986), Agit-Prop to Theatre Workshop. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Guthrie, Tyrone (1959), A Life in the Theatre. New York: McGraw Hill.
Gyseghem, André van (1943), Theatre in Soviet Russia. London: Faber and Faber.
Kempson, Rachel (1988), Life Among the Redgraves. New York: E P Dutton.
Kops, Bernard (2000), Shalom Bomb. London: Oberon Books.
Lewenstein, Oscar (1994), Kicking Against The Pricks. London: Nick Hern Books.
Littlewood, Joan (1994), Joan’s Book: Joan Littlewood’s Peculiar History As She Tells It. London: Methuen.
MacColl, Ewan (1990), Journeyman. London: Sidgwick & Jackson.
Murray, David (2004), Seán O’Casey. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan.
Norman, Frank (1975), Why Fings Went West. London: Lemon Tree Press.
Soyinka, Wole (2007), You Must Set Forth at Dawn. London: Methuen.
Spinetti, Victor (2006), Up Front.... London: The Robson Press.
Tynan, Kenneth (1961), Curtains: Selections from the Drama, Criticism and Related Writings. London: Longmans, Green and Co.
Tynan, Kenneth (1967), Tynan Right And Left. London: Longman, Green and Co.
Articles and recordings:
BBC Radio, Archives
George A Cooper, British Library Oral History, 17.04.07
Guardian, 04.04.08 (article on declassified MI5 documents)
Observer, 05.03.06 (article on declassified MI5 documents)
INDEX
111A Grosvenor Street, Manchester ref1
1789 ref1, ref2
33 Stockwell Road SW9 ref1
42 Deansgate, Manchester ref1
A Taste of Honey ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8
Abbey Theatre, The ref1, ref2
ABC cinema, Stepney ref1
Abominable Dr Phibes, The ref1
Achkar, Nidal ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Ackland, Rodney ref1
ACTT (film technicians’ union) ref1, ref2
Adam, Ken (set designer) ref1
Adelphi Theatre ref1
Albarn, Damon ref1
Albarn, Hazel ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Albarn, Keith ref1
Albert Hall ref1
Albery, Donald ref1, ref2, ref3
Alchemist, The ref1
Aleichem, Sholem ref1
Alesse, Marcelline ref1
Ali, Muhammad ref1
Ali, Tariq ref1
Alice in Wonderland ref1
All Hallows, Tower Square ref1
Allen, Dave ref1
Allen, Kate ref1
Allen, Ted ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Allio, René (designer) ref1
An Evening of British Rubbish ref1
An Giall ref1, ref2
An Inspector Calls ref1
And the Wind Blew ref1
Anderson, Georges ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Anderson, Jean ref1
Anderson, Lindsay ref1
Andreini, Isabella ref1
Antony and Cleopatra ref1, ref2
Antrobus, John ref1
Appia, Adolphe ref1
Archigram ref1
Arden of Faversham ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Aristophanes ref1, ref2
Armitt, Alf ref1, ref2
Armstrong, Alec ref1, ref2
Artaud, Antonin ref1
Arts Council ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20
Arts Theatre ref1, ref2
Ashcroft, Peggy ref1, ref2, ref3
Asquith, Anthony ref1,
Assembly Hall, Edinburgh ref1, ref2
Atkins, Robert ref1
Aubriant, Colette (publicity, TNP) ref1, ref2
Aumont, Jean-Pierre ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9,
Austen, Jane ref1, ref2
Babel, Isaac (author of Entre Chien et Loup) ref1
Bahadur, Sadhur (restaurateur, Manchester) ref1
Bailey ref1, ref2
Bailey, Alison ref1, ref2
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Baillon, Jacques (Tunis student and actor) ref1, ref2, ref3
Bakaba, Sidiki ref1, ref2
Baker, Kent ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Baldick, Robert (translator of the Rabelais show) ref1
Banbury, Frith ref1, ref2
Bang to Rights ref1
Banks, Graham ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Banks, Marjorie ref1
Barchard, Hilary ref1
Barker, Clive (actor, director) ref1
Barlow, Thelma ref1
Barnes, Kenneth (Director of RADA) ref1
Barnes, Miss (Joan’s teacher at the Practising School) ref1, ref2
Barrault, Jean-Louis ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Bart, Lionel ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9
Bartholomew Fair ref1, ref2
Bassey, Shirley ref1
Bay, John ref1
Baylis, Lilian ref1
BBC 3 ref1
Beach, Ann ref1, ref2, ref3
Beatles, The ref1
Beaton, Alistair (author of Feelgood) ref1
Beaubourg Centre, Paris Beaumont, Hugh (Binkie) ref1, ref2
Beaverbrook, Lord ref1
Beggar’s Opera, The ref1, ref2
Behan, Beatrice (Brendan’s wife) ref1
Behan, Brendan ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Behan, Dominic (Brendan Behan’s brother) ref1
Belgrade Theatre, Coventry ref1
Bell, Marie ref1
Bellak, George (author of The Troublemakers) ref1
Bellany, Dane ref1
Benn, Tony ref1
Bentley, Eric ref1
Berliner Ensemble, The ref1, ref2, ref3
Bermans, costumiers ref1
Bernard Shaw, George ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Bernstein, Sidney ref1, ref2
Bertin, Roland ref1
Bevan, Aneurin (Nye) ref1, ref2, ref3
Big Rock Candy Mountain ref1
Billy Liar ref1
Blacks, The ref1
Blank-Sichel, Carmen ref1