Ann Jellicoe
Playwright who revealed her radical talent in The Knack, later a hit film for Michael Crawford
ANN JELLICOE, the playwright and director, who has died aged 90, was perhaps the most original and exotic of all the writers to emerge from the New Wave of British post-war dramatists embraced by the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre in the late 1950s.
A small, breezy, occasionally bossy young woman with poor eyesight and, at times, huge spectacles, she brought to her work a disturbingly novel and non-linear technique. While she bewildered many playgoers with her debut piece, The Sport of My Mad Mother (1958), she delighted three years later with The Knack, which became an international hit and a popular and award-winning film.
In an era marked by John Osborne’s social impertinence and bilious invective, and the extended pauses of Harold Pinter, Jellicoe’s exuberant disdain for words in The Sport of My Mad Mother seemed to go too far in its freewheeling and fantastic attempt to dramatise what she called the “irrational forces and urges” of half-a-dozen inarticulate Teddy Boys.
Unique in its style, which sought to reach the audience “directly through rhythm, noise and music, rather than dialogue or characterisation”, its unintelligible blur of sights and sounds had most people heading for the exits within the first half hour and was withdrawn within a fortnight.
By contrast, her semiautobiographical The Knack (Arts, Cambridge, 1961, and Royal Court, 1962), written in the same unreadable, incoherent, fragmented but highly actable style, was about seduction rather than violence. It spoke directly to the spirit of the early 1960s and found a wide and warm welcome.
Playing a spirited but inexperienced waif up from the provinces – not unlike the young Ann Jellicoe herself – Rita Tushingham made her name in the play, and was joined by Michael Crawford in Richard Lester’s 1965 film, which won the Palme d’or at Cannes. The New York production was directed by Mike Nichols.
With The Knack, Ann Jellicoe established herself as one of the most interesting, promising and radical dramatists of her talented generation, although she went on to write nothing else of comparable artistic consequence. Few of her later plays, like the prosaic Shelley (Royal Court, 1965) or the consumer satire The Giveaway (Garrick, 1969) quite matched the unorthodoxy, originality and impact of the two earlier shows.
None the less, the large-cast, promenade community plays which she wrote, directed and produced from the late 1970s can lay claim to have invented a new, democratic theatre form, which spread from the South West – where she had moved with her husband – across the country, and was codified in an engagingly prescriptive manual.
Meanwhile, her scrupulous adaptations of Ibsen and Chekhov won respect in the 1950s and 1960s; and she spent a year as the Royal Court’s first woman literary manager in 1973-74. Whenever anyone asked her to “explain” what The Sport of My Mad
Mother meant (and it enjoyed several revivals), she said it was based on her belief that people were seldom driven by their intellects but by their emotions, fears and insecurities, and these could only be expressed theatrically through action and images, sights and sounds, rather than words.
Patricia Ann Jellicoe was born at Middlesbrough on July 15 1927 and educated at Polam Hall, Darlington, and Queen Margaret’s at Castle Howard in Yorkshire. After studying at the Central School of Speech and Drama, where she won the Elsie Fogerty prize in 1947, she worked until 1951 as an actress, director and stage manager in repertory.
Founding the Cockpit Theatre Club, London, to explore open stage production, she directed plays by Aristophanes, Vanbrugh, Strindberg, Molnar, Shakespeare and John Whiting for two years before returning to the Central School to teach and direct. In
The Observer’s 1956 play competition she won joint third prize for The Sport
of My Mad Mother, which brought her to the attention of the English Stage Company; two years later, to everyone’s surprise, though she had only written it as an exercise for her directing style, she staged it – with some help from George Devine – at the Royal Court.
One of the English Stage Company’s most resounding failures, it was nevertheless warmly applauded by visiting actors and directors. “It was the beginning,” said one director, “of the Royal Court’s embattled writing community. It provided the creative core of its work over the next few years.”
When the influential Royal Court writers’ group – set up to cultivate new writers and including Arnold Wesker and Edward Bond – met every Wednesday to share common cause and commiseration, Ann Jellicoe would lead discussions with arguments for keeping discussions out of plays. “In the theatre things should be shown happening, not analysed and talked about,” she kept on saying. Drama was demonstration, not explanation.
When theatrical historians came to classify the most important plays discovered by the English Stage Company, The Sport of My Mad Mother usually finished in the first 12, alongside writers as diverse as Osborne, John Arden, Pinter, Robert Bolt, Peter Shaffer, Brendan Behan and Shelagh Delaney. The Rising Generation (1960), a pageant commissioned for a cast of 800 Girl Guides and 100 boys to be performed at the Empire Pool, Wembley, showed an enormous half-masked earth-mother urging the girls to reject the lads as monsters, though the youngsters settled for cooperation and went off to colonise outer space. Rejected by the Girl Guides’ Association, it was staged with a mere 150 adolescents at the Royal Court in 1967.
Towards the end of the following decade, and having moved with her family to a manor house in Lyme Regis, she expanded the large-scale community theatre event into a system of production, which was to form the basis of community plays across the South West and beyond (Arnold Wesker was to write one for Basildon).
Among her own ambitious, often historically based, community plays for promenade performance in the South West of England, were The Reckoning (Lyme Regis, Dorset, 1978), The Bargain (Exeter, 1979), The Tide (Axminster, Devon, 1980), The Western Women (Lyme Regis, 1984) and Under the God (Dorchester, 1989), all of which she directed.
She also commissioned a large number of contemporary writers – including Howard Barker, Nick Darke, David Edgar, Fay Weldon and Charles Wood – to write plays for and about local communities. Launched with David Edgar’s Entertaining Strangers in 1985, the Dorchester Community Play has become a five-yearly fixture; its seventh play is currently being planned.
Her main adaptations were of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, which she also directed brilliantly with a cast including Peggy Ashcroft and Eric Porter (Royal Court, 1959, and Comedy, 1960), Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea with Margaret Leighton and Vanessa Redgrave (Queen’s, 1961), and The Seagull with Vanessa Redgrave and Peggy Ashcroft (Queen’s, 1964). She also wrote Some Unconscious Influences in the Theatre (1967) and Community Plays: How To Put Them On (1987).
In 1978 she founded the Colway Theatre Trust to promote and produce community drama. Renamed Claque, and now run by her collaborator Jon Oram, her trust continues to produce plays on variants of her model. She was appointed OBE in 1984.
Ann Jellicoe was twice married, first to CE Knight-clarke (dissolved 1961); and secondly to the photographer Roger Mayne, with whom she had a son and a daughter and wrote Devon: A Shell Guide (1975). He died in 2014 and she is survived by her children.
Ann Jellicoe, born July 15 1927, died August 31 2017