‘Joan changed theatre from top to bottom’
Visionary British stage director Joan Littlewood is the subject of a new RSC musical. Ben Lawrence tells her remarkable story
On March 24 1963, the great theatre critic Kenneth Tynan reviewed Joan Littlewood’s production of Oh! What a
Lovely War at the Theatre Royal Stratford in east London. Tynan could often be savage, but on this occasion his praise was unstinting.
“It seems to me quite likely that when the annals of our theatre in the middle years of the 20th century come to be written, one name will lead the rest: that of Joan Littlewood.”
Tynan’s prediction turned out to be wrong, although that is not to say it was misjudged. Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop, founded in the Thirties but at its height in the Fifties and Sixties, was a company like no other, which smashed the French windows of polite English theatre, and radicalised it.
With a trusted troupe of actors, the Theatre Workshop operated like a university for those invited in. Rigorous daily training in movement, voice and text work ensured a string of dazzling hits. Oh! What a Lovely War, of course, but also Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’BE, Sparrows Can’t Sing, A Taste of Honey and an extraordinary number of reinterpretations of the classics, which challenged the theatrical orthodoxy of the time.
These productions were groundbreaking in form and content. The improvised Oh! What a Lovely War satirised the First World War via the medium of commedia dell’arte, while A Taste of Honey’s modish social realism was given extra spice by its frank depictions of gay and black characters (although the gay character was never allowed to proclaim his sexuality, such were the stipulations of the Lord Chamberlain’s Theatres Act).
Now, Sam Kenyon has written a musical, Miss Littlewood, which promises to repatriate a figure who is in danger of being forgotten. Littlewood will be played by seven actresses, all of whom represent different facets of this fascinating and deeply complex personality.
At the heart of Miss Littlewood is a love story between Littlewood and Gerry Raffles, her producer and long-time partner, who died in 1975 at the age of 50. A decade or so younger than Joan, he is a hard figure to pin down, with no Wikipedia page and a host of contradictory quotes about his looks and character.
Barbara Windsor, an integral part of the Theatre Workshop in the early Sixties, described him as “Big fat Gerry with his wandering hands” while for the actor Murray Melvin, another alumni, he was an Adonis. “No wonder she fell for him. She never understood what he saw in her.”
Kenyon has a pragmatic view. “He allowed her to be Joan,” he says. “He did all the cleaning and cooking and sacking and hiring. He provided the infrastructure that allowed her to be the genius that she was.”
Littlewood was born in poverty in 1914, abandoned by her father, and brought up by a distant mother and two doting grandparents in Stockwell, south London. She won a scholarship to grammar school, before going on to Rada. Disillusioned, she left early and vowed a commitment to agit-prop and what we would now know as Theatre in Education. Driving around in a lorry, Littlewood and her followers visited practically every community hall in the country.
Littlewood took up residence at the Theatre Royal Stratford in 1953 and soon gained an international reputation. Her artistic inclinations must have been shocking for those lulled by the inert theatrical climate of the time, which Melvin recalls. “It was polite and comfortable, for people who had just had a nice dinner.”
Littlewood, steeped in Stanislavski, the commedia dell’arte and Charlie Chaplin, was obviously at odds with the status quo, yet she was also unconnected to the Angry Young Men, such as John Osborne and Arnold Wesker, who were making theatrical waves on the other side of London at the Royal Court. She and Gerry had been offered the Court, decided that the area wasn’t for them and decamped to Stratford. While the Arts Council offered the SW1 theatre a substantial subsidy, Littlewood had to make do on a fraction of their budget.
“The Arts Council is the real villain of the piece,” says Melvin, now 85. “Those nicely brought-up boys and girls. Joan said: ‘They would piss on my grave’. They had no conception of what theatre should be.”
She was no less confrontational with her own company. “We fell out daily but she never held a grudge,” says Melvin. “She wanted you to fight back, otherwise she’d get bored with you.”
Littlewood was a communist and many of her working methods hint at the importance of the collective. The cleaners, for instance, were credited in the programmes alongside the cast and the creative team. Internally, though, she could be conflicted.
“She was vulnerable to wealth – the munificence that can come from it was meaningful to her,” says Kenyon. She was also less than communistic when it came to her own living conditions. “She and Gerry always had hot and cold running water, when the rest of the company didn’t,” says Kenyon.
Although she scored considerable success, Littlewood’s greatest project never came to fruition. She wanted to create a Fun Palace on the Isle of Dogs, a community project of theatre, music and painting, and won tacit approval from the London County Council (LCC). “We thought she was mad, but she was just ahead of her time,” says Melvin. “The new boys at the GLC [the Greater London Council, which replaced the LCC in 1965] got cold feet and they pulled the plug.”
You could deduce that the failure of the Fun Palace project was a contributing factor to Littlewood’s sudden disappearance from the UK arts scene. Melvin, however, puts it more simply: “Gerry died.”
Littlewood died in 2002 at the age of 88, and the past 25 years of her life are a bewitching enigma. The story goes that she disappeared to a nunnery in the south of France, where she was discovered by none other than Baron Philippe de Rothschild, who had once run a theatre in Paris and was recently widowed. She became his long-term companion and even ghostwrote his autobiography, Milady Vine.
Says Melvin: “People would ask: ‘What is your socialist director doing shacked up with the Baron de Rothschild?’ and I would reply that she likes a decent wine.”
Kenyon has pondered the missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, and believes her disappearance was partly prompted by a refusal to promote her history or dwell on her legacy.
Littlewood’s contribution to British theatre is, no doubt, considerable. “She changed everything from top to bottom,” says Melvin. “I go and see a production at the National with a bare stage, a shaft of light, someone rushing on with a stool. We did all that 50 years ago – it’s nice to know everyone else is getting around to it now!”