Paean to a maverick of the theatre
Miss Littlewood RSC Swan
One of the most memorable theatre book reviews in The
Spectator of recent years was Roger Lewis’s entertainingly waspish résumé of a 2014 biography of Joan Littlewood, the pioneering theatre director.
“If Stalin had been a theatre director, he’d have resembled Joan Littlewood,” Lewis began. According to his summary of Peter Rankin’s diligent scholarship, she could be thuggish, rude, humourless, and – when it came to her lifestyle – hypocritical.
After she took over running the ailing Theatre Royal Stratford East in 1953, making it the base for her hitherto itinerant radical company Theatre Workshop, he reports that “the actors squatted in the building… Life was characterised by ‘hunger, poverty and cold’ though Joan and Gerry [Raffles, her manager and partner, the “rock on whom we rested”, Littlewood wrote] had a nice big house in Blackheath and went on holidays to France”.
You don’t expect a musical devoted to the life of this remarkable woman – whose unconventional, seriousminded, revitalising approach to making theatre transformed the cultural landscape, to be a hatchet job. But if there’s a disappointment about Sam Kenyon’s largely admirable, enjoyable and accomplished portrait of a total one-off, it’s that it verges on hagiographical.
True, there are glancing references to Littlewood being a bit of a tyrant and the fittingly meta-theatrical structure, which passes around the honour of “being Joan” at six different stages of her life to a succession of actresses, entails at times a brusque dismissal of the present incumbent.
Stopping and starting the action, refining, honing and discarding what takes place, is the evening’s primary Joan (played by Clare Burt), hands in jacket pockets, nonchalant, ciggieholding, squinting. A dominant force, bordering on the difficult.
As with her deeper psychology, so with her politics. You half expect the piece to build to a broader examination of pre-thatcherite Britain; instead, it leaves us with her lonely and decreasingly engaged in the wake of Raffles’s death in 1975, a relationship, we’re told, that meant everything to her, but which doesn’t fully resonate as something exceptional here. Enough, though, of the cavils. If the show isn’t quite a new Piaf for the RSC, you’ve got to hand it to the talented Kenyon, whose debut play this is. Director Erica Whyman excelled herself in 2010 with a revival of Littlewood’s lasting claim to fame Oh! What a Lovely War (Kenyon was musical supervisor) – and that show’s collage-like aesthetic is carried over into this venture.
Part One gives us a snippet of Littlewood’s Stockwell upbringing, an Old Vic production of Macbeth so lacking in spontaneity it was like an epiphany, lesbian overtures in Paris and revolt at Rada. The tunes are first serviceable, but become more piquant in the second half, which has a show-stealing turn from Emily Johnstone as a young Barbara Windsor.
In the audience on the opening night, was the actor Murray Melvin – now 85 – who was part of the big adventure and several of the most significant hits, among them Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey and Brendan Behan’s The Hostage. He was in tears by the end. It evidently spoke to him. With just a bit more tinkering, it might well speak even more widely.