Joan Littlewood

by Peter Rankin

  A listener in 1935 might have found that puzzling and theoretical but Joan had already turned it into practice. John Bullion had actors working in different rhythms and was played on three different levels and round the audience.

  In 1936, two of Joan’s actors, Alec Armstrong and Bob Goodman, had already left to join the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. Spain needed food. What was Theatre Union going to do to raise money for it? Jimmie could write a topical song – he was good at that – and the actors could take the hat round. It was simple. It was direct. It was not for Joan. Proclaiming that only the best would do for Spain, she said that she and Jimmie were going to mount Lope de Vega’s classic play, Fuenteovejuna. With its uprising of village folk in the face of an overlord’s cruelty, she could point to it being bang-on politically, but you suspect she wanted to do it anyway.

  Jimmie made the adaptation – he called it The Sheepwell – and arranged the music. The visual side was looked after by three people: Bill Sharples, a young man who felt he could only express himself through his hands, Ern Brooks and Barbara Niven, both artists when they could be. Behind a drinking well upstage, Bill Sharples sculpted a large, towering ram. Behind it, Ern Brooks hung a backcloth of ruffled hessian, painted and dyed in russet, brown and gold. Barbara Niven designed the costumes. After the stillness of the Chlumberg play, action was back and so Joan was returned to her element. With Fuenteovejuna Theatre Union reached one of its widest audiences and, out of that, took specially written sketches and poems relating to Spain, some by the Scots poet Hugh MacDiarmid, to perform at public meetings. Chris Grieve, MacDiarmid’s real name, became a supporter of the company until he died in 1978.

  At this time, Harold Lever who, in 1967, was to become Financial Secretary to the Treasury, became Theatre Union’s business manager, bringing with him his friend, the actress Patience Collier, whom Joan had seen at RADA. Patience, mesmerised, like Jimmie, by Joan’s voice, became company secretary. Alec Armstrong and Bob Goodman did not return from Spain.

  When one puts these ideas, aims, methods of training and productions together and, to them, adds the support of people who would go on to make their names in their own right, it is easy to forget that all of it came from amateurs, people who had to earn their living elsewhere. At a time of great poverty, riches were created, not by money but by youthful energy, inquiring minds, talent, and sticking two fingers up to the rotten.

  With subscriptions to Theatre Union being only sixpence – threepence if you were unemployed – Joan and Jimmie still had to find work to keep their heads above water. They found it back at the BBC where odd jobs were turning into more regular employment: Jimmie wrote a history of Chartism, working men’s long battle for rights; Joan researched and wrote documentaries that brought men and women from the farms, mills and mines of the north to the microphone, often interviewed by her.

  For two reasons, her task was quite a performance. Firstly, all interviews had to be scripted and go past the censor. Secondly, interviews on location required a big sound van and the blocking off, at either end, of the streets where the interviews were to take place. Handy little tape recorders had not yet been invented which, in Joan’s case, was just as well. She wouldn’t have been able to work one.

  The reason why interviews had to be scripted was to keep swearing out. Joan would question her subject, usually in their home, write out both the questions and the answers, get them typed up – Joan didn’t type – run the script past the censor and, finally, get the subject, after Joan or someone else had posed the question, to read out the answer either in the studio or at the location.

  She wrote her notes in notebooks which she used for everything, radio or Theatre Union, so on one page would be a cast list for a radio play or an interview with a shepherd and, opposite, exercises specially drawn for a member of Theatre Union who needed to extend themselves in the kind of movement she was proposing.

  The person who was getting Joan to do most of her radio work was the producer, Olive Shapley. She, like others Joan already knew at the BBC, leant towards communism and, like those others, later changed tack. While in her red (or red-ish) period, Olive, together with Joan, made documentaries on important subjects: Steel (1937) and Cotton (1938) being two. The highlight was The Classic Soil (1939), which has been preserved, so it is still possible to hear it today. Manchester life in 1939 is compared with Manchester life in the 1840s when Friedrich Engels was writing about it. The programme starts with the distant sound of Walton’s newly composed ‘First Symphony’. It made Joan think of wind rushing across the moors outside Manchester. There follows a mixture of Engels talking – a natural-sounding German was found – and descriptions of daily life given by working people of Manchester. 1939 does not come off well.

  During this time, an adaptation of Jaroslav Hašek’s novel, The Good Soldier Schweik, was sent via the usual international network to Jimmie. The director, Erwin Piscator had written it and then produced it in 1927 at the Volksbühne in Berlin. Not being Czech, he hadn’t quite caught the spirit of it, but Jimmie thought it was good enough for him to start work.

  When he and Joan advertised for people to come and either be in it or work on it many answered, including – and this shows how in touch with the outside world Theatre Union was – refugees from Central Europe.

  Howard Goorney answered too. He was a junior clerk working eight miles away in an accountant’s office in Altrincham and he was seventeen. Joan cast him as an old shepherd. It wasn’t perverse. Howard’s old men, sometimes to his regret, could make audiences cry with laughter and he would carry on playing them for Joan, who laughed the most, until 1967.

  The impetus of soldiers moving, through Schweik’s many scenes, across Europe during the First World War had to be maintained. Joan achieved this by using a revolve. She had not used one before but she would again. At its every turn, a new cartoon drawn by Ern Brooks in the style of Joseph Lada, the novel’s illustrator, would appear. Each was in black and white, as were the costumes. This no-khaki look would re-emerge 25 years later in Oh What a Lovely War, as would two scenes from Schweik.

  Jimmie chose the music. Smetana’s Richard III tone poem accompanies townsfolk strolling in the park and Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé was in there somewhere and, for the rest of her life, Joan turned it off when she heard it on the radio, annoying for anyone who liked it; but for Joan, it meant too much. This knowledge of classical music shows a side to Jimmie that people in later years would know nothing of, the side Joan respected and the reason for her sensitivity when she heard those pieces.

  Schweik, laughter in the face of war’s madness, was the best of Theatre Union. In 1938 it became the most popular show the company had done. Patience Collier, still a member, played Baroness von Botzenheim and then went her way – to Komisarjevsky, Noël Coward and radio drama – until her return in 1960.

  In 1938, the Franco-Soviet Pact was broken. Czechoslovakia was on its own. During the run-up to the Second World War, this was the event that most stuck in Joan’s craw because, 40 years later, in the 1980s, some of the worst rows she had with a certain French friend, storming out of the room rows, were to do with that pact. In the late 1930s, Theatre Union had to react.

  Out came the history books and the newspaper cuttings with each member of the company having to follow a particular story. Rosalie Williams, the perky-faced daughter of a not very thrilled headmaster, joined the company. She was studying English at Manchester University but her extramural interest was movement. In fact, she was one of the people for whom Joan drew those exercises in her notebook. Rosalie’s involvement with the company would be greater than she expected.

  When read, the script of Last Edition, a Living Newspaper, the show that rose out of the books, the press cuttings and the stories brought by sympathetic journalists, is not that exciting. It was back to facts and chanting. However, the show, as performed, became exciting, firstly, because all the material, varying in quality as it did, was so topical �
� a recent pit disaster, unemployment, the Spanish Civil War, Chamberlain’s flight to Munich – and secondly, there was Joan. Always aware that she had to make pure information entertaining, she drew the audience in with narration – she and Jimmie did this as she had seen La Compagnie des Quinze do it in The Rape of Lucrece – and with even more performing areas than John Bullion had. Then, across the stage for world events, she sent Hitler, Mussolini and Daladier, the French prime minister, not just talking but carrying on as gangsters. That was the way to liven things up. As for Neville Chamberlain, notorious for saying of the Czech debacle, ‘A quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing,’ merely having him appear on stage at all was sensational. Portraying living people on the stage was forbidden, especially Chamberlain, who was Britain’s prime minister.

  In other words, the show couldn’t have been fresher, or appear more daring, particularly as it was being changed from night to night. Certainly, lots of people turned up to see it, so many that further performances were arranged for the town centre. Had anyone in this excitement sent a script to the Lord Chamberlain, the censor? No, they had not. With nightly changes, it didn’t seem worthwhile. Two policemen came and asked at the ticket office where the licence was. It should have been on display. No one could give an answer. The show moved to the town centre. The police came again. Some members of the company left. There was, after all, the last scene in which the workers were encouraged not to fight because it was with the wrong enemy:

  Girl: Who is the enemy? The German lads like Bill? The German girls like me? Or the men who make millions out of wars? The men who breed hatred through their press. The men who cut wages and raise the price of food so that whole families live on the fringe of starvation. The men who allowed the Spanish people to be massacred and sent the Gresford miners down to die. I tell you the enemy is at home.

  In other words, it’s the class struggle. Heartfelt as this opinion was, not everyone held it by any means. It was a minority view.

  Joan and Jimmie had started a hare but, as was often the case when trouble was brewing, something happened to Joan which was particularly noticeable given her phenomenal stamina. She fell ill. This time it was a quinsy and, on that night, while she was stuck at home and someone was playing her part, a burly, curly haired lad, ‘A giant’ as Jimmie described him, joined the company.

  CHAPTER SIX

  TROUBLE

  The next evening, Joan got herself to the show and, having been cheered by the sight of an undercover policeman laughing at it, waited, curious to see the giant. It wasn’t until over three quarters of the way through, when a Czech worker in the streets of Prague was spelling out their country’s fate to a group of onlookers, that she noticed something about the group of onlookers. It didn’t look the same and that is because in it was not a giant – Jimmie had exaggerated – but a burly schoolboy with a mass of dark, unruly hair: Gerry Raffles.

  A member of the company, Graham Banks, had known him at Manchester Grammar School and told him about the show. He’d gone along and Jimmie had put him in it. At the end of the performance he said nothing but, the next night, there he was again and this at a time when company members were dropping out. The police, as well as turning up at the show, had by then visited both Rosalie’s and Graham’s fathers. Did they know what sort of people their children were consorting with? It would not be long before they visited Gerry’s father too but, in that particular case, there was history. Gerry had already been photographed at the head of a May Day march waving a red flag.

  As it happened, there had been more trouble but Manny, Gerry’s father, would have kept that to himself. Only a few months earlier, he had for a while given over the running of his factory to Gerry to see if he’d be any good at business. The next time he looked, the workers were all for striking; Gerry’s idea, and he was only sixteen.

  If Joan had known this she would not have been so anxious when she heard of the police visit to Manny, fearing as she did that he would prevent Gerry from having anything to do with Theatre Union. Gerry was already proving himself useful.

  Pressure had been mounting on Joan and Jimmie too, so when Alison Bailey bumped into Joan and said, not having spoken to her since she resigned from the Rep, ‘I’ve denounced you to the police,’ it was nothing new. MI5 agents had already set up a surveillance operation in Hyde where Joan and Jimmie had their new home. The agents, struggling to find something to report, wrote: ‘A number of young men who have the appearance of communist Jews are known to visit Oak Cottage. It is thought they come from Manchester’ [Declassified MI5 documents]. Never has Manchester sounded so exotic. Its town centre was all of seven miles away. These undercover agents, sometimes not as undercover as they would like to think, would have been spotted by Joan. She was hardly unobservant. Jimmie would have known his position for years. He’d been a marked man since 1932 when the police chief constable of Salford reported him as a Communist Party member of the Ramblers’ Section of the British Workers’ Sports Federation.

  By then, 1940, the heightened sensitivity of the time was only exacerbated by clumsy orders from above. ‘Collar the lot,’ said Churchill of Italians and German Jews who had lived in the UK for ages. Another order was ‘Anyone spreading alarm and despondency is liable for prosecution.’ It was enough for the police to close the show. Not only that, Joan and Jimmie were summonsed.

  It was then that Joan’s on-off relationship with the Establishment – think of her time at RADA – gave her a helping hand. Harold Lever, not yet part of the Establishment but getting there, found a barrister.

  Things at the trial didn’t look good, at first. The policemen who had been taking notes – not very good ones, according to Joan, she being a stickler for accuracy – attacked the show for its political content. It was inflammatory, they said, and, in those tense wartime days, it was. The barrister, smooth as you’d want him to be, interrupted. Political content, he said, was not the issue. The issue was that this young, artistic company with little experience of the law had, in its excitement, failed to obtain a licence. To prove just how extremely artistic the company was, he produced the elegant programmes for Fuenteovejuna and Schweik. You couldn’t argue. Their spare, angular style made the Manchester Rep ones look tatty.

  Joan and Jimmie were fined five pounds each and bound over for twelve months, so they were free, but ten pounds in those days was a big sum.

  What happened next shrunk their income even more. Walking into the BBC one morning to work with Olive Shapley, they found the doorman barring their way. No extremists allowed, those were his orders and both were known communists. They might find a way of broadcasting their ideas to the nation. Joan pointed out that this was hardly likely, given that they would be performing a vetted script for Children’s Hour, but it was no use. Walking away, she wondered if Uncle Mac, presenter of children’s progammes, and famous for his signing-off phrase ‘Goodnight children, everywhere,’ would, as a fascist, be barred too. He wasn’t.

  Of the days that were to come, Joan said one thing. Of the same period, an MI5 document, declassified in 2006, said another. Joan recalled John Coatman, the north regional director of the BBC, inviting her and Jimmie to a restaurant away from the BBC to tell them that this barring was a lot of nonsense. He would sort the problem out. Nothing happened. They were not reinstated.

  The MI5 document, a 1941 BBC memo, has John Coatman expressing fears that Jimmie and Joan could stoke revolutionary fervour among listeners to the north. It was the exact opposite of what he had said in the restaurant. ‘Miss Littlewood,’ he wrote, ‘whose real name is Mrs Miller, and her husband, Mr James Miller, are active communists who have taken a leading part in the organisation of the Communist Party and its activities in this area.’

  Firstly, you wonder what would have been the reaction of the Communist Party. Jimmie and Joan were so disobedient, it’s almost funny. Then, if you turn your attention to Coatman, you are left to ask if he was straightforwardly two-faced or
writing on official BBC notepaper what he thought the BBC wanted to hear in order to protect the north region branch. This is not the end of him in Joan’s story. She respected John Coatman and would speak well of him again.

  After the excitement of the trial, a quietness was forced on Theatre Union. On the one hand, Joan and Jimmie had to be careful about what they did. On the other, war, tightening its grip on everyday life, was taking the male actors into the services one by one. While thinking about its next production, the company settled down to study. Jimmie drew up a reading list: Greek theatre, Chinese theatre, the Elizabethans, commedia dell’arte, Restoration comedy; everything you would expect. The librarian was Gerry. At seventeen, he was at the studying stage. Joan and Jimmie’s teacherly qualities impressed him. He wrote an essay on Strindberg’s The Dance of Death. Anyone who has worked with Joan could guess that it was not unprompted. Her hand was there, a mixture of encouragement and instruction: first, put the play into its context. Then, what is the situation of these characters? How do they earn a living? What is the author really saying? Nowadays this is standard but, in the late 1930s, unusual. It is what Joan called ‘reading a play’, a command she would, in later years, shout at a radio on hearing a director describing his or her concept.

  ‘The bourgeoisie,’ wrote Engels, ‘have raised monuments to the classics. If they’d read them, they’d have burned them.’ That was a favourite quote of Jimmie’s, and a good example was Aristophanes’ anti-war comedy, Lysistrata, which Theatre Union set about putting on. There would be plenty of fun modelling the old men in the play on real figures in government.

  Joan, when not totally absorbed with work, began to notice how Gerry’s effortless appeal to girls – his current girlfriend, Clare Ffoulkes, was in the company – contrasted with Jimmie’s need to be admired by women and then to dominate them. This he did by using his knowledge to impress girls he’d found at Communist Party meetings. Having done that, he’d bring them into the company, whether they were any good or not. In other words, Joan was going off him. His knock-you-down talk was sounding empty.