Joan Littlewood (Routledge Performance Practitioners)

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JOAN LITTLEWOOD

Routledge Performance Practitioners is a series of introductory guides to the key theatre-makers of the last century. Each volume explains the background to and the work of one of the major influences on twentieth- and twenty-first-century performance. A theatrical and cultural innovator, Joan Littlewood’s various contributions to theatre made a huge impact on the way in which theatre was generated, rehearsed and presented during the twentieth century. This is the first book to combine: • • • •

an overview of Littlewood’s career in relation to the wider social, political and cultural context an exploration of Littlewood’s theatrical influences, approach to actor’s training, belief in the creative ensemble, attitude to text, rehearsal methods and use of improvisation a detailed case study of the origins, research, creative process and thinking behind Littlewood’s most famous production, Oh What a Lovely War, and an assessment of its impact a series of practical exercises designed to capture and illustrate the key approaches Littlewood used in the rehearsal room.

As a first step towards critical understanding, and as an initial exploration before going on to further, primary research, Routledge Performance Practitioners are unbeatable value for today’s student. Nadine Holdsworth is Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick.

ROUTLEDGE PERFORMANCE PRACTITIONERS Series editor: Franc Chamberlain, University College Cork

Routledge Performance Practitioners is an innovative series of introductory handbooks on key figures in twentieth-century performance practice. Each volume focuses on a theatre-maker whose practical and theoretical work has in some way transformed the way we understand theatre and performance. The books are carefully structured to enable the reader to gain a good grasp of the fundamental elements underpinning each practitioner’s work. They will provide an inspiring springboard for future study, unpacking and explaining what can initially seem daunting. The main sections of each book cover: • • • •

personal biography explanation of key writings description of significant productions reproduction of practical exercises.

Volumes currently available in the series are: Eugenio Barba by Jane Turner Augusto Boal by Frances Babbage Michael Chekhov by Franc Chamberlain Jacques Copeau by Mark Evans Anna Halprin by Libby Worth and Helen Poyner Jacques Lecoq by Simon Murray Joan Littlewood by Nadine Holdsworth Vsevolod Meyerhold by Jonathan Pitches Konstantin Stanislavsky by Bella Merlin Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo by Sondra Horton Fraleigh and Tamah Nakamura Future volumes will include: Antonin Artaud Pina Bausch Bertolt Brecht Peter Brook Etienne Decroux Jerzy Grotowski

Rudolf Laban Robert Lepage Ariane Mnouchkine Lee Strasberg Mary Wigman Robert Wilson

JOAN LITTLEWOOD

Nadine Holdsworth

First published 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2006 Nadine Holdsworth

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Holdsworth, Nadine. Joan Littlewood/Nadine Holdsworth. p. cm.–(Routledge performance practitioners) Includes bibliographical references and index. Littlewood, Joan–Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. II. Series. PN2598.L577H65 2006 792.02⬘33092–dc22 2005032208 ISBN10: 0–415–33886–7 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–415–33887–5 (pbk) ISBN10: 0–203–44848–0 (ebk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–33886–8 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–33887–5 (pbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–44848–9 (ebk)

FOR GEOFF AND CORIN

CONTENTS

List of figures Acknowledgements 1

BIOGRAPHY IN POLITICAL, SOCIAL AND ARTISTIC CONTEXT

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1

Introduction 1 Early life 4 Early career: ‘Theatre as a Weapon’: Theatre of Action and Theatre Union (1935–1945) 5 On the road: the creative ensemble (1945–1952) 12 Popular theatre/critical success (1953–1963) 22 Community initiatives (1963–1975) 32 2

JOAN LITTLEWOOD’S WORKING METHOD Introduction 43 What was Littlewood against? 45 Attitude to acting 47 Promoting the creative ensemble 48 Approaches to actor training 50 Creating a movement-based theatre: the influence of Laban 51

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Using and adapting Stanislavsky 56 Realising the world of the play 59 Improvisation: creating the conditions for theatrical invention 62 Keeping a show alive 72 Conclusion 75 3

DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS OF OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR

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Introduction 77 1963: political and cultural context 78 The war game 79 Theatricality 81 Developing the show 82 The pierrot show 86 Documentary material/the ‘technological actor’ 87 The songs 89 Act One 91 Act Two 98 Selling out 108 Impact and influence 110 4

PRACTICAL EXERCISES

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Introduction 115 Aims 116 Approach 116 Warm-up exercises 117 The performing body in space and time 120 Releasing the imagination 127 Working with text 130 Ensemble playing 132 Working with documentary sources 133 Name glossary References Index

137 143 149

FIGURES

Frontispiece Joan Littlewood

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1.1

Operation Olive Branch (1947)

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1.2

The Other Animals (1948)

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1.3

Edward II (1956)

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1.4

You Won’t Always Be On Top (1957)

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1.5

You Won’t Always Be On Top (1957)

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1.6

Joan Littlewood outside the Theatre Royal, Stratford East (1974)

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2.1

The Flying Doctor (1945)

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2.2

The Quare Fellow (1956)

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Joan Littlewood directing

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3.1

Extract from Oh What a Lovely War programme (1963)

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3.2

Avis Bunnage, Oh What a Lovely War (1963)

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3.3

Murray Melvin, Oh What a Lovely War (1963)

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Brian Murphy and Victor Spinetti, Oh What a Lovely War (1963)

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3.5

Trench scene, Oh What a Lovely War (1963)

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George Sewell as Haig, Oh What a Lovely War (1963)

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Joan Littlewood outside stage door, New York (1964)

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Joan Littlewood (1974)

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Firstly, I must thank Murray Melvin at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East for granting me unrestricted access to the theatre’s archives and for permission to quote from manuscripts and to reproduce many of the photographs contained in this volume. Murray’s voluntary work as an archivist, together with Mary Ling, provides a model of selfless dedication to a beautiful and ground-breaking theatre that not only housed Joan Littlewood and Theatre Workshop for more than twenty years, but has subsequently earned an enviable reputation for its dedication to new writing and musical theatre that reflects and, more importantly, attracts the local diverse community. Murray and Mary’s sifting, filing and documenting means that the important history of this vital theatre will be accessible to future theatre historians and their generosity deserves my and the wider theatre community’s heartfelt thanks. I visited the archive numerous times whilst researching and writing this book and each time was enormously grateful for the trust invested in me and for the help I received with my numerous requests and questions. Thanks also to the staff and archivists at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin for granting access to and permission to quote from the Michael Barker Collection relating to Joan Littlewood and Theatre Workshop. The opportunity to read some of Littlewood’s early creative notebooks proved invaluable and this learning experience contributed greatly to the chapters on working methods and practical

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exercises. I must also thank Shelley Ayliffe who worked as a short-term research assistant for me in the early stages of my research. Shelley’s impressive organisational skills, hard-work and initiative were greatly appreciated. Thanks also to Methuen for granting permission to quote from Theatre Workshop, Charles Chilton and Joan Littlewood’s Oh What a Lovely War and Howard Goorney’s The Theatre Workshop Story. Visits to archives, Shelley’s work as a research assistant and other aspects of the research for this book were made possible by grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and I am most grateful to the AHRC for supporting the project in this way through the Small Grants in the Performing Arts and Research Leave schemes. Thanks also to the University of Warwick for granting me study leave and to my colleagues in the School of Theatre, Performance and and Cultural Policy Studies for their support while I was away from the department. My thanks especially to Nicolas Whybrow for taking the strain. I must also acknowledge my gratitude to Richard Perkins for his help accessing sources. The late Clive Barker’s work, conversation and advocacy opened many literal and intellectual doors for me during the research process for this volume – I can only record my thanks and my regret that he will not get to see the final result. I must also thank Derek Paget, not only for his informative work on Oh What a Lovely War, but for his willingness to provide judicious comments on work contained in this volume. Ben Harker similarly proved that academic generosity is alive and well by sharing sources gleaned during his research for a biography of Ewan MacColl. Franc Chamberlain, the series editor, and Talia Rodgers from Routledge have provided advice and thoughtful comments throughout the process and I thank them for this. In various ways the following people have also helped in the process of developing, researching and writing this book: David Bradby, Jim Davis, Maggie Gale, Laura Hitchcock, Liese Perrin, Peter Rankin and Naomi Tummons. Finally, love and thanks to Geoff for the enormous emotional, intellectual and practical support. And to Corin – who before he arrived probably could not have made the process of writing this volume much more difficult – but who has quickly made up for all that with the sheer joy and pleasure of him.

NOTE ON TEXT

In the first chapter on Joan Littlewood’s biography in political, social and cultural context, I have provided brief definitions or explanations of key terms or events that are mentioned in the text. These are ‘boxed’ and the term is indicated in bold print on its first mention in the text. I have also provided a name glossary of selected figures – primarily from the world of theatre – who are referenced in the text. Inclusion in the glossary is indicated by the name in question being highlighted in bold on its first appearance in the script. The glossary is deliberately selective and excludes better known figures such as Brecht and Stanislavsky, assuming the reader’s broad acquaintance with these names. It also excludes people such as Rudolph Laban, who have their work discussed in some detail within the main body of the text.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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Frontispiece Joan Littlewood

1 BIOGRAPHY IN POLITICAL, SOCIAL AND ARTISTIC CONTEXT

INTRODUCTION

During the mid-twentieth century, Joan Littlewood was one of the foremost directors of her generation. Her imagination, originality, theatrical chutzpah and lively representations of working-class life stood out when compared to the rather bland British theatre available at the time. As a person, she also stood out in relation to the domesticated, subordinate role assigned to women during this period and the genteel culture of the male-dominated arts industry. Littlewood was a maverick associated with anti-establishment views. She had a fiery temperament and bluntly refused to respect authority for its own sake. Carving out a varied career that more often than not captured the spirit of the times, she wanted to create theatre that had the capacity to be as exciting and all-consuming as the cinema whilst keeping the immediacy of direct contact with an audience. She was a pioneer of the creative ensemble, devised performance, improvisation and for a theatre that moved beyond a polite regurgitation of middle-class life to capture the exuberance, wit and poetry of working-class lives and communities. She showed how theatre could be simultaneously thought-provoking and pleasurable; exuberant and serious; playful and highly skilled. A cultural and artistic innovator, Littlewood’s widespread impact can be seen in the many performers and directors with whom she worked, those who were influenced by productions she created or received their training at

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the East 15 theatre school established to promote her working methods. This book will outline key aspects of Littlewood’s career, approach and theatrical output by asking the following questions: What influenced Littlewood? What did she reject about traditional theatre practice? How did her outlook on the world affect the working methods she used? What was so radical about her approach for the time? How and why did her work change and develop? Before we begin to uncover Littlewood’s ideas, theories and practical approach to theatre-making, it is important to issue a few provisos to the material presented in this book. It is a feature of series such as these that the focus is on the work of an individual. However, this approach can mask the fact that theatre-making is a collaborative process that relies not on the vision of one person but the creative engagement of many: performers, designers, technicians, playwrights, producers and the people who make the event of theatre possible: theatre managers, box office staff and cleaners, for example. During her career, Littlewood was unusual in her insistence that her work relied on discussion and creative explorations with other people. She worked closely with performers, writers, choreographers, designers, architects and community activists to develop their practice as part and parcel of her creative output, but it is difficult to pin down exactly what the nature and extent of that input was. As such, there are points in this book when it is tricky to distinguish exactly what Littlewood was responsible for as her tentacles stretched far beyond the parameters traditionally associated with the director figure. Sometimes it is only possible to write about the broader conditions for working that she championed rather than the detail, but I hope that this information itself will illuminate the work of a visionary ‘theatre person’ who variously turned her hand to teaching, playwriting, acting, choreographing and directing, sometimes by financial necessity and sometimes as a natural extension of the directorial role and function. It is also important to accept that, unlike some practitioners covered in this series, Littlewood did not propose a definitive method or style of theatre in the same way that Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863– 1938) was associated with naturalism or Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) with ‘epic’ theatre. She was a theatrical magpie who stole ideas, adapted them and through this process generated an approach that evolved, developed and turned back on itself as she rejected or returned to ideas. Above all, she never stood still and was variously associated with the experimental avant-garde, radical interpretations of classics, new

writing, musical theatre, rousing comedies and large-scale community initiatives. This chapter will chronologically document Littlewood’s development as a theatre practitioner and situate her changing practice in relation to wider social, political and cultural events, movements and debates. Following a brief overview of her origins and early life, the chapter will focus on four key stages in her career. The first section will explore the intersection between politics and innovative practice that characterised Littlewood’s early work with Ewan MacColl (1915–1989) in Manchester during the run up to the Second World War. Following discussion of this early work, I will examine the formation of Theatre Workshop following the Second World War and the seven-year period Littlewood spent developing her skills as a director whilst establishing a highly trained ensemble to tour an eclectic repertoire of revitalised classics, modern European texts and original plays by MacColl. The next section will concentrate on the period following the relocation of Theatre Workshop to the Theatre Royal, Stratford East in 1953. From this point Littlewood achieved notoriety for her lively interpretations of the classics and widespread critical acclaim for groundbreaking productions of The Quare Fellow (1956), A Taste of Honey (1958) and Oh What a Lovely War (1963). The final section turns to the 1960s and early 1970s, which found Littlewood increasingly preoccupied with community initiatives and the Fun Palace project. Drawing on widespread concerns with access to and participation in the arts, Littlewood pioneered a series of small and large-scale projects that combined entertainment, communication and learning. These projects form the central focus of this final section although I also document the final shows Littlewood produced at the Theatre Royal before her decision to retire from theatre-making in the mid-1970s. This broad contextualising material provides a framework that the subsequent three chapters of the book will further illuminate through: 1 2 3

Exploration of Littlewood’s theatrical influences, approach to actor’s training, belief in the creative ensemble, attitude to text, rehearsal methods and use of improvisation. A detailed case study of the origins, research, creative process and thinking behind the form and subject matter of Littlewood’s most famous production, Oh What a Lovely War. A series of practical exercises designed to capture and illustrate the key approaches that Littlewood took in the rehearsal room. BIOGRAPHY

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EARLY LIFE

Born on 6 October 1914, Joan Littlewood lived with her mother and grandparents in Stockwell in the East End of London. Unusually for a girl from a working-class background, she continued her education beyond the age of fourteen after a local convent school recognised her academic potential and awarded her a scholarship. There she continued to develop a love of books, as well as interests in the arts and politics. Throughout her formative years, Littlewood was aware of the advent and consequences of a world-wide economic crisis. In Britain, whilst many people prospered from rising standards of living and the growth of affluent suburbia, class divisions widened as many working-class communities suffered a period of extreme physical, social and economic deprivation as unemployment rose rapidly when coalmining, textile and steel industries declined, the Means Test took hold and the housing crisis deepened. However, rather than suffering quietly, members of the desperate working class began to show their discontent by demonstrating, a move best exemplified by the 1926 General Strike and Hunger Marches that took place across Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. Despite being young, these events politicised Littlewood, as did events closer to home such as the death of her Aunt Carrie from tuberculosis and her own relative poverty compared with her peers at school.

General Strike: on 1st May 1926, a conference of the Trades Union Congress announced a General Strike in defence of miners’ wages and hours. The strike involved key industries and a significant proportion of the adult male population as dockers, printers, steelworkers and railwaymen came out on strike for nine days. Hunger Marches: a series of regional and national marches, organised by the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement during the early 1930s, to protest against the poor living conditions of the unemployed. Means Test: in 1931, the Government restricted access to the employment insurance fund and introduced the ‘means test’, a humiliating appraisal of all sources of personal and family income before sanctioning assistance.

Littlewood discovered theatre after seeing a production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and secured a place and a scholarship to train at RADA in 1932, but she soon grew frustrated by the type of people she met and the limited learning environment she encountered. She hated the concentration on classics, classical verse speaking and drawing room comedies that bore little relation to the ‘real’ world and her experience growing up in East London. The prospect of a theatre capable of contributing to the widespread calls for social change excited Littlewood and she did not find these represented at RADA. Despondent, she left early in 1933 and, after a brief spell in Paris, decided to walk to Manchester, an industrial heartland far from the elite atmosphere of RADA. As she remembered: I loved the northern city at first sight. No Horse Guards, no South Kensington accents, no sir and madam stuff. The wind from the Pennines which swept through the Manchester streets had blown them away . . . This was the Classic Soil of Communism. (Littlewood 1994: 75)

After contacting Archie Harding, a BBC producer who awarded her First Prize for verse speaking whilst she was still at RADA and cast her as Cleopatra in a BBC Overseas Service programme, Scenes from Shakespeare, Littlewood secured irregular work reading poetry, acting and helping pioneer regional documentaries for the BBC. It was here that she met her artistic collaborator, fellow Communist and husband to be, MacColl, then known as Jimmy Miller, in 1934. EARLY CAREER: ‘THEATRE AS A WEAPON’: THEATRE OF ACTION AND THEATRE UNION (1935–1945)

In MacColl, she met someone with strikingly similar goals and together they made a formidable pairing. MacColl was already active in the Workers’ Theatre Movement (WTM) a movement associated with the Communist Party that aimed to use ‘theatre as a weapon’ in the political struggles of the day. With groups such as the Red Megaphones, MacColl took topical, flexible and portable agit-prop theatre to the streets that consisted of short didactic sketches, satirical songs, mass declamation and, more often than not, information or appeals for money BIOGRAPHY

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on behalf of a particular cause or strike. However, following the rise of Hitler in Germany and the rapid spread of Fascism throughout Europe, it became clear that the changing political climate required more sophisticated, discursive analysis than street theatre could provide so in 1934 MacColl formed Theatre of Action. Littlewood became involved as they rehearsed a variety show that included Newsboy (1934), some songs by Brecht and Hanns Eisler (1898–1962), an anti-war sketch and a recitation of The Fire Sermon, a poem by Sol Funaroff (1911–1942). During this time, Littlewood also worked at the Rusholme Repertory Theatre as an Assistant Stage Manager, who played small roles. Here, Littlewood worked with the exiled German dramatist, Ernst Toller (1893–1939), when he came to supervise a production of his play Draw the Fires. However, this was not typical of the Rusholme Repertory Theatre’s usual theatrical diet of staid thrillers and limp comedies. Committed to theatrical exploration and working with socially committed subject matter, Littlewood resigned shortly after working with Toller, to join MacColl full-time to research, develop and ‘create a theatre which would be more dynamic, truthful and adventurous than anything the bourgeois theatre could produce’ (MacColl 1990: 211). They wanted freedom to experiment as they formulated their own distinct training methods and theatrical vocabulary that placed movement at its centre and drew on their research into leading continental practitioners such as Stanislavsky, Brecht, Rudolph Laban (1879–1958), Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940) and Erwin Piscator (1893–1966), alongside popular cultural forms such as music hall, films and street entertainers. Their pursuit of knowledge was extraordinary and their research continually expanded their theatrical frame of reference and desire to experiment. During the summer of 1934, Littlewood and MacColl attended a WTM Conference in London, where they saw the anti-war play Slickers (1934), a left-leaning well-made play. Despite being appalled at the subWest End style of production and acting, this show provided source material for a new Theatre of Action production called John Bullion (1934), which offered commentary on the capitalist pursuit of war for material gain. During this period, the peace movement was at its height. The Peace Pledge Union formed in 1934 and the League of Nations released the results of its Peace Ballot in 1935, which showed overwhelming support for the League of Nations, the prohibition of private arms sales and a move against rearmament. Whilst the content of John

The Workers’ Theatre Movement (WTM): emerged in 1926 and responded to the political climate by taking theatre to the streets, outside factory gates, alongside dole queues and to political rallies. This was an international movement and groups from all over Europe, Russia and America shared scripts and information, culminating in the International Olympiad of Workers’ Theatres held in Moscow during October 1932. The WTM ended in 1936, as the rising threat of Fascism called for a broad alliance of ‘popular front’ politics rather than a class versus class emphasis. Agit-prop (agitational propaganda): is the term used to describe the style of short, topical and provocative sketches performed by the WTM.

Bullion chimed with this mood of pacifism, its mode of expression was highly controversial. The 1931 publication of Leon Moussinac’s The New Movement in the Theatre disseminated information about seminal works by directors such as Piscator and Meyerhold, but also, more importantly, provided a wealth of images from which to glean a sense of the growing influence of constructivism, expressionism and the application of new technologies. Described as a ‘satirical ballet’ (Littlewood 1994: 100), John Bullion combines agit-prop techniques with a constructivist set on three levels, with symbolic lighting, sound and action. A man in a mask performs a dance symbolising the modern war for profits, the sound of heavy artillery fire intrudes as businessmen buy shares in an armaments manufacturer and three mannequins in swimsuits and gas masks appear as the threat of war gets ever closer. Despite the political credentials of the subject matter, the form radically departed from the Communist Party’s support for Soviet socialist realism and, at a series of meetings, Littlewood and MacColl faced accusations of individualism and putting art before politics. Eventually, the local Communist Party branch expelled them. In late 1935, the Moscow Academy of Theatre and Cinema granted MacColl and Littlewood study scholarships. However, after a short period in London waiting for visas and spending the meagre travel grant they had managed to scrape together with the help of friends, they temporarily formed a theatre school where they gave lectures on key theatre movements, practitioners and ran practical workshops. By the BIOGRAPHY

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Naturalism: emerged through the work of French novelist, Emile Zola (1840–1902). Naturalists stress the importance of heredity and environment in determining behaviour and therefore imitate the real world as a means of locating fictional characters as products of their background and upbringing. In the theatre, the movement is principally associated with Konstantin Stanislavsky’s productions of Anton Chekhov’s plays such as Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1903). Socialist Realism: has formal similarities with naturalism, but stresses the importance of social factors such as environment over heredity. It views people as products of society, but able to intervene in their own destiny and to enact change. Constructivism: an artistic movement that grew out of the modernist avant-garde in the early part of the twentieth century in Russia. As opposed to concerns with the individual and the subjective, constructivists used new technologies, abstraction and geometric design to convey universal meanings. Expressionism: an artistic movement originating in Germany in the early part of the twentieth century. The preoccupation of the Expressionists was to find a way of representing reality as subjective experience as opposed to reflecting external reality.

time visas came through, they could no longer afford to get to Moscow and accepted an offer from the Manchester branch of the Peace Pledge Union to produce Hans Schlumberg’s anti-war play Miracle at Verdun (1930). After a two-week run at the Lesser Free Trade Hall that secured the group its largest audience and a core of like-minded participants and supporters, Littlewood and MacColl called a meeting of all those who had taken part. They proposed a new inter-disciplinary group, Theatre Union, consisting of actors, artists, technicians, tradesmen and writers who were committed to training, as well as producing socially relevant and theatrically engaging material. A heady whirl of researching, planning, talking, training, rehearsing and performing followed. To aid their quest to reach the broadest possible working-class audience they

appealed to Trades Unions and to all groups engaged in political struggle to affiliate with this new organisation in order to build up a network of supporters who could promote shows in their local community and/or workplace. Theatre Union declared its ambitious theatrical aims and broad frame of reference in the following manifesto: The Theatre must face up to the problems of its time: it cannot ignore the poverty and human suffering which increases every day. It cannot, with sincerity, close its eyes to the disasters of its time. Means Test suicides, wars, fascism and the million sordid accidents reported in the daily press. If the theatre of to-day would reach the heights achieved four thousand years ago in Greece and four hundred years ago in Elizabethan England it must face up to such problems. To those who say that such affairs are not the concern of the theatre or that the theatre should confine itself to treading in the paths of ‘beauty’ and ‘dignity’, we would say ‘Read Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Calderon, Moliere, Lope de Vega, Schiller and the rest.’ The Theatre Union says that in facing up to the problems of our time and by intensifying our efforts to get at the essence of reality, we are also attempting to solve our own theatrical problems both technical and ideological. By doing this we are ensuring the future of the theatre, a future which will not be born in the genteel atmosphere of retirement and seclusion, but rather in the clash and turmoil of the battles between the oppressors and the oppressed. (MacColl 1986: vix)

The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) prompted the newly formed company to produce pageants and sketches at ‘Aid for Spain’ meetings and anti-fascist demonstrations. They also mounted a full-scale production of Lope de Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna (1612–1614) to promote solidarity with the International Brigade’s struggle against fascism and the forces of Franco, as well as raising money for medical aid. Telling the story of revolt against a tyrannous feudal overlord, the play called for large crowd scenes where people fought, danced and sang songs, as well as intimate scenes and overall the play marked a stylistic advance for Littlewood and MacColl as they tackled their first classical production. The first British production of The Good Soldier Schweik, which Littlewood and MacColl translated from Piscator’s 1928 version of Hasek’s famous novel, and a version of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (411 BC) followed. Both extended Theatre Union’s theatrical range and vocabulary. For Schweik, the company drew on their knowledge of Piscator’s original production BIOGRAPHY

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and experimented with a back-projector designed and built for them by four engineering research scientists from Metropolitian-Vickers, alongside agit-prop techniques, an episodic structure, knockabout comedy and comic dance-interludes. Alternatively, Lysistrata employed burlesque style comedy to tell the famous story of women standing up against the ravages of male-dominated war. Theatre Union mounted the production during the immediate run-up to the Second World War, a time of appeasement, the Munich Pact and the relinquishing of Czechoslovakia to Hitler. The threat of Fascism across Europe and the growing strength of the British Union of Fascists formed by Oswald Mosley in 1932, made it clear that a more urgent and topical response was required. It wasn’t a matter of having less art and more politics but of having more clearly stated politics and more powerful art. The better the politics, we reasoned, the better the art and the nearer we would be to achieving our goal of a truly popular theatre. (MacColl 1986: xliv)

This sense of political urgency became even more acute following the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939. Deciding that they could no longer justify producing classic plays to obliquely comment on contemporary events, the group began working on a large-scale living newspaper project inspired by the American Federal Theatre’s Triple A Ploughed Under (1935) and One Third of a Nation (1938). Performed in March 1940, Last Edition made extensive use of documentary material from libraries, government papers and newspaper items as a basis for sketches about the Spanish Civil War, unemployment, the hunger marches, the Gresford pit disaster and the outbreak of the Second World War. Whilst the piece promoted the fight against fascism, it also presented a blatant critique of the politics of compromise evident in the run up to War and a call for the working class to unite across Europe and fight the forces of capitalism. Whereas Littlewood and MacColl had functioned inter-dependently on previous productions, from this point there was a far clearer division of labour as MacColl concentrated on writing and Littlewood devoted her attention to staging and direction. In addition to the central stage area, she employed two platforms that ran down each side of the auditorium so that the eclectic, variety-style mix of sketches, song and dance would confront and engulf the audience as they played simultaneously or in carefully

orchestrated counter-point. She also pulled together all of the techniques previously experimented with as MacColl remembers it: the mass-declamatory form, the satirical comedy style of agit-prop, the dancedrama of Newsboy, the simulated public meetings of Still Talking and Waiting for Lefty, the constructivism of John Bullion, the expressionism of Miracle at Verdun, the burlesque comedy of Lysistrata, the juxtaposition of song and actuality from the Spanish Civil War pageants and the fast-moving episodic style of The Good Soldier Schweik. (1986: xliv)

In order to get this controversial show past the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship, the company decided to run it as a club performance, a familiar strategy whereby the audience enrolled for club membership before admittance to the show. Nonetheless, during the run, the police arrested Littlewood and MacColl, the courts bound them over for two years and they had to withdraw the production. Shortly afterwards, they were blacklisted from the BBC for their communist sympathies and lost their only secure source of income. In the early years of the War, the group continued their training regime and classes, which focused on Laban-based movement exercises and vocal training, but eventually call-ups, blackouts and bombings

Communism: a political ideology based on the teachings of Karl Marx (1818–1883) in the Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das Kapital (1867), which offered a critical analysis of the economic organisation of capitalist societies. Marx argued that the state secured ruling class domination by supporting private capital and suppressing the mass of the population through institutions such as religion and culture. However, he argued that capitalism was inherently unstable and subject to crises that would eventually lead to revolution and the working class establishing a communist society based on shared ownership and the abolition of class distinctions. Marx’s writings underpinned the many communist parties that emerged across the world in the early part of the twentieth century and specifically following the Russian Revolution of 1917 that appeared to show Marx’s theory in practice. The Communist Party of Great Britain formed in 1920 through the merger of various left-wing groups.

BIOGRAPHY

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Fascism: the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) founded the Fascist movement in 1919. Profiting from economic and political instability in the inter-war period, Fascism based itself on aggressive nationalist sentiments, militarism, a hatred of socialism, rejection of democratic and liberal institutions and the presence of a single charismatic leader. A Fascist totalitarian regime headed by Mussolini came to power in Italy in 1929 and exerted influence during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) when the ‘Republicans’ fought ‘Nationalist’ insurgents under the leadership of General Franco. Nazism was an extreme manifestation of fascism that arose under Adolf Hitler in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s. Lord Chamberlain’s censorship: in accordance with the Theatres Act of 1843, all theatre scripts had to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain for scrutiny before a licence for performance would be granted in Britain. The 1968 Theatres Act abolished this censorship.

made it impossible to sustain the company and Theatre Union disbanded in 1942. Agreeing to reunite after the War, Littlewood and MacColl urged members to keep in touch and gave them reading lists so they could continue their education. To make ends meet, Littlewood turned her hand to freelance journalism and during 1942 wrote a series Front Line Family with Marjorie Banks, a producer at the BBC who managed to get around Littlewood’s BBC ban with a temporary pass. By the end of 1942, the BBC removed her name from the blacklist as it became far too complicated to ban somebody for their communist sympathies as the Soviets were by now allies in the Second World War. With the ban removed, Littlewood spent the next couple of years making BBC radio documentaries charting the lives of ordinary people in their everyday environments. However, her first love was theatre and as soon as the War ended, she started another venture. ON THE ROAD: THE CREATIVE ENSEMBLE (1945–1952)

Filled with post-war optimism, Littlewood, MacColl, Bunny Bowen, who first appeared in Newsboy, Rosalie Williams and Howard Goorney, who joined for Schweik, and Gerry Raffles, who performed in Last Edition

and became Littlewood’s life partner, re-formed as Theatre Workshop. The new name signalled a growing concern with making theatre as an on-going process that grew out of research, training and collaboration. Living and working as part of a collective, Littlewood spent the next few years establishing an ensemble through regular movement, voice and actor’s training explored in detail during the following chapter. A spirit of invention characterised this period as the group experimented with all aspects of theatre from developing their physical skills to constructing cheap sound and lighting equipment and over the next two years, they established a repertoire of plays including original works by MacColl and European classics. Developing a distinctive, energised theatrical style, Littlewood rejected the more familiar text-driven approach of the English tradition in favour of an eclectic, textured, European aesthetic that drew on her earlier agit-prop work, alongside commedia dell’arte, burlesque and revue forms that combined drama and dance, verse and stylised movement, song and direct address, together with satire and emotive sequences. Imaginative sets and stark, atmospheric lighting influenced by the work of Swiss scenic designer, Adolphe Appia (1862–1928) equally characterised these early Theatre Workshop productions. In terms of content, the company remained aligned to a left-wing perspective and used theatre to offer social commentary on the complexity of modern life in the immediate post-war period. The social misery and political unrest of the 1930s initiated a widespread call for change when the War ended. This popular mood for fresh ideas saw Labour sweep to victory in the 1945 general election and prompted attempts to tackle various social problems through the introduction of the Welfare State. Unfortunately, the euphoric mood of optimism waned and post-war disillusionment set in as people lived with the reality of rationing, a devalued pound, the decline of Empire, the increasing

Commedia dell’arte: originates in sixteenth-century Italy and refers to a form of popular improvised comedy based on stock scenarios and characters such as Pantalone and Harlequin. Most of the characters wore masks and the material had a strong physical element as it included mime and slapstick. Commedia has had a significant influence on comic theatre in Europe ever since.

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prominence of America, the threat of atomic war, the ushering in of the Cold War and the awareness that large social divisions still remained despite the successes of the Welfare State. Theatre Workshop explored these issues and the fight for a more egalitarian and humanitarian society in the work they produced between 1945 and 1952. Littlewood dreamed of creating a cultural centre where she could research, train her company, run workshops to disseminate her ideas and be free to rehearse and create work that would revolutionise British theatre and re-connect with a large working-class audience. She believed those who had experienced war would want a rich cultural life that valued the forces of creativity, civilisation and humanity rather than the forces of destruction and had every faith that an audience would be forthcoming if Theatre Workshop created appropriate and stimulating work. Unfortunately, the next eight years were to disabuse her of this notion. Despite widespread critical praise, the company faced a constant fight against poverty, homelessness and a largely uninterested public. The Welfare State: was fully implemented after the Second World War to tackle social inequality as the state took responsibility for the provision of basic welfare for its citizens. The principle aim of the Welfare State is to use tax and national insurance to fund free education, health care, social housing and pensions. The Beveridge Report instigated a new national insurance scheme to protect those blighted by loss of wages from unemployment or illness. The Butler Report initiated free compulsory secondary education for all and to ensure investment in an industrial infrastructure crucial for an effective economy, the Government set about nationalising key industries such as coal and steel. The Cold War refers to the mistrustful relationship that developed between the East and West, largely dominated by the USSR and America, after the Second World War. Both sides lacked respect for the other’s approach to social organisation – capitalism in the West and communism in the East. The Cold War dominated international affairs and involved several major crises such as the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War. For many, the most worrying aspect related to the growth of weapons of mass destruction that meant the consequences of any escalation of violence between these superpowers was unthinkable.

With no public subsidy, the company lived a hand to mouth existence touring the north of England and Scotland playing often ill-conceived, one-night stands and short bookings in out of season theatres. Without a permanent base, the company survived on short-term digs, communal living, minimal wages and regular periods of disbandment whilst Littlewood and Raffles sought appropriate financial and physical resources. Despite these hardships, it was a period of intense commitment, exciting collaboration and rigorous creative practices. There were also several highlights including regular appearances at the Edinburgh People’s Festival and successful tours of Sweden and Czechoslovakia during September and October 1948. To launch Theatre Workshop, the company decided on a double bill of MacColl’s ballad opera Johnny Noble (1945) and a commedia dell’arte inspired adaptation of Molière’s The Flying Doctor (1649–1650) that employed broad physical and vocal caricature alongside stylised movement. Theatre Workshop built a small, manually operated revolving stage for The Flying Doctor that consisted of two halves representing a domestic interior and the street. In stark contrast, Johnny Noble played in front of black drapes, with no set or props. The company identified transitions and different settings through an ambitious use of light and recorded sound of artillery, aeroplanes, ships’ engines, factory noise and the street played through new portable switchboards and a sound unit consisting of six turntables, built by the company. The play charts the life of a north-east coast fisherman through recorded sound, live narration, folk song, poetry, naturalistic scenes and movement material ranging from a stylised depiction of a gun crew loading and firing weaponry to a joyous jig celebrating Mary and Johnny’s engagement. This conventional love story is off-set by recent political events and ends on a topical note of post-war disillusionment illustrated by Johnny’s cry, ‘we fought for something better’ (Goorney and MacColl 1986: 65). These first two productions, one a classic piece of popular theatre and, the other, a multi-dimensional theatrical experience dealing with contemporary political issues, set the tone for Theatre Workshop’s repertoire and were quickly joined by a British premiere of Federico Garcia Lorca’s Don Perlimplin (1931). Johnny Noble received considerable praise for its treatment of contemporary themes, alongside the energy and originality of the production. Typical is a review in the Penrith Observer that hailed it as ‘something new, something vital. A simple story told by the clever orchestration of song, dance and dramatic interlude – an BIOGRAPHY

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unforgettable theatrical experience’ (Anon 1945: 2). Despite lacklustre public support, faith in their aims, gritty determination and youthful exuberance compelled the group to continue and soon events took a positive turn. After seeing Don Perlimplin at St John’s Hall, Middlesborough in May 1946, Colonel and Mrs Pennyman invited them to stay at Ormesby Hall where they had access to facilities to rehearse and run training classes and summer schools co-organised with local authorities. Unfortunately, personal relationships prompted the company to withdraw from Ormesby Hall in 1947. Shortly after arriving in Kendal, the official Smythe Report appeared, a document detailing the development of atomic weaponry and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Two new recruits with scientific backgrounds, Bill Davidson and Verity Smith, urged Theatre Workshop to develop a piece about the horrific implications and widespread anxieties generated by the discovery of atomic energy. For many on the Left, it was clear that British political, economic and intellectual life, ‘had been transformed by wartime participation in the development of the atomic bomb, and by the decision – taken in secret by the first postwar Labour government – to establish an independent nuclear force’ (Davies and Saunders 1983: 31). With the help of Davidson and Smith, MacColl set about learning the history of atomic energy. At first glance, the subject does not suggest the makings of a scintillating evening’s entertainment, but the result was the thematically, theatrically and technically ambitious Uranium 235 (1946). Adopting a fast-paced, episodic structure of fifteen scenes containing fifty-seven characters, in many ways, Uranium 235 harks back to the agit-prop days of Theatre of Action and Theatre Union with its use of audience plants, microphone voices, actors as narrators and direct address. Yet, it is much more than this. The central scientist figure encounters a chorus of dancing alchemists and expressionistic figures of the Puppet Master, his secretary and servant, Death. A waltz inter-cut with verse explains the scientific discoveries of Marie and Pierre Curie before Death removes them from the stage and Albert Einstein, together with his sidekicks, Nils Bohr and Max Planck, are knock-about comedians who enact the processes of atomic fission through an ‘atomic ballet’. The central theme pits the forces of humanity and civilisation against the forces of destruction as MacColl puts science on trial for generating the means to destroy the human race in the pursuit of profit and power. A generation who once had faith in science to alleviate, if not cure, the problems of mankind,

now faced the daunting reality that science enabled the manufacture of sophisticated killing machines, poisonous gas, ovens capable of murder on an unimaginable scale and atomic warfare. One moment in the piece encapsulates the sense of outrage that permeates the work and the ideological and moral struggles explored in the play; an inmate of Auschwitz confronts the scientist and declares, ‘You are accused of conspiring against the world, of betraying mankind to war and wretchedness, of using the brain to do the work of death’ (Goorney and MacColl 1986: 124). First performed as a short play at the Newcastle People’s Theatre in 1946 and developed into a two-hour version first staged at the Community Theatre, Blackburn on 24th April 1946, over the years, Uranium 235 played numerous venues including the Library Theatre, Manchester and a famous week at Butlin’s Holiday Camp in Filey, alongside tours of South Wales in late 1950, Scandinavia in February and March 1951 and a week-long run at the Edinburgh Festival in August 1951. The company achieved great success in Scotland and a group called the Friends of Theatre Workshop formed to promote their work. In the programme accompanying their sponsorship of Uranium 235 at St Andrew’s Hall in Glasgow 24–25th March 1952, the Chair of the group, Morris Linden explained the impact of the company: The state of British theatre to-day is unquestionably very low. Standards over the years have gradually become debased. The West End theatre is largely a closed shop; theatres everywhere, with few exceptions, are in the hands of small groups of impresarios. While we have many good actors, producers generally seem to lack originality. Because the box-office must come first, the emphasis in productions has been on spectacle and on the star system, and rarely on originality of thought, or of experiment. . . . It was in this atmosphere of frustration that members of this committee first encountered THEATRE WORKSHOP at the Edinburgh Festival three years ago. It was an exciting experience. By comparison, the offerings of some of the other, famous, companies seemed to be stiff-jointed and inarticulate. It was with a jolt that one realised how much one’s standards had been reduced by the general lack of virility in present-day British theatre. But in THEATRE WORKSHOP we found a group of dedicated players, led by a producer of genius. Here was something fresh, delightful and stimulating. The old techniques of Stanislavsky, Eisenstein and of the commedia dell’arte had been revived, and all the elements of artistic creation excitingly fused into one. (Theatre Royal Stratford East Archive; hereafter TRSE Archive) BIOGRAPHY

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In 1947, the company added Chekhov’s The Proposal (1888–1889), Irwin Shaw’s The Gentle People (1939) and Operation Olive Branch, MacColl’s free adaptation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, to the repertoire. Nonetheless, with mounting debts, the company temporarily disbanded before settling in a shared house in Manchester during March 1948. At this time some of the company worked at other jobs to earn a living, many took classes at the Art of Movement Studio run by Laban associates and rehearsals took place for MacColl’s The Other Animals, which opened at the Library Theatre on 5 July 1948. The production proved an excellent example of the complex theatrical vision Littlewood was developing with MacColl. It was a far more abstract, philosophical piece than the group had worked on previously. Adopting an episodic structure and a fluid approach to time and space, the play depicts Robert Hanau, a political prisoner who has been in solitary confinement for three years and suffered abuse at the hands of his captors and the prison doctor to the point that he slips between consciousness and delirium. Whilst not as overtly topical or political as earlier work, all the prisoners declared insane have attempted to disrupt the status quo: a woman who refuses to bear children in a war-obsessed society and a labourer who commits himself to the class war, for example. Drawing on European expressionism, particularly Lorca’s Blood Wedding (1933), the characters include the Moon, Death as an Old Woman and Morning as a Young Girl and the piece calls for song, dance, heightened poetic speech, choral speaking, dream sequences, stylised lighting and an intricate musical score. Littlewood recognised the play’s potential obscurity but welcomed the theatrical challenge and the critics applauded her results. The reviewer for the Manchester Guardian argued that the company should be seen not only ‘because they give new ideas of theatre’s potentialities but because they were unique in this country’ (J.W 1948: 3). At last, Littlewood was receiving credit for her careful manipulation of experimental theatre techniques. Unfortunately, financial constraints began to take hold once more and after MacColl produced two rather uninspiring pieces for the company, The Rogues Gallery, performed at Manchester’s Library theatre in July 1949, and Landscape with Chimneys (later renamed Paradise Street), which received a South Wales tour in January 1951, Littlewood became increasingly pragmatic. For example, she adapted versions of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Henry IV to raise money on schools tours of Manchester and Glasgow

Figure 1.1 Operation Olive Branch (1947). Courtesy of Theatre Royal Stratford East Archives Collection

Figure 1.2 The Other Animals (1948). Courtesy of Theatre Royal Stratford East Archives Collection

between 1949 and 1952. At the time, there were few theatre-ineducation companies so schools welcomed the opportunity for children to experience a live performance in their own environment. Less successfully, in December 1949 the company also rehearsed Littlewood’s adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s classic children’s stories Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871) to take advantage of the Christmas family market. However, the company’s decision to replace the traditional pantomime format with Carroll’s vivid and surreal fantasy left many audiences flummoxed. In 1951, Littlewood collaborated with Raffles to write The Long Shift, a piece evocatively described as follows: A tale of five miners in a Lancashire pit – how they laughed and joked, spat and cursed their way through the day. The tale of ‘Plodder Seam’ the wickedest seam in Lancashire. Only 60ft to go, then ‘Plodder’s finished’ – But ‘Plodder’ won’t be finished . . . Suddenly the roof caves in – the men are trapped between two bad falls. Four pit props between them and a mile and a quarter of the earth’s crust. How long will their bit of roof hold? (TRSE Archive)

This story of a working-class community’s bravery and camaraderie in adversity preceded MacColl’s The Travellers, which opened at the Oddfellows Hall in Edinburgh during the 1952 festival. Preparations for The Travellers provide an excellent illustration of the company’s hand to mouth existence during this period. Without a permanent base, the company rehearsed in a barn, slept in tents in Tom Driberg’s grounds and raised money for food, travel and production expenses by working as farm labourers when not rehearsing. The ambitious set of a simulated train complete with compartments, guard’s van and platform transpired after an enthusiastic response greeted an appeal in a local Glasgow paper for help with materials, construction and space to work. Help was also forthcoming from a furniture manufacturer after Harry Greene traded his drawing skills for material and the help of an upholsterer. The play itself marked a return to a broader political canvas as, once again, the company tackled the subject of war. Carrying passengers from many nations, an American train hurtles towards an unknown destination, but to a certain war. MacColl represents the West having learnt little from experience and there is a growing sense of America as a new assertive, BIOGRAPHY

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arrogant, and brutal superpower blighted by ignorance and prejudice. A battle of wills ensues between the warmongers, individuals driven by their own desire for success in the land of opportunity and those who want to promote collectivism, peace and post-war prosperity for all. The conscientious objectors, who recognise the imminent perils of war, win out and collective action stops the train in its tracks. Whilst accusing the play of blatant Communist propaganda, the reviewer for the Scotsman praised the strength of the production and Littlewood for proving ‘once again her masterly handling of grouping and movement’ (Anon 1952: 6). Littlewood used sound and motion to convey the rhythm of the train and the audience were intimately involved in the action as they sat either side of the elaborate set, which extended from the stage to the hall’s entrance. Despite being a great success, The Travellers ironically marked the end of touring for Theatre Workshop. Exhausted by lack of money, poor digs, small audiences and unable to find a permanent base in Manchester or Glasgow, the company voted on whether to relocate to a dilapidated Victorian theatre in the East End of London. Founding figure and primary dramatist, MacColl refused to make the move, as he feared a London setting and reliance on critical acclaim would undermine the ideological basis of the company’s work. However, a majority voted to try a permanent base and a new chapter for Littlewood and Theatre Workshop opened at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East in January 1953. POPULAR THEATRE/CRITICAL SUCCESS (1953–1963)

During the next decade, radical interpretations of classics, vibrant new writing, popular theatre forms, avant-garde experiment, theatrical inventiveness and groundbreaking representations of working-class life, earned Theatre Workshop a reputation for invigorating the British stage and Littlewood established herself as one of Europe’s most critically acclaimed and influential directors. Nonetheless, without Arts Council support, the company struggled to survive and financial worries placed continual pressure on the company. Unfortunately, in the climate of the Cold War, Littlewood and Theatre Workshop’s left-wing perspective and communist sympathies made them incompatible with the ethos and prevailing cultural conservatism of the Arts Council, which was more concerned to disseminate high culture then to foster artistic experimentation. However, in the wider cultural sphere of the 1950s, challenges

to post-war consensus politics emerged from a generation who benefited from the progressive policies that inaugurated the Welfare State, but who resented the failure of the Labour government to enact significant changes to the status quo. A stasis emphasised by the maintenance of Labour’s post-war legislation following Conservative election victories in 1951, 1955 and 1959. As a growing economy, low unemployment rates, increased standards of living and rampant consumerism encouraged Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to proclaim ‘you’ve never had it so good’ in 1959, there also developed the embourgeoisment thesis, which argued that class divisions were being eroded as the working class adopted the lifestyle and voting patterns of the middle class. Social theorists, alongside novelists, filmmakers and playwrights, began to re-evaluate and represent issues of class, metropolitan dominance over the regions and popular culture. With its defiant rejection of cultural elitism, desire to establish a local working-class audience, preference for subject matter that placed the working class at its centre and its inventive use of popular cultural forms, regional dialects and colloquial speech, Theatre Workshop keyed into many of these post-war concerns. Moreover, their work stood in direct contrast to the prevalent theatrical diet of middle-class intrigue, drawing-room comedies and Shakespearean star-vehicles. Littlewood’s emphasis on creative collaboration, the ensemble and improvisation also placed her at odds with the hierarchical structure of British theatre and the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship during this period. Arriving with no money, the company worked and lived in the cold, damp and seriously run-down Theatre Royal as they attempted to overhaul the décor at the same time as developing their opening programme of fortnightly repertory theatre. A fortnightly turnaround meant far less time for research, training and discussion, but Littlewood initially benefited from working with a long-standing ensemble familiar with her methods. Raffles took responsibility for theatre management and in 1955 acquired the money to buy the theatre, a change that marked a significant shift in the company’s organisational structure and decisionmaking process as whilst the company still nominally operated as a cooperative, Raffles held the purse strings and Littlewood concentrated on the selection and production of scripts. As key members of the ensemble such as Harry Corbett, George Cooper and Joby Blanshard left in the mid-1950s to pursue careers elsewhere, new actors joined but, according to Goorney, the atmosphere and creative ethos changed BIOGRAPHY

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radically as ‘the emphasis was now on learning from Joan rather than on learning together as previously’ (1981: 103). As the years passed, the cult of ‘Joan’ ensued, as she became the central artistic focus rather than the collective ensemble, a change that proved devastating for Littlewood’s working practice. DIRECTING CLASSICS

In the first few years at Stratford East, Littlewood performed in a number of productions, directed an ambitious repertoire of historical and contemporary classics including Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid (1673) and Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (1924) and adapted works by novelists such as Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. Despite playing to small audiences, the company received immediate support from the local press who praised Theatre Workshop’s commitment, willingness to experiment, tenacity and theatrical vitality in the face of physical exhaustion, financial struggle and a lacklustre reception. In these early years, Theatre Workshop relied on this local support because minimal attention was forthcoming from the national press, although all this was about to change with events that emerged in 1955. In January 1955, Littlewood staged Shakespeare’s Richard II to coincide with a production of the same play at the Old Vic. The national critics flocked to compare two very different productions. Whereas the Old Vic emphasised pomp and ceremony, Littlewood offered a stripped back production. Even the critic Harold Hobson, who had reservations about Corbett’s portrayal of the king as an effeminate man struggling to keep a grip of his mental faculties, admitted that ‘of the two, it is more interesting, controversial and subtle’ (1955: 11) because it offered an interpretation of the play rather than providing a predictable vehicle for a bravura performance of poetic verse; an interpretation that has been highly influential for subsequent productions of the play. In May, following an invitation by the organisers, Theatre Workshop represented Britain at the Theatre des Nations in Paris, alongside the Peking Opera, the Berliner Ensemble and the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. Regardless of the fact that the company arrived with no subsidy or official support, the performances of Arden of Faversham (1592) by an unknown Elizabethan dramatist and Ben Jonson’s Volpone (1606) were acclaimed for their energy and originality. In July, Littlewood directed and played the title role in Mother Courage, the first professional production of a Brecht play

in Britain following a recommendation from Oscar Lewenstein, a longtime supporter of the company. These events put Theatre Workshop firmly on the theatrical map and Littlewood continued to raise the profile of herself and Theatre Workshop by acquiring a reputation for lively, experimental productions of neglected classics such as John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan (1605). In her direction of classics, Littlewood was never interested in poetry or trying to preserve museum pieces, instead she wanted to see the works with fresh eyes, to concentrate on the action as well as the verse and, above all, to bring out their contemporary relevance. These productions also gained a reputation for their sets by John Bury (1925–2000), who had taken responsibility for lighting and stage design. Employing minimal resources such as scaffolding and planks, his austere angles of ramps, stairs and textured surfaces provided ideal subjects for atmospheric, cinematic side lighting used to create the effect of pools, shafts and shadows, as opposed to the painted backdrops and realistic settings seen in the West End. For example, at the beginning of 1956, Littlewood produced Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II (1594) ingeniously set on a ramp covered in a vast map of England, with a singular elongated throne that converted into a stained glass window and tombstone with lighting changes that also created shadowy areas for plots to unfold. NEW WRITING/IMPROVISATION

The 8th May 1956 is indelibly etched on the theatrical consciousness as the premiere of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, a play widely credited with revolutionising the content, if not the form, of British theatre and sparking the ‘Angry Young Man’ movement. As Osborne’s character, Jimmy Porter, indiscriminately railed against the establishment and the contemporary state of England in a Birmingham bed-sitter, commentators welcomed the voice of a generation and theatre, once again, became a fashionable pastime for the young and socially conscious after decades of trite comedy and bland drawing-room dramas. When Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow opened two weeks later on 24th May 1956, another radical theatre voice was born, and a new chapter in Theatre Workshop’s history began. Whereas Littlewood had secured a reputation for fresh interpretations of classics, over the next five years she became renowned for working with emerging theatre writers to create vibrant depictions of life on the fringes of society that captured BIOGRAPHY

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Figure 1.3 Edward II (1956). Courtesy of Theatre Royal Stratford East Archives Collection

the public’s imagination and the interest of West End producers keen to capitalise on a successful product. The theatre text had never been sacred to Littlewood but she now began looking for texts with a spark of life, an original subject matter or grasp of everyday speech patterns from which the company could improvise and flesh out the details of dialogue, relationships, atmosphere and stage business. Because of this eccentric approach, Littlewood developed the reputation of a ‘miracle worker’ capable of conjuring exciting theatre from minimal resources. Legend has it that Littlewood read the first five pages of Behan’s unsolicited text before telegramming her acceptance and invitation for him to come to England to help her tighten and produce his script about twenty-four hours before an execution of a prison inmate. In rehearsal, with Behan’s approval, Littlewood started cutting and honing his text to find the best way to theatricalise the tragic and comic elements of this hermetically sealed environment, the robust language, popular song, gallows humour and wry look at the darker recesses of humanity. In particular, she used improvisation (explored in detail in Chapter 2) to generate a realistic atmosphere and an intricate depiction of the individuals, relationships, habitual actions and tensions that are part and parcel of prison life as the characters share banter, jokes and observations on life and death as the tension builds to the horror of execution. Critics welcomed Behan’s exuberant text brought alive by Littlewood’s theatrical vision and after a four-week run at the Theatre Royal, the production settled in for a three-month run in the West End, followed by a short regional tour. Littlewood added to her reputation for courting controversy with Henry Chapman’s You Won’t Always be on Top (1957), a naturalistic portrayal of a day in the life of a building site. The attempt at verisimilitude was helped by an impressive set by Bury that included a three-storey building in the process of construction and a wall built from scratch every night. Offering a faithful depiction of men at work, the authentic dialogue benefited from Chapman’s experience as a building worker and, more unusually, from the help received from local bricklayers, who trained, watched and criticised the performers at Littlewood’s request. Littlewood wanted the performance to come across as real as possible and for her this entailed going to the source – the building site – to authenticate the action; it also meant using improvisation to develop dialogue and to keep the show fresh and in the moment of performance. However, this approach ensured that the show changed, in some aspect, BIOGRAPHY

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Figure 1.4 You Won’t Always Be On Top (1957). Courtesy of Theatre Royal Stratford East Archives Collection

Figure 1.5 You Won’t Always Be On Top (1957). Courtesy of Theatre Royal Stratford East Archives Collection

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every night, which resulted in a high profile court case as Raffles, Littlewood, Bury, Chapman, and the actor Richard Harris faced prosecution by the Lord Chamberlain for presenting unauthorised material. The whole incident achieved masses of publicity as it became central to a wider debate on and campaign against censorship in British theatre. For Littlewood, the case further secured her reputation as a maverick unafraid to confront head-on British theatre practice and received modes of working. Littlewood’s unconventional approach to text and production struck gold once more with Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey (1958). A study of dysfunctional family life in a grotty Salford bed-sit, Delaney was a nineteen-year-old factory worker and cinema usherette when she sent Littlewood her unsolicited script, but Littlewood recognised an original voice in the rich, earthy northern dialogue, finely drawn characters and chaotic relationships. Through some judicious cutting and improvisation, Littlewood shaped Delaney’s text. In performance, she avoided sentimental mawkishness by investing it with music-hall style theatricality as direct address, quick-paced banter and a live jazz trio burst through the fourth wall. This dynamic combination excited critics including Lindsay Anderson who declared he had found ‘a work of complete, exhilarating originality . . . [that] has all the strength, and none of the weaknesses of a pronounced, authentic local accent’ (1958: 42). After A Taste of Honey, Littlewood produced Behan’s The Hostage (1958), a loosely structured, vaudevillian follow up to The Quare Fellow. As Behan struggled with alcoholism and greater desire for the conviviality of the bar, rather than putting his art for storytelling and witty dialogue on the page, Littlewood received only small sections of text to work with. Hence, she developed The Hostage in a haphazard way using Behan’s text as a basis, bolstered by noting, and having others note, Behan’s drunken anecdotes and vast repertoire of original, folk and music-hall songs and by filling gaps through improvisation. The result was a freewheeling tragi-comedy populated by eccentrics, prostitutes, pimps, a secret agent, religious zealot and IRA sympathisers who share their songs, stories and coarse banter with the audience. The critics loved the production and Hobson best exemplifies their enthusiasm: . . . it made on me the impression of a masterpiece . . . It crowds in tragedy and comedy, bitterness and love, caricature and portrayal, ribaldry and eloquence, patriotism and cynicism, symbolism and music-hall songs all on top of one

another, apparently higgledy-piggledy, and yet wonderfully combining into a spiritual unity . . . It is an honour to our theatre. (1958: 21)

The Hostage received similar accolades when it represented Britain, with support from the British Council, at the Paris International Festival in April 1959 and during a transfer to the West End later the same year. Littlewood’s next new writing project, Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be by the ex-convict Frank Norman, similarly made it into the West End. Littlewood had become deeply fashionable and the West End impresarios were not going to miss the chance of making some money on the back of her reputation. Despite being criticised for having a meandering plot, a lack of purpose and only minimal entertainment value, Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be won the Evening Standard Award for the Best Musical of 1960 and received praise for Littlewood’s ‘slap-up, street-party production’ (Brien 1959: 289). The latter description pinpoints a significant shift in Littlewood’s output. Gone were the serious-minded interrogations of contemporary political questions, which during this period could have dealt with the consequences of the ever-deepening Cold War, the Suez crisis, the decline of Britain’s imperial power and the increasing global power of America. Instead, Littlewood replaced Theatre Workshop’s earlier political and social agenda with a rousing knockabout East End ‘knees up’ style of theatre that owed a great debt to popular variety entertainment. Despite the emphasis on music-hall style banter and raucous comedy on-stage, behind the scenes things were taking a toll on Littlewood. Critics largely dismissed attempts to move away from the ‘knees-up’

Suez Crisis (1956): a political crisis focused on the Suez Canal in Egypt following intensive re-armament by Egypt, the nationalisation of the Suez Canal and a plot by Egypt, Syria and Jordan to isolate Israel. In October 1956, Israel launched a pre-emptive strike in the area which prompted Britain and France to request all sides to withdraw from the Canal Zone and agree to temporary occupation. When Egypt refused, Britain and France invaded, but the USSR and USA forced them to withdraw following diplomatic action, a defining moment in Britain’s imperial decline and the rise of the two superpowers.

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aesthetic and Littlewood, due to a lack of public subsidy, found herself forced back to a winning formula. However, by the time she produced an improvised version of Marvin Kane’s television play We’re Just Not Practical in 1961, there was a general feeling that ‘what began as a highly original and altogether stimulating method on the part of Miss Littlewood has now degenerated into something of a stale formula that is beginning to fail to inspire either the producer or the players’ (Roberts 1961: 13). After a six-month break from producing work at the Theatre Royal when she went to work and live in Berlin, Littlewood directed James Goldman’s fantasy They Might Be Giants (1961). Littlewood produced the play in association with Robert E. Griffith and Harold S. Prince, American impresarios who achieved success with West Side Story and now wanted Littlewood to provide a Broadway hit. The opening night boasted the presence of Princess Margaret and large numbers of press, but the show was barely ready and received a damning response. Upset by the critics’ reception and frustrated by financial pressures that meant minimal rehearsal time and the constant pressure to generate West End transfers that ultimately broke up her ensemble, Littlewood withdrew from the Theatre Royal declaring, ‘when you have to live by exporting bowdlerized versions of your shows as light entertainments for sophisticated West End audiences you’re through’ (1961: 5). During the next two years, Littlewood travelled extensively, tried to get a film of Wole Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel (1959) off the ground, read numerous unsolicited scripts and devoted much of her energy to plans for a Fun Palace. She returned to the Theatre Royal in early 1963 to create the politically charged and theatrically adventurous Oh What a Lovely War, a satirical dissection of the capitalist imperatives, powerbrokering, class relations and devastating human consequences of the Great War, a ‘War To End All Wars’, re-interpreted in the long shadow of the Second World War and the widespread political fall-out of the very present Cold War. The impetus, rehearsal process, production and influence of this piece will receive detailed attention in Chapter 3. COMMUNITY INITIATIVES (1963–1975) THE FUN PALACE

During the mid-1960s and early 1970s, Littlewood increasingly withdrew from making theatre and threw herself into ambitious plans to

democratise the arts and to animate community-based activity and values. In particular, she developed and promoted ideas for a Fun Palace, which harked back to traditional forms of popular entertainment such as the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, whilst also utilising all the advantages of the new technological age. Littlewood’s plans for a centre of cultural, educational and technological activity situated in the East End were echoed in the ill-fated Millennium Dome but, in many ways, Littlewood’s plans were far more ambitious. Her visionary project was inextricably tied to the spirit of the times as speculation arose about how much extra leisure time people would have as computers or robots took over the bulk of the manufacturing process and domestic labour-saving devices freed people from time-consuming domestic chores. Writing in the New Scientist, Littlewood proposed that: Those who at present work in factories, mines and offices will quite soon be able to live as only a few people now can: choosing their own congenial work, doing as much or as little of it as they like, and filling their leisure with whatever delights them. (1964: 432)

Littlewood and the architect Cedric Price’s plans for a Fun Palace aimed to meet these new demands. Described as both a ‘university of the streets’ and ‘a laboratory of pleasure’, Littlewood envisaged the Fun Palace as a multi-use space housing a series of short-term, frequentlyupdated activities dedicated to pleasure, entertainment, communication and learning. During the 1950s and 1960s, social and cultural theorists such as Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams were concerned that Welfare State educational and cultural policies, alongside American-dominated commercially-produced consumer culture and mass-media communications, were resulting in passive audiences. In contrast, Littlewood wanted to provide opportunities to learn and experience culture beyond the commercial market place and hierarchical institutions such as the BBC and education system. By providing numerous types of activity, Littlewood hoped to encourage people to make active decisions about what inspired them, gave pleasure and stimulated their imagination, regardless of whether that involved high art, popular culture, direct participation or casual observation. Alongside opportunities for activities, cultural encounters, eating, drinking and socialising, Littlewood also wanted a space akin to the BIOGRAPHY

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great parks that facilitated strolling and a chance to watch the world go by. Littlewood wanted her Fun Palace to draw on the latest scientific gadgets, technological systems and groundbreaking ideas. A ‘science playground’ holding illustrated lecture-demonstrations by day, by night was to become a space for sharing new theories and ideas. An interactive ‘fun arcade’ would include games for people to test their knowledge, spatial awareness and physical skills, alongside tests to explore character traits, moral dilemmas and contemporary social themes. A ‘plastic area’ would enable people to experiment in woodwork, clay, textiles, painting and metalwork. The idea being that somebody could pick up an activity and discard it in a day or return to develop skills and techniques over a longer period. Similarly, a ‘music area’ would provide access to instruments, free instruction, recording facilities, a music library and places to listen during the day, followed by jamming sessions, music festivals and dancing in the evening. An ‘acting area’ dedicated to drama therapy formed an important and exciting part of Littlewood’s vision. Rather than performing to an audience, she proposed a theatre of everyday life in which people would use theatre to explore ideas, events and dilemmas that directly affected them. Men and women from factories, shops, and offices, bored with their daily routine, will be able to re-enact incidents from their own experience in burlesque and mime and gossip, so that they no longer accept passively whatever happens to them but wake to a critical awareness of reality, act out their sub-conscious fears and taboos, and perhaps are stimulated to social research. (Banham 1964: 191).

Littlewood’s intention to use enactment and discussion to activate personal and political awareness of relationships and social structures was later developed through Augusto Boal’s notion of the spect-actor and his work developing theatre to help liberate people from restrictive, exploitative situations by offering them alternative ways of seeing and responding. Even when more traditional theatre events were proposed, Littlewood planned mechanisms to enable audience participation such as a backstage computer to calculate and relay audience input and responses. In another forward-thinking move, Littlewood proposed an extensive use of large screens to transmit local and national news as well

as popular events including concerts, Cup Finals and state occasions such as weddings and funerals. She also anticipated the current cultural obsession with reality television and fly-on-the-wall observation in her plans for closed-circuit television that would capture and transmit unedited images of people going about their daily business in and around London or in the complex itself. Littlewood developed her ideas with Price, whom she met in 1961. Like Littlewood, he was happy to fly in the face of convention and together they produced groundbreaking plans for a modern, nonpermanent, multi-functional arena, which completely opposed the post-war obsession with permanent structures such as new housing estates, universities and municipal buildings. Price believed in innovation over conservation and re-conceived a building’s worth not in terms of its durability or the quality of its construction material, but in terms of its use and social value. He proposed a physical network of zones housing numerous adjustable units that could range from small workshop spaces to large volume enclosures for rallies, concerts and major exhibitions. Exploiting the potential of technology to revolutionise architectural practice, Price used cutting-edge technology to maximise accessibility, control climatic conditions and to divide the spaces in new and exciting ways. The emphasis on flexibility, consumer choice, impermanence, pleasure and technological solutions connected to the wider social and cultural context of the 1960s. In particular, the Fun Palace provided a cultural response to Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s claim that the 1960s were characterised by the ‘white heat of technological change’, exemplified by experiments in space travel and satellite communication systems. Throughout the 1960s, Littlewood battled to raise awareness of, interest in and financial support for the Fun Palace. She assembled a board of high profile trustees comprising R. Buckminster Fuller, Lord Ritchie Calder, The Earl of Harewood and Yehudi Menuhin, to lend weight and credibility to the project. She wrote articles, spoke at conferences and delivered lectures, as well as lobbying local councils, arts organisations and residential associations. To generate funds she made TV commercials, directed a film of Sparrers Can’t Sing (1963) and agreed to direct Twang! (1965) in the West End. There was a general sense that support for the arts would increase during the 1960s as local authorities made use of the provision made in the Local Government Act of 1948 for cultural activities and the Arts Council received more central BIOGRAPHY

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funding from government. Unfortunately, no organisation was prepared to back such a radical, untested project and whenever Littlewood and Price identified a potential site, the Fun Palace got caught in a vicious administrative cycle of plans, proposals, feasibility studies, council meetings, local resident groups, muted support and eventual rejection. The project was way before its time and demanded a leap of faith and imagination from potential funders, local councils, town planners and local residents that few were able to meet and, unfortunately, the Fun Palace never materialised. LOCAL REDEVELOPMENT AND THE PLAYGROUND PROJECTS

Between the mid-1960s and early 1970s, the immediate area around the Theatre Royal was subject to extensive redevelopment. The Council were determined to replace the rows of Victorian Terraces, the street market, small local shops and a local school with an office and shopping complex, car parks and low-rise flats. Newham Council wanted the theatre demolished as part of this process but, typically defiant, Raffles responded by having the theatre designated a listed building by the Historic Buildings Council in 1972. However, Raffles and Littlewood’s concern stretched beyond the theatre as they feared children, teenagers and adults, with nowhere to go and nothing to do in the evenings and weekends, would become increasingly socially alienated. To remedy this situation, Raffles proposed that Newham Council build an entertainment complex around the Theatre Royal with a cinema, disco and restaurants. Newham Council declined. Undeterred, Littlewood approached the immediate problem of local demolition creatively and set about animating environments blighted by destruction. Erecting temporary structures on sites cleared by volunteers and using the theatre itself, at various points between 1967 and 1975, Littlewood arranged drama activities, playgrounds, gardens, a city farm, educational and recreational classes and pony rides for local children and teenagers. She also gave the children freedom to organise their own events such as mock trials and ‘posh nights’ on the Theatre Royal stage. To help transform the area, local firms donated turf, scaffolding, tools, paint and toys. Teenagers painted the shop fronts around Angel Lane a multitude of colours, children helped lay crazy paving, volunteers lay turf and trees to replace all the lost gardens and, in all, five sites were

Figure 1.6 Joan Littlewood outside the Theatre Royal, Stratford East (1974). Courtesy of The Press Association

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cleared and transformed. Writing to potential backers, Littlewood explained her rationale: Everywhere land is becoming temporarily derelict while local authorities wait for the go-ahead on new building schemes. There is insufficient money for schools, nurseries, modern youth clubs and clubs for people of all ages. At the same time, talented people are prepared to give their time and skill to direct practical solutions of (sic) this problem. Pleasant, temporary structures to house these activities can be erected on the old debris instead of giving it over to dumping and dirt. When rebuilding starts, the structure can be moved on. Meanwhile, we may find out how to enjoy ourselves and even enrich ourselves a bit more. The talent, which in the old days seemed to belong only to the ‘stars’ in society, is in each child. It just needs cherishing. (TRSE Archive)

In 1969, activists for the Theatre Royal Club, led by Christine Jackson, together with children, teachers and helpers took over, cleaned and decorated a disused factory so that is could be used for classes, games and drama therapy. In 1974, Littlewood gave the children responsibility for organising a Grand Easter Fair in an old National Car Park site and established a Zoological Garden for the Easter holidays. Heavily subsidised by Littlewood and Raffles, all these activities came under the auspices of the Fun Palace Trust. THE FINAL PRODUCTIONS

Littlewood directed less than twenty shows at the Theatre Royal between 1964 and 1973 as her creative energies were devoted to the Fun Palace. With Oh What a Lovely War in the West End, in March 1964 Littlewood directed Norman’s follow-up to Fings Ain’t Wot They Us’ed T’Be called A Kayf Up West. Critics were unanimous in their disappointment with this pale imitation of Norman’s previous success and complained about a lack of authenticity, clichéd characters and an absence of theatrical vitality. A strained relationship with the critics continued with Littlewood’s modern adaptation of parts one and two of Henry IV into a single piece that premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in August 1964. Frustrated, Littlewood retreated from making theatre at the Theatre Royal for another two years. During this period, Oh What a Lovely War

went to America; she directed two Summer Schools with students from all over the world in Hammamet, Tunisia, and focused her attention on raising funds for the Fun Palace by directing Twang!, a satirical musical based on the Robin Hood legend. The writer and composer Lionel Bart envisaged a spectacular extravaganza that combined Theatre Workshop techniques with all the trappings of commercial theatre. The combination was a disaster and Littlewood resigned on the opening night of the pre-London run in Manchester. Many held Littlewood responsible for the failures of Twang! The honeymoon period of the mid- to late 1950s and early 1960s was definitely over. Littlewood returned to the Theatre Royal in April 1967 to direct four shows and expectations ran high as she re-assembled several Theatre Workshop regulars. Barbara Garson’s Macbird (1966) opened as a Theatre Royal Club production after the Lord Chamberlain refused to issue a licence for a play that put two American presidents, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnston, at the heart of a parody of Macbeth and American political power-brokering. Transforming Garson’s text from a biting satire to a vaudeville romp, critics accused Littlewood, once again, of riding roughshod over an existing text. Based on the satirical magazine, Private Eye’s column that explored national and international events through the eyes of the Prime Minister’s wife, Littlewood’s production of Richard Ingrams’ and John Wells’ Mrs Wilson’s Diary (1967) marked a significant precedent in British theatre censorship as living politicians and, specifically the Prime Minister, were held up for topical ridicule. Political satire had become popular on the cultural circuit in the early 1960s with Beyond the Fringe in the theatre, That Was the Week That Was (TW3) on television and Private Eye. The growth of satire signalled a wider social shift, specifically a decline in social deference as the working class became successful in all walks-of-life and events such as the Profumo Affair revealed the fallibility of people in authority. Akin to an extended revue sketch with songs and comic turns, Mrs Wilson’s Diary presents the Wilsons as ridiculous, tasteless figures, who put gnomes in the No. 10 Downing Street Garden, eat paste sandwiches and send off for the Dalek competition advertised on the back of Frostipuff cereal packets. Its affectionate lampooning of authority figures proved hugely popular and the show transferred to The Criterion in the West End for an eight-month run. Daniel Farson and Harry Moore’s The Marie Lloyd Story (1967), an old-fashioned musical based on the life, BIOGRAPHY

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The Profumo Affair: named after the Conservative MP John Profumo, who resigned as Secretary of State for War in 1963 after he deceived the House of Commons about his relationship with Christine Keeler, who was also involved with a Soviet diplomat. The high-profile scandal at the height of the Cold War rocked the establishment and the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, resigned shortly after the publication of Lord Denning’s report into the events.

loves and songs of the East End music-hall entertainer Marie Lloyd, starred Avis Bunnage. In nineteen scenes announced like music-hall turns, Littlewood emphasised the shifts between realistic scenes of backstage life, the personal tragedy of a very public star and the highly theatrical music-hall songs, sexual innuendo and banter to the audience. Several critics hailed a return to form for Littlewood, but the Theatre Royal was still struggling financially and, once again, she withdrew from making theatre for several years. When Littlewood returned to directing she complemented the community-orientated work outside the theatre with the productions Forward Up Your End (1970), The Projector (1970) and The Londoners (1972), which tackled local politics, particularly ‘the erasing of communities in the name of bureaucratic progress’ (Ansorge 1972: 20). For instance, The Projector, billed as a newly unearthed work by the eighteenth-century playwright William Rufus Chetwood, offered a humorously satirical treatment of the 1968 collapse of a residential tower block at Ronan Point. Threatened with legal action if she pursued her original plan to produce a drama documentary based on the inquiry into the Ronan Point disaster, Littlewood and Wells concocted the story of Chetwood’s non-existent play, The Mock Mason, centred on a crooked Dutch property developer, Van Clysterpump, who bribes and dodges his way through a series of deals and mishaps including the collapse of one of his buildings. Evoking the song spiel style of The Beggar’s Opera and the biting wit of Hogarth’s paintings, the vaudeville style revue was populated by Theatre Workshop’s familiar band of prostitutes, hucksters and social misfits, who introduce an atmosphere of amoral lasciviousness to accompany the political intrigue surrounding the Ronan Point incident. After another break, Littlewood returned to the Theatre Royal in early 1972 with two revivals: a musical version of

Lewis’ Sparrers Can’t Sing called The Londoners and a new version of Behan’s The Hostage with eight members of the original cast. With music by Bart played by Bob Kerr’s Whoopee Band, The Londoners heralded a return of the East End knees-up first seen with Fings Ain’t Wot They Us’ed T’Be. Nonetheless, its depiction of the inhabitants of a condemned slum terrace and their rumbustious community spirit also spoke volumes in the context of the loss of two thousand such homes in the immediate vicinity of the Theatre Royal. Behan’s The Hostage had similarly acquired significant contemporary relevance owing to the violent escalation of ‘the troubles’ in Ireland, Northern Ireland and mainland Britain. Littlewood’s final productions in 1972 and 1973 increasingly resembled end-of-pier entertainments with their saucy postcard-style humour. Reminiscent of the hugely popular Carry On genre of films, Frank Norman’s Costa Packet (1972) even had an accompanying series of risqué postcards produced by the cartoonist Larry, who also created the set. Unfortunately, these productions simply did not reflect the spirit of 1970s Britain during a period of fervent political, social and industrial unrest. The work seemed frivolous in comparison with the burgeoning alternative theatre movement that attempted to attract non-theatre going audiences with a progressive approach to subject matter and performance strategies. Ironically, this movement drew on Theatre of Action’s agit-prop and Theatre Workshop’s creative approach in its attempt to revolutionise theatrical process and product, but, in the light of this new aesthetic and political radicalism, Theatre Workshop appeared populist, commercial, and even reactionary. Littlewood and Raffles battled to keep the theatre going for twenty years without any significant subsidy from the Arts Council or the local authorities and, by the time revenue funding was finally allocated in 1972, Littlewood was too disillusioned to take advantage of it. There was a remarkable shift in the Arts Council’s culture during the early 1970s that reflected an economic boom and an atmosphere of social and political upheaval. A new generation of Arts Council employees and panel members such as Philip Hedley, who eventually took over as Artistic Director of the Theatre Royal in 1979, recognised Littlewood’s contribution to British theatre, but despite offers of increased funding, it was not enough to run the building efficiently or effectively. Raffles resigned as theatre manager in April 1974. A year later he died. Littlewood’s grief and her subsequent decision to move to France put an end to her work at the Theatre Royal. She established an advisory BIOGRAPHY

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council to discuss artistic proposals and handed over to a new generation headed by Maxwell Shaw, a long-standing Theatre Workshop actor. In 1975 Littlewood announced her intention to give the Theatre Royal to Newham through the Fun Palace Trust and from this point she had very little to do with the theatre. After 1975, Littlewood lived a nomadic existence staying in a small apartment and enjoying the hospitality of friends. She spent her time writing letters, established a long-term friendship with Baron de Philippe Rothschild, whose autobiography she edited, and wrote her entertaining, if highly selective, autobiography, Joan’s Book, before her death in London in 2002.

2 JOAN LITTLEWOOD’S WORKING METHOD

INTRODUCTION

Unlike many other influential theatre directors covered in this series such as Stanislavsky, Brecht and Boal, Littlewood did not provide any substantial written accounts of her opinions on what theatre should aspire to or any definitive outline of her working methods. Clive Barker has argued that Littlewood’s resistance to setting out, or even acknowledging, a distinct working method, allowed people to accuse her of being an unorganised dilettante who occasionally managed to hit the right notes by luck rather than judgement (see Barker 2000: 113). However, accusations such as these grossly underestimate the strength of Littlewood’s theatrical vision and the way her working methods and productions shook up British theatre practice in the latter half of the twentieth century. Certainly, it is notable that Littlewood is the only British theatre director to have had an acting school founded to secure the continuation of her vision. Opened by Margaret Walker in 1961, East 15 aims ‘to ensure the retention of the working method and inspiration of Theatre Workshop’, a principle that suggests there was a working method to celebrate and sustain. Responding to requests to document her ideas, Littlewood declared she was far too busy making theatre to find the time to write about it. She also steadfastly refused to promote her own views in a way that denied the importance of collaboration with an ensemble. She hated the

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cult of the director and always insisted that she was an equal contributor with her actors, designers and technicians. Equally, Littlewood’s reluctance to write about her working method points to the emphasis she placed on each production as a new adventure demanding specific approaches. She championed theatre as a live event, a living breathing organism generated through group experiment and in the creative exchange between the performers and audience. She was sceptical of trying to formulate written theories and definitive statements on an ephemeral, incredibly complex and ever-changing imaginative process that relied on the active domain of the rehearsal room where responsiveness to new ideas, alongside a healthy respect for trial and error, played a major part. However, whilst this rightly suggests Littlewood failed to adopt a singular, definitive approach to every text or production she worked on, it is possible to identify common elements that characterise her theatrical vision and distinct methods of generating, rehearsing and presenting theatre. We can glean a sense of her approach and working practices from the theatre notebooks and manifestoes she produced in the 1940s, the short articles and interviews she produced in the 1950s and 1960s and texts written by those who collaborated with her such as Goorney’s The Theatre Workshop Story (1981), Goorney and MacColl’s Agit-Prop to Theatre Workshop (1986) and Barker’s essay in Twentieth Century Actor Training (2000). What comes across in these and other explorations of Littlewood’s practice, is that her methods were inextricably tied up in her maverick character and approach to life, which included a fierce anti-authoritarian stance, political conviction, a rigorous intellect, passion for working-class life/culture, respect for collectivism over individualism, a tendency to dismiss anything that smacked of worthiness in favour of an anarchic spirit of fun and an ability to contradict herself regularly. In trying to define Littlewood in relation to her contemporaries, Kenneth Tynan commented that ‘others write plays, direct them or act in them: she alone “makes theatre”’ (1989: 179). Tynan’s statement points to the fact that Littlewood wanted to create not flat, but threedimensional theatre; not polite, but raw, dynamic theatre; not carefully constructed presentations of character types, but believable flesh and blood characters; not theatre which ignores the audience, but one which embraces them and acknowledges their role in the process of generating the live event of theatre. This chapter will explore how Littlewood set out to achieve these aims. It will investigate Littlewood’s impact by

examining the types of acting and production she reacted against, the influences that galvanised her, her approach to actor training, the nature of her rehearsal processes and how she continued to work on productions during a run. The chapter addresses two key questions: how did she make rather than direct theatre and why was this approach such a radical departure from the dominant practices of the time. WHAT WAS LITTLEWOOD AGAINST?

It is impossible for anyone to grasp the impact of Littlewood’s working methods without appreciating what she rejected about established modes of acting, directing and presentation, so before we explore what she was for, it will be useful to outline what she reacted against. During the first half of the twentieth century, British theatre remained remarkably impervious to the widespread theatrical experimentations taking place across Europe. Largely ignoring the implications of Meyerhold’s explorations in biomechanics, Piscator’s radical use of technology, Brecht’s theories of alienation and developments associated with artistic movements such as Futurism and Expressionism, the British theatre scene predominately churned out traditional fodder and retained its close affiliation to literary-based naturalism. In contrast, Littlewood embraced innovation and animated the static, text-driven theatre of the period through a European-inspired commitment to experimentations with form and style. She championed the importance of movement training and movement in performance, whether expressed through the particular movement vocabulary of a given character or group dynamics and dance. In terms of production aesthetics, Littlewood similarly reacted against the limits of the proscenium arch stage and a fourth wall style of performance. She wanted a theatre based on human contact and exchange – director to company, actor to actor and actor to audience – with each relationship rooted in a two-way dialogue. As a student at RADA in the early 1930s, Littlewood was introduced to the dominant training methods and theatre of the time which largely revolved around restrained productions of Shakespeare focused on classical verse speaking and polite drawing room comedies about personal relationships, infidelities and intrigues, of which she later admitted, ‘I hated the tennis club, cup-and-saucer, French-window stuff we were taught’ (cited in Barber 1971: 7). A view reiterated in a short article titled ‘Plays for the People’ in 1959: WORKING METHOD

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In England unfortunately during the first half of this century the theatre was firmly in the hands of the philistines, and in spite of Shaw the majority of plays mounted were of such banality that it is difficult to imagine where they found an audience, even in the barren reaches of the ‘upper’ classes, so-called. Even the great English classics were produced and acted as if they had been conceived by Edwardian old ladies seated at their embroidery. (Littlewood 1959–1960: 284)

She had no time for polite, genteel theatre that provided pleasant diversions for a predominantly middle-class audience and indiscriminately despised the theatres she accused of generating it. For instance, she described the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal Court and the National Theatre as ‘the walking dead’ (cited in Croyden 1971: 7), although she saved her particular brand of vitriol for the West End, arguing that ‘anybody at all who goes into that dusty museum, with a few racketeers, conning people into watching a boring repetition, is either doing straightforward whoring, because they need to dough, or has got a very pretty ego’ (ibid.: 7). Littlewood hated everything she thought the West End stood for – blatant commercialism, infantile concerns, safe and slickly packaged productions and an audience more interested in the social cachet of going to the theatre than in theatre itself. She was angry that the majority of theatre in the West End bore no relation to its immediate social, political and cultural context; neither did it attempt to represent people as they really are in life as opposed to heavily theatricalised versions of reality. As such, she found that ‘the atmosphere of the West End theatre is humanly and aesthetically unsatisfying. The curiously affected speech and the lack of anything resembling normal activity in the movements and gestures . . .’ (programme for Arden of Faversham, TRSE Archive). She wanted to create the antithesis of this type of theatre. At the beginning of her career, this oppositional stance led her to create ‘present-tense’ theatre that was topical, socially relevant and issue-based, whilst in latter years she promoted a rumbustious, irreverent and high-spirited theatre that presented the messy, clumsy lives of ordinary men and women speaking in terms familiar from Salford back streets, East End markets and low-life brothels, cafes and gambling dens.

ATTITUDE TO ACTING

She despised the acting styles of the time that centred on heroic, virtuoso performances exemplified by Sir Laurence Olivier or the presence of the ‘acteur’ figure such as Sir John Gielgud or Noel Coward, who relied on transmitting their own dignified elegance, finely-honed profiles and clipped elocution regardless of whatever part they were playing. As Milne and Goodwin summarised, ‘the kind of acting Joan is reacting against is the suave, polished, slick personality that repeats itself unchanged from play to play’ (1967: 116). Instead of individualistic, personality based acting that relied on the regular wheeling-out of ‘stars’ in ‘star vehicles’ trotting out tried and tested techniques or wowing their audiences with yet more evidence of their transformational skills, Littlewood wanted a company of versatile character actors capable of looking, behaving and moving like real living, breathing human beings on the stage. Ideally, she avoided working with actors who had already received drama school/conservatoire training as she felt they were too ingrained with ideals of poise, propriety and ‘tricks of the trade’ that relied on easily recognisable technique, routine gestures and clichéd delivery. She hated the London-centric nature of drama schools and the ironing out of regional differences they promoted, where part of the learning process relied on getting everybody to speak in the same elevated tones of Received Pronunciation rather than the full range of the English dialects and the virility of demotic speech. Above all, she preferred working with willing amateurs, ordinary working people and those prepared to explore beyond the limits of their social, cultural and theatrical inhibitions. She was also keen to cast against type as, in her opinion, ‘an actor who looked exactly right for the part would need to work less hard and therefore produce a less interesting performance than an actor who did not fit one’s image of the character’ (Bradby and Williams 1988: 34). More importantly, she wanted to work with unselfish actors who cared about and contributed to the whole production and not just the bits where they had a chance to shine; actors whose ego allowed them to take the lead in one show, followed by a series of bit parts in the next. This meant that Littlewood’s actors had to put the success of the whole production over their own career advancement, a position contrary to the established commercial system whereby actors progressed through the ranks from minor to lead roles as they gained experience and standing in their field. WORKING METHOD

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PROMOTING THE CREATIVE ENSEMBLE

Despite being often labelled a ‘genius’ by critics, theatre practitioners and the actors who worked with her, Littlewood refused to accept this accolade and instead focused attention on ‘the genius of each person’ and the creative charge achieved through collaboration with a group of uniquely talented individuals rather than the singular vision of one person. As such, she was vehemently opposed to the British hierarchical and patriarchal theatrical establishment that placed the director (more often than not a he during this time) as the authoritative figure with the power to manipulate action on stage. Despite knowledge of the permanent ensembles led by the likes of Stanislavsky and Brecht, it was a phenomenon unheard of in Britain. Alternatively, Britain relied on a free market system whereby directors hired actors according to the demands of each production. A system that inevitably led to type-casting as actors became associated with particular styles of theatre or types of character, rather than providing the challenge of a group of actors taking on a play regardless of form, style or the range demanded. In a radio interview, Littlewood made her feelings very clear by insisting that: I think that the worship of the genius producer is deadly. I think that age should go. One sees it becoming mummified all around one, the brilliant producer who arranges these patterns in a balletic fashion that is all very entertaining and beautiful, but we are in the age of community. My belief is in the genius of each person and this form of collaboration can reveal something unique, which is more important than any one producer superimposing on a cast. (Talking About Theatre, 1964)

In practice, she rejected the tendency of some directors to work out the style of a show, character motivations, and blocking prior to rehearsals, before fixing and polishing the results with the actors. For her, this method only resulted in deadly ‘past tense’ theatre whereby actors relied on ‘remembering, recovering and repeating the past’ (Barker 2000: 120) regardless of what might happen around them during the live event of theatre. She wanted actors who were equal partners with her in the creative process, who could explore possibilities in rehearsal and be able to adapt to change, respond to interruptions from the audience and cope if someone in the company messed up during performance. This emphasis on collectivity and group exploration came from a strong

creative impulse but also allied with Littlewood’s socialist political convictions that stressed the value and importance of the group over and above the cult of the individual. Hence, her working methods provided a vision of socialist theory in practice as she rejected hierarchical structures in favour of ferociously egalitarian team-work and shared responsibility for outcomes achieved. She summarised her position in an article for Encore written in 1961: I do not believe in the supremacy of the director, designer, actor or even of the writer. It is through collaboration that this knockabout art of theatre survives and kicks . . . No one mind or imagination can foresee what a play will become until all the physical and intellectual stimuli, which are crystallized in the poetry of the author, have been understood by a company, and then tried out in terms of mime, discussion, and the precise music of grammar; words and movement allied and integrated. (Littlewood, cited in Marowitz 1965: 133)

Littlewood wanted to work with a permanent company to develop skills, a shared vocabulary, a common theatrical vision and knowledge of each other so that they could establish a rapport born of familiarity in the rehearsal room and on stage. Through collaboration and surmounting difficulties as a unit, she hoped to foster trust, not in herself as director, but in the abilities of the team to confront problems and find solutions. An attitude that encouraged any member of a cast to take on a role played by someone else or to offer suggestions on how to delivery lines, without this seeming threatening – the emphasis being on collective graft and decision making to achieve the best possible production rather than cosseting the egos of individual actors. Littlewood maintained faith in the centrality of a permanent creative ensemble, the ‘composite mind’ engaged in a cooperative sharing of ideas, skills and creativity, throughout her career, even though the loss of her company to West End transfers and more lucrative jobs, made this goal increasingly unachievable as the 1950s progressed. Despite all this is would be disingenuous to suggest that Littlewood did not have a primary role in the rehearsal room. She selected plays for production, took on the role of the intellectual driving force by researching essential background information, instigated rehearsal processes and shaped the material evolved through collaboration, as will become clear during the rest of this chapter. WORKING METHOD

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APPROACHES TO ACTOR TRAINING

During the mid-twentieth century in Britain, it was widely presumed that an actor’s training was complete once they had graduated from an appropriate drama school and been released into the competitive outside world. In stark contrast to dancers and musicians, there was no tradition of actors as artists developing their craft through further research and training. Littlewood found this attitude incomprehensible and in a 1955 flyer advertising Theatre Workshop confirmed her view that ‘acting is an art of infinite difficulty which demands constant training and humility’ (TRSE Archive). By committing to a regular training regime that encompassed research into theatre history, theories of acting and rigorous practical explorations, Littlewood hoped to help actors grow and develop into creative artists. She hated the idea of standing still and constantly sought to instil her own sense of intellectual and physical curiosity in the actors who worked with her. By utilising Laban based movement training to increase physical awareness and dexterity, alongside approaches to text and character analysis drawn from Stanislavsky’s influential text An Actor Prepares first published in Britain in 1937, Littlewood determined to ‘train a company to the pitch of perfection expected from a ballet company or a great orchestra’ (Milne and Goodwin 1967: 122). In the early days of Theatre Union and Theatre Workshop, Littlewood and MacColl sought to establish an intuitive way of working by having methods ingrained through repetition and the gradual development of vocal work, movement exercises and workshops exploring aspects of theatre such as relaxation, releasing the creative imagination, character development and improvisatory skills. Recalling the early aims of Theatre Workshop, MacColl makes clear that: Our actors would be able to handle their bodies with the same degree of skill and control that was generally regarded as the special domain of ballet-dancers and professional athletes. We were going to find ways of developing our voices so that we could handle the most exacting of roles. As for acting proper, we would combine Stanislavski’s method of ‘living the role’ with the improvisational techniques of Italian comedy. (1986: xlix)

In establishing a training regime, Littlewood placed great importance on relaxation to free the mind and body from the stresses and strains of

everyday life so that actors would be able to experiment without mental and physical restrictions. Rehearsals would start with exercises designed to relax the muscles, followed by general breathing, movement and games to release tension and create the conditions for effective working. This general introduction would often by followed by vocal exercises designed to improve diction, range and power. She encouraged the company to find and extend their own vocal range by first recognising their own vocal character and then playing with the rhythm of different speech patterns. Nelson Illingworth, an Australian voice coach who worked at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York before setting up Labour Stage, a training school in London, influenced this aspect of the Company’s work. He taught the Italian bel canto method (beautiful song) that emphasised breath control, evenness of tone and vocalisation exercises that focused on clearly articulated vowels and consonants and Littlewood used his method of repeating words that combined particular consonant and vowel structures to improve precision and clarity of delivery. Equally, she worked on allying speech with movement by adapting Laban’s ideas on ‘efforts’ to develop vocal characterisation. CREATING A MOVEMENT-BASED THEATRE: THE INFLUENCE OF LABAN

As previously stated, Littlewood was determined to counteract the static ‘talking head’ quality of British acting by creating theatre that placed dynamic movement at its centre and recognised the whole body as the primary resource of the actor. Having first encountered Laban’s work at RADA through Anny Fligg, a Laban trained specialist, Littlewood recognised the significance of his theory and analysis of kinesics for her purposes. For a number of years, Littlewood and MacColl adapted Laban’s movement theory to the art of acting until, in 1948, Littlewood invited Jean Newlove to join Theatre Workshop as a movement teacher and choreographer. Newlove had been Laban’s assistant and together with Lisa Ullman helped introduce Laban’s Art of Movement in schools and factories in England. Ullman later co-founded the Art of Movement Studio in Manchester and it was here that early members of Theatre Workshop had an opportunity to meet Laban. After joining Theatre Workshop, Newlove ran daily movement classes to improve flexibility, fluidity, awareness of the body’s potential and knowledge of the interdependence of motivations, behaviour and WORKING METHOD

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physical efforts according to Laban’s principles. Laban had been the first person to articulate and tabulate basic principles of movement through a process of notation. He based his theory on observing and understanding how all movement related to the dimensions available within the Icosohedron crystalline structure and by thinking about the body and movement in terms of the range of efforts available given the three elements of space, time and energy. Newlove explains: Once we know WHERE we are going in space, we must observe and analyse HOW we are going and WHAT KIND OF MOVEMENT ENERGY we use. Our choice of the type of muscular energy, or from now on, EFFORT, which determines how we carry out an action, is the result of previously experienced inner impulses. (Newlove 1993: 13)

Company members employed Laban’s ideas on the interrelationship between time, space and energy to identify and avoid movement patterns that came most naturally, to counteract ‘an inbuilt resistance we all have to using our bodies in a different way’ (Goorney 1981: 159) and to extend the range of efforts available to them. Actors were encouraged to try out different dimensions of movement – up/down; left/right and forward/backward – and to explore the space through walking, skipping and lunging. Laban’s theories also informed character analysis, physical characterisation, rhythm-based

The Laban Efforts EFFORT Thrust Slash Wring Flick Press Float Dab Glide

SPACE Direct Indirect Indirect Indirect Direct Indirect Direct Direct

TIME Quick Quick Slow Quick Slow Slow Quick Slow

ENERGY Strong Strong Strong Weak Strong Weak Weak Weak (Goorney 1981: 163)

work, an awareness of spatial dynamics and the ability to handle awkward pieces of set such as ramps, stairs and ladders. When rehearsing for productions, actors approached characters through an exploration of their movement habits and relationships. Asking what physical relationship does the character have to their environment, what efforts do they use and how does this relate to and interact with other characters? Recalling the influence of Laban for Theatre Workshop, Murray Melvin explains that: We would ask whether a character is in the air, grounded in the earth or somewhere in the middle – the basic ‘planes’. Once you have got that sorted out, which is what you did with Joan, you then worked out the different efforts of the character to give you his movements. So very quickly you had a double source of information for your building block. (2004: 1).

Various actors have also commented on the significance Littlewood gave to an actor’s feet in rehearsal, which also connects to her adherence to Laban’s ideas. If an actor’s feet were ‘apologetic’, heavy and leaden it meant they were not in a position to respond quickly and intuitively to what was happening around them. Actors were encouraged to be thoroughly aware of what their feet were doing and suggesting about the character they were playing – were they firmly connected to the ground, constantly changing direction or moving whilst barely touching the floor? Littlewood was also willing to manipulate effects, for instance, in conversation with the author, Melvin recalled that she used to put chains on the bottom of his trousers during The Hostage in order to weigh him down, to make him more earthbound. Establishing a physical characterisation in this way also helped to determine how the character worked vocally. Is the character direct or indirect in speech? What effort does the character employ to speak? How does this differ depending on whom the character is addressing in the play? This approach can be illustrated effectively by quoting Newlove, at some length, describing her work with Goorney on his character of Sganarelle from The Flying Doctor: You had to be very mobile, very lively, much of it was flicking and dabbing, there wasn’t much heavy effort. Sometimes you had to slow down, perhaps float a bit, so we had to work on that effort. I remember quite clearly getting you to leap up with a flick, which is a fairly hard thing to do. This is where we came to Ewan’s WORKING METHOD

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work on voice. Voice is an extension of movement, and when you leapt up from the ground with a flick, you got the right intonation in the voice. Now Sganarelle was a light character, and this suited you. Suppose we’d had an actor whose material efforts were pressing and heavy, his voice when he got up would have mirrored this heavy quality. Knowing about an efforts an actor can use them for his own development. We don’t use pure efforts, we merge one into another. For example, when Joan, playing Marinette, knocked Gorgibus about, she didn’t slash him, neither did she flick him, it was in between, and by defining the efforts she should use, we arrived at the essence of the character. (Goorney 1981: 160)

BIOMECHANICS AND EURHYTHMICS

Littlewood also drew on Meyerhold’s quasi-scientific conception of biomechanics and the biomechanical actor, particularly in her early work. With clear connections to Laban’s aims, Robert Leach identifies that, as a general principle, biomechanics ‘taught the actor self awareness in threedimensional space, the need for efficiency as well as expressiveness in movement and the essential rhythms and dynamic qualities in stage movement’ (1989: 53). Through individual, pair and group work, Meyerhold emphasised precision, economy, clarity, rhythm, tempo, coordination, action and counter-action as a means of depicting and communicating character, attitude and relationships. An approach valued and adopted by Littlewood as, she too, hoped to encourage economical movement, alongside physical and rhythmic expressiveness to convey precisely the right mood, atmosphere and character trait for any given scene. As she documented in one of her early working notebooks: ‘Actions must be clear – the more delicate the feeling the more it requires precision, clarity and plastic quality in its physical expression’ (Michael Barker Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin, hereafter MBC, Austin). This preoccupation with clarity is particularly evident in the exercises Littlewood used for isolated body parts. For example, her early notebooks refer to hand exercises that progress from general loosening exercises to using the hands to express a variety of emotions such as cruelty, sensuality, strength, fear, nervousness and terror. In this way, she explored how slight, yet clear, changes to gesture could convey large amounts of information, just as Meyerhold experimented with the signification potential of stillness, gesture and silhouette.

Figure 2.1 The Flying Doctor (1945). Photograph by Ursula Hartleben. Courtesy of Theatre Royal Stratford East Archives Collection

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Alongside Laban and Meyerhold, Littlewood’s notebooks also reveal her debt to the Swiss composer-teacher, Emile Jaques-Dalcroze’s theory of Eurhythmics, principally a method of music education using body movement subsequently adopted for use in theatre training. He promoted exercises of walking and breathing, beating time, gesture and improvisation to encourage an awareness of the human body as the original instrument. Littlewood developed on this principle to foster an understanding of rhythm and explored how the actor could control and manipulate different rhythms individually or in tandem with other actors. She ran training classes asking participants to complete movement tasks such as walking, skipping and using a pickaxe whilst responding to rhythmic beats; and incorporated pair work involving couples walking, hopping and running in rhythmic synchronicity. This work encouraged a subtle awareness of how shifting rhythms could alter stage dynamics and reveal something of character motivations and relationships, as well as suggesting something of the way different communities worked together in such diverse circumstances as the prison yard in Behan’s The Quare Fellow, the building site in Chapman’s You Won’t Always Be on Top and the trench scenes in Oh What a Lovely War (explored in detail in Chapter 3). USING AND ADAPTING STANISLAVSKY

Littlewood made extensive use of Stanivlavsky’s ideas, even though ‘her application of his theory [offered] no slavish adherence to a set of iron principles. And certainly no one could accuse her productions of being method’ (Milne and Goodwin 1967: 116); instead she utilised Stanislavsky’s ideas on finding the inner life of a character, but extended them to the non-naturalistic stage and combined them with various experimental staging techniques. Littlewood’s notebooks reveal that during early training sessions carried out in Ormesby Hall and Manchester she adopted a rather rigid adherence to Stanislavsky’s ideas on actor training proposed in An Actor Prepares. She gave lectures on concentration; units and objectives; ‘if’ and ‘given circumstances’; the imagination and truth. Littlewood supplemented these lectures with practical exercises, for example exploring how key scenes such as Act II, sc. IV of Romeo and Juliet could be broken down into units and objectives and how the actor needed to stimulate their imagination to develop the fine shadings of a character’s thought and feelings to animate plays. In her notebooks, Littlewood returns repeatedly to the necessity to activate the creative

imagination, either as a means of initiating material or for ‘freshening up and refurbishing something the actor has already prepared and used’ (MBC, Austin). Echoing Stanislavsky she stressed in a lecture: A play is a whole series of ifs and given circumstances thought up by the author – there is no such thing as actuality on the stage – an act is the production of the imagination. The aim of the actor should be to use his technique to turn the play into a theatrical reality – in this process IMAGINATION plays by far the greatest part. (MBC, Austin)

Taking inspiration from Chapter Four of An Actor Prepares on imagination, when the director Tortsov invites his students to adapt the current given circumstance of their acting class by imagining an altered time of day, during one session, Littlewood asked the group to imagine that their class took place not at 42 Deansgate, Manchester, but in: 1

A Lakeland youth hostel at 11.00 am on a sunny summer morning. After the class, what are you going to do?

2 3

On a spring early evening on the banks of the Seine in Paris. In a London night school on a November evening – it is thick yellow fog outside. (MBC, Austin)

As such, she invited the group to imagine how they would respond physically and emotionally if their situation were different. This type of exercise appears again and again as a means to release the imagination by encouraging actors to transpose situations to different contexts and to consider the impact of altered circumstances on behaviour, attitudes, the body and relationships. Littlewood followed up exercises with detailed critiques of individual’s work, commenting on the authenticity of their response, the originality of their interpretation, the truthfulness of their depiction and the presence of personal clichés. She continually stressed the importance of research and preparation to avoid false performances. Hence, Littlewood echoes Stanislavsky when she insists that: Every invention of the actor’s imagination must be thoroughly worked out and solidly built on the basis of facts. He must be able to answer all the questions (when, where, why, how) that he asks himself when he is driving his inventive WORKING METHOD

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faculties . . . Sometimes he may not need to make all this conscious, intellectual effort. His imagination may work intuitively. (MBC, Austin)

Like Stanislavsky, Littlewood tried to encourage access to the subconscious and conscious mind in order to activate an effective combination of intuition and carefully worked out motivation that drew on the self and observation of the outside world as resources. Exploring this combination in an early lecture, Littlewood explained: First, our art will teach us how to create consciously and rightly – that is the mastery of our technique – conscious and right creative moments in one role will in turn open the gates of inspiration. To play rightly, that is truly, our acting much be logical, it must be coherent, we must think, strive, feel and act in unison with our role. (MBC, Austin)

Also linked to Stanislavsky was Littlewood’s faith in simplicity and clarity of action, as opposed to overacting which relies on packing in information to try and convince the audience of the authentic truth of what they see before them. Instead, Littlewood advised actors to find one strong, clear action and to look to everyday life for inspiration stating that ‘nature operates a living organism far better than our much advertised technique’ (MBC, Austin). Rather than a mechanistic application of technique, Littlewood stressed an organic process that combined a physical understanding of character derived from Laban-based analysis, coupled with a thorough consideration of inner motives and objectives arrived at through a Stanislavsky-based approach. So, we get a sense of the rigorous preparation proposed by Littlewood to facilitate character analysis, the selection of motives and objectives and her aim to ally this to an excellently honed vocal, physical and mental apparatus achieved through training. During training and rehearsals, if Littlewood detected any signs of complacency, inhibition, falseness or a retreat into ‘bloody acting’, she responded with ferocity and set about breaking down the actor by forcing them to play against type, pointing out their clichés or getting the company to act out what the culprit was doing to show up their faults. Whilst this approach appears, and was, often harsh, actors have also confirmed MacColl’s assessment that Littlewood had ‘an

inexhaustible store of patience and the ability to coax performances out of actors which were far in excess of their normal level of achievement’ (1990: 245). It would seem that she used whatever techniques were required and, by all accounts, was a great psychologist who was quite prepared to bring her actors to breaking point before building their confidence back up again. She manipulated her actors to achieve results, whether that necessitated being overly cajoling, downright nasty, inciting pride or using personal information. She rooted out and used an actor’s foibles, uncertainties and in-built defence mechanisms to secure powerful performances regardless of any potential fall-out for the actor. Joan stripped you down. All your inhibitions were exercised so you knew what they were, then if you could stick it – it was a mental and physical assault course – she built you up again with an assuredness that your place was there on the stage. That was her genius. It was an academic approach – she called us her ‘thinking clowns’, ‘nuts’ and ‘kinder’. (Brian Murphy, cited in Brown 1993: 12) The superb performance of the actor playing Edward II for Theatre Workshop was achieved, through great pain, by having him confront his latent homosexuality, at a time when no great sympathy or tolerance could be expected from society at large. (Barker 2000: 121) The greatest lesson I learned is pace, not standing around, droning on, and boring the arse off everybody. She wouldn’t allow self-indulgence. (Toni Palmer, cited in Brown 1993: 12)

REALISING THE WORLD OF THE PLAY

The initial stages of rehearsal were devoted to round-table discussion, textual analysis and exploring the social and political background of the text. Dense, classic texts were given a long time for analysis. Contemporary plays were often experimented with in terms of lines and passages of dialogue spoken by a succession of different actors and pairings to discover timing and qualities WORKING METHOD

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of irony and social gests. Actors brought books and other research materials to rehearsal and the insights these gave were incorporated into the discussions. (Barker 2000: 117–18)

Discussions relied heavily on the extensive research Littlewood carried out before introducing a new work to the ensemble so that she could bring in books, illustrations, period music and significant experts in the field if she thought it would help. This is not to suggest that she had clear ideas about the production that was about to unfold, but that she had fully immersed herself in the wider world of the play. It was this contextual information that she hoped to translate to the actors. For example, when working on Arden of Faversham, Littlewood arranged for the company to visit Faversham, the house Arden lived in, and a talk with a local historian. A level of background research and preparation that was unheard of in British theatre at the time. In some ways, this marks a distinction between Littlewood and Stanislavsky’s ‘system’ and a move towards a more Brechtian approach, for whereas Stanislavsky stressed the importance of the individual actor’s truthful depiction of character, Littlewood was concerned to elicit the overarching social truth of any given work, in relation to its original social, political and cultural context, as well as unearthing contemporary relevance. Whilst this may suggest a rather dry academic exercise, the aim was to bring the context of the play alive for the actors and, as an extension, the audience. For example, when working on Renaissance plays, the aim was to introduce notions of the Elizabethan court, power brokering, political intrigue, personal animosities and sexual politics. By providing contextual information, Littlewood hoped to ignite the passion of the actors, to spark their imaginations and to encourage their active engagement in the creative processes of realising the world of the play. With this information to hand, the Company would return to Stanislavsky’s principles in order to break the script down in to units of action with a beginning, middle and end, analysing objectives and discussing practical possibilities. The aim was to find ‘“the active verb”: we know what they’re saying, what are they doing?’ (Wells 1992: 46). As Melvin recalls: At the start of every production with the Workshop you broke the script down Stanislavsky-wise into your unit and objectives. I can remember us all sitting on the floor in Joan’s room . . . we would unit the whole play, work out our objectives

for each unit as we went along. Once we had completed that as a company we would discuss what we thought the Major Objective, or the reason for the whole work would be. (2004: 1-2)

Rehearsals would concentrate on working through the identified individual units by exploring physical possibilities, spatial dynamics and the delivery of text until the right combination emerged through a creative process of trail and error. During the run of a play, Littlewood augmented her Stanislavskybased approach to text and performance by insisting that actors spent at least an hour in quiet contemplation before curtain-up so that they would have an opportunity to immerse themselves in their role and the world of the play. However, the mid-1950s period marked not only the transition from historical and contemporary classics to vivacious examples of new writing, but also a turning point in Littlewood’s working method. After relocating to the Theatre Royal, it was harder to maintain an extensive training regime due to the constant pressure to produce plays in fortnightly and three-weekly repertory, but the company still engaged in regular training until the mid-1950s when, according to Goorney, rapid changes of personnel and an emphasis on new plays meant ‘the awareness of the need for movement and voice training and the very distinctive quality of the earlier productions was lost’ (1981: 162–3). Equally, there was a decisive break in how the company prepared for an evening’s performance. A shift Michael Coren attributes to Behan’s influence during the run of The Quare Fellow when he would arrive with a crate of Guinness to talk and share stories with the actors until minutes before curtain-up. From this point on, Melvin, in conversation with the author, made it clear that the cast would meet to sing, dance, tell jokes and share banter immediately before performances. This more informal approach similarly infused what was happening on the stage as Littlewood increasingly embraced her inclination to move beyond the constraints of the fourth wall to acknowledge the presence of the audience in ways that emphasised the communion of popular theatre that she found so inspiring. Littlewood’s growing pull towards the disruptive, playful and spontaneous also influenced her developing use of improvisation as a way of generating, rehearsing and executing material that forms the focus of the next part of this chapter. WORKING METHOD

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IMPROVISATION: CREATING THE CONDITIONS FOR THEATRICAL INVENTION

Whereas Littlewood appreciated and utilised Laban, Meyerhold, JaquesDalcroze and Stanislavsky’s attempts to provide ‘systems’ to explain and document the process of activating human beings to movement, action and characterisation on the stage, she possessed an anarchic spirit and equally championed possibilities that arise from the chance encounters, accidents and explosive dynamics activated through improvisation. She firmly believed that the creative process involved risk, play and drawing a lot of lines in the sand before finding the right one and used improvisation to promote opportunities for discovery. Therefore, in a radical departure from the text-bound British acting tradition of the period, Littlewood employed games and improvisation ‘to develop initiative, excite curiosity, exercise the imagination’ (Littlewood 1994: 199). She regarded improvisation as a way of facilitating the conditions for theatrical invention, an unspoken ‘process of thought’ (ibid.: 372) that enabled actors to be original, intuitive, responsive and real in rehearsal and performance. Improvisation is now an accepted and familiar component in rehearsal rooms, but during Littlewood’s career it was largely unheard of and, as a result, she became associated with championing and using improvisation during the creative process and as an integral part of performance. Because of a widespread lack of knowledge and/or antipathy, she had to be careful to find actors who were capable of taking improvisation on board and using it as a creative tool. As a result, Littlewood largely rejected the traditional audition formula of actors arriving to read two pre-prepared speeches in favour of a more free-form audition process. In conversation with the author, Melvin recalled that when he turned up at Stratford East, Littlewood asked him if he wanted to do his speeches, when he replied ‘no, not really’, Littlewood laughed, said ‘I don’t blame you’ and invited him to get up on stage to tell a funny story. She was looking for actors who had courage, could use their imaginations, think on their feet and respond creatively to the situations she threw at them. One actor remembers: When I went along for my audition she gave me a script and she said, ‘Read all the parts – play all the characters.’ I said, ‘I can’t do this’ – and she said, ‘Go ahead and do it. You are either an actor, or you can’t!’ Well, I did it. Women, children, old men, young men. I was terrible – I felt such an idiot. She said, ‘Well,

at least you don’t mind making a fool of yourself – and any man who has courage on the stage and is willing to make a fool of himself can, in fact, become a good actor.’ (Milne and Goodwin 1967: 114)

Games and improvisations held multiple functions in the early stages of rehearsal from creating the right conditions for practical work through relaxation and concentration exercises mentioned earlier, to exploring the attitude and physicality of characters, to improvising the feel and tone of a unit, to generating text and working towards the overall style of production. As Barker summarises, ‘The games and exercises became a laboratory through which Littlewood was able to explore such qualities as time, weight, direction and flow . . . It was also the process through which the rhythmic patterns of the performance were established’ (Barker 2000: 119). A favourite exercise Littlewood employed when she was working with a new group involved asking the group to leave a room and to return exactly as they had done the first time they entered it, to ‘follow the same people, say the same things, walk the same way, recapture the mood’ (Littlewood 1994: 210). This exercise served several purposes: to break the ice, to heighten awareness of surroundings and people and to bring home how hard it is to recreate the mood and atmosphere of real life. For Littlewood, ‘It might be simple but it had to be carefully manufactured, the beginning of the art of acting’ (1994: 210). And this one basic exercise points to the roots of why Littlewood often turned to improvisation – she was trying to get to the ‘theater in people, in the city, in life. I’m very keen on watching people. I guess I’m a voyeur. I love the patterns, and the lies and the performances you get everywhere’ (cited in Croyden 1971: 1) – as such, she used improvisation to capture and recreate the theatrical in everyday interaction. SCORING A PLAY THROUGH IMPROVISATION Theatre directors have to be witch doctors, mediums, magicians: whether the playwright is alive or long dead, the director has to recreate, from a very minimal top line – the written dialogue – a whole invisible, unrecorded score. Not only how characters speak, but how they look, how they look at each other, how they watch each other, how they think, think about each other, how they feel, feel about each other, how they move, alone or together, and when. (Wells 1992: 46) WORKING METHOD

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Initially, Littlewood had actors discard scripts in rehearsal as she thought it was only necessary to roughly know what the scene was about in order to play with the physical ‘truth’ of the unit. By freeing the actor from having to remember lines, appropriate movements or the right intonation, Littlewood enabled actors to fully explore a situation, relationship or mood so that the spatial dynamics, physicality and delivery grew organically out of the events being depicted rather than mechanistically from trying to block a text unit by unit. A key example of this method concerns Avis Bunnage and Francis Cuka dragging heavily weighted suitcases around the Theatre Royal, trying to get on buses, struggling through wind and rain and arguing with landladies before embarking on an improvisation based on the first scene of A Taste of Honey when they finally arrive exhausted at the squalid, sparsely furnished bed-sit that is to be their home. According to Melvin, Littlewood would often get actors to improvise an outdoor promenade scene, which would bring all the senses into play. She would invite actors to consider how the sun, rain, the breeze, daylight, smells, would affect characters. Characters would meet during the improvisation and the postures, attitudes and efforts established through Laban-based exercises would be tested out in relation to other characters – ‘Who would be comfortable standing next to whom? Who would keep outside the group? Who would interfere? (Melvin 2004: 2). Extended improvisations were employed to capture the human minutiae of everyday interaction, the shifting moods, silences, physical detail, rhythms, textures, antagonisms and complex spatial relations so that actors could live rather than act on stage by complementing and counter-pointing each other’s actions. For example, during the first week of rehearsals for The Quare Fellow, Littlewood kept the script back and alternatively set about establishing the power relations, rhythms and atmosphere of day to day prison existence through long improvisations. According to actors who worked on the show, Littlewood set the scene for them by talking about the environment, the narrow corridors, high windows, physical restriction, the continual sound of doors being locked and unlocked; as well as the human dimension of boredom, gossip, jealousies and the fear of warders and other prisoners. She then introduced an element of physical authenticity to stimulate the actors’ imaginations further: She took us up on to the roof of the Theatre Royal. All the grimy slate and stone made it easy to believe we were in a prison yard. We formed up in a circle, and

Figure 2.2 The Quare Fellow (1956). Courtesy of Theatre Royal Stratford East Archives Collection

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imagined we were prisoners out on exercise. Round and round we trudged for what seemed like hours – breaking now and then for a quick smoke and furtive conversation. Although it was just a kind of game, the boredom and meanness of it all was brought home. Next, the ‘game’ was extended – the whole dreary routine of washing out your cell, standing to attention, sucking up to the screws, trading tobacco, was improvised and developed. It began to seem less and less like a game, and more like real. (Milne and Goodwin 1967: 116–17)

In early rehearsals, it was commonplace for actors not to play the part they ended up with, a technique that highlighted the play as the primary focus for attention rather than individual parts or actors’ egos. Having established the right atmosphere for a piece, Littlewood gradually introduced scripts and allocated parts. As it turned out, many of the improvised sequences appeared in the scripts so the actors were already familiar with situations and relationships before having lines to learn. A mode of working that made the rehearsals a much smoother, organic process. In developing scenes, Littlewood stressed the importance of counterpoint, the co-existence of complimentary or oppositional attitudes, movements and rhythms to create complex patterns of activity populated by finely drawn characters who each worked within their own sphere of motivation and movement vocabulary, but in complete harmony with everything else taking place on stage. As a result, highly textured performances emerged that relied on sophisticated composition of interesting groupings, stage images, peripheral exchanges, overlapping dialogue and subtle nuances of attitudes, relationships and resentments. Critics and academics have often likened this style to the quality of a jazz ensemble whereby an overall rhythm allows for the ebb and flow of different instruments to fade in an out of the foreground. A quality that, once again, connects Littlewood’s practice to Meyerhold as Leach confirms that ‘the idea of an actor fitting in a group was seen by Meyerhold to be healthily creative, in the way a musician’s work in an orchestra was’ (1989: 73). The result is the impression of spontaneity, but the reality is that Littlewood meticulously crafted this spontaneity through improvisation and rigorous rehearsal; although as her faith in improvisation developed, she increasingly opted for purely improvised moments in performance as will be discussed later.

TEXT AND IMPROVISATION

As the above discussion indicates, Littlewood was primarily concerned to establish the physical truth of a unit before introducing text and if the text failed to coalesce with the action then it was subject to alteration. In conversation with the author, Melvin recalled how Littlewood used to refer to ‘taking the arse out of it’, which basically meant taking a heavy, overly-wordy text and cutting out the superfluous bits by seeing what worked in action and out loud. This often meant improvising the dialogue of a scene to see how that worked and then replacing improvised text with scripted elements to ascertain what was most effective. From this approach a hybrid would emerge that combined scripted with improvised elements, particularly when working with new writers. Taking on classics such as Volpone, Arden of Faversham and Richard II, she worked to service the demands of the playwright and, in particular, championed textual clarity over decorative poetic delivery. One method she frequently adopted entailed actors updating scenes and dialogue. For example, Littlewood would contemporise the relationship between a king and courtier by having the actors improvise a scene involving a boss and employee to uncover issues of status, registers of language and physical relations before applying the ideas raised to the text in question. To flesh out background information about tensions, gaps in the narrative and character motivations, Littlewood was known to have actors improvise completely fictional scenes, for instance: ‘In Macbeth, the actors improvised the scene which Shakespeare never wrote, when Macbeth actually meets the murderers for the first time – in a pub’ (Milne and Goodwin 1967: 117). Working on verse, she tried to establish movement to accompany the rhythm of the text, which for her invariably carried the right meaning. Hence, she often used movement to configure appropriately suggestive rhythm and intonation before discarding it to leave a more active delivery of a speech. Regardless of whether scripts were classic or modern, Littlewood employed numerous exercises and improvisations to experiment with speeches, dialogue and the texture of multiple voices in group scenes. As with physical work, she did not offer prescriptions, but explored the potentialities of a text before endorsing a mode of delivery that evolved organically through the rehearsal process – so she would never say ‘try it like this’, but rather ‘try it another way’. For instance, she often invited actors to experiment with every part and replace dialogue with WORKING METHOD

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Figure 2.3 Joan Littlewood directing. Courtesy of Theatre Royal Stratford East Archives Collection

colloquial speech, gibberish or action to unearth the most effective timing, delivery and tone. According to Barker she also used a method referred to as ‘via negativa’, perhaps more associated with Jerzy Grotowski (1933–1999) and Jacques Lecoq (1921–1999), which involves the continual repetition of a line or phrase of text by one or all the actors, with each inappropriate solution dismissed with a ‘no’ until a valid form of intonation, phrasing or emphasis emerges. Whilst this method may seem brutal, it was conducted in the atmosphere of a scientific laboratory, where each potential ‘result’ had to be experimented with in order to confirm that the right discovery was chosen. Barker also records Littlewood using an exercise known in French as the ‘siffleuse’ or ‘whistler’. In this instance, a prompter follows an actor to speak their lines just before they have to deliver them as a means of freeing the actor to explore the situation without having to devote mental energy to remembering the line so that a more natural, functional mode of communication can arise (see Barker 2000: 121–2). As indicated earlier, Littlewood also directed actors to Laban’s notion of efforts to give difficult speeches meaning as an actor with Theatre Workshop explained: In The Dutch Courtesan I had a practically impossible speech about Euphues and His England, a book by John Lyly, and I was supposed to get a laugh on it. Well, of course, no one had ever heard of it. But we did get a laugh out of it, because of the way Joan explained she thought it ought to be done. The explanation was a purely technical one. She said ‘if you gather the first half of the speech, and scatter the second, the sense will come over.’ Well, I knew what she meant. So I gathered like mad and scattered like hell, and got a big laugh. (Milne and Goodwin 1967: 16)

IMPROVISATION TO GENERATE TEXT

Improvisation became an increasingly integral part of generating text for performance after Theatre Workshop started working with new writers following the success of Behan’s The Quare Fellow in 1956. With shows such as You Won’t Always Be On Top, A Taste of Honey and The Hostage, Littlewood developed a reputation for viewing text as a starting point rather than a given blueprint as she set about cutting, reconfiguring and adding material as she responded to the enacted, live event and the WORKING METHOD

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creative interaction between text and performance. In some cases, she chose to work with very little material because she spotted something in the quality of the writing, the characters or relationships that seemed original and offered the potential for theatrical invention. For instance, Henry Chapman’s You Won’t Always Be On Top arrived as several pages of carefully observed and authentic dialogue drawn from his experience as a building worker, but by no stretch of the imagination did it constitute a fully formed play. Rather than rejecting the material out of hand, Littlewood appreciated its ear for the language of the streets, its original depiction of day to day working life on a building site and invited Chapman to work with the Company to develop the script. The actors read the text, improvised, went out to local building sites to learn the physical rhythms of the work and explored ways of transposing what they learnt on to the stage. It was not a case of the actors simply replicating what they had seen but of playing out everyday incidents in the moment of performance. During each performance, the actors worked a concrete mixer, made their way up and down ladders carrying hods and constructed an entire brick wall, whilst engaging in the everyday banter and exchanges of the workplace. Rather than the grammatically correct dialogue presented on the page, the actors developed conversational speech that involved broken rules, overlap and strange flights of fancy. According to Littlewood, throughout the run of the play: Whole sections of the play were improvised night after night. We checked, a couple of hours before the show, on the plot, on the broad outline, where improvisations could be improved or had perhaps got out of hand or were not as entertaining as the night before. (Talking About Theatre, 1964)

To achieve this level of free-form creativity, Littlewood’s actors had to be supremely flexible, aware of everything going on around them and confident not only of their own abilities, but of their colleagues. A confidence Littlewood fostered through the continual use of improvisation in rehearsal and her faith that this mode of working generated significant results, even though, in the age of the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship, it was illegal and the company faced a high profile prosecution, as discussed in the previous chapter. Littlewood repeated her method of improvising around an original text with A Taste of Honey, a fully formed unsolicited script sent to Theatre Workshop by a nineteen-year-old

Salford woman. Impressed by the earthy, unpretentious working-class voice and situation, Littlewood was keen to develop the play, its structure and style through rehearsal. What arrived as a fairly typical example of social realism, evolved into a highly theatrical evening that refused to wallow in sentimentalism or bitterness despite the subject matter. The script received the usual cutting, tightening and re-structuring associated with Littlewood, but changes also occurred in the theatricalising of the production. Abandoning the fourth wall, Littlewood added a live jazz trio, choreographed entrances and exits to music and encouraged Avis Bunnage, in particular, to build on her larger-than-life music-hall style characterisation of the mother through direct address. Delaney presented none of these elements in her script, but they emerged organically through the rehearsal process and gave the production the originality to secure a long-term critical and commercial success. IMPROVISATION AND THE AUDIENCE

In accordance with Littlewood’s appreciation of theatre as a live event that takes place in front of a live audience, from the mid-1950s she built in the freedom to respond to interruptions from the auditorium in a style akin to the popular music-hall, variety act or the now more familiar heckling that greets a stand-up comedian. It is interesting that this aspect of the Company’s work particularly gained currency as the television age took hold, as if Littlewood was keen to depart from the sterility of the box in the corner by offering the one thing it never could – the capacity to answer back and engage in dialogue. Admitting in a radio interview that, for her ‘there is something about the actual improvisation in front of an audience and with an audience that nothing can replace’ (Talking About Theatre, 1964). We can trace the origins of this twoway dialogue to Theatre Workshop’s attempts to respond to Behan’s unpredictable, drunken outbursts from the auditorium during The Quare Fellow. It became clear that audiences loved the frisson caused by seemingly impromptu interruptions and increasingly the potential for these charged moments became incorporated into rehearsals as Goorney remembers of work during The Hostage: We allowed for improvisation in the actual performance, particularly in relation to the audience: interruptions were never ignored, we dealt with what was given to us. If someone walked out, we turned it to our advantage, and late-comers WORKING METHOD

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were treated roughly. All of this done in the spirit of the play. At the same time, such units as the ‘going to the lavatory’ were carefully rehearsed and drilled. (1966: 103)

Equally, Littlewood was not adverse to manufacturing situations for her actors to cope with in performance. For instance, during the run of Oh What a Lovely War, a rugby team came as a block booking and Littlewood arranged that as Barbara Windsor sang the recruitment song, I’ll Make a Man of You they would all get up on stage. Windsor, completely unaware of this contrived interruption, had to find a way of responding to the men and getting them off the stage so that the show could continue. For the conservatoire trained actor this sort of intervention would be deeply unprofessional and completely anathema to the ideal of a pre-planned performance competently executed as rehearsed; but Littlewood’s working method relied on continually updating and keeping a work fresh, of and in the moment of performance. KEEPING A SHOW ALIVE

One of Littlewood’s remarkable attributes as a director was her ability to maintain the centrality of exploration, experimentation and improvisation until the last possible moment in the rehearsal process; and according to Barker, ‘working this way is harder, and more rewarding, than heading for home on the first day with a fixed and finished concept’ (1977: 48). With an opening night snapping at her heels, she would sculpt and choreograph material to generate the appropriate spatial relations and a dynamic sequence of pictorial images, group formations, shifting tempos, rhythms, tones, energy, text, music, movement and action. Whilst this suggests a final domineering directorial presence, Littlewood was keen to use material that had evolved organically during rehearsals. Material she took responsibility for shaping, honing and editing in the run-up to opening night. However, unlike other directors, Littlewood did not rely on a company reproducing the same material night after night. She did ‘not believe a production can be perfected in three or four weeks and placed upon the stage as a glossy-finished product. It is a living, breathing thing, subject to change, and needs continual testing and checking’ (Milne and Goodwin 1967: 121). Hence, she continued to experiment with all aspects of a production, to subject each aspect to continual analysis and re-evaluation to see if alterations were

necessary or desirable. In particular, Littlewood understood that a show is only complete when it comes into contact with an audience and that the introduction of this unpredictable dynamic can necessitate changes impossible to envisage during the relatively closed rehearsal process. Rather than leaving her actors to get on with their job, Littlewood sat in the stalls night after night taking down copious notes of her observations about the delivery of lines, changes of timing, rhythmic alterations, loss of vitality, entrances, exits, the effectiveness of ad-libs, misdirected energies, audibility and absence of objectives. Littlewood gained a formidable reputation for the level of her expectations and the harshness of her response if she felt things were getting stale. According to MacColl, ‘a missed cue or a late entrance earned you a slap on the wrist, so to speak; falseness, particularly when it had been carried over from a previous performance, earned you a tongue-lashing that left you shaking’ (1990: 259). Any signs of complacency, cosiness, milking an easy laugh or ‘bloody acting’ were derided in an acerbic turn of phrase and denounced in coruscating notes pinned to dressing room walls. Typical is the following extract from one of her pages of notes during the run of Fings Ain’t What They Used T’be: As a young ‘actress’ I was told ‘stick your behind out, dear, it’s always good for a laugh’. Well, this show of ours, at the moment, is one big behind. We may as well go the whole hog and start throwing whitewash at the audience and custard pies at the obtruding behinds only that would need better timing. Can we stop regarding the audience as morons, cut out the rubbish, get back a bit of tension, pace and atmosphere in Act II. Can we stop wriggling our anatomies all over the script, over-acting, bullying laughs out of the audience and playing alone, for approbation. This latter, which looks like selfishness, is mere insecurity and lack of trust in yourselves and each other. You cannot play alone, stop wanting the audience to adore you and you only, they do anyway. People love actors and actresses, so relax and let them have a look at a play for a change. (TRSE Archive)

If a scene had become slow, small or stale, Littlewood used improvisation in on-going rehearsals to pep it up either by throwing in a new dynamic for the actors to work with, or by asking them to play the scene at double speed or to sing, mime or dance the scene to music as a way of releasing stodginess, injecting pace and upping energy levels. WORKING METHOD

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Littlewood also notoriously created friction during a run of a performance by causing arguments or playing people off against each other. In an unpublished manuscript, Avis Bunnage reveals that, ‘Sometimes she’d give an actor personal notes beforehand and not tell anyone else, and this actor would have to think about what she’d just said, go on and do something else and take everyone else totally by surprise’ (TRSE Archive). At short notice, she asked actors to alter what they were familiar with as a way of shaking them up and unfixing something that had become set and, therefore, stale. She regularly asked actors to change the region their character came from, to enter from a different place or in extreme situations to swap roles completely. Prior to a dress rehearsal, complete with paying audience, for a run of The Hostage in America, Littlewood announced to Victor Spinetti and Patience Collier: ‘Now listen you two, I want you to do something for me and I don’t want any argument. Celia and Alfie are getting a bit fly, a little bit stale. They think they’re good, they think they’re being funny and they’re going to ruin themselves. I want you two to take your books and play their parts tonight – don’t change your costumes.’ – I was dressed as Miss Gilchrist, funny black boots, Salvation Army clothes and a hideous wig. I looked dreadful. Victor was dressed as the IRA officer. – ‘Just read the parts, you know the moves, if you don’t it doesn’t matter, and the other two will play your parts.’ Before the curtain went up, she simply announced to the audience: ‘I’ve asked these people to do this because it’s good for them, and I think they’re good enough actors for you to understand what’s going on.’ – I was entirely uninhibited and I’ve never played so well. I felt I was seventeen, with beautiful red hair like Celia. The applause was enormous. Now Joan could do that with people. Who else could be so daring? (Goorney 1981: 156)

The success of these rigorous and unconventional practices relied on the trust built up between long-standing collaborators. Over the years, however, Theatre Workshop became an increasingly loose alliance of regular and irregular participants as established members left for lucrative work elsewhere or became embroiled in West End transfers. This dispersal meant Littlewood increasingly worked with actors who never encountered her rigorous training to forge the creative artist, were unfamiliar with improvisatory techniques and wary of the generational possibilities of her unpredictable methods. As success built on success,

commercial imperatives eroded Littlewood’s ability to maintain a creative ensemble, a factor that contributed to her growing dissatisfaction with theatre and withdrawal from theatre making during the 1960s. However, Littlewood had already left her mark on twentieth-century theatre practice and secured a reputation for invigorating the stage, actor’s training and creative working processes. As Albert Hunt summarises: Without her, none of it could have been imaginable. She taught me most of what I’ve learned about theatre and its possible uses years before I met her. She taught me that theatre wasn’t forced to be either solemn or trivial – that it could be serious joyfully. That acting needn’t consist of agonised performers baring their emotions all over the stage, that there was a kind of acting built on physical skills, teamwork, lightness, adroitness, precision, wit, taking pleasure in performance. That theatre needn’t reflect the ponderous middle class attitudes that dominated (and still dominate) the British stage – that it could capture the exuberance of the people who crowd the terraces at football matches. That making theatre could be a collective experience, a cooperative way of working. That theatre needn’t be cloaked in mystery, pretending to be what it wasn’t, but could be direct and open. (1981: 492)

CONCLUSION

From an examination of Littlewood’s writing, interviews and the comments of those who worked closely with her, this chapter has identified and explored the central principles that underpinned her approach to actor’s training, rehearsal processes and the theatre event. I have tried to convey a sense of how Littlewood made theatre through experimental and collaborative means rather than simply directing actors in plays, a process brought into sharp focus by the detailed consideration of the origins, devising strategies and outcomes achieved by her work on Oh What a Lovely War in Chapter 3.

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3 DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS OF OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR

INTRODUCTION

Ironically, the production that secured Littlewood’s reputation as one of the great twentieth century directors was not her idea, but that of Raffles. On 21st February 1962, he listened to a radio broadcast by Charles Chilton called A Long Long Trail, in which Bud Flanagan narrated a history of the Western Front from an ordinary soldier’s point of view, interspersed with popular songs from the First World War. Raffles was convinced that the songs would make a strong basis for a theatre piece so he acquired a copy of the broadcast and commissioned Chilton, as well as playwrights Gwyn Thomas and Ted Allan, to come up with theatre scripts. Raffles took this decision without any consultation with Littlewood who was absent from the Theatre Royal at the time. Chilton failed to produce a play and the playwrights’ first attempts received a lukewarm reception because they tried to represent the War in naturalistic terms. When Littlewood returned and experienced a read-through of one of the submitted plays, she was adamant she could do better and came up with a rough structure sketching out some key events, quotes and production ideas. After assembling the nucleus of a company, Raffles and Littlewood called a meeting with them at the Theatre Royal attended by Chilton, alongside the Musical Director and choir who performed the songs from the original broadcast. The actors were decidedly under-whelmed; Victor Spinetti and Griffith Davies made their dislike

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of the sentimental songs very clear and Littlewood recalled being taken back to her childhood, ‘red, white and blue bunting, photos of dead soldiers in silver frames, medals in a forgotten drawer, and that look as family and friends sang the songs of eventide’ (Littlewood 1994: 676). Despite reservations and no script, the show went into production with Littlewood as director and the result became a widely recognised theatrical landmark that premiered at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East on 19th March 1963. 1963: POLITICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXT

In many ways, it is not surprising that a seminal piece of theatre should emerge in 1963, as this was an extraordinary year in many respects. It was a year full of high profile events and audacious challenges to authority and the established order. In America, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy shocked the world. The Civil Rights movement reached new heights when 250,000 people marched on Washington to demand equal rights and Martin Luther King delivered his famous ‘I have a dream’ speech. In Britain, the Profumo sex and security scandal involving the minister for war, John Profumo, and Christine Keeler came to light. For many, these revelations not only confirmed the presence of corruption at the heart of government, but also exposed the hypocrisy of those in high office. In addition to unease with domestic, defence and foreign policy, the ‘Profumo Affair’ was another reason cited for the declining faith in Conservative rule that lead to Harold Macmillan’s resignation in October 1963 and the first Conservative defeat since 1951 when Harold Wilson became Prime Minister in 1964. Wilson marked a significant shift in British politics as he ‘stepped forward to present the country with a fresh self-image’ (Hewison 1986: 39) that drew on the modern age of technological change and scientific development. With a distinct Yorkshire accent and ‘an extraordinary ability to project a working-class and anti-establishment image’ (Sked and Cook 1984: 185), Wilson signalled a more egalitarian impulse in Britain and a move away from the traditional political hierarchy epitomised by the new Conservative leader, Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Cultural producers were equally challenging hierarchies in the cultural field. Whilst the National Theatre staged its inaugural production of Hamlet played by Peter O’Toole and directed by Laurence Olivier; John Arden and Margaretta D’Arcy held a ‘festival of anarchy’ in

Kirbymoorside in Yorkshire, which included films, plays, poetry readings and concerts. The Beatles launched their rise to international stardom after releasing Please, Please Me and the television show That Was the Week That Was continued to grab headlines with its satirical treatment of authority figures after its launch in November 1962. THE WAR GAME

Oh What a Lovely War captures a spirit of oppositional defiance and as Paget points out ‘The play’s essential line of argument (which is to attack upper-class incompetence, insensitivity and hypocrisy) will always tell us something important about the time in which it was written’ (Paget 1990b: 119). At the same time, Oh What a Lovely War is the last in a long continuum of works in which Theatre Workshop and its predecessor Theatre Union, characterise war as inextricably tied up in capitalist profiteering, imperialism and the exploitation of the working classes. In terms of the wider political climate, Oh What a Lovely War clearly engaged with the prominent Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) that arose in the late 1950s supported by many Theatre Workshop members, including Littlewood. The Second World War proved those in power had not learnt lessons from the mass destruction of the First World War; whilst the continuing presence of the Cold War and the threat of nuclear war, brought chillingly home by the Cuban Missile Crisis, fuelled a widely supported campaign for unilateral disarmament. The campaign took the position that following the decline of Empire Britain no longer had status as a world power and urged it instead to be ‘a great moral rather than a military influence in the world’ (Sinfield 1983: 31). Debates raged about the futility of war, the economic imperatives that drive war and the humanitarian and environmental damage proposed and implemented through nuclear testing, let alone the prospect of actual nuclear war. In the current climate, it is difficult to imagine how real the threat of nuclear war seemed to be at this time, but this generation lived through the unthinkable events that occurred in Nagasaki and Hiroshima during the Second World War – for them nuclear war was a very real and present danger. Oh What a Lovely War also responded to, and coincided with, wider cultural interest in and attempts to uncover the everyday ‘truth’ of the First World War, the first truly modern, industrialised and mechanised war that caused unimaginable scales of death and trauma as it was played OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR

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Cuban Missile Crisis (1962): a defining moment of the Cold War when the USA discovered Soviet nuclear missile sites in Cuba. Military confrontation was only avoided when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev agreed to President John F. Kennedy’s demands for the base to be dismantled in return for the withdrawal of US missiles from Turkey.

out across land, sea and air. The early 1960s saw numerous works about the First World War thrust into the public arena: autobiographies and biographies of leading figures, radio programmes, anthologies of poetry and BBC2 ran a six-month documentary series, The Great War, in 1964. This material ignited a renewed sense of loss, waste and anger that found expression in CND, as well as a broader questioning of the values and wisdom of the establishment. The long-held suspicion that the War was ill-conceived and ill-managed by a brutal and incompetent upper-class elite that stayed well away from the danger zones of the front line was by now widespread and Theatre Workshop gave voice to this view. In order to provide counter-narratives to the official versions of history written by those in positions of power and in line with concerns to recuperate working-class histories, there was also a move to discover the front line soldier’s role in the War. From the start, the aim of Oh What a Lovely War was to provide a collective voice for the many ordinary soldiers who had lost their lives and been reduced to nameless and faceless statistics. For instance, like many people, Chilton was keen to make sense of his personal history and the loss of his father in the War. As the programme for Oh What a Lovely War explains, in 1958 he visited Arras to photograph his father’s grave, but found no grave and just a list of ‘35,942 officers and men of the Forces of the British Empire who fell in the battle of Arras and who have no known graves’. He writes: What could have possibly happened to a man that rendered his burial impossible? What horror could have taken place that rendered the burial of 35,942 men impossible and all in one relatively small area? The search for the answer to this question has finally led to this production, in the sincere hope that such an epitaph will never have to be written upon any man’s memorial again. (TRSE Archive)

Hence, a major impetus behind Oh What a Lovely War was an attempt to record and honour the experiences of these men, to celebrate their lives and to make them the stars of the show, whilst simultaneously questioning the legitimacy and management of the War that brutally claimed their lives. Having been in the production, it is quite clear to me that Lovely War is a celebration of human resourcefulness in the face of the most appalling catastrophic conditions. So Joan celebrates courage, humour, comradeship, the triumph of life over death and the international solidarity between soldiers. (Barker, cited in Goorney 1981: 126)

Barker’s last point is worth further consideration. Another notable characteristic of Oh What a Lovely War is its international perspective and universal respect for the common soldier, regardless of their country of origin. There is a sense that all the soldiers, whether British, French or German, are pawns in a war driven by capitalist profiteering, imperialism and power-hungry generals. THEATRICALITY

The most striking aspect of Littlewood’s 1963 production of Oh What a Lovely War was the sheer audacity, confidence and variety of her theatrical vision. In this one production, she successfully combined all the theatrical elements she had previously experimented with from her early days producing politically motivated sketches in the 1930s to the creation of what John Russell Taylor refers to as ‘magnified realism’ in productions such as A Taste of Honey. For Oh What a Lovely War she put together a framework of exuberant, parodic, comic and poignant First World War songs on which she hung a collage of antithetical theatrical styles. The traditions of popular entertainment – the seaside pierrot show, music-hall, comic turns – sat alongside huge projected slides of recruiting posters and photographic evidence of trench life and war casualties, whilst a ‘ticker-tape’ newspanel flashed contextual information, official death tolls and statistics of battles fought, won and lost. These living newspaper techniques functioned in dynamic interplay with multi-faceted live action: a Master of Ceremonies’ jocular interjections and actors performing satirical sketches, vaudevillian acts and realistic scenes of trench life. The acting styles were drawn from agit-prop, OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR

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music-hall, expressionist and naturalistic traditions and demanded great flexibility from the actors as they tackled a variety of roles and modes of delivery. In constructing the piece, Littlewood constantly played with the order of scenes, information, songs and slides to find the most potent combination. She stressed the importance of dialogue between the scenes and in Joan’s Book argued that the success of the piece is ‘all a question of juxtaposition’ (Littlewood 1994: 682). Paget has identified the theatrical lineage of European innovators such as Meyerhold, Piscator and Brecht in the creation of this ‘collision montage’ technique and throughout Oh What a Lovely War it is possible to see the impact of scenes coming up against each other to generate ironic counterpoint, bitter commentary, comedy and radical shifts in tone and atmosphere. The formal complexity of the show ensures that the audience has to remain alert to shifts and subtle combinations of material. Thus, ‘the active calling of the spectator’s attention to technique shifts more of the burden of construction of meaning on to the audience’ (Paget 1990a: 61), a process that has led the show to be referred to as an example of Brechtian theory in practice. The overall result was a show that succeeded in being at once ‘epic and intimate, elegantly stylized and grimly realistic; comic and tragic-comic’ (Marowitz 1965: 231), didactic and entertaining, educational and pleasurable, uproarious and deeply moving. Joan Littlewood performed a miracle of integration, not by ironing out the discontinuities but by emphasising them. The preposterousness of the stylistic mixture has been imitated so often since 1963 that it is hard to recall the impact it made then, but style was inseparable from substance in the resultant exposure of historical falsifications. Ruthlessness, mindlessness, and inefficiency had been disguised as recklessness, patriotism, and courageous disregard for actualities. In the fighting itself there had been elements of farce as well as mass slaughter; reducing the slaughter to statistics, the production focused on the anomalies. Most ingenious and most influential of all were the transitions which Joan Littlewood contrived, a series of giddying jolts as hilarity faded into pathos or solemnity was replaced by obscenity. (Hayman 1979: 136)

DEVELOPING THE SHOW

Constructed through collectivist principles of sharing knowledge, discussion, exploring possibilities and theatrical experiment, work to

develop Oh What a Lovely War completely rejected theatrical hierarchy. The generation of material occurred through creative collaboration, argument, trial, error and Littlewood trusting her instincts that what she witnessed emerging on the stage through improvisation could amount to a unified whole when all the elements were fused together. Littlewood was keen to emphasis this collaborative creative impulse in her assessment of the project: Part of the good that has come out of this show is the way which a group of young people have worked together. Each brought a different point of view. They hated some of those songs. They didn’t want to do propaganda, so they argued their way through each scene, and you’ve got, in the piece, the points of view of many people. This has been splendid. What you see is not a piece of direction by a producer. There were no rehearsals as they are known. There was a collection of individuals, more of an anti-group than a group, working on ideas, on songs, on settings, on facts. And if you get a few people with a sense of humour and brains together, you’ll get theatre. (cited in Goorney 1981: 126–7)

In the first instance, detailed research fed into the subject matter of the show. Littlewood presented the whole company with a mandatory reading list and organised lectures to help foster intellectual engagement, interest and identification with the material under discussion as the company reached decisions about the inclusion of key bits of information and the theatricalisation of real life events. As the programme to the show and the published edition of the text acknowledge, multiple documentary sources such as books, newspapers, military despatches, regimental histories and oral testimonies informed the political stance, subject matter and dialogue of the show. In particular, Paget identifies that three texts provided crucial source material: Leon Wolff’s In Flanders Field (1959), Alan Clark’s The Donkeys (1961) and Barbara Tuchman’s August 1914 (1962) (for a detailed analysis of these sources see Paget 1990b). The company also had access to Chilton’s research files, material brought in by the actor, George Sewell, who was an avid collector of First World War memorabilia, and Raymond Fletcher, who receives a credit as a military advisor. Scenes arose from this research in a variety of ways and extensive improvisation gradually built up the detail, characters and interaction that brought the piece to life. Alongside the scenes suggested by Littlewood in her rough plan, Chilton also OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR

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developed scripts that Littlewood employed to kick-start improvisation. As Chilton recalls: I’d work on a scene, I might work two or three days on it, and I’d take it up to Stratford. Then Joan would get me to go and write another one. Meanwhile she’d take what I’d written to the cast and get them to read it. Then she’d say, ‘Right, throw the script away, and play your own!’ And what they thought was worth keeping they kept in their minds. (Paget 1990c: 249)

Littlewood spent many rehearsals exploring how best to convey information about historical events, individuals and the complex manoeuvrings that characterised the relations between people, organisations and countries during the War. Hence, scenes such as the circus parade and the grouse shooting party emerged, which provided potent theatrical metaphors for the ways in which countries vied for positions of power and influence. This experimental approach was praised by Marowitz, who argued that this is ‘the healthiest kind of experiment because it is not exploring, in the abstract, questions of technique and style, but devising forms to suit the practical need of conveying its intentions’ (1965: 233). Mind you, evidence suggests that this was not always easy. For instance, the ‘war profiteers scene’ caused considerable difficulty as the company strove to theatricalise material drawn from Raffles and Littlewood’s documentary sources that included H. C. Engelbrecht and F. C. Hanighen’s Merchants of Death (1934) and The Private Manufacture of Armaments (1936) by P. Noel-Baker. As Brian Murphy, an original member of the cast, remembers: We had to get so much in the way of ‘facts and figures’ over, but in a way that would make the point and also hold the attention. And, let’s face it, entertain. We worked on it, changed it – we always worked on it, it seemed to me, always. We were forever working on that scene! (cited in Paget 1990c: 255)

Littlewood also used extensive improvisation to develop the right atmosphere, rhythm and tone of sections – the boredom of the trenches, the fear caused by bombardment, the exhaustion experienced by the soldiers and the camaraderie forged amongst men forced to live in close proximity and in such dangerous circumstances. Littlewood would

often suggest a scenario and invite the actors to respond by immersing themselves in the moment of improvisation: Imagine there’s a trench running across the stage, you’re in it, protected from the enemy by a wall of sandbags. A bombardment, which has been going on for two days, has just died down. Can you put yourself in that situation? (Littlewood 1994: 677)

From these scenarios, individual characters, relationships and details evolved as Murphy recalls of the Christmas 1914 scene: We first improvised being stuck in trenches, out of which we had to find some kind of character. So somebody would take on the role of being the witty one, or somebody would play cards, or somebody would just want to play a mouth organ. (cited in Paget 1990c: 252)

The dialogue for this scene owed much to the spoof newspapers generated by troops in the Ypres sector during 1916 that the company reproduced in the programme for the show. Littlewood’s faith in her ensemble, alongside the dynamic combination of detailed research, documentary actuality and the chance encounters that originate during improvisation characterised the development of Oh What a Lovely War and the creation of a seminal piece of theatre that could never have been pre-planned. The result, according to Richard Eyre, ‘was political theatre that, unlike most of the genre, neither patronised its audience, nor tried to reprimand of reform them. It sought to inform and to entertain, and it broke your heart in the process’ (2000: 269). Nevertheless, Littlewood’s eclectic approach sat uncomfortably with the more familiar divisions of labour and classic hierarchical structures seen in the theatre industry. Whilst the ensemble gathered for Oh What a Lovely War were familiar with Littlewood’s methods from prior collaborations, people new to this mode of working experienced some difficulties, particularly when it came to issues of authorship. Ronald Hayman recognised that ‘it may never become clear how credit should be apportioned either for the concept or for the text’ (1979: 134) and there have certainly been several expressions of dismay from Allan and Chilton that they did not receive due credit for their contributions to the production. OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR

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Figure 3.1 Extract from Oh What a Lovely War programme (1963). Courtesy of Theatre Royal Stratford East Archives Collection

THE PIERROT SHOW

Littlewood refused to have actors depicting events from the War through a sustained realistic narrative and instead created a multiple theatrical experience that utilised numerous elements to bring the causes, character and consequences of the War to life. Rejecting Raffles’ plans for authentic khaki costumes and sandbags, Littlewood decided on the format of a music hall style pierrot show driven by a Master of Ceremonies who, with a ringmaster’s whip, directly addresses the audience, tells jokes and introduces scenes. The seaside, end-of-pier, pierrot show not only drew on the medieval Italian commedia dell’arte tradition that Littlewood returned to throughout her career, it also specifically referenced a form of British entertainment contemporaneous with the First World War. In fact, the Master of Ceremonies refers to the performers as ‘The Merry Roosters’, appropriating the name of a troupe that existed during this period. Therefore, Littlewood deliberately placed Oh What a Lovely War as part of a long continuum of popular

entertainment perpetrated by strolling players who existed outside of traditional theatre structures. Arguing that ‘the pierrot imagery is more decorative than functional’ (1985: 130), Joel Schechter suggests that the pierrot costumes were solely about establishing historical precedent and referencing a music-hall style rather than serving any specific political or theatrical purpose. However, this is a rather limited assessment. In theatrical terms, the pierrot costumes become stark Brechtian alienating devices that constantly remind the audience that they are watching actors playing pierrots playing soldiers or representing real-life military personnel. Right from the outset it is also clear from the stage directions that the pierrots are ‘one of us’, they are associated with the audience as they enter and watch the newspanel, just as the audience would be doing, before beginning the first scene. Dressed in loose, shiny, white satin pierrot costumes with traditional black ruffs and pompoms, the actors are dressed in a neutralising uniform of sorts, which stresses their collectivity in a similar way to the army uniform. The costumes undergo rapid emblematic transformation through the addition of hats, belts, cloaks and other more specific props, but the underlying clown imagery never goes away. Equally the setting of a traditional seaside entertainment, complete with red, white and blue fairy lights and highly coloured circus tubs, remains throughout the action. Together with the costumes, the set serves as a signifier of a more frivolous, innocent time corrupted by the brutal machinations of war or, as Littlewood put it, a satirical reminder that ‘war is only for clowns’ (Littlewood 1994: 675). Hence, Littlewood places the content’s emphasis on military blunders, war profiteering and mass slaughter in complex dialogue with the form of the show as the documentation of death is juxtaposed with seemingly light-hearted banter, popular songs and the affectionate depiction of pierrots. DOCUMENTARY MATERIAL/THE ‘TECHNOLOGICAL ACTOR’

According the Schechter, ‘The pierrot show framework serves largely to stress the past tense of events’ (1985: 131); in direct contrast to this historical signification, Oh What a Lovely War employed cutting-edge new technologies. This strategy connects the show to Piscator’s ambitious attempts, in the 1920s and 1930s, to use technology (principally film) to bring the outside world on to the stage. The multi-media OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR

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environment and ability to ‘cut’ between elements similarly aligns the piece to a new sophisticated ‘technological age’ in which televisions and even rudimentary computers were becoming part of everyday life. According to Paget, the modernist ‘technological actor’ and documentary elements of the production were ‘used subtly, dialogically, both to illuminate and to throw into relief the activities of the production’s human agents, the actors’ (2003: 72). As such, technology enables a dialogue to take place between the historical period of the First World War and Theatre Workshop’s theatrical treatment of it using dramatic scenes as well as a mixture of existing, adapted and hired lighting, sound and projection equipment including a large screen capable of moving in and out of the space quickly and silently, two projectors, a tickertape newpanel supported by scaffolding and a complex sound system. All required meticulous timing to achieve maximum impact during the production and throughout rehearsals Littlewood and several technicians played with the choice, timing and volume of sound effects, the order and speed of slides and the placement of newspanel facts and figures, as well as practical ways of ensuring good sightlines and avoiding image distortion and spill. According to Ivor Dykes, a technician at the Theatre Royal, ‘Theatre Workshop productions at Stratford NEVER had formal lighting, plotting or exotic things like technical rehearsals’ (1998: 4), instead technical elements were part of the wider creative process and subject to continual revision. The newspanel was inspired by one Littlewood had seen over the Friedrichstrasse in East Berlin and sourced by Raffles, who had an uncanny knack of acquiring things that Littlewood wanted. Raffles took responsibility for ‘assembling and collating the facts and figures which would flicker across the panel at a relentless speed while living, breathing men and women held the stage. The dead only appeared as numbers’ (Littlewood 1994: 683). Relaying information from documentary sources meant the newspanel acquired ‘imperious authority’ (Paget 2003: 72), particularly given the signification of the newspanel as a conveyor of facts. The technical team were intricately aware of the power of the words and statistics being ushered across the stage and played with the speed and timing to ensure maximum impact. ‘Words were accelerated and decelerated in their travel across the proscenium, and they were highlighted for emphasis’ (ibid.: 74). Hence, no matter what happens on stage, or the theatricality of any given moment, the piece draws the audience back to the actuality of the First World War

through the stark record of facts and figures, as well as the large-scale posters and photographic images projected to tower above the actors. These slides underlined the human dimension; these were not just nameless and faceless figures but men with histories, families, friends and futures. ‘Joan was insistent that we get away from the idea that these people were old dim photographs long dead. These are young men and women full of life and ideals, they do not know they are to be wasted!’ (Dykes, undated manuscript, TRSE Archive). It is they, and the millions more they stand in for, who reside at the heart of this piece and technology makes their presence possible. As Paget describes, ‘This theatre tradition, too, testifies to the twentieth century’s faith in the ability of the photograph to represent reality and to capture and preserve significant historical experiences’ (1996: 94). In its powerful combination of text and image, the documentary material translated through technology, authenticates the stage action, asserts its credibility and provides a potent multi-dimensional agent in the cognitive and emotive impact of Oh What a Lovely War. THE SONGS

Littlewood maintained the music-hall quality of the show through the dominant presence of songs from the First World War that appeared in the original BBC broadcast, as well as a few additions. However, Littlewood was adamant that Oh What a Lovely War would not adopt the nostalgic mood and sentimental atmosphere that pervaded A Long, Long Trail. She wanted to ‘shed the schmaltz’ (Littlewood 1994: 679) and asked her actors to tackle the songs ‘as if you were talking to someone’ (ibid.: 678) rather than trying to offer a beautiful rendering. Throughout the show, the songs serve multiple purposes such as period authenticity; comic interludes; examples of propaganda; bitter commentary; gallows humour and ironic critique. The show opens with an overture of songs that from the patriotic Land of Hope and Glory and English national anthem, to the rousing Oh It’s a Lovely War and the resigned mood of Goodbye-ee and Pack Up Your Troubles, capture a sense of the shifting mood and atmosphere that characterises the show. The overture ends with I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside, which sets the mood for the light-hearted pierrot show beginning that continues with Row, Row, Row, a gentle story of Johnny Jones and his girlfriend Flo as they kiss and cuddle on his ‘cute little boat’. However, this age of innocence has been well and truly OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR

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Figure 3.2 Avis Bunnage, Oh What a Lovely War (1963). Photograph by Romano Cagnoni. Courtesy of Theatre Royal Stratford East Archives Collection

disrupted by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and Germany’s invasion of Belgium by the next song Belgium Put the Kibosh on the Kaiser, a hopelessly upbeat, jingoistic song that celebrates British victory and the humiliation of Germany. The next big number, I’ll Make a Man of You, is pure music hall with a woman delivering a mixture of sexual innuendo and comedy as she contributes to the recruitment drive. The music-hall style emphasised in the grand costuming of a long sequinned dress complete with an oversize hat covered in white feather plumes. The songs in the first act reflect the optimism exhibited in the early period of the War, but the mood shifts abruptly at the close of the act when a lowkey rendition of Goodbye-ee, is drowned out by the sound effect of a shell exploding and an ironic newspanel declaring ‘welcome 1915 . . . happy year that will bring victory and peace’ (p. 54). A sombre mood continues throughout the second act with songs depicting trench warfare, such as Gassed Last Night and Hush, Here Comes a Whizzbang, alongside the dark humour of I Don’t Want To Be a Soldier and the defeated tone of If You Want the Old Battalion. Roger Gellert found that: In the context of history the Tommies’ songs have a crushing pathos the original singers can’t have guessed at, and after being informed, quite unsentimentally, that 13,000 men died in three hours at Passchendaele for a net gain of 100 yards, it is heart-breaking to hear ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’. (1963: 470)

Towards the end of Act Two, bitter parodies of hymns including Onward Christian Soldiers and What a Friend we have in Jesus, depict anger towards the army commanders, resentment against the church and a sense of anguish and purposelessness. A shift that characterises the trajectory of the play from the Act One focus on the beginnings of the War in 1914 and the optimism, jingoism and patriotism for the cause; to the second Act, which compresses the final years of the War and deals with the scale of death, destruction and maiming on the Western Front. ACT ONE

The opening style and mood is that of a variety night with a Master of Ceremonies (MC) welcoming the audience, telling jokes and generally lulling the audience into a false sense of security as he declares ‘We’ve got some songs for you, a few battles and some jokes’ (p. 12). The mood OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR

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Figure 3.3 Murray Melvin, Oh What a Lovely War (1963). Photograph by Romano Cagnoni. Courtesy of Theatre Royal Stratford East Archives Collection

is light, jovial and conceals the seriousness of the material, just as the title, Oh What a Lovely War, is tainted with irony by the end of the show. From the outset, it is clear that the production abandons any pretence of a fourth wall and refuses to present the illusion of ‘truth’. This is a theatrical event that openly acknowledges itself as such as the MC embarks on a three-way conversation with the audience and actors as pierrots. The audience play an active part in the proceedings and their presence is crucial to activate the live interaction between stage and auditorium. After the pierrots sing their light-hearted period piece, Row, Row, Row, the MC introduces the beginning of the ‘War Game’ and the opening Circus Parade. THE BEGINNINGS OF WAR: THE CIRCUS PARADE AND PROMENADE

The theatrical device of the Circus Parade and Promenade can be traced back to Meyerhold, who ‘used exercises based on the traditional circus “parade” opening’ (Leach 1989: 73) and even staged one in his 1924 production of The Forest. Taking inspiration from Meyerhold’s practice, the pierrots enter in the stylised national dress of France, Britain, Germany, Austria and Russia and engage in a circular parade of the stage. Introduced by a band playing the national music of their various countries each representative unit provides a brief outline of how other nations view them. For example, Britain is presented as a rather arrogant nation protecting its colonies and Empire; France as a centre of civilisation, culture and love and Germany as ‘disciplined, moral, industrious’ (p. 13), but with the hint of an inferiority complex. There is a sense of the build up to war as the nations express imperialist and nationalist ambitions, vie for position, eye up their competitors and deny the possibility of war. A stance that quickly dissolves into bravado as the nations talk up their military power and strategic planning after eavesdropping on the Kaiser and General Moltke discussing their scheme to pursue world domination and the 1914 Schiefflen plan. During this scene, the first slides come into play depicting a map of Germany’s plan to invade Belgium before attacking Paris, a map of France’s plan for a counter attack and images of the Russian infantry and a British battleship. As occurs throughout Oh What a Lovely War, these images pre-empt what is to come and provide a stark reminder of the historical actuality of the events depicted. OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR

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Moving the action along with regular blows on his whistle, the MC figure introduces the next section entitled ‘Find the Anarchist’, which portrays the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. The pierrots embark on a jolly promenade before the action is brutally interrupted by a pistol shot. An innocent scene of strolling, chatting and flirting is harshly disrupted by the event that triggers the War. Littlewood used ‘Living Newspaper’ techniques of short exchanges between newsboys, girls and businessmen to convey the confusion and rumour that accompanies the onset of war, until Germany makes a formal declaration of mobilisation and invades Luxembourg and Belgium. Following this scene of frantic exchanges the stage directions indicate: ‘Explosion. The lights go out. Full stage lighting flashes on. The whole company is standing in a semicircle grinning and clapping wildly but soundlessly. The band plays a line of the National Anthem. All the pierrots stand to attention’ (p. 22). This expressionistic image of the predominately white pierrots grinning and soundlessly clapping the onset of war is eerily suggestive of the many ghosts that will be created as the brutality of war takes its course. To break the mood following the pierrots slow exit, the MC ushers in the projection screen to show images of civilians waving flags, cheering military parades and recruiting as the band plays a chorus of ‘We Don’t Want to Lose You’. During the last chorus, a slide of General Kitchener with the caption ‘Your Country Needs You’ appears and the pierrots replace their pierrot hats for uniform caps, kiss the girls goodbye and march off saluting to their unknown fate. The optimistic newspanel ‘COURAGE WILL BRING US VICTORY’ (p. 24) and the confident cry of ‘Pour la gloire’ as the French officers charge is rapidly undermined by the sound of machine gun fire, the sight of men collapsing and the newpanel simply announcing the fall of Brussels. This sharp change consolidated in speeches by French and German Officers that emphasis the parity of the soldier’s experience regardless of their country of origin: FRENCH OFFICER: The battlefield is unbelievable; heaps of corpses, French and German, lying everywhere, rifles in hand. Thousands of dead lying in rows on top of each other in an ascending arc from the horizontal to an angle of sixty degrees. The guns recoil at each shot; night is falling and they look like old men sticking out their tongues and spitting fire. The rain has started, shells are bursting and screaming; artillery fire is the worst. I lay all night listening to the wounded groaning. The cannonading goes on; whenever it stops we

hear the wounded crying from all over the woods. Two or three men go mad every day. (p. 27)

The simple, present tense observational narrative is deeply moving and provides a jolt to the audience as it appears directly after the music-hall jollity and cartoon-like imagery of ‘Belgium Put the Kibosh on the Kaiser’. However, the tone shifts again for the bayonet drill sequence. THE BAYONET DRILL

According to Littlewood, the drill sergeant’s scene emerged after Raffles invited a serving sergeant to come and help the actors with their portrayal of soldiers. The resulting torrent of abuse, chaos and scenes of ‘lunging and stabbing and twisting imaginary bayonets in the imagined enemy’s guts’ (Littlewood 1994: 681) was unintentionally funny. Moreover, when the others left Melvin blowing his nose whilst they charged at the audience with blood-curdling cries and Griffith Davies jumped down into the auditorium and chased the cleaner, Littlewood knew she had the makings of a great scene. However, it was only when Spinetti offered to play the drill sergeant as an incomprehensible Welshman that Littlewood was convinced they would be able to get the scene past the censors. As it transpired, the harsh language remained implied rather than actual and the comedy arose through the sheer speed of Spinetti’s delivery as he cajoled four inept pierrot recruits to be aggressive with walking sticks instead of rifles. The recruits’ failure further fuels the comedy as the distance increases between the sergeant’s instructions and the recruits’ ability to fulfil his demands, as rifles are lost, dropped and pathetically handled. This highly comic scene of male incompetence is juxtaposed with the song ‘I’ll Make a Man of You’ and slides of 1914 recruitment posters appealing to male bravado and pride. COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN

The next scene centres on a meeting between British army commanders, Field Marshall Sir John French and Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson and French leader General Lanrezac and Belgium leader General de Moranneville. It introduces the dominant theme of the British army commanders’ arrogance, class prejudice and incompetence. For example, OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR

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French’s refusal to take Wilson’s advice or to allow an interpreter to aid the conversation is indicative of his blind faith in his own abilities. The resulting conversation at crossed purposes is comical, but has much deeper implications. As General Moranneville reminds French and Lanrezac, if there had been ‘Decisive action by Britain and France, while my troops were holding Liège [then] the war would have been over by now’ (p. 38). Instead, the generals are more concerned with protecting their own interests and self-congratulation, a fact theatrically symbolised by the opulent exchange of medals in the midst of military confusion. Once again, there is no attempt to give a naturalistic portrayal of these men, they are satirical caricatures; alternatively, the emphasis is on conveying information about the character of men in charge of the War, it is about establishing their failings and an attitude towards them. THE SOLDIERS TAKE CENTRE STAGE

Theatre Workshop revealed the chilling consequences of the British commanders’ incompetence and the ingrained hierarchical class structure of the War in the next scene. The newspanel introduces the scene: ‘AUG 25 RETREAT FROM MONS. AUG 30 FIRST BRITISH WOUNDED ARRIVE AT WATERLOO’ (p. 40). Rather than the flags and heroes welcome the soldiers expect; their superiors have stranded them without ambulances as they have only arranged transport for officers. In an awkward exchange between an officer and soldier, the reality of the men’s function as front-line fodder is highlighted when the officer departs saying he’ll see the men back at the front, a sentiment reiterated by a nurse who informs a soldier on a stretcher that she will have him swiftly back to the front. The soldier’s collective anonymity is emphasised by the gradual build-up to their singing ‘We’re ‘ere because we’re ‘ere, because we’re ‘ere, because we’re ‘ere’ (p. 41) over and over until the Sergeant curtails them. The sense of working-class solidarity is further underlined when local lorry drivers volunteer to transport the wounded soldiers in their lunch break – a small act that tells a big story about Littlewood and Theatre Workshop’s class-based sympathies. Following a newspanel imparting the information that there were 300,000 Allied casualties during August alone and ironic slides depicting adverts for health remedies such as Beechams, Carter’s Little Liver Pills and Phospherine, all useless in the face of men blinded, maimed and

suffering from shell shock, is one of the most powerful scenes of Oh What a Lovely War. Offering a moving portrait of the camaraderie, resilience and black humour exhibited by men engaged in trench warfare, the Christmas 1914 scene offers a master-class in how to create naturalistic dialogue, quick-fire banter, dramatic tension and a compelling vision of collective humanity. As Paget informs us: Arguably, one of the reasons why Lovely War was so successful was that its collectivity was so manifest in performance, offering a potent theatrical emblem for another sense of collectivity – that which helped sustain the ‘ordinary’ soldier of the Great War. (Paget 1990a: 67)

As in the previous Waterloo scene, the emphasis is on the soldiers who, by being nameless, are representative of all the soldiers who fought in the War. From the outset, the pierrot soldiers are seen co-existing as they establish the scene with humorous signposts proclaiming ‘Piccadilly’ and ‘Conducted tours of the German trenches’. The actors employed appropriate movement to convey cramped conditions and the physical discomfort of chilblains, corns and infestation, as well as creating the rhythms and atmosphere of habitual familiarity as they settled down in their shared space. Moreover, collectivity is not only exhibited by British soldiers as they share banter, talk of their loves back home and ways of coping with the boredom of trench life such as playing a harmonica, writing for a satirical magazine or composing letters, but also between the British and German soldiers as they enact the famous Christmas meeting in ‘No Man’s Land’. The fact it is German soldiers who initiate the connection, signals Theatre Workshop’s desire to present the ‘enemy’ in a sympathetic light that transgressed the common perception of a cold, autocratic and unfeeling German character. As the men share greetings, gifts, drinks and songs, it becomes abundantly clear that all these men are stranded in a trench on the Western Front during Christmas and that they have far more in common than that which divides them. This scene of everyday connections between human beings freezes on a newspanel statistic giving the casualty figures for the first year of the War, a grim shift in tone lightened temporarily by the gentle rendering of the song ‘Goodbye-ee’ and the optimistic newspanel ‘WELCOME 1915 . . . HAPPY YEAR THAT WILL BRING VICTORY AND PEACE’, both cut off by the sound of a shell exploding. OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR

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Such a ‘final number’ runs deliberately counter to theatrical folk-lore about musical entertainments – that is, that the interval song should be upbeat in order to lift the audience’s spirits. Here, ironies surrounding the idea of ‘goodbye’ (Brother Bertie’s cheeriness about it, contrasted with the fact of its likely finality), coalesce as the song rather lamely (from a theatrical-musical point of view) ‘grows fainter’, as the stage direction instructs. The final optimistic newspanel is then undercut by the shriek of a shell. (Paget 1990c: 251)

Rather than leaving the audience with a rousing number, Littlewood gave a Brechtian-style indicator of the shift to a pessimistic appraisal of the realities of war in the second act. ACT TWO

Act Two begins with a newspanel, giving details of extensive British losses at the Battle of Ypres, Aubers Ridge and Loos, whilst also announcing the first German use of poison gas. Sombre material ironically undercut by the upbeat song Oh It’s a Lovely War, sung by the whole company. The tone jumps again straight away when the MC informs the audience that after the Conscription Act ‘51,000 able-bodied men left home without leaving any forwarding addresses . . . and that’s in West Ham alone’ (p. 56). This statement brought the material right back down to earth from the rather romantic vision of British and German soldiers holding hands across the divide. This was a war that caused immense suffering and death and the following scenes set about attributing blame and culpability. THE WAR GAME PART II: FIND THE BIGGEST PROFITEER

In the first scene after the interval, Oh What a Lovely War tackles the role of capitalism in generating and fuelling the War. Echoing the concerns of Brecht’s Mother Courage (1939), which Littlewood produced in 1955, the scene emphasises the economic and political ramifications of war through a cartoonish, agit-prop style representation of arms manufacturers from Britain, France, Germany and America, alongside a Swiss banker, joined for a grouse shoot in the Scottish Highlands. These highly caricatured men will go no where near the front line and instead spend

Figure 3.4 Brian Murphy and Victor Spinetti, Oh What a Lovely War (1963). Photograph by Romano Cagnoni. Courtesy of Theatre Royal Stratford East Archives Collection

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their time developing and selling weapons to the highest bidder with not the slightest hint of guilt that German fuses are being used in British grenades or that the French purchased German barbed wire to ensnare German troops. The scene deftly communicates the principle of profit over patriotism. As they shoot grouse, cry with delight and count their dead birds, they congratulate each other on their business acumen, success and profitability. The dead grouse offer potent symbols of all the dead men shot down with similar ease on the front line; whilst the squeals of delight underline the fact that every spent bullet equals profit for the arms manufacturers. Whilst the scene points the finger at all profiteers, the newspanel framing the scene states, ‘21,000 AMERICANS BECAME MILLIONAIRES DURING WAR’ (p. 57), highlighting fears about American imperialism. Equally, the scene is full of dark humour as the profiteers discuss the inconvenience of blockades disrupting the free-flow of trade and they voice their fears that a peaceful resolution will damage their profits, share prices and the world’s stock markets. However, critics were specifically damning of the scene and accused it of lifelessness, over-simplicity and failing to find the form to convey the content. Criticisms that perhaps hark back to the difficulties encountered during rehearsals (discussed earlier). The consequences of the war profiteers’ callous actions in the name of profit are brought chillingly to the fore by off-stage voices singing Gassed Last Night, whilst slides depict actuality images of French, German and British infantrymen facing gas attacks, soldiers with bandaged eyes following gas explosions and soldiers up to their knees in mud. In accordance with the ‘collision montage’ style, these provocative images are juxtaposed with a scene of black comedy when a Commanding Officer (CO) visits a trench to congratulate men who have survived in the face of snipers, shells and bombs, as well as having their own gas blown back at them following a change in the wind’s direction. The upper-class CO’s ignorance of the conditions the men face is quickly established and climaxes with the discovery of a German soldier’s leg. The following music-hall style exchange reveals mordant humour and the level of desensitisation the soldiers are forced to muster: LIEUTENANT: Hardcastle. Remove the offending limb. SERGEANT: Well, we can’t do that, sir; it’s holding up the parapet. We’ve just consolidated the position. LIEUTENANT: Well, get a shovel and hack it off; and then dismiss the men.

He goes off. SERGEANT: Right, sir. What the bloody hell am I going to hang my equipment on now. All right, lads, get back, get yourselves some char. Heads, trunks, blood all over the place, and all he’s worried about is a damned leg. (p. 67)

THE ‘PALM COURT’ SCENE AND SIR DOUGLAS HAIG

After the pierrot soldiers depart, the stage is set for a plush official reception. A sense of a bygone age is evoked by a couple singing Roses of Picardy before forming ‘a static tableau, as for a period photograph’ (p. 67). A waltz is played and a comic anti-naturalistic device is inserted as an actor formally announces the guests whilst standing with a jardinière containing pampas-grass on his head. As the Commanding Officers of the British army, Sir John French, Sir Douglas Haig, Sir Henry Wilson and Sir William Robertson arrive with their partners, Littlewood created a filmic style fading in and out of focus as the characters danced around the space before delivering their lines downstage. The scene marks the audience’s introduction to Haig, who plays a pivotal role in Act Two. New in post, the others are suspicious of his ability to overcome failed staff college entrance examinations, quick ascent to power and origins in ‘trade’, which for some makes him unfit to hold a post in high office. Indeed, the entire scene is devoted to uncovering social hierarchies, power brokering, nepotism, petty squabbles, jealousy and gossip in high office. Rather than figures deserving of their positions and respect, an impression is given of childish games of one-up-man-ship as Robertson is publicly snubbed, Haig reveals French’s weakness for unsuitable women and Haig is portrayed as a humourless individual driven by personal ambition. As Paget recalled, ‘George Sewell presented a dried-out, repressed husk of a man – convinced of and blinkered by his own righteousness’ (2003: 84). An interpretation that fuels the scene following further large-scale images of dead soldiers of several nations, a French soldier on burial duty and a field of white wooden crosses that accompanies the song, Hush, Here Comes a Whizzbang sung off-stage. The fact the song comes from off-stage is important, as it means that the actuality images are the only things on stage, the portraits of soldiers and those implied by the burial sites are the central focus for the audience and this vision of multiple corpses is held directly next to a OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR

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scene presenting Haig’s blind faith, arrogance and brutal disregard for the lives of his men. As a slide depicts men advancing across no-man’sland to almost certain death and a man slowly sings There’s a Long, Long Trail, Haig delivers an impassioned oration: Complete victory . . . the destruction of German militarism . . . victory march on Berlin . . . slow deliberate fire is being maintained on the enemy positions . . . at this moment my men are advancing across no-man’s-land in full pack, dressing from left to right; the men are forbidden under pain of court-martial to take cover in any shell-hole or dugout . . . their magnificent morale will cause the enemy to flee in confusion . . . the attack will be driven home with the bayonet . . . I feel that every step I take is guided by divine will. (p. 77)

The combination of image, song and speech is deeply chilling and curtailed by the sound of heavy bombardment and a newspanel that reads: ‘FEBRUARY . . . VERDUN . . . TOTAL LOSS ONE AND A HALF MILLION MEN’ (p. 77). Haig’s speech is not just empty rhetoric it has unimaginable human consequences. A fact hammered home in the next scene when Haig orders a newly arrived unit from Ireland, who have gone without food for forty-eight hours, to make a fresh assault across no-man’s-land. Expressionistically abstracting their attack as a spirited Irish jig, Littlewood juxtaposed this highly theatrical approach with down-to-earth naturalistic dialogue as the soldiers advance only to find themselves under attack from their own side. As the men protest, their comrades shoot them as enemy and the scene dissolves from naturalism into expressionism once more. MRS PANKHURST

As Mrs Pankhurst delivers her speech on a typical ‘speaker’s corner’ style platform, Theatre Workshop insert the first openly pacifist voices in a typical agit-prop style scene that attempts to simplistically present a two-way pro- and anti-war argument. After reading an eloquent letter from George Bernard Shaw denouncing the War as the folly of capitalists, politicians and all those lusting after power, Pankhurst charges the leaders with war-mongering, failing to enter into peace negotiations and threatening civilisation. Playing to a hostile crowd who heckle her as a traitor for over-intellectualising the war effort and undermining the

cause that their husbands are fighting for, Pankhurst retorts by suggesting the ordinary men and women have been seduced by misplaced patriotism and duped by duplicitous politicians and media propaganda. The strength of her convictions and degree of cynicism is powerfully conveyed, but so too is the faith the un-named men and women have in war and their refusal to accept dissenting voices. As the newpanel ushers in the information that 60,000 men died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the crowd affirms their support for the War and drown Pankhurst’s objections with the rousing jingoistic anthem Rule Britannia. However, the patriotic fervour exhibited by those relatively safe at home is comically undercut by two drunken soldiers who enter to sing a music-hall style rendition of I Don’t Want to be a Soldier, which brings the subject right back down to earth from Pankhurst’s attempt at an ethical debate. Unfortunately, millions of men were never to return home to England and the next scene’s treatment of the Battle of the Somme offers a damning indictment of failed leadership and suicidal decisions that led to horrific scales of death and carnage. THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME

The ineptitude of Haig’s leadership is emphasised throughout the ‘Somme Scene’ with several renditions of children’s songs including Pop Goes the Weasel and They Were Only Playing Leapfrog to the tune of John Brown’s Body. As Haig issues orders to attack, the references to playground songs suggest that he might as well be playing with toy soldiers for all the duty of care he displays towards his men. The implication is that he views the men as fodder, and worse, that he has no compunction about sending all available men to their deaths as long as he is able to secure victory by having the last man standing. Safely behind a desk at headquarters and unmoved by the news that Allied forces are facing seventy per cent casualties, he is more concerned that one of his horses dismounted the King and what this might mean for his chances of promotion. The scene suggests his distance from the action, unquestioning sense of duty, unyielding faith in his abilities and belief that he is ‘the predestined instrument of providence for the achievement of victory for the British army’ (p. 86) completely blinds him to the realities of war and the huge death tolls his decisions are wreaking. Interspersed with Haig’s orders and under his watchful gaze, Littlewood places short vignettes of soldiers caught up in a hopeless cause, OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR

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Figure 3.5 Trench scene, Oh What a Lovely War (1963). Photograph by Romano Cagnoni. Courtesy of Theatre Royal Stratford East Archives Collection

Figure 3.6 George Sewell as Haig, Oh What a Lovely War (1963). Photograph by Romano Cagnoni. Courtesy of Theatre Royal Stratford East Archives Collection

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forced to listen to the cries of the wounded stuck in no-man’s-land and preparing for their imminent deaths with gallows humour. The overwhelming sense of purposelessness and defeat is enshrined in the soldiers’ rendition of If You Want the Old Battalion, with the repeated refrain: ‘We’ve seen them, we’ve seen them / hanging on the old barbed wire’ (p. 89); whilst Theatre Workshop’s depiction of Haig as little better than a murderer is secured by the brief appearance of a pierrot as the notorious French serial killer Landru, who stole from, murdered and burnt the bodies of ten women during the First World War. However, Haig’s death toll is shockingly and starkly revealed by the newspanel that announces at the end of the scene: ‘SOMME BATTLE ENDS . . . TOTAL LOSS 1,332,000 MEN . . . GAIN NIL’ (p. 93). The implication is clear – Haig is a serial killer of unprecedented proportions. FOR GOD AND COUNTRY

Theatre Workshop stressed Haig’s religiosity and the hypocrisy of institutional religion during the church scene in which the pierrot soldiers bleakly transpose traditional hymns with their own irreligious words and dark humour. The collective singing and pessimistic content of the songs places the men at sharp odds with the sentiments exhibited by the Chaplain as he singles out Haig for silent prayer and seeks God’s approval and support. Once again, Haig’s personal ambition and selfregard is stressed as he asks the Lord for victory, specifically ‘before the Americans arrive’ (p. 96) so that he can take full credit for any success. Reviewing the show in Encore, Marowitz commented on the fact that: God is seen to be the rank immediately above Field Marshall, and war, particularly in the eyes of the British, becomes a test of Christian stamina founded on the assumption that victory belongs, as if by divine right, to wellheeled, white protestants with double-barrelled names and country estates. (Marowitz 1965: 231)

As the soldiers depart they sing ‘Whiter than the whitewash on the wall’, words with multiple meanings given the context: for example, the sense that the blood of those sacrificed will be whitewashed out of history in the name of victory or that religion acts as a whitewash on the barbaric acts that are being perpetrated in its name. Whilst Haig

continues to justify his actions, the on-stage soldiers are replaced by the documentary slides of real-life soldiers at war and a newspanel giving a death toll for those killed on the Western Front up to November 1916. The pierrot soldiers re-appear miming burial duty and sing a song first seen in Behan’s The Hostage when the hostage is killed and springs back to life with The Bells of Hell, a defiant song of life cheated by death, which holds no victory for anybody. THE FINAL PUSH

As Oh What a Lovely War proceeds towards its climax, Littlewood chose to come back once more to the humour, compassion and resilience of the men as they dig trenches, cope with appalling physical conditions and discuss missing comrades. As the soldiers go about their everyday business, Haig delivers overly confident speeches and a nurse laments the butchery she encounters all around her. A moving sequence develops as a newspanel announces that the average life of a machine gunner is four minutes, followed by a rendition of Keep the Home Fires Burning and a quickfire newspanel giving details of British losses and territory gained. Yet, rather than capitalise on this emotive atmosphere, Littlewood immediately shifts the tone to avoid any possibility of mawkishness. Encouraging the audience to join in and not look so gloomy, a female performer sings Sister Susie’s Sewing Shirts, a light-hearted music-hall style tongue-twister, yet even this crowd-pleaser is undermined by the presence of pierrots as German, French and British generals debating when the War will end. The piece once more conveys a never-ending war game as the dates go up and up until they reach the year of production. Immediately after this a group of pierrots as French soldiers mutiny as they are ordered to advance into the trenches, proclaiming they are ‘like lambs to the slaughter’ they advance baaing towards the audience before a burst of gun-fire causes their collapse. When Theatre Workshop took Oh What a Lovely War to the Paris Festival in 1963, Goorney recalls that the show: . . . made a tremendous impression. That the carnage and killing actually took place on French soil must have brought the horror of the First World War very close to the French audiences, and during the scene when the French soldiers are depicted as sheep going to the slaughter, the audience rose in their seat and cheered. (1981: 157) OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR

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As the final newspanel announces ‘THE WAR TO END ALL WARS . . . KILLED TEN MILLION . . . WOUNDED TWENTY-ONE MILLION . . . MISSING SEVEN MILLION’ (p. 106), a slide sequence depicts the real-life soldiers the show represents and honours. As Paget thoughtfully informs us, ‘while the play has no hero, it presents an implied hero who is a constant presence-in-absence. This shadow-figure, simultaneously individual and abstract, is the Unknown Soldier whose eternal flame burns in so many European capital cities’ (2004: 400). It is to these heroes that transcend age, political agendas and nations that the show turns as it closes with the image of a long line of soldiers walking away from the camera toward the trench. Their final destination is open, yet what has gone before has provided a potent examination of the origins of their journey and the moving final song, And When They Ask Us, offers a glimpse of the memories forged in the minds of a generation of men who could never convey the extent of the horrors they witnessed. SELLING OUT

Owing to Theatre Workshop’s lack of public subsidy, Littlewood had no option but to capitalise on the critical success of Oh What a Lovely War’s four-week run at the Theatre Royal with a year long run at the Wyndham’s Theatre in the West End. This move was made slightly more palatable by the fact Littlewood and Raffles formed their own West End management to ensure that all the royalties would be theirs rather than in the pockets of a West End impresario. However, the transition from the East to the West End was not without difficulties and the company faced accusations of nostalgia, sentimentality and ‘sellingout’. On a practical level, the larger Wyndham’s stage ‘produced a bigger sense of occasion’ (Pryce-Jones 1963: 838), which also demanded a less subtle style of performance as events had to be underlined to ensure those at the back of the stalls could appreciate what was going on. For example, rather than the simplicity of one singer performing the songs I’ll Make a Man Out of You and Itchy-koo, in the former Avis Bunnage was accompanied by a chorus of women indicating the meaning of every sentence and Fanny Carby was joined by other singers in the latter. According to Paget, the financial imperative to secure a sustained West End run also ‘ensured that some accommodations to West End “taste” were made on the journey from E15 to WC2’ (1990c: 244). For example, contentious elements of the war profiteers scene were edited

out and several people expressed particular concern about a change to the original Stratford East ending, as Frances Cuka, who played Jo in A Taste of Honey, recalled: When I saw it at Stratford Victor Spinetti made the closing speech, which went something like ‘The war game is being played all over the world, by all ages, there’s a pack for all the family. It’s been going on for a long time and it’s still going on. Goodnight.’ This cynical speech, which followed the charge of the French soldiers, was quite frightening and you were left crying your heart out. When I saw it again in the West End, I was shocked by the change of ending. After Victor’s speech the entire cast came on singing ‘Oh What a Lovely War’ followed by a reprise of the songs. All frightfully hearty and calculated to send the audience home happy. (Goorney 1981: 127)

Evidence suggests that this softened ending arose because Donald Albery, the owner of Wyndham’s Theatre, insisted that the show end on a light note. Murphy has spoken about the company’s resentment at how economic imperatives influenced aesthetic judgements. Nonetheless, Murphy also illuminates how: Littlewood tried to counter this weakening of the conclusion of the show by getting the cast, during the reprise of ‘Oh It’s a Lovely War’, to ‘hand back again to the men – literally, physically, pointing our hands to that screen, so that the last thing the audience saw were the actual pictures of those men’. (Paget 1990c: 259)

Even though Littlewood capitulated to the West End audiences taste for entertainment (if with an obviously radical and critical edge), she refused to leave the focus on the actors. Instead, she provided a visual reminder that the soldiers were at the heart of the show – it was their struggle, camaraderie, resilience, humour and sacrifice that the audience should take away with them to their after-show dinners, drinks and on their journeys home. However, there were still those who saw the play as a betrayal of Theatre Workshop’s original aims. In particular, MacColl offered a vociferous and typically combatative assessment: I maintain that a theatre which sets out to deal with a social and human problem like war and which leaves the audience feeling nice and comfy, in a rosy glow of OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR

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nostalgia, is not doing its job, it has failed. Theatre, when it is dealing with social issues, should hurt; you should leave the theatre feeling furious. (Goorney 1981: 128)

It is difficult to ascertain how far the 1960s audience left the theatre feeling furious, but the show certainly made a significant impact on individual audience members, critics and the development of theatre practice in the twentieth century. IMPACT AND INFLUENCE

According to Littlewood, Oh What a Lovely War ‘Awakened race memory in our audiences. At the end of each performance people would come on stage bringing memories and mementoes, even lines of dialogue which sometimes turned up in the show’ (Littlewood 1994: 693). Melvin, a performer in the production, similarly remembered in conversation with the author how after seeing the show a family were moved to return to the Wyndham’s Theatre to present him with a perfectly preserved First World War Christmas parcel. They insisted on giving this precious piece of family memorabilia to Theatre Workshop as a ‘thank you’ for acknowledging and honouring the men, including their father/grandfather, who served on the front line. For many, seeing Oh What a Lovely War was a profoundly moving experience as a letter from the veteran philosopher and anti-war campaigner Bertrand Russell testifies: I have enjoyed few things as much as ‘Oh What a Lovely War’, which I found moving and a statement on war such as I have not experienced . . . As you know, the First War was an event which has a vital place in my thinking and in my life. All the people concerned with resistance to the war were my intimates. The great horror which affected us as the war interminably dragged on was something none of us have ever fully outlived. If there were any way in which I could make people understand how true and important your play is, I should wish to do it. I wonder it has been allowed on a London stage. After it, there was much that I should have wished to have said to you and to the performers I was fortunate enough to meet. The experience of the production had drained me, and I could only speak of ordinary things when I wanted to convey to you that I thought all that had happened to me that evening to be most extraordinary. ‘Oh What a Lovely War’ brings war within our grasp, which is immensely difficult.

May you sweep through the world with this play, past governments and to as many people as authority permits you to reach. (5th June 1963, TRSE Archive)

Not only did Oh What a Lovely War make a personal impact, it also acquired significant critical praise and shared the best production prize at the 1963 Paris Festival with the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of King Lear directed by Peter Brook. In 1964, the show went to Philadelphia for three weeks followed by six months on Broadway. In Philadelphia, the critics responded in a rather bemused fashion because what publicity agents billed as a musical, turned out to be more than frivolous and diverting entertainment. As Henry T. Murdock reported in the Philadelphia Inquirer: This is not a conventional show in either material, playing or staging, but it is a potent one. It hits hard, sometimes unmercifully hard. It shouts and screams and hammers and it has no intention of letting its audience relax. But we think it will stand out in the memory and perhaps in the conscience of almost any adult audience. (1964: 11)

By the time the show reached New York the Vietnam War had begun. Melvin recalls how the show worked in direct opposition to the mood of ‘victory fever’: People walked out in groups during the show. I remember those marvellous Quakers who kept up a twenty-four hour vigil in Times Square against the war. They were beaten, spat upon and abused. We gave them free tickets, and they’d come back at the end to our dressing-rooms with tears in their eyes, thanking us for coming to America. (Coren 1984: 46)

In its substantial departure from the dominant theatre practice of the time, Oh What a Lovely War also ‘represents a turning point in the history of English theatre’ (Hayman 1979: 136). Paget has consistently referred to Theatre Workshop and Oh What a Lovely War as a ‘Trojan Horse’, a means of allowing a European, anti-naturalistic political theatre to infiltrate the British scene. In particular, the show influenced a new generation of politically motivated, socially conscious and theatrically OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR

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Figure 3.7 Joan Littlewood outside stage door, New York (1964). Courtesy of Theatre Royal Stratford East Archives Collection

revolutionary practitioners that emerged in the 1960s. For instance, John McGrath acknowledged that it ‘had an extraordinary effect on British theatre. In the 60s it was performed and loved in almost every repertory in the country. A new generation of young actors played in it, sang the songs, and heard how Joan’s actors had worked on it’ (McGrath, 1981: 48). The creation of the piece through collaboration inspired other theatre workers to embark on devising processes in both small and large-scale theatres, as seen with Peter Brook’s US (1966) at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Equally, practitioners began employing documentary methods to create work combining dramatic scenes and factual information to interrogate social and political issues such as Peter Cheeseman’s Stoke documentaries including The Jolly Potter (1965) and McGrath’s The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil (1973). Yet, Oh What a Lovely War’s impact stretches beyond the theatre. In more general terms, it has also become embedded in historiography as each new generation often has their understanding of the First World War supplemented by study of the play. The historian A. J. P. Taylor was so impressed by the piece that he dedicated his Illustrated History of the First World War (1963) to Littlewood and when London’s Imperial War Museum recently held a First World War exhibition it contained information, designs and costumes from the original production and invited Littlewood to attend the opening. The original Oh What a Lovely War probed the First World War in an illuminating and entertaining way through its use of documentary material and the vibrant antinaturalistic, technologically sophisticated exchange between the stage and auditorium. Moreover, its provocative theatricality and anti-war stance continues to speak to us in the here-and-now as the ‘war game’ maintains potent resonance in the twenty-first century.

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Figure 3.8 Joan Littlewood (1974). Courtesy of The Press Association

4 PRACTICAL EXERCISES

INTRODUCTION

Training and improvisation played an integral role in Littlewood’s rehearsals, which acknowledged the centrality of the performer’s physical skill, imagination, spontaneity and creativity within collaborative processes. However, as the previous chapters have illustrated, Littlewood utilised ideas and working methods from a range of practitioners, as well as developing her own approach to creative improvisation and group work. She did not offer a definitive system or method as each production was approached according to the given circumstances of the company – how much time did they have for rehearsals, how well did they know each other, had they trained or worked with Littlewood previously; and the needs of the production – was it a living newspaper, classic text, a piece of contemporary social realism, a musical or a farce. The danger in setting out a series of exercises is to suggest a rigid, formulaic approach rather than the complex, dynamic and ever-changing nature of Littlewood’s practice as it evolved over a forty-year period. Nonetheless, with an awareness of the limitations of the task ahead, the following selection of exercises provide a taster of the types of preparatory, Labaninspired and Stanislavsky-based exercises Littlewood employed, as well as offering opportunities to explore how Littlewood approached work on text, ensemble playing and documentary material. I have gleaned and adapted exercises from several sources: Littlewood’s early creative

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notebooks, books on Laban and Stanislavsky’s rehearsal methods and examples of rehearsal techniques encountered by those who collaborated with Littlewood, in particular works by Barker, Goorney and Newlove have been invaluable in this respect. The final section provides practical suggestions for working with documentary sources that specifically relate to Littlewood’s early work developing ‘Living Newspaper’ style agit-prop and her later experience generating Oh What a Lovely War. AIMS

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To provide an overview of some of the key training methods and rehearsal techniques employed by Littlewood. To give opportunities for groups to experience some of the exercises adopted by Littlewood as she worked to develop an actor’s physical awareness, imaginative skills, approach to text and ensemble playing. To provide a starting point for groups to consider generating their own living newspaper project or a practical way-in to examining the methods employed in the creation of Oh What a Lovely War.

APPROACH

The exercises should be tried out in practice in a studio or rehearsal room as a means of encountering – through doing – the different types of practical training and rehearsal techniques employed by Littlewood during her career. The reader may read the exercises, along with the rest of the book, as a means of further deepening their understanding of the interrelationship between Littlewood’s theory and practice, but this is not the aim of the chapter. Littlewood was a great believer in experiential learning and this premise underpins the aims and objectives of the chapter. I have divided the chapter into three broad sequences: the first offers preparatory warm-up exercises; the second tackles the practitioners that most inspired Littlewood’s methods and provides practical ways to explore Laban’s approach to the moving body and efforts, alongside exercises based on Stanislavsky’s work to release the imagination; the third sequence outlines more advanced exercises that focus on work with text, ensemble playing and creating theatre out of documentary sources. There is a presumption that an experienced teacher, workshop facilitator or lecturer in drama, theatre studies or the

performing arts will, normally, conduct the practical session and that it is at their discretion to construct the session according to the needs of the group. The exercises can be followed in sequence over a series of sessions, be re-organised to focus on a specific aspect of Littlewood’s training and rehearsal methods or, if the session aims to give a general overview of Littlewood’s working method, it may be best to take a couple of exercises from each section. If the session is accompanying work on Oh What a Lovely War then it is possible to combine some preparatory warm-up exercises with tasks taken from the working with documentary material section. I have not adjusted the exercises to accommodate group members with significant mobility difficulties or sensory impairment. The workshop facilitator can make adjustments according to their knowledge of any given situation and the needs of the group. I offer the following points as guidelines for planning, resources and delivery to ensure that the group gets the most out of a practical session based on the exercises provided: •

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The workshop room should be large enough for participants to be able to move freely in the space and they should certainly to be able to move in all directions from a standing position without any risk of colliding with another person. To facilitate physical exploration students should be dressed in loose clothing and be barefoot or with soft, flat, acrobat-type shoes so that they can feel the floor under their feet. Try to make enough time to explore these exercises in detail and do not be afraid of repetition. Sometimes the most interesting work occurs after a participant has tried an exercise several times and they will learn as much from trying and not quite making it, than if they pull off an exercise first time. Make sure there is time for observation, discussion and feedback on specific exercises and the session as a whole. Students will learn from watching and commentating, as well as doing.

WARM-UP EXERCISES

Before beginning any practical work, it is important to release bodily tension and to free the mind of the clutter of everyday life. ‘A precondition for any creative work is a free, flexible body. A blocked body PRACTICAL EXERCISES

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cannot express anything except its own rigidity’ (Benedetti 1998: 16), so it is important to warm-up the body by releasing energy, stretching, relaxing the muscles and introducing focused physical activity. Equally, it is crucial that the mind is relaxed, clear of everyday thoughts and concerns, ready to concentrate and open to new ideas and possibilities. A ‘warm-up’ should start to raise energy levels, provide a focus for the energy created and establish a mood of creative concentration. A ‘warm-up’ is also useful as a means of establishing a sense of group identity, communication and collaboration. Each member of the group may have arrived from another class, work, arguing with a friend, bed, a fraught journey or from the gym, so a ‘warm-up’ session gives an opportunity for the group to embark on a common set of exercises and, therefore, to bring them to similar ground before more demanding work can begin. Most exercises should start from a neutral ‘standing still and upright’ position whereby the student has their weight evenly and lightly distributed on both feet so that the body is ready for action. Exercise 4.1 ➤

It is good to start with an ‘energy release’ game to get the blood pumping, the feet moving and to begin to break down any inhibitions about moving and playing the fool. Tried and tested games such as ‘tag’ are useful in this respect. One member of the group is it and has to chase other members of the group until one is tagged (touched) and then they become it. Another useful game is ‘stick in the mud’ when a member of the group is nominated as it and they chase down and touch other members of the group, who when touched become frozen statues with their feet firmly on the ground and their legs apart. Other members of the group can release the captured by crawling through their legs without being caught. The person who is it should be changed frequently.

After a general ‘energy release’ game it is worth concentrating on particular parts of the body and incorporating some breathing exercises to encourage focused relaxation. Once the body is fully relaxed it is possible to introduce some exercises designed to promote imagination, concentration and physical awareness.

Exercise 4.2 ➤ ➤ ➤

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Standing still and upright, tense and release different parts of your body: hands, arms, neck, torso, toes, feet, legs, etc. Repeat the above exercise by tensing and releasing the whole body. Standing still and upright, roll your left shoulder backwards several times and repeat the same number forward; repeat with the right shoulder and then with both shoulders together. Try to feel any tension easing and disappearing. Lie on your back with your arms by your sides and feel yourself breathing at a regular pace. Bring your knees up to your chest, bend your elbows and thrust them tightly into your sides whilst clenching your fists. Exhaling, try and squeeze every last drop of air from your body up to a count of ten and then relax back to the starting position. Repeat the exercise, this time lifting the head and shoulders on to the knees and try to occupy as little space as possible by squeezing into a tight ball. Count to ten and relax. Feel the strain leaving your body as it relaxes and your breathing returns to normal. Standing still and upright, close your eyes and concentrate on your breathing. Wait until your breathing has reached an even pattern and then start to take deeper and deeper breathes making sure that your inhalation and exhalation last for the same amount of time. It may help to count in your head and to extend the inhalation/ exhalation by one count each time. When you are satisfied that you are breathing as deeply as you can, take two more breathes and then allow your breathing to return to normal. Standing still and upright, imagine that you are breathing in air through your stomach and up over your chest, head, down your back and into the ground. Repeat five times. In a relaxed state, start walking in the space as a group, paying attention to the ebb and flow of movement, the spaces that open up and the feeling of free-flowing movement. Repeat whilst jogging and running in the space. With the group in a circle, throw a ball that changes character as the next member of the group catches and throws it. For instance, a member of the group could start the exercise by throwing the ball whilst calling out ‘a rugby ball’, the catcher could then catch it as

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such and then call out ‘lead weight’ as they throw it to the next person and so on . . . other examples could include a balloon, a bomb, a glass decoration, a cricket ball, an egg. This exercise is good for promoting imagination, concentration and physical awareness. Repeat the above exercise without the aid of a ball. A game of ‘Grandmother’s Footsteps’ promotes concentration, focus and physical awareness. One person in the group stands at a wall with their back to the rest of the group, whilst the rest of the group try to creep up and touch them on the back without being detected. The person standing at the wall spins around at various times at which point the rest of the group must freeze, if they catch someone moving, they are out of the game.

THE PERFORMING BODY IN SPACE AND TIME

The following provides a taster of the basic movement principles central to the Laban-based exercises that Littlewood, together with Newlove, used to develop an actor’s appreciation of the performing body in space and time. The exercises included here focus on promoting body and spatial awareness, flexibility, weight transference, knowledge of the four motion factors: space, time, weight and flow and physical aspects of character. It is important to bear in mind that Littlewood returned to these exercises again and again as part of a training regime to develop the actor’s physical skills, dexterity and knowledge – therefore it is necessary to discard the attitude that once an exercise has been done it has been mastered – for Littlewood the learning process was continual and actors, like gymnasts, could only improve by continually exercising and training their bodies. I have taken and adapted many of the exercises in this section from Newlove’s Laban for Actors and Dancers (1993), which the student should consult to gain a thorough explanation of the aims of exercises or to develop them further. EXPLORING MOVEMENT POTENTIAL

These exercises will encourage you to explore your personal sphere of movement, or kinesphere, in different dimensions around your body. Imagine ‘a large personal bubble in which we are able to stretch out in all directions whilst standing in its centre, on one leg’ (Newlove 1993: 22).

This suggests the importance of balance as ‘if all movement is the constant shifting in space of the balance of the body’s weight, then the first factor we must consider is how balance is maintained, and how shifted’ (Barker 1977: 31). The following exercises promote an awareness of your own sphere of movement, its limits and the difference between instability and balance. Exercise 4.3 ➤

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With your body upright and feet slightly apart experiment with inclining your body forwards and backwards until you feel offbalance and have to correct yourself by putting a foot forward or back to stop yourself falling over. Try not to look at the floor as you conduct this exercise. With your body upright and feet slightly apart experiment with leaning to your right and left sides until you transfer your weight from two feet to one foot. With your hands on your hips, bend from your trunk in a forward, sideways and backwards motion. Balancing on the balls of your feet, stretch up as high as you can go with your arms pointing upwards, come back to standing and repeat. With your body upright and your feet slightly apart, lunge forward with your left leg so that both legs are bent at the knees as you explore the lower dimension. Return to standing and repeat by lunging with your right leg. Complete fencing style lunges in every direction. As you move place one arm out-stretched in front of you and the other arm above your head.

EXTENDING THE RANGE OF MOVEMENT

The following exercises encourage an exploration of the body’s potential for movement beyond the general level of use and ability usually encountered. The aim is to start thinking of the body in ways that stretch habitual patterns of movement by exploring the limits of the kinesphere and beyond. The exercises start with the individual and then develop into pair and group work.

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Exercise 4.4 ➤

Take a few running steps and spring up leading from alternate sides of the body each time.

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Explore different ways of travelling in space: walking forward, jumping sideways, jogging, skipping, running, spinning, crawling backwards.

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Repeat the above exercise, but this time, put obstacles in the way such as chairs, rostra, steps and pay attention to what this does to the flow of movement. Try to keep the movement as fluid as possible, despite the obstacles, by establishing a route and sticking to it. Try slowing down and increasing your speed.

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Imagine taking a series of objects and moving them from one dimension to another. For example, imagine taking something off a high shelf and placing it on the ground; take something from your left hand side and deposit it by your right foot; reach behind you to grab an object before placing it on a table at knee height.

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Make sure you are in enough space to be able to move in all directions without bumping in to anyone else. Shut your eyes and imagine you are in a cube shaped room that is as large as your kinesphere. The wall in front of you is made of glass, which is in need of cleaning. Standing in the centre of the cube, start to clean the window leading with your right arm and then your left. Make sure that you reach into every corner. This will necessitate high stretches onto one foot and deep bends to the ground, particularly when you are working across diagonals, e.g., using your left hand to clean the bottom right hand corner or your right hand to clean the top left hand corner.

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Freely explore every surface of your imaginary room. For example, lying on the floor try to touch the back and front wall with your hands and feet; try to touch the ceiling with your feet; run your hands along every corner.

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In pairs, one person imagines they are a goalkeeper and the other person is free to roll, throw or kick an imaginary ball at the goalkeeper. The aim is to make the goalkeeper move in lots of different directions, from picking the ball up from the floor, trying to catch it above their head to stretching either side of them. Swap roles and repeat.

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In pairs, each of you should have one hand placed palm-side out on your back and the other arm outstretched as if you are engaged in

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a game of fencing. The aim is to touch the hand behind the other person’s back without them touching your hand. You should think about combining attacking with defensive manoeuvres to encourage your partner to move as freely as possible. Barker credits Littlewood with introducing him to a game called ‘rocks and snakes’ in which all the players, except one, work together to form a honeycomb rock shape, which is interlinked and mutually supporting. The remaining player works their way over the surface of the rock and through the gaps created by other bodies (see Barker 1977: 104). In groups of 6–8, imagine that you are all faced with a huge table full of wonderful food and drink. Allow your imagination to take over so that you are free to explore the table in every dimension. Do you take some food and hide under the table; do you reach across the table and try to feed someone else; do you stand on a chair and pour drink from on high into a small cup on the table; do you move stealthily around the table sniffing and sampling the delights on offer; have you eaten too much and collapsed in a heavy heap on the nearest available surface? Repeat the above exercise, but this time concentrate not only on what you are doing, but also on the speed you are doing it and how this relates to others in the group. Vary your activity and vary the speeds along a continuum from very slow to very fast. Think about acceleration and deceleration by incorporating sudden movements and movements that build from normal pace to fast pace.

INTRODUCING EFFORTS

The following exercises introduce each of the eight basic effort actions according to Laban. The aim is to gain a sense of the different movement qualities without any consideration of character. Exercise 4.5 Pressing: direct, sustained, strong ➤

Try a pressing movement with the palm of the hands directly out from the chest. Repeat in different directions: upwards, downwards, sideways with both palms, diagonally across the body. PRACTICAL EXERCISES

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Space i The effort element ‘direct’ consists of a straight line in direction. ii The effort element ‘flexible’ consists of a wavy line in direction. Time

i The effort element ‘sudden’ consists of quick speed. ii The effort element ‘sustained’ consists of slow speed.

Weight i The effort element ‘firm’ consists of strong resistance to weight. ii The effort element ‘fine touch’ (or ‘gentle’) consists of weak resistance to weight. (Newlove 1993: 121) ➤ ➤

Let other parts of the body lead in pressing, for example, the back, the knees, the top of the head and the elbows. Imagine you are walking though deep mud and each footstep requires a great deal of effort.

Flicking: flexible, sudden, light ➤

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Imagine a fly swirling around you and intermittently landing on your clothing. As it flies and lands, flick it away with your hands by quickly twisting the wrists and fingers. Extend the above exercise by beginning to flick the fly with other parts of your body: feet, head, elbows and nose. Try jumping and flicking your feet in the air and extend by moving through space jumping and flicking.

Wringing: flexible, sustained, strong ➤ ➤

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Try the movement in the hands first, as if wringing out clothes. Imagine you are literally a wet blanket in need of wringing out. Isolate parts of the body such as the torso, arms, legs, hands and try to squeeze out all the fluid. Try imagining other circumstances when wringing might be an appropriate movement such as knotting and untangling ropes.

Dabbing: direct, sudden, light ➤ ➤ ➤

Try the movement in your hands first, as if dabbing a stain, canvas or typewriter. Dab with different parts of the body and in different directions. Move though space dabbing with your feet, alternate between your heels and toes doing the dabbing.

Slashing: sudden, strong, flexible ➤

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Try the movement in your arms first, slashing from high right to low left and vice versa as if you are trying to make your way through thick undergrowth. Experiment with slashing actions carried out by different parts of the body: limbs separately or together, whilst sitting, kneeling, lying and in different directions: upwards, outwards, sideways.

Gliding: sustained, light, direct ➤

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Try the movement with your hands and arms first, by imagining you are smoothing out a rug on the ground, a large tablecloth at waist level or sheet of paper attached to a board in front of you. Imagine you are trying to cross a lake covered in ice.

Thrusting or punching: direct, sudden, strong ➤ ➤

Try the movement with your hands first by punching an imaginary object in space. Try to achieve the same sudden, direct, strong movement quality with other parts of the body, the head, feet, elbows, shoulders and knees. Repeat whilst standing, sitting, kneeling and lying down.

Floating: flexible, sustained, light ➤

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Try the movement with your hands and arms first by allowing your arms to float up above your head from a starting position by the sides of your legs. Try floating downwards, as well as upwards and introduce different parts of the body leading alternately or simultaneously. Imagine you are a leaf, kite or ghost floating around the space being wafted in different directions as the wind or other passing bodies alter your pathway.

WORKING WITH EFFORTS

This section begins by encouraging an awareness of habitual movement patterns in order that you can begin to introduce new ways of moving, extending gestural patterns and work on unfamiliar character types. The exercises suggest ways of applying a growing knowledge of effort actions to the creation of physical characterisations, ways of aiding character analysis and suggestions for developing scenes. PRACTICAL EXERCISES

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Exercise 4.6 ➤

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Working in pairs, observe each other standing and walking as you normally would. Discuss the quality of each other’s physicality – are you naturally light, heavy, floating, fidgety, direct, indirect, etc. Once you have established your habitual pattern of movement, try to work in exactly the opposite way. Help each other to recognise and overcome your usual movement quality. Choose two of the efforts and explore ways of moving from one to the other. For example, go from flicking to punching or floating to gliding. Try transitions in different dimensions such as left to right, up to down, lower right to upper left. Work in twos and observe your partners movements, paying attention to the changing use of time, flow, weight and space. Try adding in more efforts to create sequences of movement. In pairs, add in words to accompany the basic efforts you are using. Firstly, try using a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and see how the quality of the word/delivery changes as you move between floating, dabbing and punching, for example. In pairs, start at opposite sides of the room with different character types such as nervous person/confident person; happy person/ angry person; old person/young person. As you walk towards each other, you should concentrate on your own movement efforts, but also those of your partner. As you meet in the middle, the pairs reverse so that the nervous person becomes the confident person and vice versa before you continue your walk to the opposite side of the room. In pairs, think of a situation such as employer and employee discussing an assignment, mother and child discussing a failure to get home on time or two friends debating what they are going to do for an evening. Each member of the pair takes up a different effort of movement and voice throughout the improvisation. Discuss the outcome – the rhythms generated, the difficulty of sustaining one effort throughout, the moods created, etc. Repeat the exercise using props and furniture. Choose a character from a play and through detailed analysis of character traits, motivations and circumstances try to establish their basic movement efforts – how they stand, walk, sit and what types of gestures they employ. For example, are they heavy and troubled; light and breezy; energised and fidgety; calculated and

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precise? Remember to pay attention to the movement habits of the period the play was written – social conventions, expectations of class and gender, dress, etc. Think about how the character might walk, behave and interact with props if they were on their own, how this might change in company and how their movement efforts alter depending on the situation and characters they come into contact with. This approach will force you to think about the character and how this is translated through movement – are they confident, nervous, frightened or having a great time, for example. If a group of you work on different characters from the same play, improvise a situation in which they all come together e.g. at a party, walking in the park, at a funeral, and see how the movement efforts you have established work in relation to the other characters. Do you need to alter your perspective at all? Are there subtle differences depending on the other characters you encounter? How does the environment affect your character’s movement efforts? In groups of 4–8, go to ‘real life’ for inspiration: factories, railway stations, offices, streets and classrooms. Observe the basic efforts, transitions and patterns at work in the activities you see and return to the studio with ideas on how to recreate the actions and gestures you witnessed. Apply your understanding of basic efforts, transitions and patterns of work to scenes from plays that involve worked-based situations. Examples might include Henry Chapman’s You Won’t Always Be on Top, Arnold Wesker’s The Kitchen or Caryl Churchill’s Fen. Think about how to approach individual activities in terms of efforts and how these contribute to the creation of an overall rhythm for the scene that shifts and evolves as the scene develops.

RELEASING THE IMAGINATION

Littlewood believed that any theatre work, whether it be acting, designing or directing, requires an active imagination to fuel the creative process. For some people this is easier to achieve than others, but we can develop our imaginative skills by calling on the imagination to work hard at a number of activities so that we get used to responding to stimuli in detailed, thoughtful and creative ways. The following exercises draw inspiration from many Stanislavsky-based exercises as well as approaches that are more general. The exercises begin by using basic objects and the PRACTICAL EXERCISES

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external world as a source in line with Littlewood’s demand that her actors: . . . go to the workshops, go to the farmlands, the streets . . . I tell my actors that . . . there is more stimulus in reality than in these endless discussions about art, all these schematic ideas for reviving the theatre. They’re not the answer. The answer is all around us. The world is full of great theatre and it’s not in the theatre. (Talking About Theatre, 1964)

This demand stresses the importance of observation, attention to detail and skills of re-call. Exercises are subsequently introduced that encourage the group to use the information gleaned from the external world to create imaginary worlds through improvisation. Exercise 4.7 ➤

A member of the group volunteers to sit in the centre of the room watched by the rest of the group. The rest of the group ask the volunteer a series of questions that relate to the senses. Each question should start ‘What does it feel like to . . .’, examples include: Be on top of a mountain Be in a dense forest Walking as snow falls around you Be standing in heavy rain Sunbathe with ocean waves lapping at your feet Smell the top of a baby’s head Smell acrid smoke Taste a hot curry Taste sugar on your tongue Hold hands with someone you love Touch jelly Run your hands through cold water Be searching for something in the dark

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A member of the group leaves the room and an object is placed on a table. When the group member re-enters they have to make up a story about the object. Work with very basic positions – sitting up straight, standing,

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kneeling and crouching – enhance each pose with an imaginative idea that suggests the given circumstances of the pose. Repeat in groups/with chairs/with a table/with other furniture. Sitting on a chair – imagine that you are on an electric chair condemned to death, waiting for an interview, waiting for the result of your child’s operation, waiting to murder someone, waiting for a loved one at an airport, drinking tequila in a club, getting ready for a night out. The actor, Richard Harris recalled that Littlewood once asked him to take off all his clothes and then to stand on the stage and convince her that he was fully clothed. This is obviously a very extreme exercise, however, a variation on the theme involves one person standing in front of the rest of the group to give intricate details about an outfit they are not wearing and why they are wearing it. Examples might include, full evening dress in preparation for a ball, a smart outfit in readiness for an interview, scruffy clothes in preparation for decorating, etc. Each member of the group tries to remember a journey with as much detail and clarity as possible. Try to recall colours, textures, sounds, smells, movements and atmosphere as vividly as possible. Once the individual has had time to recapture the event in their imagination, they should recount what they remember to the rest of the group. The recollection could be followed up by inviting questions from the rest of the group to try to elicit more information. Repeat the previous exercise with other examples such as a day at the seaside, a birthday party, a hospital visit, a sporting event, a quiet day at home, a night at the theatre. Each member of the group should go and observe a social event or situation such as an evening in a bar, a market, a funfair, a café, a theatre auditorium before a show begins, a factory floor. On their return to the group, each member should tell the rest of the group about their experience in as much detail as possible, paying attention to shifting moods, specific events/people, the passing of time, the sounds and snippets of conversations overheard, etc. As a group, choose one of the scenarios recounted in the above exercise and use it as the basis for staging a scene. The original observer should act as an ‘outside eye’ shaping and directing the theatrical treatment, checking for accuracy and adding in detail as required. PRACTICAL EXERCISES

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In groups of 4–6 people, improvise a situation in which you are trapped in a confined space: down a mineshaft, locked in a prison cell, trapped in a lift or locked in a cellar, for example. Imagine what happens to the body, the sensations, the textures, the relationships that develop, the feelings that emerge and the plans for escape. This exercise can be extended by allowing the group to escape into the open air so that they can experience and comment on the contrast.

WORKING WITH TEXT

Littlewood could never be accused of adopting a precious attitude towards text in the sense of honouring every word written by the playwright or looking for beautifully delivered verse. For her the art of communication with an audience was paramount. When approaching a new play for the first time, she focused on establishing the meaning of any given play in terms of Stanislavsky’s units, objectives and superobjectives through appropriate research and rigorous discussion with a company of actors. In the rehearsal room, Littlewood augmented this analytical approach with practical exercises to promote textual clarity, present tense delivery and the alignment of physical action and text. The following exercises used by Littlewood at various stages in her career, offer various ways of approaching text that encompass work on rhythm and sound; the efforts appropriate for textual delivery, the use of analogous situations to clarify meaning and intonation, the physicality of text and how text should work to illuminate and flesh out the relationships established through action, gesture and eye contact. Exercise 4.8 ➤

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Choose a Shakespearean sonnet to work with and learn the lines as preparation for the session. During the session, you should say your sonnet in your head whilst various pieces of classical music are played. Leave pauses between the thoughts and let the music take over. Use pauses for breathing, mark the sonnet for breaths and then try to speak the sonnet very softly to yourself under the music, then repeat as loud and strong as the music. Work individually with a contemporary or classical monologue and try to apply the idea of ‘efforts’ to the speech. Is the speech heavy

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and grounded in the earth, is it light and playful, is it angry and thrusting? Think about transitions – how does the speech shift from one effort to another? How can you convey the efforts intimated in the speech through movement? What happens when you take the movement away? Can you still communicate the efforts involved through intonation and delivery? Take a scene from a classic play, re-situate it in a contemporary setting, and re-work the dialogue into contemporary language. You are trying to capture the essence of the scene, the types of characters involved, the power relations at work and how you can convey this through physicality, gesture and language. Once you have mastered the contemporary version of the classic scene, return to the original and try to use the information you have gleaned from the improvisation in your staging and playing of it. As a group, take any scene that you are very familiar with and play it by replacing the text with gibberish or a false language. You should concentrate on how you depict character, relationships, mood and atmosphere through group formations, physicality, gesture, silence and eye contact, rather than relying on text as the primary carrier of meaning. When you return to the text try to maintain the physical sense acquired through the exercise. After reading through a play, act or scene once, select one unit from it and rehearse the unit without looking at the text. Try to capture the dynamic thrust of the unit and ad-lib dialogue. When you go back to the original, discuss the similarities and departures from the improvisation that has just occurred and ascertain what you can learn from the improvisation in terms of character, relationships and atmosphere to aid future rehearsals. If a scene proved difficult in rehearsal, Littlewood used a number of strategies for encouraging different ways of seeing and responding to text. The following suggestions provide useful examples of this way of working: Play the scene to different types and tempos of music. Play the scene as fast or as slow as you can. Approach the scene through song rather than straight dialogue. Discard the text and play the scene through mime or dance. Have a succession of different participants/pairings delivery the same line or section of dialogue to explore different PRACTICAL EXERCISES

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approaches to timing, delivery and meaning. This exercise can be repeated until the point of complete frustration and the absence of any pre-conceived intention at which point an interesting, more natural delivery may emerge.

ENSEMBLE PLAYING

‘The creative genius of Joan Littlewood’s work lies in the fact that she achieved her effects through the use of the actor’s creative and physical resources, and with a minimum of scenic devices’ (Barker 1977: 153). The following exercises explore the use of the ensemble as a means of creating different situations, moods and atmospheres. If done sensitively, the exercises should promote awareness of and responsiveness to others, activate spontaneity and encourage mutual exploration and discovery. Each exercise invites the participants to pay attention to the details of social situations and the ways in which people inhabit environments: the changing dynamics and rhythms, shifts in energy, evolving group formations and the tendency for conversations to ebb and flow as they play off a variety of stimuli, break down, re-emerge and change direction. Exercise 4.9 ➤

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Once the group has entered the room and got themselves ready to work, ask them to leave and re-enter the room exactly as they had done the first time. They should pay attention to the mood, atmosphere and tensions in the group as well as physical accuracy such as who was standing next to whom and for how long. They should try to recall exactly what people said, how and to whom. In groups of 5–6, create the image of a particular space/situation by just using the way you move your bodies, employ gestures and physically interact with each other. Examples could include a funeral parlour, a trench, a bus queue, a waiting room before an audition. Improvise a scene in which nobody trusts a single other person, everybody thinks everybody else is trying to stab them in the back, and yet allegiances have to be forged in order to leave the situation. Pay particular attention to the use of physicality, gesture and eye contact to establish allegiances and ways of gaining trust.

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Repeat the above exercise adding dialogue. Improvise an imaginary scene from a film. One person starts the scene and through their actions and language, they establish the genre and tone of the film (western, gangster, film noir, action, romantic comedy, science fiction, art house, etc). Each person who joins in the improvisation has to further the narrative by developing a relationship, introducing a new piece of information or instigating action. It is important that the style and feel of the scene remains as consistent as possible so that participants really concentrate on the demands of different formats in terms of physicality, narrative and language. Improvise a scene that involves a particular geographical context or situation – this might be a market square, a prison yard, a night in a pub, a beach – anywhere where people are likely to meet, engage in conversation or simply pass by minding their own business. The aim is to gradually build up the ‘world’ of the scene and the everyday ‘truth’ of the situation by encouraging people to enter and exit the scene when they feel they have something to contribute which adds to the collective picture or atmosphere. At first the improvisation should establish an accurate depiction of the scene by focusing on the right atmosphere, small incidents and exchanges, as the improvisation develops the participants should begin to introduce new rhythms, tensions and complexities by paying attention to complimenting or counter-pointing what is already happening. The emphasis is not on individuals, but teamwork and creating a collective picture that ebbs and flows. Once the improvisation has run for a while, the facilitator can discuss its effectiveness with the group, select moments or relationships for further exploration/ development and investigate ways of condensing and sharpening the scene.

WORKING WITH DOCUMENTARY SOURCES

The next set of exercises relate back to Littlewood’s work on ‘living newspapers’ in the late 1930s and early 1940s, as well as the production of Oh What a Lovely War explored in Chapter 3. They offer introductory exercises concerning ways of accessing and working with documentary/ primary sources such as newspaper articles, diaries, images, historical accounts, facts and statistics, etc. PRACTICAL EXERCISES

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Exercise 4.10 ➤

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Taking a number of newspapers from the same day, explore how one news event is treated differently across the broadsheets and the tabloids. Pay attention to the different angles the reporting takes, how attitudes to the event are revealed, the construction of narratives through the representation of protagonists, the language used and the sympathies evoked. Practically work on depicting two approaches to the same story that capture the differences in contrasting tabloid and broadsheet treatments. Take one of the news events of the day and tell the story through a series of narrative points of view: from the perspective of someone directly involved; an uninvolved witness to the event; a reporter to camera; a historian talking about the event after the fact and a witness at a consequent trial, for example. Pay attention to capturing contrasting language use, dynamics and engagement in the event. In groups of 5–6, take the same documentary source and experiment with different ways of conveying the same information – through dance, a naturalistic scene, a piece of direct agit-prop or a parody of a popular television format, e.g., a gameshow, situation comedy, news broadcast or natural history programme. This could work with each group coming up with 2–3 ways of depicting the same material or the whole group could be divided so each unit explores its own way of ‘dramatising’ the material before showing to the whole group. Decide on an historical event from a series of options that might include the Vietnam War, the sinking of the Titanic, the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster or the collapse of former Yugoslavia. When the group decide which event they would like to concentrate on, get into groups and research and access as many sources as possible on the subject – this could include newspaper articles, historical accounts, biographies/autobiographies, government reports, facts and statistics, literary/dramatic or filmic treatments, images and recordings. Following on from the last exercise the group should share the information found, discuss the dramatic potential of the material, identify key moments for development and begin to make a rough compilation of the sources/stories/images/information they want to

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see in a piece and to think about how the material might be structured, a ‘skeleton’ which can be fleshed out through improvisation – it is important at this stage to experiment with many different combinations so that active decisions can be made about what scenes will potentially work against each other in terms of information, shifts of dynamic and dramatic impact. Begin working on individual scenes, concentrating on how best to convey the necessary information and/or dramatic potential of the material. Share work in progress ideas with the rest of the group, receive feedback and develop your work further.

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NAME GLOSSARY

The following glossary provides brief details of figures – largely from the world of theatre – who have been cited in the book. It does not include better-known names like Stanislavsky and Brecht, assuming the reader’s acquaintance with such figures. It also excludes people such as Rudolf Laban, who are discussed at some length within the main body of the text. Adolphe Appia (1862–1928) 13 A Swiss scenic designer who pioneered a three-dimensional synthesis of theatrical elements as opposed to the flat painted scenery of the late nineteenth century. He was particularly influential for his writing on theatre as a visual art form and for his innovative lighting designs that employed stark blocks of light and shadow. Clive Barker (1931–2005) 43 A British theatre practitioner, academic, expert in actor training and author of Theatre Games (1977). His influential work on the importance of body awareness, play and spontaneity owed much to his time as an actor and stage manager with Littlewood in the 1950s and 1960s. Augusto Boal (1931–) 34 A Brazilian theatre practitioner, theorist, teacher, director and

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founder of the international Theatre of the Oppressed movement. Boal developed his ideas on theatre in Brazil, where he became active in the face of increasing political repression. Forced into exile, he finally settled in Paris before returning to Brazil in the late 1980s. He has written a number of books including Theatre of the Oppressed (1979), The Rainbow of Desire (1995) and Legislative Theatre (1998) that document his work using theatre as a force for change and to encourage participatory democracy. Peter Brook (1925–) 113 A British theatre director who achieved success in the 1960s with innovative productions such as Marat/Sade and A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Royal Shakespeare Company. He left Britain for Paris in 1970, where he established his company at the Bouffes du Nord and founded the International Centre of Theatre Research. More recently he has specialised in inter-cultural theatre. John Bury (1925–2000) 25 A British theatre, film and opera designer and early member of Theatre Workshop who stayed with the company when it moved to the Theatre Royal. He rapidly gained a reputation for his economical, striking and effective stage and lighting designs. He left Theatre Workshop and began a close working relationship with Sir Peter Hall as head of design at both the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre. Sir Noel Coward (1899–1973) 47 An English actor, director and playwright famed for elegant productions of his own plays including The Vortex (1924), Hay Fever (1925) and Blithe Spirit (1941). Tom Driberg (1905–1976) 21 A journalist, gossip columnist and Labour MP in the post-war period, Driberg was a life-long supporter of and friend to Joan Littlewood. Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948) 17 A Soviet film director and theorist who started his career in theatre. He is most famous for his film Battleship Potemkin (1925) and for pioneering the use of montage, a technique of juxtaposing images through editing.

Sir John Gielgud (1904–2000) 47 An English actor and director who achieved a distinguished professional career in classical and modern theatre. He was particularly famous for his command of Shakespearean verse. Jerzy Grotowski (1933–1999) 69 A Polish theatre director who created the ‘Theatre Laboratory’ in 1959 to research the physical and emotional processes central to the art of acting and theatre-making. His work, documented in his book, Towards a Poor Theatre (1968) made a lasting impact on the development of radical theatre practice in Europe and America, with practitioners such as Peter Brook and the Living Theatre citing him as a major influence. Emile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865–1950) 56 Dalcroze’s system of eurhythmics came to prominence in the interwar period. His philosophy was that all actors should learn rhythmic dancing to improve their coordination and to help synchronise bodily movements with speech. He believed that every gesture and facial expression should serve to articulate an ‘inner voice’ and much of his work focused on the emotions aroused by musical rhythms. Jacques Lecoq (1921–1999) 69 A French theatre-maker, director, writer, choreographer and teacher who founded a theatre school in Paris in 1956 where he focused on his preoccupations with the actor’s body and movement as the primary carrier of meaning in the theatre-making process. He had a great influence on the development of physical and visual theatre in Europe and beyond. Ewan MacColl (1915–1989) 3 A British actor, playwright, poet and principally famous as a folk singer and composer. He formed Theatre of Action in 1934, which aimed to address contemporary political concerns with work that exhibited complex dramatic form, subject matter and technical ambition. Together with Littlewood, he formed Theatre Union in 1936 and Theatre Workshop in 1945. He left Theatre Workshop when the company located in London and from this point concentrated on his career as a folk singer. NAME GLOSSARY

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John McGrath (1935–2002) 113 A British theatre, film and television writer, director and producer who emerged as a leading figure of the political theatre movement in Britain during the 1970s. He co-founded the 7:84 Theatre Company in 1971, produced the seminal political theatre piece The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil in 1973 and published his theoretical reflections on making popular, political theatre for working-class audiences as A Good Night Out in 1981. Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940) 6 A Russian actor and director who rejected naturalism in favour of a visual and physical theatre. In 1921, he became director of the Moscow State Higher Theatre Workshop and perfected a system of physical training for the actor called ‘biomechanics’. During this period, he supported the aims of the Bolshevik revolution and directed his theatrical and artistic energy towards serving this cause. However, by the mid-1930s, Stalin closed down his theatre and in 1940 Meyerhold and his wife were imprisoned and murdered. Since the 1960s, when his writing began to be translated into English, Meyerhold’s reputation has been rehabilitated and he is now widely regarded as one of the greatest figures of twentiethcentury theatre. Sir Laurence Olivier (1905–1989) 47 A British stage, film and television actor and director famous for his heroic portrayals of classical roles such as Hamlet and Henry V. From 1962 to 1974 he served as Artistic Director of the newly formed National Theatre. Erwin Piscator (1893–1966) 6 A German director renowned for his experiments with early twentieth century stage technology and large-scale filmic images to convey the complexities of the modern age. A contemporary of Brecht and forerunner of ‘epic theatre’, he came to prominence with productions such as Hoppla, wir Leben! (1927) and The Good Soldier Schwejk (1928). In 1929 he published the highly influential The Political Theatre. After seeking exile in America during the Second World War, he returned to Germany to work on a series of documentary plays including Rolf Hochhuth’s The Representative (1964) and Peter Weiss’s The Investigation (1965).

Ernst Toller (1893–1939) 6 A German dramatist and part of the Expressionist movement with plays such as Masses and Men (1923) and Draw the Fires (1930). A Communist and pacifist, Toller was imprisoned for his political views and later became a British subject after fleeing Hitler’s Germany in 1933. He committed suicide in 1939. Kenneth Tynan (1927–2001) 44 A British theatre critic and dramaturg who exerted a profound influence on mid-twentieth-century British theatre as theatre critic for the Observer newspaper (1954–1963) and Literary Manager for the newly formed National Theatre (1963–1974).

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REFERENCES

Anderson, Lindsay (1958) ‘A Taste of Honey’, Encore, Vol. 5, No. 2, p. 42. Anon (1945) ‘The Flying Doctor Comes to Town’, Penrith Observer, 4 September, p. 2. —— (1952) ‘The Travellers’, Scotsman, 20 August, p. 6. Ansorge, Peter (1972) ‘Lots of Lovely Human Contact!’, Plays and Players, Vol. 19, No. 10, July, pp. 18–21. Banham, Reyner (1964) ‘People’s Palaces’, New Statesman, 7 August, pp. 191–2. Barber, John (1971) ‘The Littlewood Dilemma’, Daily Telegraph, 11 January, p. 7. Barker, Clive (1977) Theatre Games, London: Methuen. —— (2000) ‘Joan Littlewood’, in Alison Hodge (ed.) Twentieth Century Actor Training, London: Routledge. Benedetti, Jean (1998) Stanislavski and the Actor, London: Methuen. Bradbury, Ernest (1964) ‘Fairy World of Dvorak Opera’, Yorkshire Post, 21 August, p. 7.

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Bradby, David and Williams, David (1988) Directors’ Theatre, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Brien, Alan (1959) ‘Anyfing Goes’, The Spectator, 27 February, p. 289. Brown, Georgina (1993) ‘Sightings of the Invisible Woman’, Independent, 12 May, p. 12. Coren, Michael (1984) 100 Years of Stratford East, London: Quartet. Croyden, Margaret (1971) ‘Joan Littlewood’, in Joseph McCrindle (ed.) Behind the Scenes: Theatre and Film Interviews from the ‘Transatlantic Review’, London: Pitman, pp. 1–12. Davies, Alistair and Saunders, Peter (1983) ‘Literature, Politics and Society’, in Alan Sinfield (ed.) Society and Literature 1945–1970, London: Methuen. Dykes, Ivor (1998) Oh What a Lovely War: Then and Now, unpublished manuscript, Theatre Royal Stratford East Archive. Eyre, Richard (2000) Changing Stages: A View of British Theatre in the Twentieth Century, London: Bloomsbury. Gellert, Roger (1963) ‘Tommies’, New Statesman, Vol. 65, No. 1672, 29 March, p. 470. Goorney, Howard (1966) ‘Littlewood in Rehearsal’, Tulane Drama Review, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 102–3. —— (1981) The Theatre Workshop Story, London: Methuen. Goorney, Howard and Ewan MacColl (eds) (1986) Agit-Prop to Theatre Workshop, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hayman, Ronald (1979) British Theatre Since 1955, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hewison, Robert (1986) Too Much: Art and Society in the Sixties 1960– 1975, London: Methuen. Hobson, Harold (1955) ‘Richard II’, The Sunday Times, 23 January, p. 11. —— (1958) ‘Triumph at Stratford East’, The Sunday Times, 19 October, p. 21.

Hunt, Albert (1981) ‘The Changing Fortunes of People’s Theatre’, New Society, Vol. 56, No. 970, 18 June, pp. 492–3. Laban, Rudolf (1988) The Mastery of Movement, 4th edition, revised by Lisa Ullmann, Plymouth: Northcote House. Leach, Robert (1989) Vsevolod Meyerhold, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lewis, B. N. (1965) ‘Fun Palace: Counter-Blast to Boredom’, New Society, 15 April, pp. 8–10. Littlewood, Joan (1959–60) ‘Plays for the People’, World Theatre, Vol. 8, No. 4, pp. 282–90. —— (1961) ‘What Miss Littlewood Demands of the Theatre’, The Times, 12 July, p. 5. —— (1964) ‘A Laboratory of Fun’, New Scientist, Vol. 22, No. 391, 14 May, pp. 432–3. —— (1965) ‘Goodbye Note from Joan’, in Charles Marowitz, Tom Milne, Owen Hale and Richard Findlater (eds) The Encore Reader: A Chronicle of the New Drama, London: Methuen. —— (1968) ‘Non-Program, a Laboratory of Fun’, Drama Review, Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 129–31. —— (1994) Joan’s Book: Joan Littlewood’s Peculiar History as She Tells It, London: Methuen. Lobsinger, Mary Louise (2000) ‘Cybernetic Theory and the Architecture of Performance: Cedric Price’s Fun Palace’, in Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Rejean Legault (eds) Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Post-War Architectural Culture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. MacColl, Ewan (1986) ‘Introduction: The Evolution of a Revolutionary Theatre Style’, in Howard Goorney and Ewan MacColl (eds) Agit-Prop to Theatre Workshop, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. ix–lvii. —— (1990) Journeyman, London: Sidgwick and Jackson. McGrath, John (1981) A Good Night Out, London: Methuen. Marowitz, Charles (1965) ‘Littlewood Pays a Dividend’, in Charles REFERENCES

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REFERENCES

Marowitz, Tom Milne, Owen Hale and Richard Findlater (eds) The Encore Reader: A Chronicle of the New Drama, London: Methuen. Melvin, Murray (2004) ‘Memories of Laban at the Theatre Workshop’, unpublished manuscript, Theatre Workshop Stratford East Archive. Milne, Tom and Goodwin, Clive (eds) (1967) ‘Working with Joan’, in Charles Marowitz and Simon Trussler (eds) Theatre at Work: Playwrights and Productions in Modern British Theatre, New York: Hill and Wang, pp. 113–22. Moussinac, Leon (1931) The New Movement in the Theatre, Paris: Editions Albert-Lévy. Murdock, Henry T. (1964) ‘“Lovely War” Stirs the Conscience’, Philadelphia Inquirer, 9 September, p. 11. Newlove, Jean (1993) Laban for Actors and Dancers, London: Nick Hern Books. Paget, Derek (1990a) True Stories? Documentary Drama on Radio, Screen and Stage, Manchester: Manchester University Press. —— (1990b) ‘Popularising Popular History: “Oh What a Lovely War” and the Sixties’, Critical Survey, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 117–27. —— (1990c) ‘“Oh What a Lovely War”: the Texts and their Context’, New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 23, pp. 244–60. —— (1996) ‘Remembrance Play: Oh What a Lovely War and History’, in Tony Howard and John Stokes (eds) Acts of War: The Representation of Military Conflict on the British Stage and Television Since 1945, Aldershot: Scolar. —— (2003) ‘The War Game is Continuous: Productions and Receptions of Theatre Workshop’s “Oh What a Lovely War”’, Studies in Theatre and Performance, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 70–85. —— (2004) ‘Case Study: Theatre Workshop’s Oh What a Lovely War, 1963’, in Baz Kershaw (ed.) The Cambridge History of British Theatre Volume 3, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 397–411. Pryce-Jones, David (1963) ‘Shot in the Arm’, The Spectator, 28 June, p. 838.

Roberts, Peter (1961) ‘We’re Just Not Practical’, Plays and Players, Vol. 8, No. 6, March, pp. 11–13. Schechter, Joel (1985) ‘Pierrot in the Great War: Theatre Workshop’s “Oh What a Lovely War!”’, in Durov’s Pig: Clowns, Politics and Theatre, Theatre Communications Group, pp. 127–33. Sinfield, Alan (ed.) (1983) Society and Literature 1945–1970, London: Methuen. Sked, Alan and Cook, Chris (1984) Post-War Britain: A Political History, 2nd edition, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Theatre Workshop (1965) Oh What a Lovely War, London: Methuen. Tynan, Kenneth (1989) Profiles, London: Nick Hern Books. Wells, John (1992) ‘Heroes and Villians: Joan Littlewood by John Wells’, Independent Magazine, 29 February, p. 46. W, J. (1948) ‘The Other Animals’, Manchester Guardian, 6 July, p. 3. VIDEO AND AUDIO MATERIAL

Omnibus (1994) ‘Joan Littlewood’, BBC1, 19 April. Talking About Theatre (1964) ‘Joan Littlewood in Conversation with Carl Wildman’, BBC Radio, 28 June.

REFERENCES

147

INDEX

Pages containing illustrations are indicated by bold type. acting, Littlewood’s attitude to 45–6, 47 actor training (see also exercises; movement training) 11, 50–1, 56, 51, 115; adapting Stanislavsky 56–9, 60 actors: allocation of parts 66; Littlewood’s manipulation of 58–9, 73–4 agit-prop theatre 5–6, 7, 10, 41, 81, 102 Albery, Donald 109 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, adaptation of 21 alienating devices 45, 87 Allan, Ted 77, 85 alternative theatre 41 American Federal Theatre 10 Anderson, Lindsay 30 anti-fascism 9, 10 Appia, Adolphe 13, 137 Arden, John 78–9 Arden of Faversham 24, 60 Art of Movement Studio, Manchester 18, 51 Arts Council 22, 35, 41

audience 16, 22, 34, 73; interactivity with 71–2, 93; in Oh What a Lovely War 82, 87, 93, 107 audition process 62–3 Banks, Marjorie 12 Barker, Clive 43, 44, 59, 63, 69, 81, 137 Bart, Lionel 39, 41 BBC 33; Littlewood blacklisted from 11; radio documentaries 12 Behan, Brendan (see also The Hostage; The Quare Fellow) 25, 30 bel canto method 51 biomechanics 54, 140 Blackburn, Community Theatre 17 Blanshard, Joby 23 Boal, Augusto 34, 137–8 Bowen, Bunny 12 Brecht, Bertolt 2, 6, 24–5, 56; Mother Courage 98 British theatre, Littlewood’s attitude to 45–6, 48

150

INDEX

British Union of Fascists 10 Brook, Peter 111, 113, 138 Bunnage, Avis 40, 64, 71, 74, 90, 108 burlesque 11, 13 Bury, John 25, 27, 30, 138 Calder, Ritchie, Lord 35 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) 79, 80 capitalism 11; role of in First World War 98, 100 Carby, Fanny 108 censorship 40; illegality of improvisation 70; Lord Chamberlain and 11, 12, 30 Chapman, Henry 27, 30, 70 character analysis 50, 52–3, 58; exercises 125–7 Cheeseman, Peter 113 Chekhov, Anton 18 Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil, The (McGrath) 113 Chilton, Charles 77, 80, 83–4, 85 Civil Rights movement 78 Clark, Alan, The Donkeys 83 classics 5; improvising 67; Littlewood directing 24–5 Cold War 14, 22, 79 collaboration 2, 23, 48, 49, 83 collectivist principles 48–9, 82–3, 97 Collier, Patience 74 ‘collision montage’ technique 82, 100 comedy 10, 11, 31 commedia dell’arte 13, 17, 86 communism 11, 22 Communist Party of Great Britain 5, 7, 11 community initiatives 32–6, 40 concentration 63 constructivism 7, 8, 11 contemplation 61 Cooper, George 23 Corbett, Harry 23, 24 Coren, Michael 61 Costa Packet (Norman) 41 counterpoint 11, 66, 82 Coward, Noel 47, 138

creative ensemble 2, 12–22, 23, 48–9 Cuban missile crisis 79, 80 Cuka, Francis 64, 109 D’Arcy, Margaretta 78–9 Davidson, Bill 16 Davies, Griffith 77, 95 Delaney, Shelagh 30, 70–1 dialects, use of 23, 47 dialogue, improvising 27, 67, 68, 69 direct address 16 directing 10–11; classics 24–5 directors 63; Littlewood’s attitude to 43–4, 48 documentary sources, use of 10, 83, 88, 113; exercises 133–5 Don Perlimplin (Lorca) 15, 16 drama schools 47 Draw the Fires (Toller) 6 Driberg, Tom 21, 138 Dykes, Ivor 88 East 15 theatre school 2, 43 ‘East End knees-up’ 31, 41 Edinburgh Festival 17, 21, 38 Edward II (Marlowe) 25, 26, 59 efforts 52–3, 54, 69; exercises 123–7 egalitarianism 49 Eisenstein, Sergei 17, 138 Eisler, Hanns 6 Engelbrecht, H.C. 84 ensemble playing (see also creative ensemble) 132–3 epic theatre 140 episodic style 10, 11, 16, 18 eurhythmics 56, 139 exercises 63, 64, 115–17; characterisation 125–7; ensemble playing 132–3; for imagination 56–8, 127–30; movement 120–7; vocal 51, 67, 69; warm-up 117–20; working with documentary sources 133–5; working with text 130–2 experimentation 2, 6, 13, 45, 72–3; in Oh What a Lovely War 84 expressionism 7, 8, 11, 18, 82, 94, 102 Eyre, Richard 85

Farson, Daniel 39 fascism 6, 12 festival of anarchy 78–9 Filey, Butlin’s Holiday Camp 17 Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be (Norman) 31, 73 Fire Sermon, The 6 First World War (see also Oh What a Lovely War) 88–9, 93, 113; cultural interest in 79–80; songs of 77, 81, 89, 91; working-class histories of 80–1 Fletcher, Raymond 83 Fligg, Anny 51 Flying Doctor, The (Molière) 15, 53–4, 55 Forward Up Your End 40 fourth wall, abandoning 45, 71, 93 Friends of Theatre Workshop 17 Front Line Family 12 Fuente Ovejuna (Lope de Vega) 9 Fuller, R. Buckminster 35 Fun Palace 32–6, 38, 39, 42 Funaroff, Sol 6 games, use of in rehearsal 63, 118, 119–20, 123 Garson, Barbara 39 Gellert, Roger 91 General Strike 4 Gentle People, The (Shaw) 18 Gielgud, Sir John 47, 139 Glasgow, St Andrew’s Hall 17 Goldman, James 32 Good Soldier Schweik, The (Hasek) 9–10, 12 Goodwin, Clive 47, 62–3, 65–6, 69, 72 Goorney, Howard 12, 23–4, 44, 61, 107; and The Flying Doctor 53–4; and The Hostage 71–2 Griffith, Robert 32 Grotowski, Jerzy 69, 139 group exploration 48 Haig, Sir Douglas, portrayal of in Oh What a Lovely War 101–2, 103, 106, 107 Hanighen, F.C. 84 Harding, Archie 5 Harewood, Earl of 35 Harris, Richard 30, 129

Hasek, Jaroslav 9 Hayman, Ronald 82, 83, 85 Hedley, Philip 41 Henry IV, Parts I & II (Shakespeare) 38 Hobson, Harold 24, 30–1 Hostage, The (Behan) 30–1, 41, 71–2, 74 hunger marches 4 Hunt, Albert 75 Illingworth, Nelson 51 Imaginary Invalid, The (Molière) 24 imagination 50, 57; exercises in 56, 57, 127–30 Imperial War Museum, London 113 improvisation 1, 23, 62–3, 133; audience and 71–2; in dialogue 27, 67, 68, 69; in Oh What a Lovely War 84–5; scoring play through 63–6; text 69–71 Ingram, Richard 39 International Brigade 9 Jackson, Christine 38 Jacques-Dalcroze, Emile 56, 139 Joan’s Book 42, 82 John Bullion 6–7 Johnny Noble (MacColl) 15 Johnson, Lyndon Baines 39 Jolly Potter, The (Cheeseman) 113 Jonson, Ben 24 Juno and the Paycock (O’Casey) 24 Kane, Marvin 32 Kayf Up West, A (Norman) 38 Kennedy, John F. 39, 78 King, Martin Luther 78 Laban, Rudolph 120, 123; influence of 6, 51–3, 69 Labour Stage 51 Landscape with Chimneys (MacColl) 18 Last Edition 10–11, 12 Leach, Robert 54, 66 League of Nations 6 Lecoq, Jacques 69, 139 Lewenstein, Oscar 25 lighting 13, 15, 25; in Oh What a Lovely War 88 INDEX

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Linden, Morris 17 ‘Living Newspaper’ techniques 10, 94, 133 Londoners, The 40, 41 Long, Long Trail, A (Chilton) 77, 89 Long Shift, The (Littlewood and Raffles) 21 Look Back in Anger (Osborne) 25 Lope de Vega, Felix 9 Lorca, Federico Garcia 15 Lord Chamberlain 11, 12, 30 Lysistrata (Aristophanes) 9, 10

Mother Courage (Brecht) 98 motivation 58 Moussinac, Leon 7 movement-based theatre 6, 51–6, 67 movement training 50, 51–6, 120–7 Mrs Wilson’s Diary (Ingram and Wells) 39 Murdock, H.T. 111 Murphy, Brian 59, 85, 99, 109 music-hall style 30, 31, 40, 41, 71; in Oh What a Lovely War 81, 82, 86, 87, 89, 91, 98, 100, 107 Mussolini, Benito 12

Macbird (Garson) 39 MacColl, Ewan 5, 44, 73, 139; aims of Theatre Workshop 50; expelled from local Communist Party 7; Johnny Noble 15; on Oh What a Lovely War in the West End 109–10; Theatre of Action 6; Theatre Union 8–9, 10; Theatre Workshop 12, 13, 18; The Travellers 21–2; Uranium 235 16 McGrath, John 113, 140 Macmillan, Harold 23, 40, 78 Manchester 5, 8; Art of Movement Studio 18, 51; Library Theatre 17, 18; Theatre Workshop in 18–22 Marie Lloyd Story, The (Farson and Moore) 39–40 Marowitz, Charles 84, 106 Marx, Karl 11 means test 4 Melvin, Murray 53, 60–1, 62, 64, 67, 92, 110, 111 Menuhin, Yehudi 35 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 6, 45, 54, 66, 93, 140 Miller, Jimmy see MacColl, Ewan Milne, Tom 47, 62–3, 65–6, 67, 69, 72 mind, conscious/subconscious 58 Miracle at Verdun (Schlumberg) 8 Molière 15, 24 Moore, Harry 39 Moscow Academy of Theatre and Cinema 7 Moscow State Higher Theatre Workshop 140

narrator, actor as 16, 86 National Theatre 46, 78, 140 naturalism 8, 82, 102 nazism 12 new technologies, use of 7, 33, 87–9 Newcastle, People’s Theatre 17 Newham Council 42; redevelopment of Theatre Royal area 36 Newlove, Jean 51, 52, 53–4, 120 Newsboy 6, 12 newspanels, use of 81, 88–9, 96–7, 98, 103 Noel-Baker, P. 84 nuclear war 79 O’Casey, Sean 24 Oh What a Lovely War 32, 38–9, 72, 90, 92, 99, 104–5; acting styles 81–2; battle of the Somme 103, 106; bayonet drill 95; beginnings of 77–8; Christmas 1914 85, 97; circus parade 84, 93–5; as collective voice for soldiers 80–1, 96–7, 103, 106, 107, 108, 109; developing 82–6; final push 107–8; grouse shooting party 84, 98–100; impact of 110–11, 113; Mrs Pankhurst 102–3; newspanels 81, 88–9, 96–7, 98, 103; Palm Court scene 101–2; pierrot show 86–7, 93–4; political and cultural context 78–9; portrayal of generals 95–6, 101–2 (Haig 101–2, 103, 106, 107); songs 89–91, 101, 102, 103, 106, 107, 108; theatricality of 81–2; use of

slides 81, 88, 89, 93, 94, 95, 100, 102, 107; use of technology 87–9, 93; war game 79–81, 107; war profiteers scene 84, 98, 100, 108–9; in the West End 108–10 Old Vic, Richard II in 24 Olivier, Lord 47, 78, 140 Operation Olive Branch (MacColl) 18, 19 Ormesby Hall 16, 56 Osborne, John 25 Other Animals, The (MacColl) 18, 20 O’Toole, Peter 78 pacifism 6–7, 8; in Oh What a Lovely War 102–3 Paget, Derek 79, 82, 83, 88, 89, 97, 108, 111 Palmer, Toni 99 Pankhurst, Mrs 102–3 Paris Festival 31, 107, 111 Peace Pledge Union 6, 8 Pennyman, Colonel and Mrs 16 performance, preparation for 61 Piscator, Erwin 6, 9, 45, 87, 140 ‘Plays for the People’ 45–6 political theatre 10, 15, 85, 111, 140 popular entertainment, Oh What a Lovely War as 81, 86–7 preparation 57–8, 60, 61 ‘present-tense’ theatre 46 Price, Cedric 33, 35, 36 Prince, Harold S. 32 Private Eye 39 production: Littlewood’s attitude to 45–6, 47; of Oh What a Lovely War 81–2, 87–9 Profumo Affair 39, 40, 78 Projector, The 40 Proposal, The (Chekhov) 18 Quare Fellow, The (Behan) 25, 26, 56, 63, 71; rehearsals for 61, 64–6 RADA (Royal Academy for Dramatic Art), Littlewood at 5, 45, 51 Raffles, Gerry 12, 15, 30, 38, 41; and Oh What a Lovely War 77, 86, 95;

and theatre management 23, 36; writing in collaboration with Littlewood 21 Red Megaphones 5 rehearsals 59, 61, 72; games used in 63, 118, 119–20, 123; improvisation in 63, 64, 66, 73, 115, 133; for Oh What a Lovely War 84 relaxation 50–1, 63 religion, in Oh What a Lovely War 91, 106–7 research 6, 57–8, 60; for Oh What a Lovely War 83, 84, 85 rhythm 54, 56 Richard II (Shakespeare) 24 Rogues Gallery, The (MacColl) 18 Ronan Point disaster 40 Rothschild, Baron Philippe de 42 Royal Court Theatre 46 Royal Shakespeare Company 46, 111, 113 Rusholme Repertory Theatre 6 Russell, Bertrand 110–11 satire 39, 79 Scenes from Shakespeare 5 Schechter, Joel 87 Schlumberg, Hans 8 schools, theatre performances in 21 scripts 64, 66 Second World War 10, 11–12 sets 13, 15, 25, 27 7:84 Theatre Company 140 Sewell, George 83, 101, 105 Shakespeare, William; adaptations of 18, 21, 24, 38; improvisation of dialogue 67 Shaw, Irwin 18 Shaw, Maxwell 42 simplicity 58 Slickers 6 slides, use of 81, 88, 89, 93, 94, 95, 100, 102, 107 Smith, Verity 16 Smythe Report 16 social realism 7, 8, 71 socialist theory 49 INDEX

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sound effects 88 Spanish Civil War 9, 12 Sparrers Can’t Sing 35 Spinetti, Victor 74, 77, 95, 99, 109 spontaneity 66 staging 10–11, 15; of Oh What a Lovely War 86–7, 88 Stanislavsky, Konstantin 2, 6, 8, 17, 60; An Actor Prepares 50, 56–8 Suez Crisis 31 Taste of Honey, A (Delaney) 30, 64, 70–1 Taylor, A.J.P. 113 texts 27, 30, 59–60; exercises on working with 130–2 That Was the Week That Was 39, 79 Theatre des Nations, Paris 24 Theatre Laboratory 139 Theatre of Action 139 Theatre Royal 22–32, 39–41, 42, 61; local redevelopment 36, 38 Theatre Royal Club 38, 39 Theatre Union 8–12, 50, 79 Theatre Workshop (see also Oh What a Lovely War) 13–14, 50, 74; financial problems 15, 22; launch of 15; in Manchester 18–2; movement training 51–2; and new writing 24–32; at Ormesby Hall 16–18; productions 15–22, 24–5, 27, 32, 39, 40–1; at Theatre Royal 22–32, 39–41, 61; transfers to West End 27, 31, 32, 74 Thomas, Gwyn 77 They Might be Giants (Goldman) 32 Through the Looking Glass (Lewis Carroll) 21 Toller, Ernst 6, 141

training see actor training; movement training Travellers, The (MacColl) 21–2 Tuchman, Barabara, August 1914 83 Twang! 35, 39 Tynan, Kenneth 44, 141 type-casting 47, 48 Ullman, Lisa 51 Uranium 235 (MacColl) 16–17 USA, Oh What a Lovely War in 111 variety entertainment 31, 39, 81 vaudeville style 39, 40, 81 ‘via negativa’ 69 vocal work 50, 51 Volpone (Jonson) 24 war (see also First World War; Second World War) 10, 21–2, 79 Walker, Margaret 434 We’re Just Not Practical (Kane) 32 welfare state 13, 14, 23 Wells, John 39, 63 West End 17, 35, 39; Littlewood’s attitude to 46; Oh What a Lovely War in 108–10; plays transfer to 27, 31, 32, 74 Williams, Rosalie 12 Wilson, Harold 35, 78 Windsor, Barbara 72 Wolff, Leon, In Flanders Field 83 Workers’ Theatre Movement 5, 6, 7 working class 4, 14, 23, 96 workshops 14 Wyndham Theatre 108–9 You Won’t Always be on Top (Chapman) 27, 28–9, 30, 56, 70