Interviews

Playwright. Censorship; Central School of Speech and Drama; Community Theatre; George Devine; early theatre experience; Endgame; The Knack; Look Back in Anger; Lord Chamberlain; The Observer writing competition; reading plays; Royal Court Theatre; Michel Saint-Denis; Shelley; The Sport of My Mad Mother; Sir Vincent Troubridge; Ken Tynan; Waiting for Godot; writers group; writing.

Conducted by Kate Dorney on 21/05/05

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KD: This is Kate Dorney interviewing Ann Jellicoe on the 21st of May.  I wonder if I could ask for your permission to deposit this recording in the British Library and Archive.

AJ: Yes, you have my permission.

KD: Thank you very much and also if I could ask for us to retain the copyright for the interview, us being the AHRC British Library Theatre Archive Project.

AJ: Yes it is, it’s fine.

KD: That’s lovely.  I’d like to start by asking you about your pre-Royal Court experiences of going to the theatre and working in the theatre.

AJ: Right, well, when I was four years old if you please I knew I wanted to go into the theatre, though I thought, you know, I thought I wanted to act, and I’m not quite sure why it should be but it’s an interesting question, I haven’t really thought about it before but I had a… not an easy childhood, my parents separated and I have a feeling that the world of fantasy struck me that early, that you could go into another situation.  Anyway, from four years old, I knew what I wanted to do and went right through school doing as much theatre work as you can do at school.  What was your original question?

KD: Yes, your experiences of…

AJ: Oh pre-experiences.

KD: But I think… had you been to the theatre then when you were four?

AJ: I’d been in a dancing class.  Oh perhaps it was when I was about four, that might have been it!  I was in a dancing class and I remember vividly the performance, you know the sort of performance that dancing classes give, and I was a raindrop in one dance.  Oh and another significant experience, I can remember while we were just having, being really rather bored and not bothering and then suddenly thinking ‘Oh, I suppose I’d better make an effort’.  I was probably about six at this time, it must’ve, I couldn’t have been much younger, and so I really put myself into it and was visibly appreciated, do you see what I mean?

KD: Yes.

AJ: I learnt very early the value of trying your best, which was a very useful thing to learn at that age.  Anyway, come the performance it was great, and my father sat in the audience and sent a box of chocolates round to the stage door with his card tucked in the corner, ‘Captain J. A. Jellicoe’, you know.  Oh it was great fun.  And so then I went through school doing a lot of theatre work, often just the… apart from the ordinary school productions which I always took a big part in, I also got endless small things.  A charade is a very low-key form of theatre but extraordinarily easy to put on, you know, for… but there was one thing which was truly remarkable which when I was organising these charades, I would lie awake the day before it had to put together and in my head write everything.  I would have the whole dialogue in my head, and so the next day all I had to do was tell people exactly what they had to say, what they had to do and it was all there.  I made an extraordinary, looking back on it, I couldn’t even believe it… think of it now.  But anyway that was very… and that was I suppose from about 14 onwards, because I was at boarding school so had plenty of time for that sort of nonsense.  And then I went to drama school, the Central School of Speech and Drama, and there I did my first productions, oh and indeed, in a sense the first tentative writing, I mean apart from the charades which was a very low-key form of writing.  But I did do the first productions with other students and things like that, and did very well, I came out with their chief prize at their public show, but not being a pretty girl, at an age when we hadn’t had the Berliner Ensemble and plain girls were allowed to be interesting, you know, I didn’t immediately get work.  Oh, I did go into rep, that’s right, I went into… some friends of mine were taking over a rep at Aberystwyth, because they worked out they were going to run it for some ghastly commercial man called J B Somerville, and they asked me to go and I went, more or less because I hadn’t been offered anything else.  But it was great fun and you did a lot of work, it was weekly rep and very, very good experience.  Then… it’s hard to remember what happened.  Then I got desultory work.  I’m probably missing out vast chunks but I can’t remember.  Anyway, one day, I suppose in 1955, I can’t remember, The Observer announced it was holding a playwriting competition, and I had frequently tried to write plays and could never get myself together or, you know, never finished anything, and so from the conditions - and Tynan was behind it - I realised they didn’t want a conventional thing.  I think I must have done quite a bit of writing at Central England and…

KD: They didn’t have any kind of course in writing no?

AJ: Oh no, no, no!  But I did have a lot of experience of theatre, and also at Central there had been a remarkable teacher who used improvisation of a very free kind.  He prepared improvisation often just, single you know not groups, just somebody to… and I remember seeing a student… This was very important I think.  I remember seeing a student playing a trumpet, he was, it must have been improvising a dream.  He was playing a trumpet which turned into a bird and flew away.

KD: Oh!

AJ: And I suddenly realised this was something quite new, never seen anything like… because I, what was it, early… late forties, early fifties, it was mostly conventional theatre and I realised this was something extremely new and when I wrote The Sport of My Mad Mother for The Observer, I knew first of all that The Observer would be ready to look at new styles.

KD: Because of Tynan?

AJ: Because of Tynan. And the other judges were pretty… I can’t remember who they were, but they were pretty open-minded people.  I think Tynan was wanting, actually probably wanting to find a new approach and of course the Court had just started.  We had had Joan Littlewood I think, yes… yes, one had seen a lot of Joan Littlewood, must have seen Waiting for Godot and certainly the plays at the Court ... what dear?

KD: Do you remember anybody leaving Waiting for Godot?

AJ: Do I remember anybody…?

KD: It’s a kind of myth that people, you know, got up and stormed out.

AJ: Oh not when I saw it.  By the time I saw it, which was at the Criterion, it was definitely… ‘I could not love anyone who would not love this play’.

KD: Oh really?

AJ: Oh yes, no, no.  In fact I don’t ever remember hearing stories of people walk out of Waiting for Godot.

KD: Apparently when it was first at the Arts Theatre…

AJ: The Arts, before it went to the Criterion?

KD: Yes.

AJ: Oh well, you know, so they did.

KD: Well, no, so the legend has it.

AJ: Yes well…

KD: We haven’t found anyone that did.

AJ: Well I don’t remember anything like that, and I was certainly in the thick of it.  Was I in the thick of it?  No, I wasn’t really.

KD: You were living in London.

AJ: I was married, my first marriage, we lived in a mews in London and I had a little room, half the size of this, in which I could do what I wanted.  Anyway The Observer play competition was announced and I wrote The Sport of My Mad Mother, influenced very much really by suddenly seeing… this improvisation was like a door or an opening into a cavern, you know which you could explore.  Anyway…

KD: Because it didn’t really happen in England at that time did it?

AJ: What didn’t?

KD: Well improvisation and to…

AJ: No, no.

KD: It wasn’t all about steering you round the furniture.

AJ: This man had worked with Michel Saint-Denis…

KD: Oh.

AJ: At the… oh and, oh yes of course, George Devine worked at…

KD: At the Old Vic.

AJ: I think they used improvisation but it wasn’t a common thing, you wouldn’t find it in most drama schools.  Well maybe you would, but this guy had worked with Saint-Denis and had picked up that… He was called Oliver Reynolds.  He was a very, very clever man but without ambition really because he could have done very well.  I mean, his contemporaries were George Devine and people like that, a very good director, I learnt an awful lot from him, then he died rather early.

KD: So you wrote The Sport of My Mad Mother.

AJ: I wrote The Sport of My Mad Mother and I won’t say lived happily ever after but what that did was, it was quite extraordinary, I mean you know I’d be sitting writing in my little room and posted the thing off and The Observer said ‘We’ve had 2000 or 2500 scripts you know, we’ll start sending back those we don’t want’.  So you sat and thought ‘Well, it’s not come back yet’ [laughs] and then one day the phone rang and a very sort of Foreign and Commonwealth Old Etonian kind of voice said ‘Oh you, you submitted a play didn’t you?’ [laughs] ‘Well, you’ve won a prize’, and there was three beats and I said ‘What prize?’ [laughter]. So anyway he said ‘Joint third’ which was… it was clearly, they’d all been able to agree about the first two, one was a play which totally disappeared without trace, two of the… one was called Moon on a Rainbow Shore, and I don’t remember the other one, but then Wally Simpson and I won joint third, and I mean, you know, the phone rings and within 24 hours you’re having lunch with the directors of the Royal Court Theatre and their designer is coming round to your room with a model to… it’s unbelievable.

Interview continued...

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