Interviews

Actor. Audiences; Lionel Bart; Brendan Behan; Peter Brook; Cinderella; critics; dialogue; Joan Littlewood; Ewan MacColl; Oh What a Lovely War; playwrights; Gerry Raffles; rehearsals; Royal Court Theatre; Shakespeare; theatre-going; Theatre Workshop; Kenneth Tynan.

Interviewed by Helen Temple on 09/05/07

Pages 1 2 3 4 5 6

Interview continued...

PR: Then later she came back in ’72, carried on with that idea and also had Ken Campbell's Roadshow which is when Silvester McCoy came to us in that show. Out in front of the theatre, it was the summer and they would do their show. This is what seemed to fascinate her the most at that period, and for example, she saw a show at the ICA that had been put on by Janet Street-Porter called The Body Show. She liked it, but  she thought it needed a bit of structure. She said, 'Can we do it at Stratford? I will think of the structure.' The structure was that Victor Spinetti would be like a sort of fashion guy, very sort of cool, bringing on lots of models to show beautiful fashions. George Sewell, who was a more sort of burly guy, would be wrestling, and they had double-booked the theatre, so both things had to go on at once, because Joan adored that kind of conflict. Not only that, but you had makeup and things being done in the foyer, so that the whole building was alive, and I think that that was what appealed to Joan more than text at that time. Joan would say, 'Oh I am not interested in plays', and John Antrobus said, 'Well I am!', and I remember thinking 'good for you John!' because Joan was interested in this all round thing, and we did another thing called Nuts which again was a bit of a failure! But it was a marvellous idea which was that ten actors would rehearse a lot of sketches for each night, and you would invite guests – you know famous people – and do their piece whatever it was. But also you would bring in journalists who would leap up onto the stage and tell a story that had happened that day. And we would have a video screen - which was very unusual for those days - which projected a TV picture, a big TV picture so that you could have the news of the day. You could have these sketches, which would be pretty relevant, and you could have some entertainer who you liked very much coming on and doing their funny old thing. You jumbled it all up together and you edited it, and Joan would edit it each night. I was fascinated by it, but it demanded a tremendous effort to ring up people every day rehearse the latest sketch you wanted to do, and pull the whole thing together, and some nights it went as flat as a pancake! And unfortunately it went as flat as a pancake the night the critics came – they were totally mystified! I thought that if you had the devotion to this thing, and the energy it would be no bad thing. I was intrigued by all those ideas but I think that there were people who were impatient with Joan because she was not settling down to taking a person’s text. She once had a saying about plays, she said, 'If a play is good, it’s bad', and what she meant by that is that someone might send in a play that is beautifully crafted but somehow dead. What interested her, and what she was brilliant at, and what her genius was for, was that somebody sent something, like Shelagh Delaney, where it needed a ton of work, but there was a kind of spirit in it, or a tune, or in the case of Frank Norman this use of Cockney that people didn't know at that time, and it kind-of chimed in your head and you thought 'yes yes' and you do it – you do it now, you don't wait. I mean, Shelagh Delaney's play A Taste of Honey, she sent it down to Stratford East, it was accepted almost immediately and done almost immediately. There was no ‘Brochure Theatre’ where you plan and plan and plan! They were going to do a play by a guy called Cops - who lives round here actually - The Hamlet of Stepney Green but they brushed that aside, which was cruel for him, and did A Taste of Honey. But that was the way they did things and it was very vital and very alive. Intelligent people responded to that, and less intelligent people who had a very fixed idea of what theatre was, didn't. That I suppose was the Arts Council. Their idea of something you champion was Sybil Thorndike touring a Greek tragedy around Welsh mines, which would have puzzled them no end. Joan wanted her shows to be intelligent but accessible, and she tried her hardest in the touring days to make them like that, and to make them really entertaining. Sometimes on those tours where people think they failed all the time, they didn’t! They would have a marvellous night and people would say, 'Oh this is absolutely great', and then they would go somewhere else and they would have a dud night. Well anyway, that is where I have got to. Now. What else do you want to talk about? If anything?

HT: When did Ewan stop working closely with Joan?

PR: That would be about, ‘53-‘54.

HT: Fairly early then.

PR: Well, do remember that she had known him before the war. There had been the agitprop and the shows they had done before the war, there had been eight years of touring, and then about three years at Stratford East, before he thought he was being frozen out. If you read his book, which is called Journeyman, he is very tactful, but he felt that he was being frozen out. Then he went off to become a folk singer, with Peggy Seeger, and Joan always respected his songs. Like 'Dirty Old Town' which is still played, 'The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face', and one of Joan's favourites 'I'm A Rambler', which I think is the Ramblers’ anthem even now. Gerry respected the songs, but I think he found the texts rather school-masterish. And he wanted something different, and Gerry got his way. Because those plays of Frank Norman, Brendan Behan, Shelagh Delaney, that is what Gerry wanted. I think Joan didn't feel the same as he did, and yet those are the plays that made the theatre internationally famous. But almost in a very strange sort of way, Joan almost didn’t care. In the case of Oh What a Lovely War that was an extraordinary coming together. As I said, in 1961 Joan left Gerry, left the theatre, and she tried to make a film, which was going to be set in Nigeria with the playwright Wole Soyinka, who is still very much on the go – he went to Leeds university. And that didn’t come together. I think she found Nigeria tough, she didn't like the heat. Then she got into the idea of making films, and that is how Sparrers Can't Sing came about. It wasn’t a film version of the play Stephen Lewis had written, because it was completely different by the time they had finished. But it has great charm these days, because it tells you of an East End that has now gone, and it’s like a kind of document when you see it. She cared nothing for it when she made it, she said, 'Go drop it in cement in the Thames, I couldn’t care less.'. But she saw it quite recently, before she died, and she said, 'It's not bad is it?'. It does have great charm, and if you ever want to get a tiny feel of how things were it does come up every now and again and it has Barbara Windsor in it, and James Booth, and a lot of Joan's actors from Theatre Workshop at that time.
Of course the place was always evolving, because to start with you had a team of people who were politically aligned and aligned with the whole idea of Theatre Workshop, but you get a feel from Gerry's diaries, notes and letters that he thought they were very keen but not very talented. That sounds a bit blasphemous, but as I said, I am reading between the lines. When two actors, Avis Bunnage and Harry Corbett came along, now they were not so politically aligned by any manner of means, and Joan used to be quite scornful about their politics, but they could do it. They could do what she wanted, and so could an actor called George A. Cooper, and they became her principal actors. Gerry would have been very appreciative of that, because he did like solid, strong performers. He likes clear voices and this whole idea about Performance with a capital P. It makes it interesting because you have two people who have similar ideas and different ideas at the same time. Gerry had his idea about the way he wanted things to go, and the tension is interesting between the two of them because Joan was not like him entirely. He served her tremendously well, because as a young man I think he said something like, 'I will lay down my life for you' - which he did, because he died very young. All his energy had gone into Stratford East.  She was very scornful about the building. He stayed there when things were rough, and when great wreckers’ balls were in the area - because they were completely flattening the are - he stayed there to make sure that the wreckers’ ball did not come anywhere near the theatre. Which might have happened accidentally-on-purpose at that time. So he was different, and I know people thought he was a bit of a rogue at the time, but I think he is a bit of an unsung hero. He wanted to be unsung. He put his name at the bottom of the programmes as General Manager G. C. Raffles, when it could have been 'A Gerry Raffles Production' if he had wanted, but he pushed Joan in the spotlight, and her name in the spotlight, which she was not totally at ease with. She always told me she was very uncomfortable with that, whilst others would say, 'Oh no, she was very much a star', and all that… I think there were sort of conflicting things going on there. You see, for instance on the posters it would always give you the name of the play, the author, the designer John Bury – who was very important to Theatre Workshop – and ‘Joan Littlewood – Director’ [Producer was the word used in those days] in big letters. The cast were never, never on the poster, I think that some of the actors at that time when Harry Corbett and George A Cooper left, that things were changing and that Gerry was becoming a boss figure and that it was no longer quite the co-operative that it was – you know, the whole idea that you had meetings and you decided everything by vote. But I think they found that Joan and Gerry had formed a bit of a unit and were going their way, so that they became I always felt, benevolent despots. I didn't mind that, because I always thought, ‘Well if you don't like it, then go!’ That is the nice thing about theatre: you don’t have to be a democracy! You have to be a democracy in a country, but in a theatre, if everybody's always chipping in then there is a terrible slowness about the whole thing. But if you have some bastard coming in saying ‘this is how it is going to be’, and the bastard is talented, then you might have something. If you think that person is a bastard, and you don’t want to work for them, fine - go and start your own company and be your own bastard! I didn’t worry about that too much! I came to respect Gerry immensely, and I realise now that it is very likely that those plays Joan was famous for probably landed on his desk first, actually, and he probably read them first. Nobody ever talks about that. He would have handed them to Joan and said, 'What about this? Shall we do this?' I suspect that that is what happened. Because Joan needed a lot of help, this is the other thing. People thought that Theatre Workshop was Joan, and it wasn't - it was different people helping. She did admit it. I always looked upon her as a kind of queen bee – the rest of us were workers who brought the raw material that you would give her, if you were a writer or an actor. She would weave it together - because she was a genius editor - she would weave it all together and you would get your show.

Interview continued...

Pages 1 2 3 4 5 6