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

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Interview continued...

HT: When Ewan left the company, did Jean Newlove stay?

PR: No, she left pretty much at that time actually, although she would come back and arrange dances and things, There was never a total falling out, Joan spoke to Ewan on the phone every now and then and of course she took great interest in his children - Hamish MacColl who is still alive and living in France, and the two children that Ewan had by Jean Newlove – Hamish MacColl - Joan always took a great deal of interest in him, he was her godson, and also Kirsty, who died young, which was just the ghastliest, the worst thing that I can think of, in my life because it was so stupid in that if somebody gets ill and they die then you think that is terribly sad. But when somebody is killed by a stupid mistake, that you cannot take in. It just refuses to go in and you shudder at the thought every time you think about it.  So Joan, no, she kept in touch with Jean, who still does little performances with her students. Joan used to go to those. And, Ewan MacColl wrote a play with a name like Sea Sinners and Shore Saints or vice-versa and we went up to Manchester to see it, and it wasn't bad, and it was all set in a ship's chandler and they talk about being at sea and the characters in the play, the sailors and things that come into the ship's chandler, and there's a funny old captain played by David Scase who was one of Joan's actors and her original stage manager and somebody she liked immensely and he ran the theatre up there, which I mentioned before, the Library Theatre. So we went up to see Ewan's play, and Joan and I were sitting there when it came to an end, and she'd say, 'Yes but it's all arse about face, there's a character who comes on at the end who says, they say, 'where are you from, young man' and he says, 'Pendlebury' and he got a big laugh for saying that and she said, 'But he ought to have come on at the beginning of the play so it would be almost like the play had been done for him, that he's being given information', and she said, ‘Look, you see that guy, the smelly sailor, now listen, wouldn't be great if halfway through Act 2 you brought on a tin bath and made him have a bubble bath or something... and you thought 'Yes, because it would'... and that's a classic thing that Peter Brook would say, about halfway through Act 2 - this is just technical stuff - you need a lift, before you finish the play, and Joan was… she knew about that sort of thing, she didn't talk about it openly but she knew about that kind of thing and she wrote a rather brisk letter, I think it could be in somebody's book, it might be in Robert Leech's book, saying ‘it's all arse about face, and I can fix it in no time at all' and I think he either didn't answer, or said 'thanks but no thanks' and… but she would've, she would've done it in ten days and it probably would have been a better play, because she could put action into dialogue which sort of [inaudible] on itself. When she was doing Mrs Wilson's Diary for instance, which I was in with John Wells and Richard Ingrams, with whom she got on very well, [Richard Ingrams said it's the oldie which is over there – unclear meaning], and now when the original script came of Mrs Wilson's Diary, it was full of these kinds of jokes which sort of, were literary - they worked when you read them on the page but they didn't bounce off, you know actors always say, 'Ooh I do love this play it comes right off the page.' Well, these jokes stayed firmly on the page, but Joan found a way, by getting the actors up on their feet and doing things of making those jokes get up on to their feet, and be funny, and it was a little smasher that show, so that's an example of her taking something that was, that had something in it, but in this particular case, its fault was that it was literary, in somebody else's case it might have been that there was no construction, so she would have to find some kind of construction, which would be more musical - you think of Terence Rattigan who will have, do his structure like, you plant a piece of information which works later on, or you bring on a glass of wine and you leave the glass standing there and somebody says, 'What's that glass of wine' and you have to tell a story of why it's there. She didn't do that kind of construction, she did it musically. Almost like symphonically you know, quick follows slow, or ‘if I've got the piccolos up at the top there going ‘duh duh duh duh’ I want the double basses going ‘eh eh eh eh eh’.’ and she would do - I think that's how she held an audience, with production, I mean again, not that she ever said these things, you have to kind-of work it out by watching her do it or being in it, actually, being in it's about the worst thing, you need to sort of stand back, because when you were in it, a lot of the actors didn't have a clue what they were up to. They were rushing around the stage in, you know, a total panic but there were many opening nights like that where they thought, 'What the hell are we doing and what is this play?', and then the audience would go berserk and suddenly they realised they were in a classic. I mean, I don't think they quite knew what they'd got with Oh What A Lovely War, they were up and down in rehearsal, sometimes exhilarated and sometimes very, very depressed and actors would say, 'Where are we going, where are we going, what are we doing?' and 'Let me go back to the Royal Court where it's all written out for you' and then, this particular actress did go back to the Royal Court and she said, 'Boy was it boring after that!' Ha ha, she said, 'I never knew where I wanted to be because when I was at Stratford it was all so chaotic and you just wanted a bit of peace and everything sort of written out and you just rehearse it and do it and then I would go there and do it at the Royal Court and I would think, ‘Jesus, is this boring!' She was interested but never quite satisfied.

HT: How did critical reception go down within the company?

PR: Well Joan herself never – actors never believed her, but I think I do and I think I know why – she used to say, ' I never read reviews.' Gerry Raffles said, 'Well, I am afraid I do have to read reviews, it’s part of my job because I have to sell the play. If it has got good reviews I have to tell people it has good reviews and I've got to show photographs.'. She didn't like photos either. He thought that they were very important, because you had to get out there and sell the company, because Joan she couldn't sell anything – well, that's not true, she could – in a mysterious sort of way, she could sell very, very well indeed, but not in a conventional way, but Gerry knew that he had to go out there and flog things by the means of photographs and reviews and things. She would say 'I never read reviews', and people would think that she meant this in a very superior tone by saying that she didn't read reviews. But then she said, 'If I had read reviews I would have probably given up', and that is another honest remark because they would have affected her and she didn't like to admit to ever being affected by anything, you know, that she was very sturdy and brave. I remember after the first night of Henry IV with the reviews, which were stinging, absolutely stinging! The cast were sitting on the end of the stage kind of numb! I was sort of very puzzled because it was the first thing I had ever done to do with professional theatre and I said something like, 'Well the rehearsals were absolutely riveting!', and one of the actors said, 'Yes, that’s not the point', but he was slightly conventional I thought. But I thought they were interesting. I have done rehearsals with actors since with directors which have been incredibly boring - telling the actors to come on here and go off there and not sort of use their imagination. So reviews, Joan always thought that Theatre Workshop always got terrible reviews - it is not true, every now and then people would write pages and pages. Ken Tynan went absolutely berserk over Oh What a Lovely War, he said 'I stormed out of the theatre in a rage', which is what Joan wanted. She didn't want to depress people by having blood and guts and mud. This is again to do with her earlier experiences in theatre.
She once did a play that Gerry Raffles... which was based on his experiences of being a Bevin Boy, which was teenagers were sent down the mines during the war to make themselves useful - that's not the career you were going to have, you were jolly well just going to have to do it. He wrote this play and I am sure they did it very well, and they did it in a mining area and nobody came, but then she worked out, ‘well of course they don't come to see these plays - they have been down a pit all day, they don't want to watch one all night!’. So she knew she had to find a kind of stylisation, which she did with Oh What a Lovely War. There is no blood and the guns are not particularly real, and there is no brown - she hated khaki. Everything is very black and white and very up, so Ken Tynan would come out at the end of the show in a rage but he wasn't depressed and that is the important thing. He also gave a marvellous review for The Quare Fellow. He had been very anti-Joan until then, or sniffy shall we say. She had done Mother Courage in 1955 at the Devon Festival and that had all gone rather wrong. He thought it was very disrespectful. Joan had been obliged to play Mother Courage at the last minute - now that is a whole story almost like something on its own - but anyway it didn’t go very well and he was a bit fed up with Joan and with Theatre Workshop for having botched up the first major production of a Brecht play in this country. But with The Quare Fellow he wrote about Ireland having produced all of the best comical dramatists. I don't think there is any such thing as an English comedy dramatist, we have never written one! They are all Irish, and if you go back, sure enough if you go back through Shaw and Synge, O'Casey and right back to the Restoration comedy writers, most of them are Irish, and Oscar Wilde – it is extraordinary. He praises Ireland and he praises Brendan Behan and he was knocked out by that, and yet it was the most ghastly subject, and he came up with a marvellous quote from Shakespeare which was something like 'to move wild laughter in the throat of death' because that is about hanging and that is terribly funny and honestly funny. It is not trivially funny. I suppose that is why Joan thought he was a great writer. He had written tons of stuff, put it this way – Brendan Behan – so in this case there was a play there and Joan just had to edit it and sort it out and work with the company. When it came to The Hostage, by that time Brendan was very famous, and finding it hard to concentrate and settle down and write, and probably drinking more than was good for him although Joan always defended him. He was not as much of a drunk as people thought, it was just that he was slightly diabetic which meant it only took a few drinks before he was right half seas over. I think it was nice of her to defend him, The Hostage really did have to be pieced together with phone calls and him coming in and talking to the actors and remembering what he had told them. There were some early scenes but as the play went on there was less and less there. This was a marvellous example of the cast not knowing what they were doing, but Joan - because of this extraordinary genius for editing and listening carefully to what Brendan had said, and piecing it all delicately together - there you are! it's there! and it is great! And again Ken Tynan thought that was marvellous too. He used the word which was very popular with Joan, which was commedia dell'arte, because she loved commedia dell'arte. There was a marvellous commedia dell’arte actress called Isabella Andreini and she was really, I think, one of Joan's idols. It sounds like Michael Caine, but not a lot of people know that, I think, that whole business of a company going around the country and living on its wits. Also, the other thing that interested her about commedia dell'arte is, the thing about Joan is that people used to say, 'Oh, she does theatre for the working class', and she would say, 'Fuck the working class!', and that she gave working class actors a break, which she did, but that wasn't a chief interest. The thing is, she loved a jumble, that you would have lots of people coming from different backgrounds but with the same aim. So she found out that in commedia dell'arte. There were some really well-educated people who joined the company, but others were very good clowns. But they came together and did this thing of these minds all coming together and working, and she used to talk about the collective mind, like scientists all working on the same project but with all their different brains going into it. I think that it is a lovely theory but with Joan in the end, she did dominate because that was her instinct. I don’t think you can hold that against her. She was this very powerful person with a great, great sense of theatre. Some of us went along with it, and other people walked away. They said, ‘No, we’ll go off and do it the boring old way, we like it nice and clear. You come on and you pause and you say your lines, there is a whole language where they talk about blocking. You set the moves and things like that.’ Joan never blocked anything in her life! I didn't know what it was until I was about thirty or forty. Yet that is what actors knew all their lives elsewhere. 'Have you blocked the play yet?' if you worked in weekly rep - funnily enough, Joan had known about that when she had worked in Rep as a young girl. She never spoke about it, she kept that rather well hidden.

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