Joan Littlewood
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Joan Littlewood

Nadine Holdsworth

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eBook - ePub

Joan Littlewood

Nadine Holdsworth

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About This Book

This book uses original archival material to consider the theatrical and cultural innovations of Joan Littlewood and her company, 'Theatre Workshop'. Littlewood had a huge impact on the way theatre was generated, rehearsed and presented during the twentieth century.

Now reissued, Joan Littlewood 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 Performace Practitioners offer unbeatable value for today's student.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2017
ISBN
9781351333825

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 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, play writing, 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. Follow ing 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 com munity 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 learn ing. 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. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. A series of practical exercises designed to capture and illustrate the key approaches that Littlewood took in the rehearsal room.

Early Life

Born on 6 October 1914, Joan Littlewood lived with her mother and grandparents in Stockwell in South 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 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 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 sub-West 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
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 charac...

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