Joan Littlewood by Peter Rankin

Author:Peter Rankin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OBERON BOOKS Ltd

CHAPTER NINETEEN

AN OLD DREAM REVIVED,

OR JUST BUGGERING ABOUT?

It would be wrong to have the idea that Joan’s aims were as clear as Gerry’s. It’s safer to say that she was entering another ‘I don’t know what I’m doing but, boy, is everybody else going to pay for it’ period like she had in her teens. And people did pay because the energy she could bring to not knowing what she was doing was dangerous. The build-up to this period had begun ages before but, by 1960, it was accelerating.

Claude Planson asked her to bring an English classic to the Théâtre des Nations, but quickly. Not too confident, she mounted a production of Ben Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour, the one that had Victor Spinetti in it, in London, that is. He couldn’t make it to Paris. The money he was earning in cabaret with Danny La Rue was vital to him and his boss there, Bruce Brace, would not let him off, not even for four nights. Instead, Murray Melvin, free of Geof in A Taste of Honey, had to take over Brainworm, Victor’s character. Bob Grant was also in the play and he won the Théâtre des Nations’ Best Performance award playing the merchant, Kitely. It was gratifying but Joan did like to get things right for Paris and the feeling persisted that she hadn’t.

John Bury’s set for Every Man, covered in real bricks, became the set for Sparrers Can’t Sing, which was Joan’s next production. Stephen Lewis’s play was another example of her taking work that would never have been accepted by anyone else and making something of it. What Steve wrote was almost entirely a monologue spoken by Gran, an amusingly loquacious character based on his own gran. There was almost nothing there and yet a feeling came off the page that was golden. Joan broke up the monologue and, by means of lots of comings and goings, managed to pull the wool over the audience’s eyes, while preserving the golden feeling. It ran for ten weeks at Stratford and the following year, 1961, was revived in order to go to the Wyndham’s Theatre. Looked at on its own, there would seem to have been nothing wrong. It was teaching Gerry that, as with Fings, characters who talked like people who lived near the Theatre Royal but didn’t lecture them, would draw a local audience. As far as Joan was concerned, though, it was a play that had to be taken off, put back on and then transferred.

Hal Prince came over from America with a new play by James Goldman, They Might be Giants, that he wanted to try out at Stratford East. It was about a mad man who thought he was Sherlock Holmes. Joan’s actors liked the play. Joan liked the play. James Goldman liked Joan. Joan liked James Goldman. Hal teased Joan because he saw her being driven round London in a Rolls-Royce. Harry Corbett came back to play the mad Sherlock Holmes character.

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