Tag: You Won’t Always Be On Top

Littlewood’s Approaches to Texts and Devising

Posted on by Phil

Interview with Nadine Holdsworth: Part 4

Nadine Holdsworth is Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Warwick. Her research has two distinct, but sometimes interconnected strands in Twentieth Century popular theatre practitioners and theatre and national identities in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. She has worked particularly on Joan Littlewood and has written Joan Littlewood for the Routledge Performance Practitioners Series in 2006 and Joan Littlewood’s Theatre with Cambridge University Press in 2011.

email: n.holdsworth@warwick.ac.uk

Connections to the GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • Methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing
  • Key collaborations with other artists
  • The relationship between actor and audience in theory and practice
  • Influence
  • Significant moments in the development of theory and practice
  • Social, cultural, political and historical context

PC: Is there a clear difference in her work with text compared to her devised pieces?

NH: Yes. The form was always about making it work with the text, so whatever the text required was the form that was made. Or in terms of the more improvised pieces like Oh What a Lovely War or earlier plays like John Bullion it was about the best relationship between the different elements of production. Derek Paget uses a term collision montage which I think is a really lovely way of talking about that work. She constantly reordered scenes making something like Oh What A Lovely War, to see what was going to have the most impact: put that next to that, what does that do? Try it again here, what does that do?

PC: I know that Littlewood was very playful with her actors: was her experimentation with form rooted solely in her playfulness or was it rooted in a research and understanding of the theatre?

NH: I think it changes given the different contexts she was working in.

  • In the beginning the impetus was political
  • then it moved through to wanting to make really vivid theatrical imagery
  • then the idea of the authentic working class voice becomes more important (A Taste of Honey, You Won’t Always Be On Top and Brendan Behan’s plays)
  • Then she shifts into wanting to be much more improvisational, breaking down that relationship between the auditorium and the stage space with interruptions and humour to develop a relationship with the audience.
  • Then after Oh What a Lovely War she gets completely bored with theatre and theatre spaces full stop and she starts doing community projects for kids and makes plans for this big cultural centre – the Fun Palace. This idea lives on in the Fun Palace events run across the world at the start of October led by co-directors Stella Duffy and Sarah-Jane Rawlings.

So yes there is definitely the sense of her anarchic spirit driving these shifts but it is also about her ever growing knowledge of the theatre that never allowed her work to stay still.

Summary

  • Littlewood constantly reordered scenes making something like Oh What A Lovely War, to see what was going to have the most impact. Derek Paget uses a term collision montage.
  • Littlewood’s anarchic spirit drove shifts in her approach but changes always came about with her ever growing knowledge of the theatre.

 

Littlewood’s Continuous Loop and the Authentic Voice

Posted on by Phil

Interview with Nadine Holdsworth: Part 3

Nadine Holdsworth is Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Warwick. Her research has two distinct, but sometimes interconnected strands in Twentieth Century popular theatre practitioners and theatre and national identities in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. She has worked particularly on Joan Littlewood and has written Joan Littlewood for the Routledge Performance Practitioners Series in 2006 and Joan Littlewood’s Theatre with Cambridge University Press in 2011.

email: n.holdsworth@warwick.ac.uk

Connections to the GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • Social, cultural, political and historical context
  • Key collaborations with other artists
  • Influence
  • Methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing
  • Theatrical style
  • Innovations
  • The relationship between actor and audience in theory and practice

PC: What was her existence during the Second World War? Did she continue making theatre?

NH: She was making a living by doing lots of radio. There is an early period when she went to Manchester because she’d met a guy called Archie Harding at RADA. He’d come and examined a verse speaking competition that she’d won. So she went off to search for this guy and he offered her work at the BBC. This led to her doing quite a few documentary pieces; most famously a piece called The Classic Soil. She’d go out, again you can see real links with the theatre, she’d go out and interview ordinary people in their ordinary working or living environments and just talk to them. She had a big thing about wanting to hear the authentic working class voice.

PC: How common was the documentary style that presented the authentic working class voice?

NH: Not common at all; it was a really new thing; it was again with Ewan MacColl. We mustn’t underestimate the importance of him in that early period. The two of them were totally in cahoots and developing things. It is worth looking up The Classic Soil.

PC: This search for an authentic voice and specifically an authentic working class voice in Joan Littlewood’s work, along with Erwin Piscator’s Living Newspaper technique and Peter Cheeseman’s Stoke documentaries, are seen as early examples of what has become known as verbatim theatre. Joan’s legacy can be seen in Alecky Blythe’s Little Revolution or Dan Murphy’s new play Carry on Jaywick. Are there examples in her theatre work that were influenced by the radio documentary form?

NH: Yeah, I think definitely that idea of presenting the authentic voice is a root of modern verbatim theatre. She felt the authentic working class voice wasn’t being heard on the British stages at that time so it became really important to her. A good example is a play called You Won’t Always Be On Top (Henry Chapman), which was set on a building site. It was one of the plays that she did in the 1950s in which she collaborated very closely with the writer and the script was evolving in rehearsals, which happened a lot with her work. She took all the performers off to a building site and they had to learn how to build a wall because they had to build one in the production every night. She had this incredible replica of a building site on stage. But more important than the visual authenticity, was the focus on patterns in the voice. Joan wanted to have that very real quality of back and forth banter that happens in lots of contexts, but this building site in particular. I think that idea of trying to document and record and authenticate the voice does have a line through to verbatim theatre today.

PC: In terms of records of those things. Is there the play text?

NH: Yes there is the play text of You Won’t Always Be On Top and there are some great photographic images as well. Another is The Long Shift, a play she wrote with Gerry Raffles, who became her partner.

the-long-shiftCourtesy of Theatre Royal Stratford East Archive Collection.

It is about miners down a mine shaft so you see that attempt at visual authenticity there.

This is the set for You Won’t Always Be On Top.

you-wont-always-be-on-topCourtesy of Theatre Royal Stratford East Archive Collection.

You can see she is trying to create a truthful recreation, a very naturalistic looking environment.

PC: She is not usually associated with that style of work.

NH: No but it was a major part of what she did. I think that is one of the things that is really interesting about her: there is no set style. She believed that theatre should always be organic, made in the moment.

PC: The authentic voice seems to be an important debate at the moment, in the theatre and broader society. Theatre is accused of being too London centric, whilst the country, post-EU Referendum, as a whole is suffering a disconnect with working class people, particularly illuminated by the Labour Party’s current identity crisis. So a hypothetical question: How might Joan Littlewood respond to modern Britain in terms of creating her theatre?

NH: She referred to the idea of the continuous loop between the theatre, the audience and the local community. So I think it would be interesting to think about what the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, has become. When Littlewood was there it was a staunchly working class environment predominantly. It is now an incredibly multi-ethnic community and the theatre has evolved to reflect that community. Theatre today, like in Littlewood’s day, is predominantly a white middle class pursuit but at Theatre Royal, Stratford East it absolutely isn’t. It is one of the most diverse audiences and I think that is because they work with that ethos of the continuous loop. You have to go out into the community, find out about the people, who the people are, what their narratives are, what the voices are, what the stories are that they want telling. Then you go back into your theatres and you make that work, you commission it, you make it.

Summary

  • Ewan MacColl was an important part of Joan Littlewood’s life and career in that early period. We mustn’t underestimate the importance of him.
  • Littlewood had a big thing about wanting to hear the authentic working class voice. She’d go out and interview ordinary people in their ordinary working or living environments and just talk to them.
  • The idea of trying to document and record and authenticate the voice does have a line through to verbatim theatre today.
  • You Won’t Always Be On Top and The Long Shift had a set that tried to be a truthful recreation, a very naturalistic looking environment.
  • The continuous loop: you have to go out into the community, find out about the people. Then you go back into your theatres and you make work in response to what you find.