Interview with Nadine Holdsworth: Part 2
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
- Theatrical purpose
- Innovations
- Key collaborations with other artists
- Influence
- Theatrical style
- Significant moments in the development of theory and practice
- Methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing
PC: What was most important to Littlewood at the start of her career?
NH: I think it was the political convictions. The fact that she became involved very early on in the 30s with Ewan MacColl and the Workers’ Theatre Movement. She had gone to RADA, left RADA because she couldn’t bare the sterile nature of the theatre that she was expected to do: the “anyone for tennis”, “cup and saucer” theatre which she abhorred. So she’s looking around saying look we’ve got some people here doing hunger marches, we’ve got a general strike, there are people that are in an extreme state of poverty and the theatre of the day is simply not addressing those social, economic, political issues. So that was the galvanising force initially: a real political impetus married with this passion for theatre and how theatre could be a voice for that experience. Theatre offered a way of approaching it, tackling it, investigating it in a way that would also be entertaining. Theatrically, at the same time, she is a real magpie, getting interested in the European theatre traditions. She is one of the early people in Britain, with Ewan MacColl, to start looking at Stanislavski, Piscator and Meyerhold and thinking – “These are great!” – whereas the British theatre tradition was still very much a text heavy theatre – the voice of the ac-TOR speaking. She thought no, there are these people that are doing these incredible theatrical pieces of work that she was really excited about. So I think that initial period was about trying to marry a theatre with a political impetus and an entertaining theatricality. But also about experimenting and how she could be a magpie and pick on all these influences she was seeing from abroad.
PC: What was her first stylistic response to that political impetus?
NH: Mainly that the theatre of her day was not how it should be. She was very much reacting against what she was seeing in the British theatre. As well as the influence of what she was seeing from European practitioners and seeing a theatrical vitality that was exciting for her. I think the first works from the 1930s were quite expressionistic, with short scenes, many of them very visual. You’ve also got this Agitprop movement, the Workers’ Theatre style of theatre, which is out on the streets, pulling on a cart and doing work to people in unemployment queues, queuing up for labour exchange and for jobs. These companies would pull up and do these short sharp topical sketches. They used a visual short hand: the bowler hat or the top hat for the posh blokes and the flat caps for the workers. They were doing scenes that were trying to show the workers’ experience back to them.
PC: She was involved in a few companies. Did she have a company then?
NH: Yeah, the Theatre Union and that worked until the beginning of the Second World War when people went off to fight and then they reformed after the war as Theatre Workshop in 1945.
Summary
- People were doing hunger marches, there was a general strike, there are people that are in an extreme state of poverty and the theatre of the day was simply not addressing those social, economic, political issues.
- Theatre offered a way of approaching it, tackling it, investigating it in a way that would also be entertaining.
- She is one of the early people in Britain, with Ewan MacColl, to start looking at Stanislavski, Piscator and Meyerhold
- Stylistically she was very much reacting against what she was seeing in the British theatre.
