Tag: composite mind

Littlewood and Theatre Workshop’s Oh What a Lovely War: A Collision Montage

Posted on by Phil

Connections to the GCSE, AS and A level specifications 

  • Methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing
  • Social, cultural, political and historical context
  • Use of theatrical conventions
  • Theatrical style
  • Significant moments in the development of theory and practice
  • The relationship between actor and audience in theory and practice

PC: Let’s return to her most famous production: Oh What a Lovely War. How did they devise the play?

NH: Improvisation was used to generate the material. They worked with lots of research: materials would have been brought in. Lots of books were coming out about the First World War, a TV documentary had been on about it as well. So there was lots of documentary material that they were trying to work their way from, to find the best way of articulating it on the stage. Improvisation was used as a way to devise from that material. How do we devise from this material to make this work?

PC: Are there records of that process?

NH: There aren’t records of the process but there are people who worked on the show. There are various interviews with people who worked on the show. It wasn’t a formalised process at all, there was no document. She kept notebooks in the early period that I have seen but there is nothing from the later periods at all. She was just making it up as she went along. She kept herself in the moment of creating.

PC: So how did she control her approach to making the work?

NH: The research process was quite academically orientated although she didn’t necessarily like academics. She’d go and do lots of reading, bring source material in, she would give the company particular areas to research: maybe a particular battle or a particular period in the war or a particular figure like Hague or Marshall and people would then bring that material into the rehearsal room. They’d see something that was interesting and follow that.

PC: And how did they logistically make sure that they repeated things. Did they have a writer working alongside. How did it get set?

NH: No, it just got set by doing. There wasn’t a scribe taking down notes. It was an organic process that evolved until the scenes were relatively set.

PC: Did the spirit of improvisation spill over into performance? 

NH: In performance it was used to try and keep things sharp and alive. One of the differences with the majority of the theatres of the day was that you rehearsed something, you blocked it, you set it, and then it was about repeating that night after night, after night. For Littlewood that was deadly theatre. She wanted to keep a frisson going in the actual performances: she would invite moments of improvisation just to shift things up a bit. Sometimes she wouldn’t even tell the rest of the actors on stage, she would give somebody an instruction to do something completely new, which would make the other performers have to respond to this new piece of action that was going on. An example of that from Oh What A Lovely War, is a rugby team that had taken a block booking and she organised for them to walk on stage when Barbara Windsor sang the We’ll Make A Man Of You song. So she gave Barbara something to deal with in the moment of performance just to constantly keep things fresh and alive and in the moment of performance. Rather than just regurgitating what had happened the night before and the night before that. So improvisation was important for those things.

PC: How did the popular tradition of variety and the Music Hall influence Littlewood’s work, specifically in Oh What a Lovely War?

NH: The Music Hall was seen as an authentic working class, popular cultural form by Littlewood, that is why she warmed to it. There was a relationship between the stage and the audience, a back and forth, that goes on in those forms. As well as literally being about variety. What happens when you have lots of things happening on the stage at the same time? Or that idea of the collision montage in terms of Oh What A Lovely War. There is something in the format of Music Hall and variety, a series of turns, that is quite theatrically effective. Whereas in Music Hall and variety they were individual turns she kind of flips that idea around. What if the theatre event is effectively a series of turns but they are all thematically interconnected, like in Oh What A Lovely War?

And the Pierrot show, which she obviously used in Oh What A Lovely War, that again is part of that popular seaside tradition. The Pierrots were around during the period of the First World War. They get referred to as the Merry Roosters and there actually was a troop called the Merry Roosters during the First World War. So she is taking that popular form and reference very clearly into the play.

Summary

  • Lots of research was done during the creation of Oh What a Lovely War and improvisation was used to generate the material.
  • Littlewood was making it up as she went along. She kept herself in the moment of creating. There aren’t records of the process beyond anecdote.
  • Littlewood wanted to keep the thrill of performance going so she would invite moments of improvisation just to shift things up a bit.
  • There was a relationship between the stage and the audience, a back and forth, that goes on in Music Hall and Variety that appealed to Littlewood.
  • Littlewood’s later work shows her interest in a theatre event that is series of turns that were all thematically interconnected, like in Oh What A Lovely War – the collision montage.

Littlewood: Music, Stanislavski and Laban in Performance

Posted on by Phil

Interview with Nadine Holdsworth

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.

Connections to the GCSE, AS and A level specifications

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

PC: Stanislavski put a lot of emphasis on the idea of tempo/rhythm and again I see that in Littlewood’s work with Eurhythmics. Originally it was a theory for music, was music used in Theatre Workshop rehearsals? And how was it important in productions?

NH: Music became increasingly a part of productions, and songs certainly, when she started collaborating with Lionel Bart in Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be. She used a jazz band, famously on A Taste Of Honey stage. I’m not sure about rehearsals, I’m not aware that they did, but I think that they must have done in terms of the movement work that Jean Newlove did. Newlove trained and worked with Laban and then she joined Theatre Workshop and became their principal movement teacher.

PC: Was she scouted because of her interest in Laban?

NH: She wasn’t scouted she turned up, from memory, to one of the workshops they did when they were in Ormesby Hall and she ended up getting together with Ewan MacColl and marrying him. So it was a personal, as well as a professional thing. But she got taken on for her connections with Laban and being able to do the movement training that Littlewood and MacColl were cobbling together themselves up to that point. Now they then had someone who was an expert to do it properly.

PC: Was she influenced by Brecht’s work?

NH: Not so much consciously. They did do a production of Mother Courage. They got the rights to do the British premiere of it, which was a disaster. He only gave the rights if she would perform Mother Courage because she did perform in the early days. She didn’t want to do it and she did a poor job. It was done in Barnstaple in Devon and that was it. So no not consciously, I think she found it quite cold, which I don’t necessarily agree with but she found it as an overly intellectual theatre.

PC: Interesting that that unfortunate perception of Brecht still stands for so many. Can we talk about specific actors? Who was her leading female actress?

NH: Avis Bunnage often took the main roles.

PC: And leading male actors?

NH: Harry H. Corbett, the son from the TV programme Steptoe and Son. He was married to Avis, in the early years they came as a package. Richard Harris started off doing Theatre Workshop stuff as well. Howard Goorney who wrote The Theatre Workshop Story was always in those early pieces and trained as part of the company, I think he was part of the 1930s group and stayed all the way along. Murray Melvin, was Geoff in A Taste Of Honey and he was in Oh What A Lovely War. He is still the archivist at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East now.

PC: How important is improvisation as part of process in Littlewood’s work?

NH: Improvisation was used as a way of trying to make things real in performance. For A Taste of Honey she had Avis Bunnage and Frances Cuka walking around the theatre for hours carrying really heavy suitcases, getting them to improvise arguing with landlords and landladies, getting wet, waiting for buses, you know, arriving places, getting closed doors, moving on. Then they started working on the opening scene when they arrive in the bedsit. So they used improvisation as a way of getting to a truth, a realness on stage. So that was in the preparation for performance.

PC: These long preparatory improvisations to reach a truth, a realness, have parallels with Grotowski and his via negativa approach.

NH: Clive Barker, who was part of Theatre Workshop and wrote the book Theatre Games, talks about her using via negativa as well. Try this, try this. Never try it LIKE this. Try it again, try it again until you find the right moment. He linked that to Grotowski. That doesn’t necessarily suggest that it was a direct influence but it was a similar use of the technique.

PC: Did she feel that she had to strip over-trained actors back for them to be able to perform in her work?

NH: She just wouldn’t take them.

PC: So she knew the type of person that would be able to do it. What were the actors reactions to the continuous training?

NH: They completely bought into it initially. The initial company were an ensemble, they wanted to train and they wanted to work in this different way: they were a merry band of brothers: joining together with a common purpose. I think later on at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East it became quite a shock for actors coming in because she wouldn’t want to do a traditional audition process. Murray Melvin tells a lovely story of coming into audition for her and she said “Do you have your speeches prepared? Yeah. Do you want to do them? No. Let’s not bother then just tell me a story.” For her it was about courage. Another actor tells a story about her throwing a script at them and saying, “Right I want you to read all the parts. What? But I want to read the part… No I want you to read all of them: men women, children old men, young women” And he did and felt ridiculous and probably looked ridiculous but her response was “well if you can do that and you’re prepared to make a fool of yourself then you’d probably be a very good actor.” Another well known story is of Barbara Windsor meeting the cleaner scrubbing the steps of the Theatre Royal: they were chatting, then it turned out the cleaner was Joan Littlewood and she got the job at that moment. There are loads of great stories! Victor Spinetti who was the MC in OH What A Lovely War, she picked him, after he was compering in a strip joint. So she picked people up in strange places. She’s not going to go and pick up someone who’s RADA trained. She was more likely to go and get people from the variety or the clubs. She wanted actors with that curiosity and a willingness to play and take risks. If you weren’t prepared to do some training then what was the point? The spirit of experimentation was important. 

Summary

  • Music was an important part of performance and rehearsals.
  • They got the rights to do the British premiere of Brecht’s Mother Courage but it was a disaster. She found Brecht rather cold and overly intellectual.
  • Improvisation was used as a way of trying to make things real in performance.
  • The initial company were an ensemble, they wanted to train and they wanted to work in this different way.
  • Littlewood made sure she got the actors she wanted by searching strange places and conducting unconventional auditions.

Littlewood’s Actor Training – The Composite Mind

Posted on by Phil

Interview with Nadine Holdsworth

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
  • Theatrical purpose
  • Innovations
  • Key collaborations with other artists
  • Social, cultural, political and historical context
  • Significant moments in the development of theory and practice
  • Influence
  • The relationship between actor and audience in theory and practice

PC: What was Littlewood’s approach to training actors?

NH: In the commercial theatre at the time you went off as an actor and did your actors’ training; then you would finish your actors’ training; then you would act; then you get your script, you would learn your part then you would perform your roles. In contrast, Littlewood believed that you always kept training and that was a big thing that distinguished her from other directors at the time and still! So always, in those very early years up to the mid-1950s, they were still doing daily movement training; vocal training; improvising; doing Stanislavski exercises. She’s doing things that would always keep the actors on their toes. Laban was hugely influential on Littlewood. That sense of wanting the actors to constantly be thinking about how they move their bodies in space. What that means in terms of weight, flow, speed, rhythm. Equally vocally: having a dexterous voice and being able to manipulate that. Not just coming on stage doing your lines and off you go. Instead her actors were really grounded, fully thinking, creative people. Not only training them as individual actors but also instilling a belief in collaboration. She had this phrase ‘the composite mind’ – I think it is an important one. The importance of collaboration: that theatre is something that is done together. You needed to learn that; you needed to learn that as an ensemble. The ensemble wasn’t something in the British theatre tradition at the time, you had a company and you hired your actors for that particular production. Companies didn’t work in that ensemble way, in the way that Littlewood wanted them to do: training the actors.

PC: Is there a pinpoint moment when she discovered Stanislavski in particular and Laban?

NH: Really early!

PC: Before Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood’s first English translation of 1937?

NH: I don’t think that it was pre-that translation but she was certainly using it in the 1940s. I have seen some of her early notebooks and she is absolutely ripping off An Actor Prepares! Doing workshop notes of things that she is going to do and giving lectures on Stanislavski to people who turn up to do her sessions. So she would run this quite ad-hoc training thing.

PC: I think the dates of those Hapgood translations offer real insight into how advanced Littlewood’s training methods were. Benedetti’s introduction to the most recent translations explains how the staggered translation of Stanislavski’s writing led to massive misunderstanding of his theories on training.

Hapgood’s Stanislavski translation – dates of publication:

An Actor Prepares – 1937

Building a Character – 1950

Creating a Role – 1961

The first book covers the first year of Stanislavski’s proposed course and talks about the more psychological and cerebral methods, whereas the second and third bring have an emphasis on physical action. The circumstance of publication, the growth of the American Method, as well as a simple neglect of those last two texts led many to overplay the idea of Stanislavski as cerebral and psychological in approach rather than rooted in the physical. So for Littlewood to combine the psychological strategies of An Actor Prepares with Laban and Meyerhold’s physical approaches was truly innovative. This combination has now become common place with actor training and the development of ‘physical theatre’.

NH: Yes this three-pronged approach of Stanislavski, Laban and Meyerhold is innovative and influential. You wouldn’t think that they had a relationship with each other but they absolutely do in Littlewood’s practice.

Summary

  • Littlewood believed that you always kept training and that was a big thing that distinguished her from other directors at the time and still!
  • Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares influenced Littlewood’s approach to training and rehearsal.
  • Laban was hugely influential on Littlewood. That sense of wanting the actors to constantly be thinking about how they move their bodies in space.
  • Meyerhold’s Biomechanics also influenced her work on physicality and movement.
  • Littlewood’s combination of the psychological strategies in An Actor Prepares with Laban and Meyerhold’s physical approaches was truly innovative.