Interview with Nadine Holdsworth: Part 1
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 http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1107532043.
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
PC: There are only a few working on the historic and academic study of Joan Littlewood: yourself, Robert Leach, Wendy Richardson and her documentary series In the Company of Joan, Tom Cornford doing research into Theatre Workshop at Central, as well as, the archives at the British Library and Theatre Royal Stratford East. You are one of only a few voices in the academic community when it comes to Joan Littlewood. So why her? What drew you to Littlewood’s work?
NH: I was introduced to Theatre Workshop’s work early on. When I was at college I did a production of Oh What A Lovely War. I was 17 and that sparked my interest in her. That carried on when I was at university: I studied a few more texts; I did A Taste Of Honey (Shelagh Delaney). I was always really fascinated by her as a figure, I loved the fact that she was this incredibly feisty, maverick, free speaking, no nonsense figure. A woman working in a male dominated period. Women really struggled to be taken seriously and she was. I was interested in her and the fact that she swore, and she smoked, and she was a hard-drinker, and she got married, then she refused to marry, she didn’t have any children. She completely defied what women and femininity and women in theatre was at that time. So her as a figure. It was also about her representation of class that really got me interested. She was one of the first figures I came across who presented that authentic working class voice in a way that wasn’t taking the piss, that wasn’t belittling those figures in relation to the more dominant socially elevated characters. She was taking them seriously and honouring their experiences. You get it in Oh What A Lovely War with the soldiers in the trenches. Or that experience of those two women in A Taste Of Honey, living on the margins of life. They’re not seen as dumb or stupid, they’re taken seriously and their lives are taken seriously and represented seriously. And the sheer theatrical vibrancy of the work. It is very easy to forget how radical and ground-breaking that was at that time.
PC: You say it is easy to forget…
NH: It has been forgotten.
PC: It is criminal really. So how do we begin spreading the word? Oh What a Lovely War is often the way in with Joan Littlewood, but is it the best way?
NH: I think it is one of the best ways because Oh What A Lovely War provides a culmination of everything that has come before. You can see some of the very beginnings of her practice, that agitprop, Workers Theatre Movement style of theatre which is about a real political campaigning agenda (1934 onwards). So there is that element to it. There is also the elements that you find in her 1950s work, more social-realist, I think someone referred to it as magnified social realism – A Taste of Honey style. The trench scenes, for example, where the soldiers are just living out life, bantering, chatting to each other, reading stories and playing the harmonica. Then you’ve got the technological aspects which she was very interested in. She was influenced by Piscator early in her career and his ideas about how you can put the world on stage; how can you make that connection between that theatrical world and the real world; how can you bring that documentary material into a theatre space? So, the ticker tape, the slides, the photos and the statistics are part of that. You also have the popular theatre tradition in there with the Pierrot show.
Oh What A Lovely War (1963) blends and brings everything together she was experimenting with over the decades before that. So it is a pretty good way in I think. What becomes frustrating is when it’s the only thing that is looked at in relation to her because she is such an influential figure across the board.
Summary
- Joan Littlewood was a woman working in a male dominated period. She was this incredibly feisty, maverick, free speaking, no nonsense figure.
- She presented that authentic working class voice in a way that wasn’t taking the piss, that wasn’t belittling those figures in relation to the more dominant socially elevated characters.
- The sheer theatrical vibrancy of the work was radical and ground-breaking at that time.
- Oh What A Lovely War provides a culmination of everything that has come before: agitprop style, magnified social realism, technological aspects and the popular theatre tradition.
Still to come…
Littlewood’s Context and her Political Convictions
Littlewood’s Continuous Loop and the Authentic Voice
Littlewood: Approaches to Texts and Devising
Littlewood, Theatre Workshop and the Move to the Theatre Royal, Stratford East
Littlewood’s Shakespeare: Politics, Strong Women and Conventions
Littlewood and Design
The Composite Mind – Littlewood’s Actor Training
Littlewood: Music, Stanislavski and Laban in Performance
Littlewood and Theatre Workshop’s Oh What a Lovely War: A Collision Montage
Everyone should study A Taste of Honey and Oh What A Lovely War in Drama.
