Missing Dates: Theatre Workshop in History

Theatre Workshop was a crucible of forceful personalities, and it is no surprise that the writing-up of its history became contentious. For many years The Theatre Workshop Story (1981) by company co-founder and actor Howard Goorney stood as the standard account, even though Theatre Workshop's matriarch and producer Joan Littlewood had refused to add her voice to a book that sampled opinion from most of the key players.¹ (Littlewood was already planning her own account and declined the invitation to participate.) Ewan MacColl – Littlewood's former husband, another co-founder of Theatre Workshop and for many years their in-house playwright – was the next to have his say. MacColl's autobiography Journeyman (1990), written during the dark disillusionments of the Thatcher years and published posthumously, settled some old scores and castigated the company for abandoning their true calling as a theatre for the working class to become West End jesters (MacColl had drifted from the company in the 1950s, leaving for good in 1957). 'Theatre Workshop did not . . . make any lasting impression on English theatre as a whole', he concluded sourly.² Joan Littlewood's autobiography followed in 1994: energetic and outspoken throughout, the very title of Joan's Book: Her Peculiar History as She Tells It made a brazen show of preferring the theatricality of memory to the intricacies of the historical record. Forever suspicious of authority, Littlewood had no intention of producing a definitive version of events, and thwarted the expectations of those seeking a detailed, inside account of Theatre Workshop's heyday. Instead she lingered at length over the company's obscure early history, taking the same liberties with her own life that she'd always taken with other people's plays, editing out dull moments, spicing up bland dialogue and refashioning the plod of chronology into the dance of drama. Above all, Joan's Book demonstrated her instinct for narrative, yielding a tantalizing glimpse of the novelist she might have been.³

A range of new publications dealing with Theatre Workshop have appeared over the last two years, signalling that the company is now attracting levels of critical scrutiny to match its reputation as one of the most significant European ensembles of the twentieth century. Robert Leach's Theatre Workshop: Joan Littlewood and the Making of Modern British Theatre assiduously retraces the story told by Goorney. Nadine Holdsworth's pithy Joan Littlewood, published in the excellent Routledge performance practitioners series, focuses upon Littlewood's working methods and the company's production of Oh What a Lovely War (1963). Murray Melvin – Theatre Workshop actor, Littlewood proté gé and custodian of the company's archive at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East – draws upon this rich resource to create a sumptuously glossy photographic record of thirty years in the company's history. And the journal New Theatre Quarterly's November 2007 issue celebrated the life, work and legacy of the late Clive Barker, whose distinguished career as theatre practitioner, theorist and teacher included two spells at Stratford East. Articles by Gwynne Edwards, Claire Altree Warden, June Favre and Alec Patton focus on the company's various incarnations.

All of the work pays critical homage to Littlewood, MacColl, and the company they created; some authors offer new levels of detail in terms of Littlewood's work as director. Leach's book reproduces pages from Littlewood's training notebooks: the delicate sketches of bodies in motion functioned as blueprints for the company's famously fluid and carefully choreographed physical performance style (Littlewood could never bear flat-footed actors, famously comparing one to 'a turd on a blanket'). Leach also...