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Sporting her trademark blue cap and puffing away on a cigarette, theatre
director Joan Littlewood talks lucidly in this interview with Bernard Braden for
nearly 20 minutes, without delivering a clear message; perhaps not surprising
for someone as bright but as disillusioned as she was by the late 1960s. She
gives the impression of a person with a constant stream of thoughts and ideas
with few of them staying in her mind long enough to be given adequate form in
words. In fact, form is something that she expresses a great deal of disdain
for, particularly in the theatre. She describes herself as 'theatre Sinn Féin',
anti-form and anti-structure, having no respect for the concept of reproducing
classic works of the stage in their original form.
She sees the inadequacy of established forms as a problem for all
professions, not only theatre, and feels that they can't cope with the
'explosions' she describes as happening at the time. She refers to her most
recent stage production, Mrs Wilson's Diary, a satire on the home life of
then prime minister Harold Wilson. It was adapted for television but was
not one of her more memorable shows; her career had peaked in the late 1950s and
early '60s with productions such as A Taste of Honey and Oh! What a Lovely
War.
Littlewood's other, very personal, project, which largely took her attention
away from her theatrical work, was the Fun Palace. She organised a dry run of it
in the summer of 1968 at Tower Place in London, in the form of a festival where
artists and actors set up installations and encouraged visitors to participate
in theatrical activities. She alludes to the concept, talking about a mobile,
bubble theatre, and it was an idea to which she devoted much of her energy.
Despite getting as far as having a team of architects work on designs for the
building, it came to nothing, foiled, as so many of her ideas, by the
establishment. This failure, coupled with the death of her long-term partner
Gerry Raffles in the mid-1970s, led to Littlewood's retirement from British
theatre.
Jo Botting
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Complete interview (20:53)
