Joan Littlewood
Joan Littlewood (1914-2002) was a significant figure in British theatre, known for her innovative approaches to drama and her commitment to collective creativity. Growing up during tumultuous times, including the Great Depression and World War II, she developed strong pacifist and anti-capitalist beliefs that heavily influenced her work. Littlewood initially trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art but left to pursue a more activist form of theatre, joining the Theatre of Action, where she collaborated with playwright Ewan MacColl, whom she later married. She is best known for founding the Theatre Workshop, which emphasized communal participation and reinterpreting existing plays through improvisation and collaboration.
Her productions often involved adaptations rather than original works, showcasing plays such as "Oh, What a Lovely War!" which combined music and a sardonic take on war's impact. Although her adaptations sometimes faced criticism from original playwrights, many, including Brendan Behan and Shelagh Delaney, benefited from her artistic vision. Littlewood's legacy lies in her unique approach to theatre that blurred the lines between playwright, director, and actor, fostering an environment where every participant contributed equally to the creative process.
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Joan Littlewood
Theatre Director
- Born: October 6, 1914
- Birthplace: London, England
- Died: September 20, 2002
- Place of death: London, England
Biography
Born in 1914, just at the outset of World War I, coming of age during the Great Depression, and then enduring World War II are all probable factors that contributed to Joan Littlewood’s passionate pacifism and anti-capitalism. She translated these strong feelings into highly energetic communal work in creating theater. From her earliest association with the theater, she immersed herself in activist and improvisational work. At the age of twenty, she dropped out of the training program at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), which she regarded as “irrelevant.” She went to Manchester and joined the Theatre of Action, an agit-prop company led by Ewan MacColl. The two became collaborators in creating productions and indeed, that company formed the basis for the later Theatre Worskshop which Littlewood made so famous between the late forties and the mid sixties. She and MacColl were married in 1936.
Joan Littlewood can be called a playwright, a director, and an actor. She is all of these, and yet also none of them in any traditional sense. Her name is associated with certain plays, yet all are adaptations from novels, stories, and even other plays. She directed those productions, acted in them, and, by conducting explorations and improvisations, rewrote them. The name “Theatre Workshop” reflects the commitment to working communally right on the stage to develop a production. One might all her a “workshopper.” And in that spirit, no one was to be regarded as more important than anyone else, not one of the actors or designers, and certainly not the playwright.
There were, of course, playwrights incensed by seeing their work altered beyond recognition. She was violating a law, and at one point she had to pay a fifteen-pound fine for presenting a play with dialogue that did not conform with the script approved by the Lord Chamberlain’s office. On the other hand, Brendan Behan and Shelagh Delaney both gained enormously from the work she and the company devoted to their plays: The Quare Fellow and The Hostage in Behan’s case, and A Taste of Honey in Delaney’s. Neither playwright went on to write plays of greater significance than those entrusted to the Workshop.
As to her own work, it is hard to determine which plays might be called hers. They were all adaptations. Some of them were so successful as to move from the original home, the Theatre Royal in Stratford in east London, to the West End, plays such as Make Me an Offer, Fings Ain’t Wot They Used t’Be, Sparrers Can’t Sing, in addition to Behan’s and Delaney’s plays. The most important of them is surely Oh, What a Lovely War!, which appeared in 1963. Even that was a collaborative effort between Charles Chilton, whose radio show The Long, Long Trail provided ideas, song, and a music-hall atmosphere for the production, and Gerald Raffles’s idea of turning the play into an ironic fun house show against a backdrop of the agonies of war.