A woman with no money, a company in a derelict building in Stratford, and Oh What a Lovely War
The Theatre Royal Bar holds a 3.2 from eleven reviews, which is not a rating.
But the building it is in was run by Joan Littlewood, and she is one of the most important figures in twentieth-century British theatre, and she is the thirty-third woman in this survey – and we can name her.
What she did
She brought Theatre Workshop to Stratford East in 1953 – to a shabby, half-derelict Victorian theatre in a poor district, with essentially no money at all.
And she was not interested in the West End.
She wanted a theatre for the people who lived there
Which sounds like a slogan, and which she meant with total seriousness, and which was genuinely radical.
Because the British theatre of the 1950s was, very largely, middle-class people in drawing rooms, spoken in received pronunciation, watched by people like themselves.
And she put on plays in working-class voices, about working-class lives, in a working-class district – and she wanted the audience to be the people outside the door.
And the method was collective
Which was the other radical thing.
Because she did not simply direct a script.
The company improvised, and devised, and the actors made the play – and the writer was one voice among several, and a great many of them found it maddening.
And it produced Oh What a Lovely War – which is a musical about the First World War, told through the actual songs the soldiers sang, and the actual casualty figures projected on a screen behind them.
The songs are funny. The numbers are not.
It is one of the most devastating pieces of theatre this country has produced, and it works by refusing to editorialise and simply putting the two things side by side.
And she got almost nothing for it
Because her work kept being taken into the West End, where it made money for other people, and her company was permanently broke.
Eight postcodes and twelve hundred and eighty-seven articles.
The name goes to whoever was standing nearest the money.
Eleven reviews
Which is not a rating. It is eleven people and eleven evenings, and it will be rewritten by the twelfth.
Verdict
Eleven reviews. Not a verdict.
Go, be the twelfth, and see something.
And she refused a damehood
Which is the last thing, and it is entirely in character.
Because Joan Littlewood was offered honours and turned them down, and she had no interest whatsoever in the establishment that had ignored her for thirty years and then wanted to decorate her.
And she wanted something else instead, which she never got: a Fun Palace.
A building that was not a theatre – a place with no fixed programme at all, where anybody could come in, at any hour, and learn something, or make something, or watch something, or do nothing.
It was never built.
And it is, almost exactly, the third place – and she was arguing for one in 1961.
