Joan Littlewood was born in 1914, the illegitimate child of a cockney maid. She was raised by her grandparents in poverty in South London, but being a clever girl, she was able to receive an education through scholarships. At sixteen she landed at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, but soon decided that his stuffy, bourgeois humanism was not for her. She left after only a few months, and landed in repertory theatre in Manchester.

In the early 1930s, Littlewood began working with Theatre in Action, aimed at bringing Marxist theatre to working class people. She fell in love with company member Gerry Raffles, and after WWII, their theatre reconvened as the Theatre Workshop, with Raffles doing all manner of administrative and grunt work to keep their efforts alive.

Littlewood served as the Theatre Workshop’s visionary Artistic Director. In the 1940s they toured the outlying areas of London and abroad, restaging classics and bringing new, working class voices to the stage. With little money for sets, the Theatre Workshop focused on acting, with the company participating continuously in Littlewood’s training process (an amalgam of improvisation, Stanislavski, Brecht, Laban, and expressionist theatre techniques).

In the 1950s, the group found a permanent base in a dilapidated old Victorian theatre in Stratford, East London. The troupe moved into the space, living there illegally and fixing it up themselves after rehearsals and training sessions. When their community was selected for urban renewal, Raffles literally stopped bulldozers from knocking down their building more than once by standing in front of them until the proper paperwork had been secured to save it. Here, with no money from any “establishment” sources, the Theatre Workshop helped start Britain’s theatre revolution in the 1950s and ‘60s. The troupe had international recognition, helped create the Edinburgh Fringe Festival by attending the official festival there uninvited two years running, and slowly began to take London by storm. Some of the Theatre Workshop's most important works include Jonson’s Volpone, Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, and their most famous, Oh What a Lovely War.

There was no definitive version of Oh What a Lovely War for many years, as Littlewood allowed the troupe to improvise during the performances. Because Britain was still under censorship until 1968, she was dragged into court twice for letting her actors diverge from the censor-approved script. Based on Littlewood’s notion that “war is for clowns,” the play combines slapstick and serious satire in a way that, although now commonplace, was quite revolutionary in its time. It proved that theatre could be wildly entertaining and still have a serious message.

Littlewood left England and her theatre in 1975 when Raffles died and she had lost many of her company to television and film opportunities with more pay. She died in 2002. The theatre at Stratford, however, is still running. Now called Theatre Royal at Stratford, its focus on the multicultural voices in its community and determination to maintain affordable ticket prices continues Littlewood’s vision of a “theatre of the people.”

[February 2006]

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