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Dateline: 29th September, 2002 Joan Littlewood (1914 - 2002) Joan Littlewood, who died in Paris last weekend, was one of the great creative forces of British theatre in the 1950s and 1960s and one of the great figures of political theatre in this country. After training at RADA she set up the Theatre of Action in 1934, a radical, political company based in Manchester, along with her husband Jimmie Miller, now best known under the name Ewan McColl, the name he took as a folk singer years later. In 1936 they changed the group's name to Theatre Union, and adopted an even more pronounced socialist agenda, basing their work on that of Meyerhold (1847 - ?1940), who had worked with Stanislavsky at the Moscow Arts Theatre and then, in 1905, Stanislavsy appointed him as director of the new Studio. From 1922 to 1924 he was director of the Theatre of the Revolution but finally died (or was executed) in a labour camp around 1939/40. Another name change came in 1945 when the group became Theatre Workshop, and, for eight years, they toured the UK and Europe in a hired lorry. In 1953, having separated from her husband, she took a lease on the Theatre Royal Stratford East, with her partner Gerry Raffles. There she produced some of the most influential and exciting plays of the period, including Brendan Behan's The Quare Fellow (1957) and The Hostage (1958), Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey (1958), Stephen Lewis' Sparrers Can't Sing, Lionel Bart's musical Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'be (1959), and John Wells and Richard Ingrams' Mrs Wilson's Diary (1967). During this period (1955) she directed the first British production of Brecht's Mother Courage at Barnstaple. 1963 saw her greatest success, Oh What a Lovely War, which transferred to the West End, where it played for a year, and to Broadway and was made into a succesful film by Richard Attenborough. War was typical of her theatre style. It was devised by the company and then scripted by Charles Chilton. It contains songs, jokes and short sketches, very much influenced by music hall, and has gone on to become a classic of modern theatre. It was revived just this summer at the Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park. She continued to work at Stratford East until Rafferty died suddenly in 1975 (aged 51) and she moved to Paris where she has since worked and lived. The Theatre Royal is to held a memorial event and celebration of her work, to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of her taking over the venue in February 2003. Please note that all three Archive indices are very long and will therefore take some time to download.
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