Strasberg-on-Avon

One play, when it first turned up, was just "30 pages of unprintable dialogue." Another was a draft mailed in for criticism by a 19-year-old Lancashire girl. Yet each had all the racy, rowdy, down-to-life vitality that Producer-Director Joan Littlewood is forever seeking. After helping the authors to shape their work, she staged both plays--Brendan Behan's The Hostage and Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey -- in her small. 512-seat Theater Royal in the waterfront London slum district called Stratford East. Both won so much praise that they eventually moved from farthingsville to London's moneyed West End. Both are now on Broadway.

In two years Joan Littlewood's Theater Workshop has turned from a semi-impoverished repertory company into a money-coining enterprise. Wolf Manko-witz' Make Me an Offer, ex-Convict Frank Norman's Fings Ain't What They Used to Be, and five other Workshop plays have succeeded in the big time. None of this particularly impresses Joan Littlewood. who thinks that both the West End and Broadway are "contemptible as art and unsuccessful as business." Her avowed aim is "to break up the teacup theater."

Low Exuberance. In reaction to the gentle, polite, French-doors-and-tennis-rackets comedy that has long been the West End's mirror of English life, Joan Littlewood likes to fill her theater with the smell of cold porridge and soft coal. her stage with people of small means and great imagination. She likes her characters to rub hips with spivs, tarts, pansies and drunks, in whose vernacular a whore is a brass and a pimp is a ponce (one song in Fings Ain't What They Used to Be is called The Student Ponce). But while a Tennessee Williams plumbs similar material to draw interior diagrams of crippled psyches, and a John Osborne casts about in it for new glooms and repeated angers. Littlewood insists on playwrights who swoop low with exuberance.

She has put the British people back on the stage, and the British people, of every variety, are filling the audience too. Long black Bentleys and Rolls-Royces of the Establishment quietly rubber into Stratford East every evening. But it is Joan Littlewood's proudest claim that two-thirds of the Workshop's audience come from within five miles of the playhouse.

Neighborhood Theater. To create a neighborhood theater was Joan Littlewood's ambition as far back as the early '30s. when she was a scholarship student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. With a working-class background, she was full of phlegm because "there were hunger marches outside, and inside were girls being taught this tennis-club stuff." After completing the course, she left London on foot to walk north to seek her career, collapsed after 112 miles in Burton-on-Trent. scrubbed out a pub to get fare to go on to Manchester. There she got a job acting, writing and directing for the BBC.

Two years later she founded an itinerant repertory group with a playwright-folksinger named Ewan MacColl, then known as Jimmy Miller, who later became her husband. The ten-member troupe traveled the north country in an ancient truck, often using the tailgate for a stage. Scattered in World War II, five of the players were killed; the other five grew into the Theater Workshop.

Bawdry Lyricism. Stocky, tousled, with a generous mouth, a furrowed brow and hazel eyes set in a wide, farmwife face, Joan Littlewood at 45 is approximately a Strasberg-on-Avon. "Everyone on the stage behaves as if he had just been told that Stanislavsky was in the second row," wrote one critic of Fings. Under Littlewood's direction, actors are required to improvise business and situations before they so much as see a script. When Behan's prison drama, The Quare Fellow, went into rehearsal, she tried to show them what prison was like by leading them all up to the theater roof, marching them around on the grimy slate for hour after hour, stopping now and again to permit them a quick cigarette and furtive, prisonyard conversations.

In The Hostage, orchestration is the actual word for what she has done--glibly and deftly moving Behan's wildly miscellaneous characters about the Dublin brothel set, giving the almost plotless play a sense of unobtrusive structure. One of her new projects is a still unfinished Behan work called Richard's Cork Leg. One ditty it contains describes an assignation in a graveyard. "And what of it?" says Joan Littlewood. "Until you get bawdry, you won't get lyricism. Until you get lyricism, you won't get live theater."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.