Ewan MacColl: Theatre Workshop
"There had never been any doubt in our minds that we would reassemble after the war and continue with our work. When we did so only five of the original Theatre Union company were present. We met in a small rented warehouse near Manchester's Central station and, over a period of several weeks, discussed plans for a new theatre. We were fairly clear in our minds as to the kind of theatre we intended to build; our discussions were mainly about practical issues like finance, finding premises, drawing up training programmes, allocating jobs and responsibilities and deciding on a suitable opening programme. Most of us, I think, still believed that our aims could only be achieved by playing to working-class audiences.
All the great theatres of the past, we argued, had been popular theatres and we cited Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Calderón, Lope de Vega, the Commedia dell'arte, Moliére, etc. Furthermore, we said, all the great theatres had, in one way or another, been experimental theatres. Think of the way Marlowe's mighty line had streaked across the literary firmament scarcely twenty-five years after the limping cadences of Gorbuduc had first sounded in the Inner Temple. And hadn't Shakespeare teased and manipulated the language till it fitted the hands of the age like magic gloves? And how quickly Jonson was off the mark, eager to dissect the new merchant class at the moment of its birth and, in the process, fashioning brilliant new satires out of the old moralities. In Italy the troupes of the Gelosi and I Comici Confidenti had taken the characters from the ancient rituals and had sent them cavorting through sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Moliére had taken those same characters and had worked with them to create a brilliant dramatic literature.
Not that experiment in itself was enough to create popular theatre; nineteenth- and twentieth-century theatrical experiments had proved that. The numerous attempts to change the physical relationship of actors and audience were among the most important of those experiments. The proscenium arch had, in some cases, been banished; apron stages, thrust stages, and central stages had been adopted. Opponents of the illusionist type of theatre had removed everything which might conceal technical aids such as light and sound sources or engineering devices. In some extreme cases actors had been replaced with life-sized puppets and even with cut-out abstract shapes. Less adventurous innovators had settled for a theatre of synthesis where acting, dancing, singing, music, sculpture, painting and architecture would come together in a meaningful fusion.
As far as we were concerned experiment was merely a part of our social and political commitment; it was a tool which would make the theatre more capable of dealing with the reality of the world we were living in. Our emphasis on a working-class audience was pan of that reality. We were not concerned with philanthropic gestures or with demonstrating that our hearts were in the right place. We needed a working-class audience in order to survive; without it there could be no real development, the theatre could never be anything more than a charming toy. How in the world could one possibly build a great theatre unless one identified with and drew sustenance from the people who, in our society, produce wealth - the working class? Of course, it was also a reality that working people had stayed away from the theatre in large numbers ever since the Elizabethan age or, at least, since Jacobean times. Indeed there were large areas of Britain where no theatre existed at all. Scores of provincial theatres had been converted to cinemas in the years following the First World War and it's doubtful whether more than a handful of folk regretted it. For most working people the basic form of entertainment was the Hollywood film. It might be argued that the films current at the time were in no way superior to the plays produced by provincial theatres. Were they not just as escapist, just as lacking in real ideas as the worst kind of repertory play? The answer must be no. Furthermore, the making of a film demanded a degree of technical expertise which few theatres could match. As an art form film belonged to the age of the internal combustion engine and the assembly-line, the age of speed and through the use of montages, rapid cross-cutting and speeding up of the projected visual images, it could reflect that speed. It could produce a quick succession of short scenes in a way that was beyond the resources of all but the most splendidly equipped theatres.
More important was the fact that film actors and actresses like James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Spencer Tracy, Jean Harlow, Sylvia Sydney were frequently called upon to act working-class roles and could do so convincingly. They were certainly more like the audiences who watched them than were the average hero and heroine of the English stage play of the period or, for that matter, than the top-hatted-and-tailed heroes of many British films. My memory of English films of the early thirties is of endless inane caperings of actors got up to look like butlers disguised as Claude Hulbert or Jack Buchanan and of leading ladies who delivered their lines like well brought-up children intent on pleasing nanny. Small wonder that we were emotionally prepared for the acculturative invasion of the Hollywood talkie with its tough guys and its wisecracks.
In our theatre, we said, an actor will be able to walk into a steel foundry and pass as a puddler, our actresses will be able to stand at a loom and look like any other Lancashire mill-girl. Perhaps we were a little over-ambitious but the company which we assembled didn't look like a group of actors and they spoke in the accents of Glasgow, Tyneside, Huddersfield, Chichester, Leeds, Salford and South London. This new company we called Theatre Workshop since we intended that it should be both a production unit and a training school where new approaches to acting could be tried out. Our actors would be able to handle their bodies with the same degree of skill and control that was generally regarded as the special domain of ballet-dancers and professional athletes. We were going to find ways of developing our voices so that we could handle the most exacting kind of roles. As for acting proper, we would combine Stanislavski's method of 'living the role' with the improvisational techniques of the Italian Comedy. And for a repertoire - we would create a tailor-made one for ourselves, a repertory consisting of plays which would match at every stage the talents of the company and would extend those talents with each new production. We would, at the same time, carry the lessons learned in Newsboy, Last Edition and the agit-prop theatre to new heights.
I don't think any of us doubted that we could and would realise our objectives. How else can one explain a dozen young men and women abandoning their various livelihoods in order to become strolling players? We knew, of course, that the work would be hard but we had worked hard in the years before the war and we had done so while doing all kinds of other jobs, jobs which had virtually subsidised our theatre activities. Now we were going to give all our energy and all our attention to building a theatre and, furthermore, we were going to be paid for our work. That, at least, was the theory.
It was taken for granted that Joan would be the producer in the new company and that I should take on the job of Art Director, a title which embraced various functions including being the company dramatist, dramaturge, teacher and songwriter. One of my first tasks was to write material for an opening production. During the period in which the company was being assembled we discussed frequently and at great length the kind of show needed to launch our venture successfully. What was needed was a show in which entertainment and a statement of aims would be combined. It was important to make our political position clear while at the same time underlining our specific theatrical approach. Our introduction to the public should be in a show which, we felt, would lend itself to the kind of production ideas which had made Last Edition such an exciting experience. It should also give full scope to our views about the way actors should use their bodies, and make it possible for sound and light to make their full emotional impact. What we really needed was to create a form which was infinitely flexible, which would make it possible for us to move backwards and forwards in time and space as, say, with a film, and which could accommodate improvisations.
I wrote a double bill of two plays, each lasting about an hour. The first of them was an adaptation of Moliere's Flying Doctor , a very free adaptation owing more to the Marx Brothers and the Commedia dell'arte than to Moliere. It also included a scene taken straight from Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel ('How a great scholar of England would have argued against Pantagruel and was overcome by Panurge'). In the period between the demise of Theatre Union and the birth of Theatre Workshop, some of us had been studying the history of the Commedia dell'arte and actors like the Andreinis and the Biancholellis had become saints in our calendar. And now we were about to pay homage to them! The other half of the bill was a ballad-opera called Johnny Noble .
An offer of premises in Kendal, Westmoreland, had been accepted with enthusiasm and we packed and crated our gear ready for the great day when we would be toid that our sponsors had completed their arrangements for our reception. The arrangements were never completed, indeed they never got off the ground. In retrospect I doubt whether the sponsorship offer was ever meant seriously. When it finally dawned on us that we had spent several weeks waiting for premises that didn't exist we were in despair. all our plans had been made with Kendal in mind; it had become a kind of Mecca, a promised land where marvellous things could happen. To hell with sponsors, we said, let's go! So early in June 1945 we arrived in Kendal, booked a room in the Conservative Club there and proceeded to rehearse Johnny Noble and The Flying Doctor .
The launching of these two short plays took place at the Girls' High School, Kendal, in August 1945. In their different ways they were both typical examples of the early Theatre Workshop style. The Flying Doctor was our first attempt at interpreting the ideas of the Commedia dell'arte, or rather what we imagined those ideas to be. The classic roles of Sganarelle, Gorgibus, Doctor Palaprat, Lucille and the rest were played as broad caricatures in the way that we imagined the Gelosi had played Scapino, Dottore, Pantalone and ti Inamorata. Movement training which had gone hand-in-band with rehearsals was now being put to full use, for the production was full of stylised movement, sometimes graceful, sometimes grotesque; indeed the entire production had been as carefully choreographed as any ballet. Costumes for the show owed much of their inspiration and flair to Callot's superb engravings. The set was a small miracle of ingenuity, consisting of a small, manually operated revolving stage. Its surface was made of thin wooden board which made it light enough to be handled with ease. To prevent creaking, the underside was strutted and wired in the manner of an old-fashioned aeroplane wing. The disc was divided into two halves by a cut-out door and window, one side of which represented the street while the other represented a house interior. It was a beautiful set, economic, light and airy; one felt that, at any moment, it might take off and fly.
It would have been difficult to find a more complete contrast than Johnny Noble . This hour-long saga of a young, deep-sea fisherman's life in the thirties and forties was played in black drapes without the use of any props or stage furniture. The elaborate use of light and sound provided a setting which was wonderfully versatile; at one moment the stage would represent a working-class street and, a moment later, it would be the deck of a battleship or the execution yard of a Nazi prison. No quick changes of screens or platforms, just an added spot or flood or the sound of a factory siren cross-fading with the cry of gulls. In The Flying Doctor the movement style had been consistent throughout; in Johnny Noble the actors were called upon to change from modern dance to naturalistic movement and back again without any break in the action of the play. A typical sequence has Johnny, the central character, sitting on a box during a night-watch aboard ship, a short contemplative scene which is shattered by alarum bells signalling the approach of enemy planes. Immethately Johnny becomes a member of the gunnery squad and then, as the bombs begin to crash down, becomes part of the gun's mechanism. A tremendously exciting moment of theatre lasting some three or four minutes, then the stage is a street again with children playing hopscotch, neighbours gossiping and a young woman returning home from work.
In our press handouts we sometimes referred to Johnny Noble as 'a simple tale of thwarted love'. Thwarted love was certainly part of the story but the simplicity was achieved by using all our technical resources. New portable switchboards had been built and parallel beamed lamps specially created so that it could be lit properly. A sound unit consisting of six turntables with speakers and amplifier had been built and there were times when David Scase and his assistant sound-operators were using all six turntables at once. In addition to recorded sounds of factory noises, ships' engines, aeroplanes, artillery and bombs, we also used passages of recorded instrumental music; the contrast between this and the a capella singing of the narrators was a sure way of altering the perspective of a scene.
Perhaps our most valuable resource was the fact that we were beginning to funetion like a real ensemble; the movement training, voice production, acting theory and classes dealing with the history of theatre were combining to weld us into a group with common aims and a common vision of the future. There was also the fact that we were able to draw, to some extent, upon our past work, for Johnny Noble was a lineal descendant of Last Edition and could trace its ancestry back through Newsboy to the Red Megaphones. It wasn't merely a case of having stylistic links with the past, there were actual incidents and scenes in Johnny Noble which had first surfaced in Last Edition . They had been refined and stripped of all that was superfluous in much the same way that the text of a tradinonal ballad is stripped down by passing through the mouths of generations of singers. As a production both Johnny Noble and The Flying Doctor reflected fairly accurately most of our ideas about theatre at that time. After the Kendal opening we toured our double bill through the surrounding district for the next two months. Both productions were kept in the company repertoire for the next five years and played throughout Britain, Norway, Sweden, West Germany and Czechoslovakia.
In the weeks following our first tour we added another short play to our repertoire, Lorca's magnificently erotic Don Perlimplin's Love for Belisa in her Garden . We were rehearsing it when the Smythe Report was published. This official account of the events leading up to the creation of the first atom bombs and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki made horrifying and fascinating reading. Two of the members of the group had been trained as scientists and they were of the opinion that 'The Bomb' was an ideal subject for a play. When I was urged to begin writing it, my immediate reaction was to treat the suggestion as a bad joke. My knowledge of scientific matters was, to say the least, rudimentary; I had once sat in a class with forty other boys and watched a strip of litmus-paper change colour. That was the full extent of my scientific training. It didn't, I felt, equip me to write a play dealing with atomic physics. My two scientist friends, however, were persuasive and they undertook to put me through a crash-course in physics and the history of science. By the time the company was ready to embark on its second tour I bad completed the first phase of my scientific education and had begun the actual writing of the script.
I continued to write throughout the tour, mostly in dressing-rooms and rehearsal premises. Occasionally I would have to leave off writing a scene to go on stage and sing the Narrator in Johnny Noble or play a zany in The Flying Doctor. In December 1945 we were playing at the David Lewis Theatre in Liverpool and it was there that Joan began to rehearse the as yet unfinished Uranium 235 . We continued to tour through January and early February 1946 and by that time we had reached the point where Joan's production had caught up with me and there was usually someone standing at my elbow waiting to grab the pages from me as soon as they were written.
Uranium 235 was first performed at the Newcastle People's Theatre on 18 February 1946. It ran for just sixty-five minutes and consisted of a short opening sequence similar to the one used later in the two-hour version, and most of the scenes which later formed Part II of the play's final version. Only the gangster-cum-atomic-ballet scene was missing. By our somewhat modest standards it was a great success. As part of a double bill, however, it raised all kinds of problems. Like Johnny Noble , Uranium 235 was played in black drapes but the lighting-rig was different in each show. What suited Johnny Noble , The Flying Doctor and Don Perlimplin didn't suit Uranium 235 so it was decided that I should extend it to full length so that no changes in the lighting-rig would be necessary once the light settings had been made. Fortunately, by then I had completed my course in the history of science and it was no hardship to sit down and write about Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Democritus, Mendeleyev and the rest.
The first of the two-hour versions of Uranium 235 was staged at the Community Theatre, Blackburn, on 22 April 1946. A revised opening and a new ending was written for a production at the Riley Smith Hall, Leeds University, on 23 September and the atomic-ballet sequence was added two or three weeks later.
In Uranium 235 we had again returned to the agit-prop style of theatre and had dug deep into its rich deposits of theatrical ideas. We had, so to speak, struck gold and had come up with sufficient raw material to fashion the kind of play needed to deal with the complex world of politics and atomic physics. Johnny Noble had made use of singing, dancing and acting and had succeeded in combining them into a cohesive style; we had, in the words of a newspaper critic, 'evolved a kind of working-class dance drama'. Apart from the final ten minutes of the show when the two roaring boys enter, the style of production had been fairly consistent throughout. In Uranium 235 , however, a whole variety of styles were used; indeed the clash of different idioms was a vitally important feature of the over-all style.
How does one describe such a piece? An episodic play? A documentary? A historical pageant? A twentieth-century morality play? almost any of these descriptions would be pertinent, but not completely so. In some ways it resembled the playing of a good jazz ensemble in which, after the theme has been stated, solo instruments take turns in exploring the theme's chordal structure, each one restating the theme in a different way. In Uranium 235 , however, an actor was expected to be a trombone at one moment and a guitar the next and then to be a trumpet and a piano playing counter-melodics. They were faced with a series of rapidly changing scenes in which they were called upon to dance, sing, act, to speak in unison and to parody themselves doing all these things. A brief breakdown of the play illustrates the extent to which we were indebted to our earlier work in Theatre Union, Theatre of Action and the Red Megaphones.
The play opens with the Firewatcher's monologue, a blank-verse parody of the Watchman's soliloquy in Aeschylus' Agamemnon . There follows a short exchange between the Scientist and a 'planted' member of the audience ( the Politician and the Heckler from Still Talking ).
The expressionistic jazz-dance scene which follows is borrowed ftom the opening scene of Last Edition which was based on an idea in Newsboy .
There follows a short naturalistic episode in which actors play themselves engaging in an argument with the Scientist. This device for stripping away unnecessary layers of argument was used frequently in agit-prop sketches as was the double acting-out technique of the Greek scene in which parody and burlesque are used to expose false historical romanticism and its nineteenth-century theatrical reflection.
The Microphone Voice reading off the list of wars and battles fought during the Greek and Roman eras was borrowed from radiodocumentary technique and had been used extensively in Last Edition .
When the depersonalised Microphone Voice abandons the narration, it is taken up by an actor who talks directly to the audience as he changes his costume. This use of actor-as-narrator was a prominent feature of Last Edition .
Abandoning his narrator role, the actor leads us into a scene composed of three vignettes which mirror that early scene in which the Scientist tries to make himself heard above the frenzied chatter of a group of dancers. In the first of these vignettes a spirited fool's jig becomes a lynch-mob and culminates with the burning of a witch. In the second, a group of alchemists performs a slow formalised dance to the chorus of stichomythic gobbledegook, an episode with all the deliberation of a slow-motion film about gymnastics, and contrasting sharply with the scene which preceded it. The last of these historical vignettes has Giordano Bruno and Paracelsus caught up in a band of dancing revellers in which Death sets the pace. Bruno is finally burned at the stake. Elaborate costumes, the clever use of light and shadow and the richly orchestrated music gave these scenes a Goyalike texture and helped to underline the apparent lack of artifice in the actors scene which followed close on their heels.
Once again the passing of historical time was dealt with by actors playing themselves and talking directly to the audience, preparation for the impact of the nineteenth century and John Dalton's atomic theory!
The Dalton scene is played in a style borrowed from Still Talking and Waiting for Lefty ; our audience is transformed into a nineteenth century audience - members of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. The political orator of Still Talking (the corrupt trade-union leader of Waiting for Lefty ) has become the non-political, uncorrupted John Dalton. He is flanked by two committee members who mime sitting at a non-existent table, an idea borrowed from the Chinese theatre and filtered through Oplopkhov. Only the hecklers of those early productions have remained unchanged.
The final episode of the first part of Uraníum 235 deals with the Royal Society's reception of Mendeleyev's theory of the atomic table. We based it on an idea which had been used in John Bullion where the three gibberish-speaking secretaries collapse and melt like wax dummies.
For most of Part II of Uranium the stage is dominated by the Puppet Master, his Secretary and his servant Death, three characters whose expressionistic ancestry is obvious. They hold a series of auditions in the course of which we meet some of the leading figures in the history of atomic science.
The first of these anditionees is a duo - Marie and Pierre Curie. They describe their discovery of radium in rhymed verse as they dance a spirited waltz. Finally Pierre is ushered off by Death and Marie is left to complete the account in unrhymed verse to the rhythm of a slow waltz. She too is finally taken off by Death.
There followed a circus-act in which J. J. Thomson, discoverer of the electron, introduces us to his lion-taming act. After this comes Albert Einstein and his two cronies Niels Bohr and Max Planck. They are presented as knockabout comedians who claim to be ballet impresarios who prove their claim by staging their atomic ballet. This simple but effectively choreographed modern dance dealt with the step-by-step discovery of atomic fission. Fission having taken place, the dancers take over the stage and re-enact the fission process in a scene which is a burlesque of the Hollywood gangster movie of the thirties. A somewhat similar type of burlesque has been used in Last Edition .
This was the last of the scenes to deal with the purely scientific aspects of nuclear matters. The three short scenes which followed dealt with the social and political background of the events and had their stylistic roots in Newsboy and Last Edition . The drilling scientists which followed them was pure agit-prop, possibly the most effective example of agit-prop theatre we had ever staged.
The closing scenes of Uranium 235 deal with the social and political consequences of the discovery of atomic fission. In terms of style they are a kind of simplified diagram of the whole play for they move easily through the expressionism of the modern morality play into the kind of political confrontation which is one of the main features of agitprop theatre. The scene which actually ended the play was constantly being revised in order to keep pace with the constantly changing political situation.
At some point between Theatre Workshop's first presentation of Uranium 235 in 1946 and its final performance at the Comedy Theatre in 1952 I wrote The Other Animals , a piece in which, for the last time, I attempted to bring together the various disparate elements which had combined to add up to a style.
At first glance it appears to have little in common with John Bullion , Last Edition or Uranium 235 and yet, on reflection, one has to acknowledge that there is a family likeness. All of them, for instance, are political and all of them share the same kind of episodic structure, though in The Other Animals the episodes do not have the same sharp outline of those in Last Edition and Uranium 235 . Again, all of them require the stage to simultaneously accommodate different times and places without a change of décor. They all call upon their actors to sing and dance as well as act, they all attempt to combine two or more contrasted theatrical idioms and they all incline towards expressionism.
And there the similarity ends. The central theme of The Other Animals differs radically from the rest of the plays discussed here. To them specific political events are dealt with and the actions which lead to those events. The Other Animals , on The other hand, is not so much concerned with specific political events as with the effects of the impact of political concepts on the inner life of a human being. In terms of real time, the play deals with the last two hours in the life of a condemned political prisoner, Robert Hanau. Prolonged ill-treatment and torture have reduced him to the point where he can no longer distinguish between fantasy and reality; his captors have become less real to him than the phantoms he conjures up in his delirium. The cage he occupies is real enough but no more real than the cage he has erected in his mind, the bars of which are fears, loyalties, beliefs, obligations and the need to maintain an identity. By betraying his comrades he could escape from the cage provided by his enemies; only through self-betrayal could he escape from that other cage.
In each of the plays from John Bullion to Uranium 235 we were concerned to create a series of dramatic metaphors about the political struggles of a society. The Other Animals is a single extended metaphor of a man's struggle to create order out of chaos. It was rehearsed in a disused garage on Wilmslow Road, Manchester, and opened at The Library Theatre there on 5 July 1948. It was Theatre Workshop's last serious experiment in the theatre of expressionism." (A-P:xlvii-lvii)
Afterword: From Agit-prop to Theatre Workshop, political playscripts 1930-1950 (1986) Epilogue by Howard Goorney
Introduction to the published script of Uranium 235 by Hugh MacDiarmid