"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
funetions including being the company dramatist, dramaturg, 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.
1 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 andPantagruel
('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.
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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 anditions 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)
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