Murray Melvin, The Theatre Workshop and the Theatre Royal, Stratford

We traversed a great deal of ground during the course of this year’s Open House London weekend, from the starkly forbidding concrete canyon of Alexander Terrace in Camden to the cooler modernism and statesmanlike halls of the RIBA building in Fitzrovia; the ultra-modern foldaway one-room cupboard for living of the Lux Pod in Chelsea to the Victorian College of Psychic Studies in South Kensington, once presided over by Arthur Conan Doyle; the London Library in Picadilly, with its vertiginous floor to ceiling shelves interleaved with iron grille walkways, allowing you to see the book-lined precipice above and below to the medieval stone arch of St.John’s Gate, inserted into the narrow 18th century streets of Clerkenwell, and the twelfth century crypt of the Knights Hospitaller’s church over the road; and to the wide rectangular expanse of the Victoria Docks in Newham, which we circumnavigated in the community boat the River Princess, crewed by a disparate parcel of friendly and likeable rogues, from whose decks we could survey the surrounding Ballardian terrain, with its isolated apartment blocks and hangar-like arenas, airport runway abutting directly upon the dock basin and the looming white-walled ruin of the Millenium Mills and its attendant silos.

But the culmination of the weekend was a visit to the Theatre Royal, Straford. We had to fight our way through the milling hordes making their pilgrimage to or pouring out of the new Westfield shopping centre, corporate gateway into the Olympic park and village and genuine ‘retail destination’, positioned to funnel passengers pouring out of the termini of rail, docklands railway, underground and overground and bus route directly into its marbled naves and aisles. As one woman excitedly announced on her phone on the overground on the way back, the crowds were so huge that there was a ‘one in one out’ policy in operation, a form of martial law imposed by the security who are the law in such privately owned enclaves of the city. The theatre and its surrounding companions the Picture House and Stratford Circus performing arts venue can’t compete in terms of scale (or monumental advertising hoardings) to such a temple of consumerism, but it can offer an alternative place to congregate. Set back in the square named after the man who did so much to preserve the theatre in the face of rapacious developers, Gerry Raffles, it’s somewhere in which to find a certain distance from the frenzied busyness of transport cross-connections, the all-engulfing mall and the general ‘regeneration’ of the area.

The Theatre Royal is indelibly associated with Joan Littlewood and Gerry Raffles’ Theatre Workshop company, about which I’ve written in a previous post. We were there both to see the site of many productions which have now become the stuff of legend, and to hear a talk by one of the key members of the Workshop company, Murray Melvin. Melvin is now the Theatre archivist, a role which he assiduously carries out on an entirely voluntary basis. As he told us, this is his way of saying thank you to Littlewood for giving him such an invaluable education, the Workshop having been his university, and also akin to a family. Littlewood was not the sort to accept directly expressed gratitude. As Murray impishly pointed out, ‘if you thanked her, she’d sack you’. Murray’s hard work can be seen throughout the theatre in the many wonderful pictures of Workshop productions which adorn the walls. There’s Harry H Corbett in Richard II, Richard Harris building a wall onstage in the Lord Chamberlain vexing You Won’t Always Be On Top, Barbara Windsor in Sparrers Can’t Sing and Fings Ain’t What They Used to Be, and there’s Murray himself in A Taste of Honey, The Hostage and donning the pierrot costume for Oh What A Lovely War. Many of these photos are from the Spinner collection. As Murray points out in recorded on the occasion of an exhibition of photographs at the National Theatre of the Workshop productions, collected in a book which he edited, John Spinner was a local Walthamstow boy who shared in his father’s enthusiasm for amateur photography. He became entranced by the Workshop’s performances and began to record them, becoming a semi-official documenter (much about the Workshop was semi-official, with funds always low or non-existent) when Gerry Raffles agreed to pay for the costs of his material. Murray suggested to him that his collection could be taken into the archive, where it would be sorted, catalogued and properly exhibited, shortly before his death, and he has remained true to his word. It’s a good example of the way in which the Theatre Workshop engaged with the local community and encouraged the development of nascent enthusiasm and talent. The Workshop is also memorialised in the new area to the right of the entrance corridor, which has been christened the Avis foyer in affectionate tribute to Avis Bunnage, one of the Workshop family’s most long-standing and dedicated members. You can see the busty costume she wore in Oh What A Lovely War to send the boys off to the front with the promiscuous promise of her I’ll Make A Man of You recruitment song. There are also designs for dresses and costumes from this landmark play, and a picture of Avis as Marie Lloyd in the Marie Lloyd story, a performance which provided the enduring pleasures of the old music hall songs but also unveiled the tragedy of the life which lay behind the limelit mask of indefatigable good cheer and bawdy ribaldry.

The Marie Lloyd Story was a fairly late production in the Workshop’s history, staged in 1967, and seemed to be an attempt to reach back into the theatrical past of which the Theatre Royal was a part (perhaps inspired by the end of Gerry Raffles’ lengthy struggle to buy up the Freehold for the land in which it stood, thus seemingly insuring its future). Murray Melvin took us back to its origins in the late Victorian age. Theatrical troupes often performed at temporary sites or ‘fit-ups’, setting up wherever they felt they might attract a good crowd. One such band of wandering players was the company of Frederick Fredericks (son, wouldn’t you know, of Frederick Fredericks snr.). An actor in his company, Charles Dillon, decided to try and create a more permanent base for performance, thus presaging the Theatre Workshop’s decision some 70 years later to settle down after many year’s travelling around the country. Dillon’s application for a license met with strident opposition from the local clergy, in particular one Reverend RP Pelly, who felt that ‘a theatre would not tend to the moral devotion of the people of the neighbourhood’. He was also concerned for the corrupting effect that theatre (and presumably theatrical folk) might have on the inhabitants of the local Home for Respectable Gentlewomen. As Murray wryly observed, there is unfortunately no record of what the gentlewomen themselves felt about the prospect of this new venture. The theatre opened, in spite of the good reverend’s objections, on Wednesday 17th December, 1884, with a production of Lord Bulwer Lytton’s popular and well-known play Richelieu, or The Conspiracy. The building itself was converted from an old, barn-like wheelwright’s shop, its outer shell essentially retained in its original form, with the front wall intact to this day.

Dillon, whilst he was a seriously-minded and committed actor, proved to be a less than inspired manager when it came to the financial side of running a theatre. It soon passed into the hands of Frederick Frederick’s brother Albert (who happened to be married to Dillon’s sister), a successful coal merchant who had a far sharper sense of business acumen. It was to remain in the hands of the Fredericks family for the next 50 years, and as Mr Melvin pointed out, the double F above the proscenium arch remains as a testament to their central role in the creation and development of the theatre. Albert Fredericks put on a more populist programme than Dillon’s traditional theatrical fare, with plenty of full-blooded melodramas. He also had an eye for innovations and novelties, and staged several dioramas, moving image precursors to the cinema in which lengthy panoramas were unwound before the audience’s eyes, with an impression of life and movement created by lighting pinpointing particular areas from before or behind the semi-translucent screen. A particular masterstroke was the introduction of opera in the 1889-90 season. This proved a huge success with local audiences, which goes to show what a popular form of music Italian and light opera used to be. As a result of this success, he was able to make some improvements to the theatre, buying up some of the surrounding land, shops and houses. Murray stepped towards the middle of the stage (set up for a performance of A Clockwork Orange, with added seating to the rear) and spread his arms out to indicate where the back wall used to be, demonstrating how far the theatre had been extended, increasing the depth of the stage from 18 feet to 38 feet. The new bar to the side of the building (added after inevitable mumblings from the Temperance Society) was built on the site of the old Angel Lane fish shop, and a stretch of mosaic tiling can still be seen delineating a portion of its floor plan. After electricity was installed in 1902, along with a new box-office and panel mirror (now installed in the lobby), the theatre, now under the ownership of Albert Frederick’s niece Caroline, offered new delights such as local variety acts, and projections of bioscope pictures were inserted into the usual bill of popular plays.

The story of the theatre after the First World War is one of steady decline, however. Fires, local and national economic depression, closure during the Second World War, and failed attempts at variety and saucy revue shows all took their toll. There was still the occasional highlight. In 1950, the aptly named Tod Slaughter, a veteran Grand Guignol ham who invariably played bloodthirsty gaslight murderers in the Sweeny Todd mould with gleeful violence, starred in Spring-Heeled Jack, The Terror of Epping Forest, a performance which was broadcast by the BBC. However, when Gerry Raffles booked the Theatre Workshop in for a week towards the end of 1950 for their production of Alice in Wonderland, the building was in a shabby, rundown state, and things hadn’t improved by the time they returned in 1953 for a temporary 6 week residency which gradually settled into a more permanent arrangement. Murray Melvin joined 4 years later in 1957, Workshop productions of Edward II and Richard II having made a deep impression on him. Harry H Corbett’s Richard was his finest hour, according to Joan Littlewood and others who saw him in the role. After years of studying in evening classes at the City Lit Institute, Melvin was able to quit his job as a shipping clerk when he received a grant to study at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. But, in one of those instinctive moves, seeming irrational and foolish to others, which fundamentally change the course of your life, he rejected his place. Instead, he approached Gerry Raffles and proposed that he join the Workshop as a student, and was welcomed in to the family. His grant became his payment. All of the regular members of the Workshop lived in a semi-communal fashion in the theatre, which they patched up, repaired and decorated to the best of their abilities, making the most of the paltry funds which they amassed. They undertook all manner of tasks in addition to rehearsing and ploughing through the considerable amount of background study which Joan Littlewood insisted upon for each play. Young Murray was immediately set to work painting the front of the building, followed up by the foyer, and recalled with a barely concealed shiver how everyone was constantly attempting to coax the antediluvian basement heater into life. He told us that when the Workshop actors found out which parts they were to play, they would immediately see who was on in the first scene. The heating was turned on an hour before a performance to warm up the auditorium, and they knew that when the curtain went up, the audience would emit a collective shudder at the blast of icy air which would roll over them. Not a sound to boost an actor’s confidence at the start of a performance.

Murray’s apprenticeship was to be short-lived, however. In 1958, he was cast in two substantial roles which would afford him great critical acclaim in plays by two new writers who gained considerable attention, both for their work and as figures of interest in themselves: the Salford teenager Shelagh Delaney and the rambunctious Irish force of nature Brendan Behan. He was Geoffrey in Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, and the young English soldier in Behan’s The Hostage. His readiness to muck in with the Workshop family may have gone a good way towards helping in gaining him his first significant roles. As Joan Littlewood recalls in her anecdotal autobiography Joan’s Book, ‘Murray Melvin, who had been given a Co-op grant to study with us, was always making tea, tidying the green room, taking care of us – Geoffrey to the life – he got the part’. And it was a part which he would take on to a successful run at the Wyndham’s Theatre in the West End and, of course, to the 1962 Tony Richardson film version, alongside Rita Tushingham and Dora Bryan (Francis Cuka and Avis Bunnage didn’t make the transition from stage to screen). As he says in the National Theatre podcast, he swiftly graduated from a ‘dogsbody in 1957’ to a feted actor. ‘Wasn’t I a lucky lad’, he comments.

Murray and Rita - A Taste of Honey

Both A Taste of Honey and The Hostage demonstrated the Workshop’s concern for uncovering and nurturing new talent, whether it was on the writing or acting side. Delaney and Behan’s scripts were used as a starting point for the development of the performance, with extensive improvisations within the cast and discussions with writer and director producing a collaborative work, which was never considered a final version. The performance was always open to further revisions and rethinks, even during the course of its run. Some writers, such as Delaney and Behan, enjoyed such an active interaction with those who would be bringing their characters and situation to life (and Behan used to add his own on interjections, amendments and ad hoc interventions from the audience during his own plays). Others didn’t take so kindly to what they saw as a dilution of their original text, or a co-option of their authorial voice. Wolf Mankovitz, whose Make Me An Offer was produced in 1959, and Frank Norman, whose Fings Ain’t What They Used To Be was also performed in that year, both had difficulties with this way of doing things.

But as Melvin points out in the National Theatre interview, the Theatre Workshop wasn’t a writer’s theatre, like the Royal Court, in which the text was sacred. All elements of the performance were afforded equal import, with the creation of a genuinely engaging theatrical experience the ultimate aim. The way in which an actor moved was given particular consideration, with the ex-ballet dancer Rudolf Laban's theories being a great influence. The conscious control of movement helped to define the character and the way in which they inhabited their environment, and even their speech inflections and tone, and this was very much a part of the Workshop’s creative process. As Murray poetically put it, it was like ‘dancing the speech’. For Geoffrey in A Taste of Honey, he was ‘light and airy’, whereas for the soldier in The Hostage he was ‘down and solid’, his voice lowering in accordance with his physical movements. Joan Littlewood helped him to achieve this heaviness of movement by attaching chains to the bottoms of his trousers in rehearsals. Background study was also an intensive part of the preparation for a performance, with knowledge of a particular milieu or historical period considered vital for expressing the authentic feel of a work. The script of Oh What A Lovely War, published by Methuen, contains an appendix with an extensive reading list of what is referred to as source material for the play. This study might extend to learning new physical skills, such as World War One military drills for Oh What A Lovely War, or bricklaying for You Won’t Always Be On Top, a play set on a building site during the course of which a wall was gradually built up on stage. But all this wasn’t in the name of realism. Melvin is adamant that naturalism was never the aim of Joan Littlewood’s Workshop productions, which always had a strong theatrical element. There was always an acknowledgement that this was a performance, and one which needed to involve the audience, to draw them in to the action on the stage. They never ventured far into the kitchen sink territory so prevalent in the mid to late 50s. In A Taste of Honey, which might be thought to inhabit that territory, particularly in the light of the film version, the characters all had their theme tunes, which they would enter and exit to, sometimes dancing. When Avis Bunnage’s Helen finds herself alone on stage, with her daughter off in another room, she turns to the audience and addresses them instead, as if taking them into her confidence.

Vaudeville and music hall elements were often a part of these physical performances, which also seemed to acknowledge the history of the building in which they were enacted. There was also a healthy dose of cheerful vulgarity (something which made the Lord Chamberlain, still the official theatrical censor at this time, get twitchy) and humour which stuck two fingers up to authority. It’s fitting that a significant number of Workshop performers went on to become well known in film and television comedy: Barbara Windsor, Harry H Corbett, Victor Spinetti, Roy Kinnear, Brian Murphy and Yootha Joyce (George and Mildred, of course). All of these really came to the fore in Oh What A Lovely War in 1963, which was a perfect piece for the building, drawing on the kind of popular songs which might once have echoed around its walls, and looking at the First World War from the perspective of the ordinary soldiers who were largely drawn from the kind of working people who came to the Stratford Theatre in the Edwardian era. The screens upon which photographs and statistics detailing the terrible facts of the war projected also recall the dioramas and bioscope screens from the days of the Fredericks family. There’s a sensitivity to place in this and other Workshop productions, whether that be to the character of the surrounding area or to the atmosphere of the building and its accumulation of past entertainments, faintly echoing down the decades. Oh What A Lovely War was framed as a pierrot show, as performed by the Merry Roosters, with rough khaki being donned over the white silks as the play progressed. Murray was one of the pierrot players, alongside the likes of Brian Murphy, Victor Spinetti, Grifitth Davies and John Gower. The songs are very affecting, sometimes bitterly ironic, sometimes strangely tender.

Joan amongst the rubble - but the Theatre still stands

Murray emphasised how important it had always been to make the audience feel welcome, to feel that the theatre was their own. They would be greeted as they came in, and possibly even before, as they approached the building. Members of the cast were also encouraged to go down to the bar after a performance, where Gerry Raffles was also likely to be found, and talk with the audience, thanking them for coming. He continues to evince impeccable old school manners to this day, and we were made to feel very much at home. Welcoming us all, he asked if we had all been to the theatre before. Only Mrs W and I hadn’t, so he pronounced us doubly welcome. He asked us what had made us come along, and I mentioned having seen the film of Sparrows Can’t Sing and read up about the Workshop as a consequence. ‘Oh, well done’, he replied, before making sure I knew that Sparrers Can’t Sing (as the stage version was called) had first been performed here. I subsequently read in Joan’s Book that he was none too keen on the film version (which I like), but of course he was far too polite and accommodating to say that here. He still clearly has an enormous affection for both Joan Littlewood and Gerry Raffles, whilst not in any way sentimentalising them. He does believe that theirs was one of the great romances, however, and it’s clear that when Raffles died suddenly of a heart attack on 11th April 1975 at the age of 51, she was left utterly devastated, and effectively left the theatre for good. Murray sounded quite emotional when he said that they all still raise a glass to his memory on that day, and he always sheds a tear. But the legacy of the Workshop lives on, particularly in the work that the theatre does with young people from the area. We were ushered in by one immaculately stylish young man who has joined the theatre as a result of one of these programmes, in much the same way that Murray himself did all those years ago. He is closely involved with these youth programmes, and you can be sure that he inculcates these young aspirants with the ethos and spirit of Joan and Gerry. And for my part, that sense of being welcomed and made to feel that the Stratford Theatre was a place to feel at home means that I will surely return in the future.

If you want to find out more, you can’t go wrong with Murray’s own short book The Theatre Royal: A History of the Building (yours for a measly fiver), and also the book of Theatre Workshop photos which he edited (The Art of the Theatre Workshop). For those of you living in Devon, there are a number of books in the library system (all at Exeter, but you can get them out through the inter-library loan system). Michael Coren’s Theatre Royal: 100 Years of Stratford East covers the history from Charles Dillon to the era after Gerry Raffles’ death and Joan Littlewood’s departure. The Theatre Workshop Story by Howard Goorney follows the Workshop from the travelling days with Joan and Jimmie Miller (later Ewan MacColl) in the 30s and 40s through to the Stratford years. Nadine Holdsworth’s Joan Littlewood looks at her life and her working methods, and includes a detailed analysis of Oh What A Lovely War. Joan's Book, Littlewood’s autobiography, is a thoroughly readable and conversational take on her life and work. There’s also the CD issue (on the bizarrely named Must Close Saturday label) of the original cast recording of Oh What A Lovely War in the Performing Arts Library, as well as the Methuen published play script (only an approximation of the performance, obviously, as above comments have made clear), so you can sing along to such old favourites as Belgium Put the Kibosh on the Kaiser, Hold Your Hand Out Naughty Boy, I’ll Make a Man of You, Hush Here Comes a Whizzbang, When This Lousy War Is Over, I Want to Go Home and I Don’t Want to be a Soldier. With this year’s Armistice Day falling on the 11/11/11, it seems like a propitious time to resurrect the old songs once more and gain a sense of the tenor of those terrible years.

Goodbye

Folk, Theatre and Electronics

The Decca LP of the cast recording of the 1963 Theatre Workshop production Oh What A Lovely War came into the Exeter Oxfam music shop today, and has found its way online. I’ve written about Joan Littlewood and the Theatre Workshop in in the context of the film Sparrows Can’t Sing. Oh What A Lovely War was one of the most celebrated productions which Littlewood and her partner Gerry Raffles put on at the Theatre Royal in Stratford in the East End of London. Obviously with the record you won’t get the ironic juxtaposition of the back projected photographs from the war and the rolling statistics underlining its terrible cost, but the mixture of music hall numbers, propagandistic crowd pleasers and satirical and political anti-war songs still offers a powerful mixture, and a good example of the workshops blending of performance styles. The record was released in 1969, presumably to coincide with the release of Dickie Attenborough’s film of the show, a pale shadow of the original. Many of the cast of Sparrows Can’t Sing here appear as the pierrot singers, Workshop stalwarts all: Avis Bunnage, Fanny Carby, Griffith Davies, Brian Murphy, George Sewell, Victor Spinetti and, of course, Murray Melvin. There are also guest appearances by a number of theatre worthies, who sing particular songs: Jean Pierre Cassel sings Belgium Put The Kaibosh On The Kaiser, Penny Allen We Don't Want To Lose You (Your King And Country Need You), Maggie Smith the terrifying I'll Make A Man Of You, Corin Redgrave and Joe Melia Good-Bye-Eee, Pia Colomba Adieu La Vie, Maurice Arthur When This Lousy War Is Over, Richard Howard Far, Far From Wipers, and Joanne Brown Keep The Home Fires Burning. Sadly, Barbara Windsor, the co-star of Sparrows Can’t Sing, and who featured in the Broadway run of the play, isn’t present. This is a great record of a truly momentous and groundbreaking theatrical event. I’m really excited to see that Murray Melvin, who is now the official archivist of the Theatre Workshop (all on his own time, mind) will be giving a talk at the Theatre Royal as part of the Open House London weekend at 3.00 on Sunday 18th September. I shall certainly try to get along and hear what he has to say about the history of the remarkable institution (if such it can be called, given its anti-establishment stance) in which he played such a central part.









Some more good folkie stuff has also gone online. On the 1974 Topic LP The Rose of Britain’s Isle accordion, concertina and melodeon player John Kirkpatrick is joined by his other half Sue Harris, who plays oboe and hammered dulcimer, for a series of traditional English folk songs and tunes. Staverton Bridge, whose eponymous 1975 LP was released on Saydisc Records, were a Devon folk band featuring Tish Stubbs, Paul Wilson and Sam Richards. They tended towards the more leftward leaning side of the traditional folk repertoire (including Ewan MacColl's We Don't Want to Live Like That), mixing guitar, lute, banjo and whistle with harmonium, group percussion and medieval vocal harmonies. Staverton is a small and picturesque village just outside Totnes, a town which has a very pronounced alternative culture (it's one of a number in the country which posseses its own local currency) from which the group presumably emerged. The Watersons’ For Pence and Spicy Ale is a 1975 Topic Records LP in which the first family of traditional English folk, Mike, Lal and Norma Waterson, are joined by Martin Carthy for their first record of the 70s, a collection of traditional songs (plus one by the late Mike Waterson) such as the Swinton May Song, the Apple-Tree Wassailing Song, Swarthfell Rocks, the Maplas Wassail Song and The Good Old Way. The sleeve notes on the back cover are written by A.L.Lloyd. The Albion Country Band’s 1976 Island Records LP Battle of the Field features a mid-70s incarnation of ex-Fairport Convention man Ashley Hutching's ever-changing folk rock group The Albion Band. Martin Carthy on guitar and vocals, Sue Harris on vocals, oboe and hammer dulcimer, and John Kirkpatrick on accordions, melodeon and concertina turn up again, along with fellow Fairporter Simon Nicol on guitars and dulcimer and Roger Swallow on drums. This group is enhanced by another Fairport member, Dave Mattacks, on drums on the second side, as well as a bunch of Sackbut players. We also have the 1970 LP Folk on Friday, offering (as you might guess) recordings from the BBC Folk on Friday radio series, presented by future Folk on Two main man Jim Lloyd. Robin and Barry Dransfield feature, as do Dave and Toni Arthur, the latter yet to enter her iconic role as a Play School and Playaway presenter. Dave and Toni remark, on the back cover sleeve notes, that 'when they are not performing they are deeply involved in research and have made a study of seasonal rituals, customs and folklore'. Hear the results of their, and other's esoteric investigations here. Dave and Toni sing The Death of the Earl of Essex and Two Pretty Boys, whilst the Dransfields, by way of contrast, offer Talcahuano Girls and an instrumental medley. There’s a great sleeve by BBC Records graphic designer Roy Curtis-Bramwell, too.

Tolkien has always been a folkie favourite, and we have a fascinating recording here of The Hobbit, a 4 LP boxed set on Argo Records from 1974. This is a 'dramatic reading' of the story which introduces the Middle Earth mythos, made by Nicol Williams. Williams played a very eccentric Merlin in John Boorman's 1979 film Excalibur - hear what he makes of Gandalf here. There is a sparing use of music for dramatic effect and during interludes. This largely derives from medieval sources and is produced by Professor Thurston Dart and Bob Stewart, who plays harp, brass, shawms, flutes and a hurdy-gurdy. The illustration on the cover of the box is by Tolkien himself. At the opposite end of the spectrum, we have the 1965 Turnabout LP, Electronic Music, which gathers together 3 classic pieces of electronic music from the 50s and 60s. Turkish-born composer IlhanMimaroglu's Agony, created in May 1965 at the famous Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Centre, uses purely electronic sound sources in a manner suggesting musique concrete. It is subtitled Visual Study No.4 after Arshile Gorky, taking inspiration from the great Armenian artist's abstract paintings. John Cage's Fontana Mix is an early classic of electronic music, composed at the Studio de Fonologia of Italian Radio in Milan. Existing in several arrangements, this is the one for magnetic tape alone. Luciano Berio's Visage, also produced at the Studio di Fonologia in 1961, is a piece of musique concrete in which the composer manipulates the vocal sounds produced by his wife, the singer Cathy Berberian. All marvellous stuff, whether it be the sound of oscillating electronic tones, the shimmer of hammered dulcimer strings or the haunting echo of popular songs from a previous century with a secret purpose.

Sparrows Can't Sing, Portrait of Queenie and The Theatre Workshop

PART TWO


Another celebrated East End destination of the time incorporated into the film was Queenie Watts’ pub. It was a place which seemed constantly abuzz with jazz and blues, often performed by Queenie herself, and other musical entertainments. It’s here that all the characters from Sparrows Can’t Sing gather in the evening and the film reaches its brawling conclusion. In fact, it’s a studio interior rather than the actual location used here, but the set replicates the feel of Watts’ pub well enough, with Queenie and her partner Slim serving behind the arc of the bar opposite the music stage, on which she also sings the blues. There’s a documentary on the Shadows of Progress box set called Portrait of Queenie, made in 1964, which captures the spirit of the pub at this time. It’s only a partly accurate title, since it’s as much about the area in which she and Slim live, work and grew up as it is about her. We also get to see the people who drink and play music in the pub, and get an insight into the working lives of some of the musicians (the trumpeter is a gardener and the pianist supervises apprentices in a metal workshop underneath the railway arches). The pub, which is the central focus of the film, is the Iron Bridge Tavern on East India Dock Road in Poplar. The film begins with two fashionably dressed young women approaching along the roadside pavement, clearly outsiders who are drawn by the buzz around Queenie’s venue. They form convenient audience identification figures as they nervously enter the pub and approach the bar. Their evening is measured out in a slow but steady accumulation of sweet martinis and gin and bitter lemons. A night down the pub forms the basic structural framework of the film, but there are numerous interludes in which Queenie and her husband Slim, always working alongside her behind the bar, wander around Poplar and the Isle of Dogs, the camera eye observing telling details of their surroundings. Slim returns to Poplar High Street and ruminates on the poverty of his childhood, observing with no trace of self-pity that his Italian neighbours were considered well-off because they could afford shoes. Wandering into Sophia Street, where he grew up, he notes that it was known locally as Chopper Street, because a policeman’s head was cut off and disposed of down a drain. ‘Funny, but not many coppers came around after that’, he adds with a chuckle.

Queenie on the Isle of Dogs

The Isle of Dogs was still a busy working dockland environment at this time, a landscape crossed and harboured with cranes and cargo ships, tugboats and barges, canals and swing bridges, and ringed around with high wharfside walls as high as those around a prison. The names of the streets through which Queenie wends her way mark out the distant places with which the docked ships and their cargo form a connection: Tobago Street, Cuba Street, Manilla Street. The multi-racial make up of the area seems a natural consequence of such global confluence, and is observed with unaffected equanimity in the film. Queenie watches as some Indian children play in the street, and Caribbean, Jewish and Italian musicians play in her club. A similarly optimistic and relaxed view is taken in Sparrows Can’t Sing. Charlie initially searches for Maggie in a subdivided building to which he has been misdirected. He finds Sikhs on the ground floor (the boy translates his queries for the father), Africans on the first, with whom he enjoys a friendly bit of joshing and a brief attempt at dancing, and a group of gypsies on the top floor whose music (they seem to be holding some sort of lesson) brings out his watermelon grin to its fullest extent. Such disparate elements feeding into the area make Queenie’s love jazz and blues seem completely in keeping with the spirit of the place. Her pub is a shrine to such music, with photos of Ella and Louis pinned to the wall behind the stage like tutelary icons. She sings a local blues titled ‘It’s Raining on the Isle of Dogs (as indeed it is) as she wanders around the area, as if to point out the universality of the music. She is accompanied by the familiar stabbing chords and off-kilter, Monkish rhythms of Stan Tracey and a band including bassist Malcolm Cecil, who later made a complete musical about turn and formed the pioneering synthesiser duo TONTO’s Expanding Head Band with Robert Margouleff, both of whom worked with Stevie Wonder on his seminal early 70s albums.

Queenie sings the blues

The small collection of books on her bedroom table (and it’s difficult to see when she’d get the time to read) also suggest an eclectic worldview; a mix of the spiritual, cultural and practical which encompasses the Holy Bible, the Encyclopaedia of Sea Practice, James Baldwin’s Another Country and one of Henry Miller’s Tropic novels (both of which could loosely be defined as ‘jazz’ literature), and the Kama Sutra. The music in her pub also covers the aural spectrum of contemporary popular sounds with, in addition to the jazz and blues (and trad jazz was huge at the time, of course), a bit of skiffle, rock and roll and pop, and a spontaneous outburst of barside Caruso crooning prompted by Queenie from an old acquaintance. There’s something of a sound clash towards the latter stages of the evening (although it could all be in the edit), with a Cockney knees up breaking out around the old Joanna in the far corner as someone bashes out a rough and ready Knees Up Mother Brown. The older generation (for this is a pub in which all ages mix) get to sing the good old songs, and Queenie herself provides her rendition of My Old Man, just to show that she can do Marie Lloyd as well as Ella and Billie.

We are building a new world

As with Charlie in Sparrows Can’t Sing, Queenie is shown picking her way through the rubble of the old streets which are being redeveloped, gazing up uncertainly at the high rises which are beginning to loom above the ragged remnants of the terraced rows. There’s one perfectly framed shot which has obviously been carefully set up in which Queenie walks towards the camera and then pauses in the middle distance, forming one element in a composition which includes a row of half-demolished houses, a scraggy, blasted tree and a newly erected block of flats. Queenie went on to be a regular presence on TV and in films, becoming something of a default choice for tough-minded East End character parts. She played the worldly Aunt Emm in Poor Cow, taking in Carol White’s down at heel Joy, and was also in Up The Junction, the other 60s adaptation of a Nell Dunn novel. She made token appearances in Alfie and Half A Sixpence, as if to add a touch of authenticity. But it was on TV that she really became a familiar face, turning up in Sykes, Steptoe and Son, The Goodies, Up Pompeii, Dad’s Army, Doomwatch, Dixon of Dock Green, Yus My Dear (with Arthur Mullard) and, to further connect back to Sparrows Can’t Sing, George and Mildred, alongside Yootha Joyce and Brian Murphy. Queenie eventually had her own moment in the This Is Your Life spotlight, a sure sign that you’ve been enshrined in the public’s affections.

Roy Kinnear - comic ladder antics

Sparrows Can’t Sing is very much an actor’s film, and much of the cast were drawn from the Theatre Workshop’s then current repertory company. Joan Littlewood had wanted to use a Nagra camera, small, portable and adaptable enough to follow the small variances, sudden impulses and spontaneous gestures of the actors’ performances. It sounds like she was aiming for something similar to what John Cassavetes was doing over in America in films such as Shadows and Faces. Cassavetes also used to put on off-Broadway theatrical performances of plays which he’d written in addition to his self-financed films. Littlewood makes no bones in her autobiography about her frustrations with the producer Donald Taylor and the professional camera team that he imposed on her. The ‘well-respected’ cinematographer Max Greene was utterly disdainful of the actors and the story, reading his copy of Sporting Life throughout the dramatised read through Littlewood organised for the benefit of him and his crew, in order to familiarise them with the story and characters. Eventually, both producer and cameraman left, and the picture was swiftly concluded with more sympathetic collaborators, although Taylor still receives primary credit on the titles. Any technical deficiencies are outweighed by the variety of acting styles. This echoed the ethos of the Theatre Workshop, which aimed to incorporate a divergent mix of popular and classical performance traditions into their productions.

Murray Melvin rockin and rollin

The marvellous Murray Melvin was a lynchpin of the Theatre Workshop repertory company at this time (and has since gone on to be its archivist), having appeared in the original production of A Taste of Honey in the role he would go on to play in the film. Here, he gets to show off his singing and dancing talents (as well as a rather natty suit), twisting his way through a rock and roll number in Queenie’s pub with some gusto. Roy Kinnear and Brian Murphy make for a great clownish double act, a couple of mumbling and stumbling featherheads vying with each other to demonstrate who is the more hopeless. Kinnear displays his familiar physical characteristics which were to become so much a part of his comic make up. His nervous shrug, rolling waddle of a walk and the apologetic ‘what’s he done now’ twitch of a half smile that turns the corner of that flatline mouth. His whole being seems to exude worry and hesitant uncertainty. Both he and Brian Murphy have their cumbersome comic props, which render them ripe for slapstick misadventure. Roy Kinnear has his ladder and bucket, the former of which impedes his clumsy drunken return from the pub, and which he unwisely decides to employ whilst still in a dizzy state. Brian Murphy has his expansive birdcage (everything seemed to be bigger and more solid back then). Rather touchingly, he takes this down to the local park, parking it on the bench beside him and introducing its occupants to their sparrow brethren. Murphy narrowly misses crossing paths with Yootha Joyce in the film, and you can’t help but think that this could almost be a glimpse into the youth of George and Mildred Roper, the characters they played in the 70s sitcom, withering in the doldrums of each other’s company. Here, Joyce is full of vitality and cheer, issuing a steady stream of cheeky banter alongside her girl friends.

Brian Murphy - taking the bird for a walk

Avis Bunnage plays Bridgie Gooding as the family matriarch, organising the dithering menfolk and rounding up her errant daughter with a yell from the canal bridge to act as the messenger between Charlie and Maggie. Her loquacious, bustling character gives us a glimpse of what her portrayal of the mother in Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey might have been like in its opening 1958 run at the Theatre Royal. Dora Bryan is fine in the film, but you can’t help wondering if Avis might have made this maternal monster a little more human. Barbara Ferris, who plays Bridgie and Fred’s daughter Nellie, was one of several young women whom Joan Littlewood found performing in the nearby Winston’s Nightclub. Littlewood liked the fact that they hadn’t been through the conventional theatrical training, and points out in her autobiography that ‘they could sing, dance, ad lib, change clothes in a matter of seconds and, despite the most uncomfortable conditions, light up the scene’. All the sort of things they might be expected to do during the course of a typical Theatre Workshop production, in fact. Ferris never really found a fulfilling long term career as an actress. She was busy in 1963, however, also playing Susan Eliot, the lead female character in Children of the Damned, the sequel to Village of the Damned, which had successfully adapted John Wyndham’s novel The Midwich Cuckoos for the screen. Ferris also replaced Marianne Faithfull as the girl having larks amongst the lads of the Dave Clark Five in John Boorman’s enjoyable slice of swinging sixties satire Catch Me If You Can. It was clearly aimed to cash in on the success of A Hard Days Night, and two actors in Sparrows Can’t Sing provide an anticipatory link with that film, which was released the following year (1964). Victor Spinetti and John Junkin essentially play the same sort of characters as they would do with The Beatles: Spinetti neurotic (although without the mohair jumper here) and Junkin laconically officious.

Gerry Raffles - dropping Maggie off

There were actors from beyond the Theatre Workshop circles. Arthur Mullard appears, pulling up outside the pub with barrels of beer delivered by dray horse-drawn cart. As ever, he basically plays Arthur Mullard, which is all he’s required to do. George Sewell, who plays Bert, had also appeared in Lindsay Anderson’s debut feature This Sporting Life in 1963. This was released at the tail end of the kitchen sink era, when people where beginning to weary of its downbeat realism, and it received lukewarm reviews as a result. Its star, Richard Harris, had also passed through the ranks of the Theatre Workshop. He was involved in the court case brought against the company in 1959, which revolved around the play You Won’t Always Be On Top. This written by a building worker, Henry Chapman, and was set on a building site, complete with cement mixer and a wall which was gradually constructed on stage as the everyday action unfolded. The actors improvised around the written script, building up their characters in the build up to the opening and during the actual run. The Lord Chamberlain, who had taken against the play, or perhaps just the Workshop’s stance in general, used this deviation from the source material to prosecute Harris, Littlewood, Raffles, Chapman and John Bury, the theatre’s licensee, for presenting material unauthorised by the censor. There was a great deal of publicity surrounding the case, and the resultant fines were largely tokenistic. The whole affair played a significant role in bringing this officious and arbitrary form of establishment censorship to an end. Harry H Corbett had been a core member of the Theatre Workshop in the post war years, having joined in 1952 when it was still touring the North. He left in 1955, tired of the constant penury, a couple of years after the company had settled in Stratford. He did maintain his links with Littlewood, however, and returned from time to time, appearing in the 1959 production of James Clancy’s Ned Kelly, and playing Sherlock Holmes (or rather, someone who thinks he’s Holmes) in James Goldman’s They Might Be Giants in 1961. He makes a cameo appearance in Sparrows Can’t Sing (for old time’s sake, maybe) as the fruit and veg seller with his roadside market stall. Look closely and you can spot Joan Littlewood herself, inspecting the wares behind him. Gerry Raffles also appears briefly as the driver of the double-decker car transport lorry who drops Maggie off in the park before heading for Sheffield.

Joan's Book - her autobiography

The Theatre Workshop wanted to bring theatre to the local people, to those ordinary men and women who were outside the usual theatre-going audience, and who would not consider it to be for them. They aimed to do this by producing plays which reflected their experience, or which presented material in a way which directly engaged with them, drawing them in rather than presenting them with a passive spectacle. This was what they attempted with plays such as Sparrers Can’t Sing, A Taste of Honey, Frank Norman’s Fings Ain’t What They Used To Be and A Kayf Up West, You Won’t Always Be On Top and Oh What A Lovely War. The degree to which they succeeded in reaching such an audience is debatable. Harry H Corbett certainly felt that they’d failed to fulfil any such aims. ‘We never appealed to the working class’, he says in Howard Goorney’s The Theatre Workshop Story. ‘All I could ever see were beards and duffle coats every time I peered into the audience. It was the day of the angry young whatever. No way was there a local following, only in the sense of a few eccentrics – Johnny Speight was one – and they were leaving their working-class environment. Never a solid working-class audience in any way’. Still, local eccentrics need a focal point to inspire them, and the theatre provided a training ground for those who might otherwise never have contemplated acting on the stage. The Theatre Workshop actors really reached the desired audience to a massively greater extent with the characters they went on to play in TV sitcoms or soaps: James Booth as Vic Fielding and Avis Bunnage as first Alice Burgess, and then Edie Blundell in Coronation Street; Roy Kinnear in The Dick Emery Show; Brian Murphy and Yootha Joyce in Man About the House and its spin-off George and Mildred; and, of course, Harry H Corbett in Steptoe and Son. Joan Littlewood is very sniffy about the latter’s defining role in her autobiography, an attitude she perhaps extended to all of these defections to the idiot box. ‘Harry C’s face filled the screen’, she remembers. ‘He was talking in some stylised accent and there was a hideous old man with him…Harry, who had given us that incomparable Richard II, and so many glorious moments of theatre; what had driven him to this?’ Perhaps she might have approved of two further Theatre Workshop graduates to the small screen who went on to play central roles at the beginning and (as it then seemed) the end of Doctor Who. Carole Ann Ford played William Hartnell’s Doctor’s ‘granddaughter’ Susan from the very first episode, The Unearthly Child (broadcast in 1963, the same year that Sparrows Can’t Sing was released), through to the final episode of The Dalek Invasion of Earth a year later. Sylvester McCoy took the title role and eventually steered it to a dignified end in Survival, towards the end of 1989. On reflection, she almost certainly wouldn’t.

The Theatre Workshop had its origins in Salford, where a young man called Jimmie Miller, fiercely committed to Communist ideals, set up a street theatre group called the Red Megaphones in 1931. They would perform short and unambiguous political skits for the queues of the unemployed waiting outside the labour exchanges, and later for those taking part in the strikes then widespread in the textile industries. They gradually began to graduate from the streets and develop a more professional approach, a move which was greatly helped by the arrival of Joan Littlewood amongst their ranks in 1934. She’d grown up in Stockwell in South London, and had managed to gain a place at RADA, but disliked the conventional nature of its training and the kind of plays which it favoured. Legend has it (or her autobiography, at any rate) that she walked up to Manchester to find a new direction, her possessions tied up in a bundle like a figure from a fairy tale. This dreamlike impression was furthered when she was awakened one night by the roaring of wild beasts. The following morning, she realised that she’d bedded down just outside Whipsnade Zoo. The Red Megaphones evolved into the Theatre of Action in 1934, and then again into the Theatre of Action in 1936. Miller and Littlewood began to develop a hybrid style which adopted elements of different popular traditions of dance, music hall, agit prop and street entertainments, juxtaposing them to form a new, kaleidoscopic whole. They impulsively got married, but it never seemed a serious commitment. Littlewood comments in her autobiography that, after Miller’s sudden and offhand proposal and an ensuing row, ‘for better or for worse, I gave in’). They remained friends and collaborators after it all fell apart, however, and Littlewood was later to become godmother to Miller’s children, Kirsty and Hamish MacColl. Miller had deserted from the army soon after being called up in 1940, and changed his name to Ewan MacColl in an attempt to deflect any unwanted attention. It worked for a while, but he was finally arrested after the war, although he was soon released and returned to the fold. Littlewood met Gerry Raffles when he joined the company in 1940, and they soon fell for each other. She describes the blossoming of their relationship in a touchingly self-deprecating way in her autobiography: ‘Gerry was nineteen, sexy, a very desirable young man. I was just twenty-eight, plain, hardly what you’d call attractive, moody often, amusing sometimes, but Gerry didn’t see me as I was. He called me beautiful. Perhaps, when he looked at me, I was….Gerry was the most wonderful that ever happened to me – and still is’. They remained devoted to each other until his death in 1975.

The Theatre Union had to pack up and cease activities in 1942 for the duration of the war. When it was all over, the core members re-united to found the Theatre Workshop. MacColl wrote for the company, Littlewood directed and acted, and Raffles became the de facto manager. They toured the theatres, halls and schools and colleges of the North, bringing a mixture of the classics and new, didactic works to whomsoever might turn up (and it was sometimes a pretty meagre audience). Notable amongst the new plays was Uranium 253, which used the hybrid styles developed in the Theatre Union days to tell the story of atomic power and its development and eventual use as a weapon with terrifying destructive potential. The performance involved a variety of performance styles, with dance, comedy, movie parodies, an expressionistic figure of death, and direct addresses to the audience. The play was a big success, communicating what might have been a rather abstract subject in an engaging, entertaining and informative manner. It toured widely, even playing for a week to enthusiastic audiences at Butlins in Filey.

After several years, the strain of constant touring and their permanently penurious condition led the members of the Theatre Workshop to seek a permanent base. Manchester and Glasgow failed to offer any suitable or affordable locations, so in 1953 they moved down South and set up in the dilapidated Victorian semi-wreck of the Theatre Royal in Stratford, a place which had indubitably seen better days. MacColl opposed the move away from the North, where he believed they had begun to build up a good audience, and didn’t join them. Besides, he was now becoming more involved with folk music, hosting, curating and singing in the radio show Ballads and Blues for the BBC, and later opening a club of the same name in London in 1957 (so he did move south after all!). This would turn into the famous Singers Club in 1961 and become the epicentre of the folk revival, with MacColl and his partner Peggy Seeger as its presiding king and queen (although such royal assignations are somewhat contradictory for a movement whose constituents largely espoused left-wing views). MacColl’s series of Radio Ballads, broadcast from the late 50s through to the mid 60s, drew on the Theatre Workshop’s use of a variety of juxtaposed styles and techniques to present portraits of particular groups of people (fishermen, travellers, miners and motorway construction workers) through recorded speech, sound effects, field recordings, narration, and songs old and new.

Murray Melvin in Oh What A Lovely War

The Theatre Workshop struggled for a while, effectively squatting in the theatre building (and swiftly hiding the evidence of their inhabitation whenever any inspectors turned up), but an invitation to play at the International Theatre Festival in Paris in 1955 attracted a good deal of positive critical attention (alongside a certain amount of ‘why are these nobodies being chosen as our representatives’ comments) and heralded the many successes that were to follow. Several of these led to West End transfers, which helped a great deal with the finances, although some suggested that they marked a sell out to the conventional theatre to which the Workshop had sought to provide an alternative. Brendan Behan found something of an artistic home at the Theatre Royal (and a literal home for a while with Littlewood and Raffles), with his plays The Quare Fellow and The Hostage being staged there. There was also the 1958 premiere of A Taste of Honey by the young first time playwright Shelagh Delaney, Sparrers Can’t Sing, of course, William Saroyan’s 1960 piece of whimsy Sam, The Highest Jumper Of Them All, a quirky vehicle for Murray Melvin, and the thinly veiled satire on the Ronan Point disaster The Projector in 1970. Perhaps the culmination of the Workshop’s performance style and philosophy was Oh What A Lovely War from 1963, which juxtaposed songs from the First World War with a pierrot show, comic routines, realistic scenes of life in the trenches and music hall numbers with a constantly changing backdrop of slides showing photographs from the war, with ‘rolling’ news statistics flashed alongside.

Cedric Price's plans for the Fun Palace

Joan Littlewood’s involvement in the theatre diminished in the late 60s and early 70s as she became involved in a new project, a vision for a future in which leisure time would expand as the world became increasingly technologised (what happened to that!). She envisaged what came to be known as the Fun Palace, a flexible structure which was to be a site for serious leisure, or work-play, ‘a university of the streets…a foretaste of the pleasures of the future’. It was a mini model utopia, a proposal for the manner in which society at large might refashion itself and its priorities. She developed the idea with architect Cedric Price, and they came up with an open plan area which encouraged an informal atmosphere. There would be no doors or fixed entry points, and the different areas would not be segregated. Boundaries would be permeable, with ‘charged static-vapour zones, optical barriers, warm-air curtains and fog-dispersal plant’ to be used, according to Price’s May 1964 New Scientist article. There would be acting areas (for participation or viewing), music areas with instruments and listening posts, a construction area in which various crafts could be learnt and practised, a science playground, a fun arcade, remote-viewing screens linked to various locations in the city (or beyond). If it all got a bit too much, there was a quiet zone, which sounds not unlike Brian Eno’s idea of a Civic Recovery Centre demonstrated at the 2000 Sonic Boom sound art exhibition in the Hayward Gallery on London’s South Bank. The whole thing would be, by its nature (and philosophy) impermanent and subject to periodic rearrangements. It would be overarched with an all-encompassing gantry framework, with attendant cranes for shifting the various modules and components, and the encompassed space would be filled and crossed by inflatable enclosures, ramps, moving walkways, catwalks and radial escalators. Despite support and patronage from the likes of Yehudi Menuhin and Buckminster Fuller (who maybe saw the potential to get a dome in their somewhere) and vague encouraging noises from some local councils, it was destined to remain nothing more than a plan on paper. Echoes of some of its ideas can be felt in places like the Container City (an artistic and educational enclave which uses recycled shipping containers as living and working ‘units’) on Trinity Buoy Wharf by the Thames (and symbolically opposite the Millenium Dome or O2 Arena as it has now become); and in the modular inflatable maze of the Colourscape structure which sprouts up on Clapham Common and other sites from time to time, and which hosts musicians in its central chamber (the sound distributed around the surrounding colour saturated corridors).

Joan amongst the rubble

In the 1970s, the local council began to ‘redevelop’ the area around Angel Lane in which the Theatre Royal stood. Zones of waste ground filled with mounds of weed-covered rubble began to proliferate, the wreckage of half-carried out demolition. Joan Littlewood and Gerry Raffles began to organise clearance parties, reclaiming the land like modern ‘leisure time’ Diggers. The spaces thus cleared were asphalted over with the help of sympathetic local firms and patterned with coloured squares, becoming playgrounds and open air theatres of a sort. Activities were arranged which embodied the idea of serious leisure which had been at the heart of the Fun Palace project, and the Theatre Royal was incorporated into this new self-governed local zone, with teenagers invited to organise their own Friday night dances. Jimmie Winston, the keyboard player in the early incarnation of the Small Faces, became an enthusiastic supporter and, according to Joan Littlewood’s autobiography, ‘involved himself in everything, a frontiersman in the bad lands’. It all climaxed in an extravagant Easter Fair organised by the local children in 1974, which boasted a wide variety of stalls and booths, with a maypole at the centre and even a small zoo. Littlewood remembers that the latter included ‘pigeons, and chickens, two donkeys, three monkeys, a goat, a mynah bird and a tortoise; and Jimmie Winston brought a lion!’ The Who came along and played and donated some money, and the whole site became known as the ‘Invisible Fun Palace’, the ideal without the physical structure. Joan and Gerry had brought theatre and pageantry to the local people at last. It was the culmination their involvement with the people of Stratford. When Gerry Raffles died suddenly and unexpectedly a year later, Joan Littlewood was left utterly desolate, and left England to go and live in France shortly thereafter. Raffles is memorialised by a Square which is named after him, just south of Angel Lane and adjacent to a new arts centre, a testament to his efforts to fight for the spirit of the place and the people who inhabited it.

Across the road from Gerry Raffles Square is Stratford Station, situated on the borderlands of the massive new Olympic development site. This is currently the site for Matt Stokes’ film installation The Stratford Gaff: A Serio-Comick-Bombastick-Operatick Interlude. This series of recorded performances seeks to conjure up the spirit of ‘penny gaffs’, ad hoc entertainments common in the Victorian era that used whatever spaces might be temporarily available. Stokes met up with Murray Melvin, who now voluntarily devotes a good deal of his time to acting as the Theatre Workshop’s archivist. The variety of performers and the range of artistic styles represented in Stokes’ film is an appropriate remembrance of the Workshop’s collision of forms. A Grime MC raps alongside some acrobatic cheerleaders, a Punjabi pop singer, a female impersonator, a magician, a beatboxer and a group of Romany musicians. And then there’s Melvin himself, singing When This Lousy War Is Over from Oh What A Lovely War. In his white silk pierrot costume, he stands out against the backdrop darkness like a ghost, a spectral echo of the Workshop’s illustrious past which has drifted across from the theatre opposite.

Sparrows Can't Sing, Portrait of Queenie and the Theatre Workshop

PART ONE


Sparrows Can’t Sing (1963) was a filmed version of Stephen Lewis’ play, de-cockneyfied from its original title Sparrers Can’t Sing, which was put on by the Theatre Workshop at the Theatre Royal, Stratford in 1960. The Theatre Workshop was an idealistic outfit run by Joan Littlewood and her lifelong partner Gerry Raffles which sought to produce an alternative to mainstream theatre, and to connect more with the local community, producing work which would mean more to ordinary men and women. The film was recently included in the London Collection dvd boxset alongside Norman Cohen’s documentary of Geoffrey Fletcher’s explorations into The London Nobody Knows and other fascinating period pieces from the post-war capital. It’s hugely enjoyable on a number of levels. It captures the East End area of Stratford when it was on the cusp of a complete transformation, which would sweep away many of the old streets and the atmosphere and grime which they had accumulated over the years. The scenes set in and around the docks now have a documentary value, their life as a working area having long since ceased and any remnants of machineries or functional objects incorporated as decorative features in the exclusive redeveloped residential landscape. The film features a gallery of faces familiar from TV and film supporting roles, giving voice to a regular chorus of ‘ooh look, it’s so and so, wasn’t she in such and such’. It’s a testament to the rich repertory cast nurtured by Joan Littlewood at the Theatre Workshop. There’s a definite sense that the actors are given the space to display their particular talents, and there are plenty of diversions from the main narrative. The loose and rambling structure of the film, much of which is taken up with wandering and waiting, allows for all to have their moment and there are many performances to treasure here.

Balcony lament - Barbara sings the title song

The story is a fairly flimsy framework within which we observe the various characters hovering around the orbit of the Gooding family. The wayward son, Charlie, is returning from a couple of seemingly impulsively impromptu years at sea, and word soon gets around that he is coming home. Everybody is stirred into a scurrying bustle of activity, some excited at the prospect of his return, others filled with trepidation. It’s clear from these polarised reactions that Charlie is both a rogue and a charmer. Having shared a taxi from the docks to his old stamping grounds with a shipmate played by Glynn Edwards, best known as Dave, the long-suffering barman of the Winchester Club in Minder. He was married to fellow Theatre Workshop actor Yootha Joyce, who also appears in the film, at the time. Here, he attempts a Scottish accent with little success. Charlie sets about looking for his wife, Maggie, receiving misleading directions which send him on a tour of the area. Everyone anticipates a combustible encounter, since Maggie is now living with Bert, a bus driver, and has a baby daughter. A meeting is engineered at a local pub, and when Maggie eventually arrives, Charlie turns on the charm. There is a bit of verbal sparring, with Maggie reminding him of the old days when he used to have different birds every night and come back from the pub ‘bashin’ the door down, let alone bashin’ me ‘ed in’. But there is an undertow of attraction and playful affection beneath the to and fro, and she leaves him with a verbal ‘might do’ shrug at his proposed rendezvous later that day. Back with Bert, she contemplates the two alternatives offered by her men: the stability of life he offers, with his steady job and their clean new flat; or the cheerful chaos and unpredictability of Charlie and his clan. Bert nearly throws a spanner in the works by staying home sick from work, but Maggie goes out anyway, and she and Charlie reminisce over the old times in the park. She goes out with him to the pub that evening, with Charlie acting like the cock of the walk, greeted by all his old mates and behaving as if all is back to normal. Everything comes to a head when Bert comes in, and both he and Charlie face up to one another. Maggie is forced to make a choice then and there. All ends in brawling chaos, with Maggie and Charlie leaving by the back door and having their own private scrap. Each gives as good as they get. They walk off still having a go at each other, and the final frame freezes with the words ….and so on, which suggests that this pretty much sets the pattern for the rest of their lives.

Barbara lands a good one - Maggie and Charlie work things out

Charlie and Maggie are played with enormous vitality and charisma by James Booth and Barbara Windsor. Booth manages to convey both Charlie’s energetic charm and his wayward fecklessness, along with his potential for sudden weather changes in mood and tendency towards violent reaction. He behaves like an over-exuberant child who expects to get his way and grows sullen and truculent if he doesn’t. From what Joan Littlewood says in her anecdotal autobiography Joan’s Book, these were characteristics shared by Booth himself. She relates an incident which occurred whilst shooting the pub scene. Booth suddenly turned around and hurled a glass at a group standing at the bar. This wasn’t in the script and was clearly highly dangerous, and she told him he shouldn’t have done it, and that anyway it wasn’t something his character would do. He wouldn’t need to get their attention in such a violent manner. She writes that ‘he promptly walked off, threatening to turn in the part. It took another outburst and a lot of soothing syrup before he would consent even to try the take without the glass smashing, but when he did, it was good’. This kind of behaviour may go some way towards explaining why Booth, who was at the time tipped for great things, never made it to the same degree that fellow Londoners Michael Caine and Terence Stamp, also emerging at this time, did. It should be pointed out that Booth, whilst he tended to be cast in chirpy Cockney roles, was actually born in Croydon, way beyond the reach of even the faintest reverberations of Bow Bells. The shadows of what might have been are evident in the fact that he appeared in Zulu alongside Michael Caine and was subsequently offered the part of Alfie, which he turned down. Caine also did his time in the Theatre Workshop, although his was an extremely brief tenure, and he never made his mark there as Booth did.

Charlie comes home - James Booth on the docks

If this were a different film, with a different tone and a different actor in the lead role, then Charlie could be a threatening and violently domineering character. He does reassert his position and expect life to continue much as it did before he left, and causes a great deal of disruption in the lives of those around him, who seem slightly cowed by his presence. Ultimately, perhaps because of Booth’s portrayal, he comes across more as likeable rogue than seductive bastard. Charlie may cause Arnold, played with typically febrile neuroticism by Victor Spinetti, to crush several of his strudels in fearful overreaction to his presence in the Jewish bakery where Maggie is supposed to be working. But the extent of his menace is displayed in his chilling parting threat that he’ll shop at Kominsky’s, a rival cake shop. James Booth’s wide, Satchmo grin splits his face with natural ease, lighting it up like a benevolent jack o’lantern (albeit one which retains a certain wicked glint). Even when not there, it seems latent, waiting for the slightest excuse to spread again. Once it has, it looks like it would require a muscular effort to collapse it once more.

Pub games - Charlie takes the direct approach

Barbara Windsor portrays Maggie as both self-assertive and tough, and at the same time sentimental and tender-hearted, with a tendency to forgive if not necessarily to forget. Her performance in the pub scene, in which she finally meets up with Charlie, is particularly fine. She manages to express Maggie’s reactive shifts from resistance and feigned indifference through accusation and hostility to veiled pleasure and half-hidden smiles, all culminating in a tender backward look as she goes out of the door. In the pub scene, she makes it clear that Maggie has the full measure of Charlie. She sees through his transparent charms, but enjoys them anyway, and has fun both encouraging and mildly rebuffing his larky advances. Her breathless run down the streets towards the pub, face filled with happy anticipation, is Windsor’s enactment of her own localised version of Marilyn’s run to meet Tony Curtis at the end of Some Like It Hot, or of Shirley MacLaine racing back to Jack Lemmon in the final scenes of The Apartment. In her domestic scenes with Bert, which are by their nature quiet and fairly static, she conveys the attractions of a steady and stable home life for Maggie, but also her yearning for something more exciting. After her meeting with Charlie, her wistful and reflective manner reveal her inner state, her weighing up of the choices offered to her; the divergent lifestyles associated with the two men laying claim to her affections between which she must now choose. Windsor fully deserved her nomination for the best actress BAFTA. Although she’d appeared as a supporting actress in films for some years, going back to an uncredited appearance in the Belles of St Trinians in 1954, and had made her mark on TV in The Rag Trade, Sparrows Can’t Sing was her first big screen break. The next year would see her appearing in Carry On Spying, and, for better or worse, she would become a fixture of the team which came to define her screen character from then on. Her performance in Sparrows Can’t Sing gives a glimpse of her abilities before the broader, nudging and winking style of her Carry On persona took over with a giggled ‘ooh, saucy!’

Charlie amongst the ruins

Maggie’s choices partly reflect the changing character of the Stratford area, and the East End in general, at the time. She lives with Bert in a tidy, ordered flat near the top of a newly erected tower block. The play’s author and the co-writer with Joan Littlewood of the screenplay, Stephen Smith, portrays a comical busybody of a caretaker, a bureaucratic Napoleon leaning on his rake and surveying his small empire. He comes out with a steady stream of ‘you can’t do thats’, a speaking book of endless by-laws. Bicycles seem to particularly get his goat, and he sends Chunky in confused and wobbling circles as he tells him ‘don’t lean that hieroglyphics, mate – and don’t park it on the portico neither’. The caretaker is the mouthpiece of an architecture planned for social engineering, moulding behaviour and attempting to order every aspect of people’s lives. ‘We’re trying to civilise people like you’, he yells as Nellie and Chunky escape into the lifts, ‘don’t you understand that’. When they finally get up to see ‘Auntie’ Maggie to tell her that Charlie’s back, she initially hesitates to answer the door. She imagines all the unwelcome visits from officialdom which the knock might herald. It’s an environment in which such fearful reactions are fostered, and the idea of people just dropping by has become more remote. Whilst Nellie and Chunky (so-named by his friend Georgie because he thinks his head looks like a pineapple) wait outside, the old lady who lives opposite unloads her meagre gossip about Maggie and Bert. She lingers for an age fumbling about for her key, seeming reluctant to go into her flat. Before she moved her, she would have stood on her doorstep or leaned out of the window and nattered away without the need for an excuse. The plight of old people suddenly isolated in these newly-built tower blocks is sparely and movingly depicted in John Krish’s contemporaneous 1964 documentary portrait I Think They Called Him John, included in the recent bfi Shadows of Progress box set. When Charlie arrives back in town from his sea voyage he is perplexed and disorientated by these new edifices which have thrust up through the rubble of the old streets he knew. Yootha Joyce and her two girlfriends who bump into Charlie as he wonders around in confusion mordantly observe that they stick the pensioners up on the top floor as a form of euthanasia. They also cheerily observe that the lifts are out of order half the time. With Maggie’s Sherman tank of a pram, negotiating the stairwells would be no laughing matter.

The new flats, with their hermetically sealed living spaces shutting their occupants off from the outside world, are contrasted with the street in which the Gooding family live, and to which Charlie eventually returns after his search for Maggie proves fruitless. This is bracketed by a church at one end and a railway bridge at the other, the spiritual and temporal worlds combined. People are constantly leaning from upper floor balconies to shout down at those below, and there is a plentiful supply of local urchinry running to and fro to give a kinetic feel to the area. Planks in the garden fence are either missing or movable, providing alternative apertures for more secretive gossip. If it all gets too much, as it often seems to for Roy Kinnear’s Fred, you can always retreat to the backyard bog, or ‘music room’ as he refers to it, with its handy newspaper hanging from an outside hook. Read ‘em and wipe. The street is full of the communal chaos and noisy bustle of extrovert life, as opposed to the quiet order and discrete separation of the new flats. In the end, Maggie’s decision as to whether to stay with Bert or start afresh with Charlie is as much a choice between these different locales, old and new, and the associated ways of life.

Charlie in the brave new world

The rambling nature of the film, with its regular excursions down tributaries and side roads winding away from the main course of the story, allows for a thorough exploration of local surroundings. Maggie’s perambulations with her pram take her along Angel Lane and its surrounding streets. This was the area in which the Theatre Workshop was based (the Theatre Royal being situated on Angel Lane), as was the Café L’Ange, which gave sustenance to its starving and penniless players over many a year. She also wanders across the Regent’s Canal, and gets stuck on a swing bridge which opens whilst she’s on it. Further canal scenes, possibly set along the Limehouse Cut, form the backdrop of Avis Bunnage’s Bridgie’s search for Nellie. The new buildings with which Charlie is confronted upon his return were part of the Stifford Estate. He is hemmed in by Ewhurst House on one side and Wickham House on the other. Both have already been consigned to the rubble of history, having been demolished in 1999. The street in which the Goodings live was Cowley Gardens, with the gothic arched windows of St Mary and St Michael’s Church rising prominently at its end. The park in which Maggie and Charlie meet and reminisce over the good times they used to have is, I think, Victoria Park, although the walls and road when they leave look more like the outside of Greenwich Park. The website Reel Streets has gathered much valuable information about these locations, and more, and has some interesting accompanying then and now photos.

Larks in the park

Other locations draw on Joan Littlewood and Gerry Raffles’ close connections with the surrounding community and offer the chance for local people, some of whom had been extremely generous in the help they had extended to the Theatre Workshop in the depths of their penury, to have their moment of onscreen glory. Littlewood mentions May from the Angel Café in her autobiography, although she doesn’t seem to have made it to the final cut. Rosie from Goide’s Bakery has, however, and puts in a natural and very characterful performance which amounts, you suspect, to just being herself. For those drawn to the dubious allure of the Kray Twins, the use of their Kentucky Club as a location will be of interest. Charlie retreats into its rather dingy interior during the daytime whilst he waits for his rendezvous with Maggie. And there are Ron and Reg, staring at him with sullen and somnolent inexpressiveness, not exactly providing the sunniest of greetings to their pleasure den. Their vanity and desire for self-publicity wouldn’t allow them to let such an opportunity for a big screen appearance go wanting. According to Littlewood, they made their presence felt from the outset, presumably attaching themselves to the production through the connection with Barbara Windsor and Ronnie Knight (although they didn’t seem in the slightest bit interested in Littlewood’s theatrical productions in which Windsor played a part). They turned up at the launch party which she held to mark the start of filming, along with a minder who rejoiced in the Cockney Cagney monicker of Limehouse Willie. He is apparently the fellow seen polishing an antique tray in Angel Lane as Maggie pushes her pram along, Charlie skipping along beside and impeding her progress all the way.

Dodgy geezer

Gerry Raffles strongly disapproved of their presence, which, as a principled socialist, was a natural standpoint, the Krays representing the blunt and brutal end of individualistic capitalism. Littlewood evidently took the route of appeasement, a more pragmatic and perhaps even realistic approach. The Kentucky Club scene is largely redundant in the film, its only real interest now being as a cultural curio of a particular time and place. Perhaps it can be seen as a minor concession to the twins. The presence of their underworld environment also points to another direction the film might have taken, with Charlie as a crafty chancer involved on the edges of the criminal world. This would have anticipated the recent regurgitated slew of almost entirely woeful gangster geezer pictures, films in which sadistic thuggery is played for laughs. Thankfully, a few drinks and some moody looks rehearsed endlessly in the mirror and it’s all over. When the film received its premiere at the ABC Cinema in Mile End Road, the Krays strung up a banner loudly announcing ‘the Kentucky Club welcomes Princess Margaret to the East End’. As soon as he saw it, Gerry Raffles turned his car around and drove himself and Joan Littlewood straight back to the theatre to carry on with their preparations for their new production there. It’s an emblematic moment, in a way. The select circle which comprised swinging London brought certain sections of the criminal, aristocratic, political and pop cultural worlds together, linked by bonds of mutual fascination and symbiotic narcissism. But Littlewood and Raffles, filled with righteous radicalism and egalitarian notions turned their back on such a tempting milieu and rejected (by and large) the connections which it offered. As a result, their work carried a certain aura of integrity, even if they were stony broke most of the time.

Tativille

Much more exciting than her brief encounters with opportunist bullies was Littllewood’s chance encounter with the great Jacques Tati. He had been brought along by someone in the film world to an earlier screening at the ABC put on for the benefit of the censors. She heard him comment ‘I like the way she mixes naturals with her actors…my own technique exactly’. Littlewood got on well with him, and he invited her to use his studios at Charenton, although she doesn't mention whether she took him up on his offer. This would have been around the time when he was gearing up to make Playtime, his extravagant comedy satirising the dehumanising effects of modern architecture and planning, and celebrating the way in which the inherent anarchy of human nature tends to derail such efforts at control. Tati’s film was meticulously planned, and involved the construction of the mini-metropolis of ‘Tativille’ on the outskirts of Paris. As such, it is the polar opposite in style and directorial approcach (and in its resolute Frenchness) to the fast and loose approach of Littlewood, but it shares some of the spirit of Sparrows Can’t Sing.

continued in part two