Joan Littlewood
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Your support makes all the difference.If it were not for Joan Littlewood's imaginative stagecraft, writes Frank Gray [further to the obituary by Alan Strachan, 23 September], Brendan Behan's name might never have joined the pantheon of those writers and playwrights, led by John Osborne and Samuel Beckett, who shook up the British literary establishment in the UK in the 1950s.
His fellow Irishman Alan Simpson, who first staged Behan's The Quare Fellow at the tiny Pike Theatre in Dublin 1954, had much praise for the collaboration between director and author required to bring life to a particular work. In an interview shortly before he died in 1979, Simpson explained to me his view of the theatre as a creative process, unlike painting or the novel, one that was "shared by a number of people, the playwright who provides the written words, the director, the actors and the audience".
Behan, he said, really didn't write stage directions and only put minimal suggestions as to what should happen physically. The producer of The Quare Fellow, Frank Dermody, didn't realise the potential of the physical side of the staging:
The breakthrough came when this was done by Joan Littlewood, who was dedicated to a new sort of theatre . . . She could be said to have been influenced by Brecht, but it was a freer approach to the staging than had been normal, certainly in England, at that time.
She was quite uninhibited about her approach to the text. Kenneth Tynan referred to Littlewood's staging at her Stratford East theatre in London in 1958 of Behan's second major play, The Hostage, as a
prophetic and joyously exciting evening . . . Miss Littlewood's production is a boisterous premonition of something we all want – a biting popular drama that does not depend on hit songs, star names, spa sophistication or the more melodramatic aspects of homosexuality . . . Sean Kenny's setting is, as often at this [Stratford East] theatre, by far the best in London.
Littlewood and Gerry Raffles, her companion and collaborator, had a chaotic relationship with Behan, straining to make sure the Irishman was dried out enough to finish his plays and to co-operate on aspects of the production. Thanks to their innovative staging and growing renown with The Hostage at Stratford East, the play – preceded by the rumbustious Behan – was staged in New York in 1961 to mark the start of an extensive series of engagements in the United States and Canada. But it didn't take long for trouble to break out with Behan and Littlewood and Raffles were soon on a "damage-control" flight to curb the author's excesses.
Littlewood's final effort to turn Richard's Cork Leg, Behan's last play, into something suitable for the stage proved insurmountable. Simpson recalled that she contacted him after Behan's death in early 1964 to try and make a stage of production of it, which he was eventually able to do by 1972, thanks largely to what he had learned from Littlewood's own pioneering style begun decades before.
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