Obituary: Joan Littlewood - Radical Theatre Director

by Niall Mulholland (25/09/02)

Joan Littlewood, the radical theatre innovator who transformed British drama in the 1950s and 1960s, died on 20 September, aged 87. The lifelong socialist created hundreds of original productions of classics, as well as finding new writing and acting talent.

Her name is intimately associated with the Theatre Royal in Stratford, in working class East London. In this unfashionable part of London, well away from the bright lights and big money of the West End, Littlewood challenged the conservative and staid concept of theatre then prevalent. Under her direction, working class accents were heard for the first time on stage in Britain, not as caricature, but as representative of genuine working class life. For Littlewood, theatre was all about bringing drama to working class people. With her first husband, Ewan McColl, the famous folk singer, she showed a commitment to socialism and the collective and democratic character that could exist in theatre. It was policy for her Theatre Workshop to divide up the takings from a performance amongst all the actors and staff, including the cleaners.

The impact of her best work, including the productions of Brendan Behan's 'The Hostage', Shelagh Delaney's 'A Taste of Honey', and Frank Norman's 'Fings Ain't Wot They Used To Be', and the 1963 savage satire on the imperialist First World War, 'Oh What a Lovely War', were enormous and far reaching. So much so, that even the Tory Daily Telegraph remarked that Littlewood had "achieved a working class revolution on stage" (22/09/02).

The renowned theatre critic Kenneth Tynan once wrote of her: "It now seems quite likely that when the annals of British Theatre in the middle years of the 20th Century are written, Joan's name will lead all the rest."

In 'Working class fiction - From Chartism to Trainspotting' (1997), Ian Haywood, comments, "Joan Littlewood...produced pioneering proletarian drama."

From Rada to Brecht

Littlewood was born in Stockwell, London in 1914, the 'illegitimate' daughter of a servant girl. Her maternal grandparents brought her up. Joan came across many books left behind by lodgers in their house, which sparked a keen interest in literature and drama.

She won a scholarship to the prestigious Rada acting school but gained little from the class dominated institution. She was offered some radio work in Manchester after leaving Rada and in the city met the talented playwright and singer/song writer Jimmie Miller (who was to change his name later to Ewan McColl). Miller was an active communist party member who brought the works and 'agit-prop' ideas of the German playwright Bertolt Brecht to working class cities and coal mining villages in northern England.

Littlewood left a repertory company to commit herself to Miller's Theatre of Action, a touring company which produced Miller's plays (usually with songs), and often using experimental forms. The company renamed itself the Theatre Union and broadened its work, premiering English showings of works such as, Clifford Odets's 'Waiting for Lefty' (which argued that the working class needs to organise itself and not wait for a Messiah), and Jaroslav Hasek's 'Good Soldier Schweyk' (a satirical depiction of life in the army).

For five years, the company struggled to maintain funds to operate. After the Second World War, its name changed again into the Theatre Workshop.

Miller/McColl left to devote himself to folk music and Littlewood found a lifelong partner with Gerry Raffles, a Manchester University graduate who came to work at the company. Despite growing critical acclaim, the leftwing attitude of the Theatre Workshop cost it vital financial support. The Arts Council, which was meant to an impartial government funding body, showed, "distrust and even hostility" towards Littlewoods and refused grants to Theatre Workshop.

Finally the company found a permanent home in 1953 when they moved into the old dilapidated Theatre Royal buildings at Stratford in London. This was in one of the poorest boroughs of the capital.

Littlewood and other company staff slept and lived in the theatre while they worked to restore the ramshackle backstage area and the horseshoe shaped auditorium to the beauty of their heyday.

The new location seemed to give Littlewood a spur and over the next few years she produced some of her best work, including versions of Shakespeare's 'Twelfth Night' and Sean O'Casey's 'Juno and the Paycock'. She also spotted great working class acting talent, including Harry Corbett, who later became famous for the British television comedy, 'Steptoe and Son', and Richard Harris, the Irish actor who went on to become a renowned film actor, starring in 'This Sporting Life'.

Littlewood was very exacting in her choice of actors. She later rejected future big movie stars Sean Connery and Michael Caine, claiming, "They couldn't act for toffee".
Rewards for the Theatre Workshop came in the form of the 1955 Paris International Festival, where the company triumphed. But it was only in 1956 that they received a first funding award from the Arts Council.

Brendan Behan

In 1956, Littlewood was sent from Dublin the text of 'The Quare Fellow' by Brendan Behan, an ex-IRA man and leftwing playwright. She helped turn it into a stunning prison yard drama. In 1958, she directed another Behan classic, 'The Hostage', a darkly comic play about the IRA members who kidnap a British soldier. Littlewood recalled years later that The Hostage attracted those not normally at ease in theatres. Staging the play one night, she remembered "having 300 years' worth of prison sentences in the auditorium".

The prodigious pen of Brendan Behan ended when he died in his forties after years of alcohol abuse. Littlewood lamented his passing as a great loss to the world of theatre and literature. However, by helping to lick into shape The Hostage and The Quare Fellow, Littlewood played a crucial role in providing the Irish playwright worldwide success and lasting influence.

The Behan plays were closely followed by the successful staging of Shelagh Delaney's 'A Taste of Honey' (1958), whose main character included a young pregnant working class woman. Delaney, a 19 year old from the back streets of Salford, decided to write a play after seeing a production at the Opera House where she worked. Littlewood commented: "It [the Delaney play] didn't have any shape, and no real ending, yet there was this thing that I loved, this touch of truth that you didn't really hear in the theatre - ordinary working class stuff, nothing pretentious".

The years of success for the Theatre Workshop were always undermined by the meanness of the government arts patrons. Often actors and playwrights left the company for the West End. Littlewood said of the predicament her company found itself in, "If we were to survive, then we should have to sell ourselves in a shoddy market - the West End".

Nevertheless the Theatre Workshop staggered on to find the huge success with 'Oh, What a Lovely War!' in 1963. This began life as a BBC radio programme of 1914-1918 soldiers' songs. Littlewood was inspired to use the songs as bridges to improvised sketches. The musical's finale was based on the writer Henri Barbusse's account of French soldiers who mutinied against their generals.

Littlewood realised the play had great resonance when working class people from Stratford packed in to see rehearsals. "It really was theatre of the people", she enthused, "It was done with great simplicity and belief, and I knew it was something special".

The play's power grew over the next two decades as the movement against war US imperialism's war in Vietnam developed in Britain and internationally. As President Bush bangs the war drums today against the Iraqi people the Littlewood classic takes on new topicality.

The Theatre Workshop continued to attempt new and innovative work in the 1960s and 1970s, and although some were below power, others like 'The Marie Lloyd Story' (1967) and 'The Projector' (1970) were amongst the best plays in production in their day.
Tragedy hit Littlewood in 1975 when her partner and collaborator Gerry Raffles died. She was devastated by the loss and never worked at Stratford again. Soon she went to live in France, remaining there until her death.

"We didn't sell out"

In a rare press interview given earlier this year, Littlewood said she hardly ever went to the theatre anymore and when she did she usually walked half way through the performance bored. This reaction to the current parlous state of theatre today was not surprising coming from someone who brought such passion and honesty to dramatic works. But this did not mean that Littlewood saw no future for radical work. "There could be someone doing that [writing radical drama] right now, as we speak!"

Neither had Littlewood lost her youthful left wing commitment: "I've always been a communist. I know things go wrong, of course they do. But we didn't go wrong. We didn't sell out."

When asked what she thought about the Stratford home of the Theatre Workshop, now undergoing a £7 million makeover, Joan Littlewood remarked caustically, "It's funny, one of my old actors says it makes him laugh that they've spent millions transforming the Theatre Royal, and we transformed it with a few pots of paint and our own works."

What would she make now of the two plays currently showing at Stratford - a pantomime, and a production called 'Sammy', which claims to be based on the life of the US black entertainer Sammy Davis Junior? Will the latter production give the audience some of the Littlewood spirit, and as well as have good acting and stage excitement, will it show the racism and prejudice Davies had to face in the US army in the Second World War, and also from 'show business' colleagues, like Frank Sinatra?

Whatever the future of the Theatre Royal, the lasting brilliance of plays like The Hostage and Oh, What a Lovely War, ensure a permanent place for Littlewood as one of the twentieth centuries great directors and innovative dramatists.

Obituary: Stephen Jay Gould - Outstanding Contributor to Evolutionary Theory

by Pete Mason, a member of the CWI in England (23/05/02)

STEPHEN JAY Gould, who recently died of cancer, was an outstanding contributor to evolutionary theory. But more than this, he had the rare ability to popularise a wide range of scientific thought.

Gould's subjects were diverse: evolutionary theory, geology, biological determinism and the history of science. He campaigned against creationism and racism in scientific research. Describing himself as a 'leftist', he "could be seen at demonstrations and on picket lines, especially during the 1960s and 70s". (Stephen Rose, Guardian, 22 May) In the same newspaper, Steve Jones compared him to Darwin, "a working scientist", passing many uncomfortable summers "scraping away at lumps of rock". Gould's many books, and particularly his collections of essays, hit the best-sellers lists, earning him book-jacket acclamations, such as 'The greatest living scientist - The Sunday Times'. The US Congress named him one of America's 'living legends'.

Yet to many scientists Gould was a misguided heretic. Occasionally demonised as a Marxist by his opponents, Gould's theory of 'Punctuated Equilibrium' (written with Niles Eldredge) moved from a 'Marxist' curiosity to a mainstream contender for a more accurate understanding of the development of species in the thirty years since its publication in 1972.
Gould appears to have consciously attempted to apply a broadly-Marxist method of analysis to evolution (and the many other subjects he specialised in). And that's enough to put most establishment scholars into a state of fear and loathing.

Gould's essays, particularly his earlier ones, should be recommended reading, lessons not just in evolution in nature, but in dialectical thought. Gould wrote: "Dialectical thinking should be taken more seriously by Western scholars, not discarded because some nations of the second world [the so-called Communist East] have constructed a cardboard version as an official doctrine". (An Urchin in the Storm, 1988, p153) From a left-wing background (his father was a political activist), Gould concludes this essay with Karl Marx's famous remark: 'Philosophers thus far have only interpreted the world in various ways: the point, however, is to change it'.

In An Urchin in the Storm, a collection of book reviews published in the New York Review of Books, Gould writes: "Hegelians and Marxists have long advocated the 'transformation of quantity into quality' as a basic statement about the nature of change. Graded inputs need not simply yield graded outputs. Instead, systems often resist change and absorb stresses to a breaking point, beyond which an additional small input may trigger a profound change of state… Our metaphor about straws and camels' backs reflects an implicit understanding that not all change is continuous". (p209)

Gould applied this particular aspect of dialectical thinking to the evolution of species in the theory of Punctuated Equilibrium. He points out that the great evolutionist Ernst Mayr popularised the generally held 'allopatric theory' of speciation, in which small populations of a species become isolated and undergo very rapid evolution into a new species. Gould points out that all he has done is recognise that "If evolution almost always occurs by rapid speciation in small, peripheral isolates - rather than by slow change in large central populations - then… during [a large central population's] recorded history in the fossil record, we should expect no major change". (Ever Since Darwin, 1978)

Progress & complexity

Gould argued against those who suggest that evolutionary development is driven by a purpose - that there is a guiding hand, as it were, in evolutionary development - an inevitable progress up a 'ladder' from lower to higher life forms and, finally, to homo sapiens. Natural selection itself does not imply a progression from lower to higher life forms, argues Gould: "Life is a ramifying bush with millions of branches, not a ladder. Darwinism is a theory of local adaptation to changing environments, not a tale of inevitable progress. 'After long reflection', Darwin wrote, 'I cannot avoid the conviction that no innate tendency to progressive development exists'." (An Urchin in the Storm, p211)

One of Gould's recurrent themes was life's 'contingency'. He does not deny that natural selection leads to a greater complexity of life forms. But the developing complexity of life, Gould maintains, is only a by-product 'incidental' to evolution and not necessary or inevitable. And complex creatures represent only a tiny proportion of the whole.

Moreover, evolution on Earth has been punctuated by five mass extinction events. What role do these events play in shaping evolutionary development? In Wonderful Life, Gould studies fossils in the Burgess Shale in the western Canadian Rockies from the Cambrian geological period, half a billion years ago. These are the remains of the first explosive development of multi-cellular life. This 'Cambrian explosion' is an example of the rapid development of life forms. But it was followed by the mass extinction of all but a few of the many weird and wonderful designs.

Gould explains that just a few body forms survived the aftermath of the Cambrian explosion. Subsequent evolution of these forms remained confined to the basic architectural design of the original. Gould argues that if backboned creatures (chordates) had not survived this period, vertebrates, such as fish and mammals, would never have subsequently evolved.
In Wonderful Life Gould shows how Conway Morris and Harry Wittington, who studied the Burgess Shale, eventually drew the conclusion that chance alone governed which of the creatures from the Cambrian explosion survived the subsequent extinction. Morris, in a major article in Science magazine, concludes that the "macro evolutionary patterns that set the seal on Phanerozoic life are contingent on random extinction". (October 1989) If you were to replay the tape, says Gould in Wonderful Life, and a mass extinction event expunges the Lungfish group of fish species that crawled onto land out of the sea, "our lands become the unchallenged domain of insects and flowers". (p318)

But the anthropologist Richard Leakey, like many evolutionary biologists, questions Gould's conclusions. Perhaps some creatures survived mass extinction events because they were the fittest, while others survived due to chance. "I believe that Gould has been correct to raise our consciousness to the role of contingency in life's flow, although I suspect he pushes the argument too far". (The Sixth Extinction, p86)

Does complexity not sometimes confer an advantage of survival even in mass extinction events? If, for instance, the ancestors of the mammals survived the extinction event that ended the rule of the dinosaurs because they made their nests in burrows and were able to hibernate through the devastation of the asteroid impact, would not this be an example of a more complex set of behaviours leading to survival? On the other hand, maybe the earliest known ancestor of the vertebrates, Pikaia gracilens, a two-inch ribbon-like chordate, survived because its backbone was a simpler solution to body design. Furthermore, what is the role of convergent evolution? Examples of convergent evolution can be found in the many mammals that returned to the sea and evolved outwardly to look similar to big fish.

But if this can and did happen, why should Gould appear to rule out some other sea creature evolving to breathe air and walk on land if the lungfish didn't make it? To be sure, close inspection would then reveal a radically different physiognomy, but convergent evolution and architectural constraints (another theme of Gould's) would limit the forms of those land creatures with larger body sizes.

One of Gould's most famous collections is The Panda's Thumb, in which he describes the evolution of the panda's 'thumb', a muscled and flexible digit which evolved from a bony part of its forepaw in order to grasp the bamboo it subsists on. Gould concludes with Charles Darwin's remark that nature displays a "prodigality of resources for gaining the very same end" with limited raw material (in this instance Darwin is referring to orchids). Surely this stands in contradiction to Gould's claims that if the lungfish group of species had not survived a mass extinction event, land would be the 'unchallenged domain of insects and flowers'. Would not nature have risen to that challenge?

From Darwin to Dawkins

Amongst many other themes in Gould's writings (which are not possible to touch on here) his mastery of the history of science is a joy to read. In depicting the development of Darwin's ideas, Gould does not hold back from demonstrating in fine detail the conflicts within his writings:

"Marx and Engels were quick to recognise what Darwin had accomplished and to exploit its radical content", remarks Gould (Ever Since Darwin, 1978) adding that "Darwin was, indeed, a gentle revolutionary". But Gould also distils out the more conservative elements in Darwin's work and presents them for criticism. Darwin was an "intellectual radical" but a "cultural conservative".

The result was, in turn, a rejection and then an adoption of the bourgeois ideology (expostulated by the philosopher Edmund Burke 50 years earlier) of a slow 'organic' progress, consciously adopted by the British ruling class after the French Revolution of 1789 executed a very rapid, revolutionary type of change in a thorough exposition of the dialectic.

Of course, speciation may still take hundreds, thousands, and indeed hundreds of thousands of years. But this is still "a geological microsecond" in the average five million year lifespan of a single species. By comparison, Gould's would-be nemesis, Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, writes that evolutionary problems can be solved "if only a slow, gradual step-by-step pathway can be found". (Climbing Mount Improbable, 1996)

Dawkins' Climbing Mount Improbable is clearly meant as a refutation of Gould and contains a strongly worded denunciation of him. But it misrepresents the full lifespan of a species, let alone the large-scale evolution over the history of the planet. Gould, for his part, takes issue with the reductionism of Dawkins: the fatal flaw of the selfish gene theory is that, "Selection simply cannot see genes and pick them directly. It must use bodies as an intermediary. A gene is a bit of DNA hidden within a cell. Selection views bodies. It favours some bodies because they are stronger, better insulated, earlier in their sexual maturation, fiercer in combat, or more beautiful to behold… There is no gene 'for' such unambiguous bits of morphology… bodies cannot be atomised into parts, each constructed by an individual gene". (The Panda's Thumb, p76)

Gould protests that Dawkins's theory arises from "some bad habits of Western scientific thought… the idea that wholes should be understood by decomposition into 'basic' units; that properties of microscopic units can generate and explain the behaviour of macroscopic results".

Gould's exploration of the complexity of evolutionary development (and of many other natural processes) is far richer than Dawkins. Indeed, the lack of a true dialectical, many-sided approach to development, whether in the natural world or in human society, hinders the development of our understanding of processes throughout nature and human society, as Gould demonstrates with great gusto.

By a strange coincidence, a few days before Gould died the BBC showed an episode of The Simpsons in which Gould was the special guest, doing a voice-over of a remarkable likeness of himself. Gould would have been very happy with this as his obituary. His references to popular culture (particularly baseball) are a defining mark of his essays, which appeared every month in Natural History magazine for nearly thirty years.

In a Simpsons episode, a giant supermarket chain plants a fake 'angel' fossil, as a marketing ploy. Capitalism is shown using creationism and exploiting people's religious beliefs to make a quick buck, just as the Republican religious right use campaigns around creationism to bolster support for their anti-working class policies. Gould continually campaigned against creationism, but never attempted to compromise on a complex truth when presenting his arguments to the public.

Stephen Jay Gould died on 20 May 2002.