A Stratford Stalin: the nasty, aggressive and stupid world of Joan Littlewood

If Stalin had been a theatre director he’d have resembled Joan Littlewood. What an outstandingly unpleasant woman she was — yet I must admit it was fun making notes on her spitefulness. Few escaped her scorn and derision: Sybil Thorndike (‘a shocking actress’), Rachel Kempson (‘she had a face like a scraped bone’), Laurence Olivier (‘not trying’), T.S. Eliot (‘thin gruel’), Daniel Massey (‘a dud’) and John Gielgud (‘voice wanking’). Rather wonderful that last one, let’s be honest.

Joan dismissed every one of the Redgraves (‘How do these untalented people make it?’) and when she saw Flora Robson, Cedric Hardwicke and Ralph Richardson, she was ‘appalled’. Shakespeare didn’t quite make the grade, because ‘too politically middle-of-the-road’, and neither did the second world war impress her, as it was ‘large, boring’.

Theatrical historians always make great claims for Littlewood. ‘One of the two undoubted geniuses of the postwar theatre, the other being Peter Brook,’ said Peter Hall. While I appreciate that her contempt for polite West End drama and Old Vic fustian was merited in the 1950s — ‘daffodils up arses’, she called it — the credo of her Theatre Workshop (that drama ‘was not just about doing plays. It was a design for living’) was pretty horrible.

As always with a revolutionary, matters began well — even brilliantly — then got thuggish. Joan was born in Stockwell in 1914. Her mother manufactured brushes and her father was unknown, though ‘thought to be rather posh’. She was a ghastly child who ‘seemed to have a deep well of anger inside her’, according to Peter Rankin, who does his commendable best to remain sympathetic.

This anger never abated. Joan’s mother wanted to hand her over to an orphanage, and by the age of 12 Joan had already tried to leave home three times.