Barker, Michael

Michael Barker, who assembled this collection of Joan Littlewood materials, worked with her in the 1960s and '70s as an assistant and was involved both in theatrical endeavors as well as the street theater ventures.

Joan Maud Littlewood was born into a working-class family in London's East End in October 1914. Early demonstrating an acute mind and an artistic bent she won scholarships to a Catholic school and then to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. Quickly realizing that RADA was neither philosophically nor socially congenial, she departed to study art. In 1934--still short of twenty years of age--she arrived in Manchester to work for the BBC. Littlewood soon met Jimmy Miller (Ewan MacColl) and collaborated with him in the Theatre of Action, a leftist drama group. In spite of her antipathy to traditional theater she was active in repertory theater in Birmingham during the late '30s and increasingly interested in the theories of Rudolf Laban on dance and movement as they applied to the stage.

The outbreak of World War Two ended the Theatre of Action, and, after a varied journalistic and theatrical career during the war, Littlewood, MacColl, Gerry Raffles (whom she married), and others founded the Theatre Workshop in 1945. The Theatre Workshop won considerable praise for its tours of Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Sweden during 1947 and '48, but at home led a vagabond existence, playing one-night stands all over Britain. In 1953 the group secured the use of the Theatre Royal at Stratford in east London, and at last began to make a name for themselves in their homeland.

Innovative stagings of traditional theater ( Volpone, Richard II ) and new non-traditional works (Behan's The Hostage and Delaney's A Taste of Honey ) solidified the Theatre Workshop's reputation--and Joan Littlewood's--in the years down to the early 1960s. The culmination of Littlewood's Stratford period was perhaps 1963's Oh What a Lovely War, after which her attentions turned increasingly toward the Fun Palace Trust and similar attempts to establish interactive non-theatrical public entertainment. The ultimately unsuccessful fun palace ventures, together with a growing interest in African and Asian theatrical and film projects absorbed Littlewood's energies in the years after the mid-1960s.