Theatre Workshop

Theatre Workshop, company founded in Kendal in 1945 by a group of actors who were dissatisfied with the commercial theatre ‘on artistic, social, and political grounds’. Joan Littlewood, who had worked with some of the members of the group earlier in the North of England, became Artistic Director and Gerald Raffles General Manager. After seven years spent touring in England and Europe, the company took over the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, London (Chaucer's Stratford-atte-Bowe), repairing and redecorating the building themselves before opening in 1953 with Twelfth Night. The company quickly made a name for itself, and was invited to represent Great Britain at the Paris Théâtre des Nations in 1955 with Lillo's version of Arden of Feversham and Jonson's Volpone and in 1956 with an adaptation of Hašek's The Good Soldier Schweik. It also visited Zürich, Belgrade, and Moscow, where it appeared at the Moscow Art Theatre, filling it to capacity. Left-wing and indeed almost Communist in its ideology, it sought always to revivify the English theatre by a fresh approach to established plays—two of its most interesting and controversial productions being Lope de Vega Carpio's Fuenteovejuna as The Sheep Well and Shakespeare's Richard II (both 1955)—or by producing working-class plays, some of which were subsequently transferred to West End theatres, among them Brendan Behan's The Quare Fellow (1956) and The Hostage (1958), Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey (also 1958), Frank Norman and Lionel Bart's musical Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be (1959), and Stephen Lewis's Sparrers Can't Sing (1960). When Joan Littlewood left to work elsewhere the company carried on under Gerald Raffles, until in 1963 she returned to produce Oh, What a Lovely War!, a ‘musical entertainment’ satirizing the First World War. This also transferred to the West End, after which the company dispersed. It was back in residence, however, in 1967, when once more under Joan Littlewood's direction it presented a succession of plays including Barbara Garson's MacBird! (a reworking of Shakespeare's Macbeth first seen in New York) and Intrigues and Amours (based on Vanbrugh's The Provoked Wife). After directing Peter Rankin's So You Want to be in Pictures? (1973) Joan Littlewood went abroad and the group finally dispersed.