Search Results

“... tense, it is not immune to the arcadian virus: ‘the National Theatre at the Old Vic’ and ‘Joan Littlewood at Stratford East’ are robust strains, and in the case of Joan Littlewood I believe that there was a ‘genius’, an innocent virtue, that can never be replicated. The work that is done at the ...”

“... How lucky he was in his ghost: not some wan emanation from a publisher’s stable, but punchy Joan Littlewood, formerly the director of the Theatre Royal, Stratford East and the co-author of Sparrers can’t sing and O What a lovely war. She writes with tremendous verve and seems to get the Baron’s tone exactly right with debonair period idioms ...”

“... the only major work his name is attached to is the aviary at the London Zoo, yet the ideas he and Joan Littlewood developed around the Fun Palace project prefigured and influenced the Piano and Rogers design for the Pompidou Centre. He also suggested the equivalent of the London Eye in a study of what might be done with the South Bank long before the ...”

“... whom the Sunday papers meant something quite different. Under the maverick genius of its director, Joan Littlewood, Stratford East was the secondary modern to Sloane Square’s grammar school. The Royal Court put writers at the centre; Littlewood put directors and actors at the forefront (textual integrity not being a ...”

“... they were to be masculine, rebellious and shocking. When, in April 1958, Delaney sent her play to Joan Littlewood, the director of the avant-garde Theatre Workshop in East London, she adopted a naive, Northern persona that was more than a little misleading. ‘A fortnight ago I didn’t know the theatre existed,’ she gushed to ...”

“... to be a transparent allegory of both social and theatrical decay. Some of the recent obituaries of Joan Littlewood have suggested that she should have had the credit for that renaissance. These matters may be, indeed usually are, overdetermined, but simpler explanations are handier, and in recent years Littlewood seems ...”

“... whether most of the audience recognised the allusion, but it gave me my exit line. How I wish that Joan Littlewood would produce Oh, what a lovely war again. But I fear it has vanished. I am glad to think that my copy of ‘Oh, what a lovely war’ is the best preserved of my gramophone records. I look forward to playing it in ten, perhaps even in twenty ...”

“... idea. Among the short stories, I struck old memories of Brendan Behan. Before he was discovered by Joan Littlewood, he used to wander into my office and say he would write me a short story if he could have 25 guineas. I would write him a cheque on my wages, perfectly certain he would come up with the goods, and he would nip off to a pub at the back of our ...”

“... you might have found Nina Hamnett next to Louis MacNeice, the maharajah of Cooch Behar next to Joan Littlewood, Christine Keeler taking advice from Lord Goodman or conversing with Leonard Blackett (the Military Cross-winning hero of the Somme – ‘she was a brave little soldier’). E.M. Forster talked to Donald Maclean, who is believed to have ...”

“... was ‘in the image business’. Like the Fun Palace project (1961-67) designed by Price for Joan Littlewood and her Theatre Workshop, Plug-in City offered ‘an image-starved world a new vision of the city of the future, a city of components . . . plugged into networks and grids’. Perhaps Banham looked to Brutalist architecture to give a needed ...”

“... was not.’ D.G. Bridson, Laurence Gilliam, Jack Dillon, Douglas Cleverdon, Olive Shapley and Joan Littlewood produced programmes which ranged from adaptations of The Waste Land to features on homelessness and unemployment, from the uncompromisingly highbrow to the popular. Their ‘features’ broke away from the strait jacket of the formal talk or ...”

“... from the National Gallery in Death at the Dolphin, as well as the Great Train Robbery and a Joan Littlewood name check. When in Rome (1970) has a reference to the musical Hair. And in Tied Up in Tinsel (1972), we hear about Greek servants who want to come to England to get away from the Colonels. There is also an internal fantasy of ...”

“... at every table children reading on their own. This library is one of those institutions that Mark Littlewood, the head of the right-wing think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs, said would make ‘a useful retail outlet’, a facility and a building for which there was no longer a social purpose. Most of the children reading here are black or Asian, with ...”

“... of his argument that the new theatre was commercially unpopular, he cites the supposed failure of Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Royal at Stratford East to gain a working-class audience, ignoring the considerable popular success of Littlewood shows like Make Me an Offer, Fings Ain’t Wot They Used t’ Be and Oh! What a ...”