Littlewood, Joan (Maud) 1914-2002

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LITTLEWOOD, Joan (Maud) 1914-2002

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: October 6, 1914, in London, England; died September 20, 2002, in London, England. Stage director, producer, and author. Littlewood was renowned, especially in her native England, for heading the Theater Workshop in London, where she put on plays by and about working-class people and was considered by some to be the "mother of modern theater." She developed a love for the theater as a child, and as a teenager won a scholarship to attend the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. However, coming from a working-class family, she was put off by the more elitist attitudes of the students and teachers there, so she dropped out. Rejecting the trappings of popular theater that appealed to middle- and upperclass playgoers, Littlewood wanted to strip play production down to the essential bones. She began her mission in the 1930s by founding the Theater of Action in Manchester, which was followed by her creation of the traveling company Theater Union, which often did improvisational work. After World War II she founded the Theater Workshop, which started as a touring company and in 1953 settled down at the dilapidated Royal Theater in London. She and her company of actors worked on a shoestring budget, sleeping in hammocks and running and maintaining the theater. Under these tough conditions, however, Littlewood became famous for producing thought-provoking plays that were largely about the struggles of working-class people. She also was responsible for discovering and adapting the works of talented playwrights such as Irish writer Brendan Behan, whose plays The Quare Fella and The Hostage she directed; Shelagh Delaney, whose first play, A Taste of Honey, Littlewood directed when the playwright was only eighteen years old; and ex-convict Frank Norman's Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be; she is, furthermore, often credited with discovering the actor Richard Harris. The most successful play produced by the Theater Workshop was perhaps the improvisational Oh What a Lovely War, an anti-war farce about World War I that won a Tony Award in 1965. Little-wood disbanded the Theater Workshop in 1964 to work at a cultural center in Tunisia and then at Image India in Calcutta during the late 1960s. Returning to England in the early 1970s, she reformed her acting company; but after her long relationship with theater manager Gerry Raffles ended with his death in 1975, she moved to Vienne, France, and retired from the theater scene. Littlewood's influence on modern theater, especially during the 1950s and 1960s, is undeniable, and she wrote about her experiences in her 1994 autobiography, Joan's Book: Joan Littlewood's Peculiar History as She Tells It. She was also the author of Baron Philippe: The Very Candid Autobiography of Baron Philippe de Rothschild (1985), about the man with whom she became friends in France after Raffles' death.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

BOOKS

Frick, John W., and Stephen M. Vallillo, Theatrical Directors: A Biographical Dictionary, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1994.

International Dictionary of Theatre, Volume 3: Actors, Directors, and Designers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Oxford Companion to English Literature, sixth edition, Oxford University Press (Oxford, England), 2000.

Partnow, Elaine T., and Lesley Anne Hyatt, The Female Dramatist: Profiles of Women Playwrights from the Middle Ages to Contemporary Times, Fact on File (New York, NY), 1998.