NADINE HOLDSWORTH. Joan Littlewood's Theatre.
2011; Oxford University Press; Volume: 63; Issue: 259 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/res/hgr117
ISSN1471-6968
Autores Tópico(s)Irish and British Studies
ResumoIn the programme for the National Theatre's splendid 2011 adaptation of Arnold Wesker's The Kitchen, Dominic Sandbrook writes, gushingly, about 1950s audiences ‘who flocked to the Royal Court to see new plays by Arnold Wesker, John Osborne and Shelagh Delaney’. Delaney's one great play, A Taste of Honey, was, of course, directed by Joan Littlewood at The Theatre Royal in Stratford, East London. Sandbrook's elision of Littlewood, his casual ascription of all that was radical in 1950s drama to the Royal Court is typical of a general amnesia about the achievements of Littlewood and her collaborators at the perennially unglamorous, underfunded Theatre Royal. Nadine Holdsworth does much to address this amnesia in her splendidly researched, tastefully argued, well illustrated and meticulously referenced study of Littlewood's theatrical legacy. The monograph has a slightly odd structure in that there is no introduction and no conclusion. Instead, we have seven distinct, numbered chapters. The first chapter works as a sort of potted biography of Littlewood. Although clearly in awe of Littlewood's intellectual and physical commitment to her idiosyncratic, highly politicised drama, Holdsworth lacks the sort of myopia that would blind her to Littlewood's egocentricity, over-emotive aggression and exaggerated belief in the impact drama can have. It is typical of Holdsworth's wit that she makes the reader laugh about the paradoxes of a woman who read voraciously but distrusted anything academic and who was ‘a fierce supporter of collective working’ but who was also uncompromisingly ‘autocratic’ (p. 3). A cynic might argue that such a potted biography advances little on Peter Rankin's Oxford Dictionary of National Biography account. But as well as using the chapter to outline the book's remaining structure, Holdsworth effectively establishes her reaction to Littlewood the person, clearing the deck for subsequent chapters that deal with what matters: Littlewood's ideas.
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