Working with Steven Berkoff in the London Theatre Group
Jude: I think that as actors, we were frustrated by, I mean you know, we were in our early twenties, so we were frustrated by the fact that the roles in The Trial, for instance, Kafka’s The Trial, which was the next play that we did with Berkoff, they were very reduced and were three dimensional characters, you know. And I said to Steven, ‘Why don’t you just get men to play the women’s roles?’ you know, because he would say, how you put on a stocking… everything was very described, he described it, so there was very little room for interpretation. And we know, we all know about the limitations of those sort of roles. So yes, we wanted to do something more than that, but we weren’t experienced as writers. I’d never even heard of Brecht. I mean people said to me, you write like Brecht, the way you combine, you juxtapose images, you use political and personal, and glamour and the contradictions of life and all that. I was just instinctively doing all of that.
Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven at the Arts Lab
Sheila: She'd got this script together and she sent it me and she said Victor Spinetti’s interested. So that’s what we did, at the Arts Lab. There used to be a pub opposite, we used to meet there and have a coffee, and then Jane and I would look at Victor and he’d say, ‘Yeah, I know, I’ve got to go and wake everybody up,’ and there were all these recumbent bodies everywhere, and Jim Haynes, who was one of the three Americans who changed London, at that time – Charles Marowitz and that guy, Ed Berman…
Susan: Ed Berman, of course
Sheila: Three of them changed London. But the fifteen that worked with us were wonderful. They were no Sunday hippies, they were the real thing. The police knew about it, but as Jim said that they knew we were kind of giving them… we were kind of doing social work there really, which they were. They gave them somewhere to stay, they went on the streets [during the day]. Jane directed us and that was okay. They loved Victor so much they hired a tape of the Yellow Submarine and when it got to his big scene, they played it through, then they stopped it, then they played it backwards, and then they played it through again and then they stopped it, then they played it backwards. I mean it was just hysterical. Because Victor and I, you know, were pros and we knew what we wanted from our experiments. It was fine because, you know, Victor was used to working with Joan [Littlewood] who would use all sorts of methods to evolve a production, so this was, for him, just another version of that.
Susan: Yes.
Sheila: And I followed along because he was very sweet. I remember Jane having a kind of, one of her moods, just before we were due to open, with real people coming, plus the hippies – they were going to come anyway – but real people were coming, outside people, and he said, ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake Jane, this isn’t Broadway. We can’t stop because we haven’t got the right hats for Act III. Come on, we’re just going to do it,’ and it became a succès fou. I mean someone came from the Garrick to see it, and sat on these orange boxes that were painted black. It’s now a very fashionable and a very exquisite, handmade furniture place. They’ve got lovely symbols hanging outside and I go past and I think, ‘Oh, the snows of yesteryear.’
From Inter-Action to Interplay
Tony: Ed Berman, he came over I think, in about 1968, and he was part of that wave of Jim Haynes, Charles Marowitz – the Americans who came over. He worked as a play leader in Notting Hill, and I think – this is a whole area of kind of research that I’m really interested in finding out about – I think he bought something of that Jewish, summer camp, the kibbutz culture with him. As it were, the campfire culture, the circle, the very, very important sort of formation for working with kids. And I know he was working with very heavy kids in Notting Hill. He hooked up with a Leeds-based teacher, called Carrie Gorney. She’d been doing some teaching at Jacob Cramer College, an art college in Leeds, and she had in turn – she’d done some work with Stephen Joseph, in Scarborough, again its that something about the circle, something about the formation of the in-the-round thing there, that I think she had in her DNA, and perhaps also I think she had in her DNA something of that Jewish culture of – I’m speculating now about this, but I’m interested in where all this comes from, particularly for Ed, and the games. So Carrie worked alongside Ed in Notting Hill for at least a summer and became very, very attached to his way of working, and when she went to
Kate Crutchley
First Women’s Festival at Action Space (now Drill Hall)
Kate: Nancy [Diuguid] goes to the Drill Hall and asks the collective, can we do Voices by Susan Griffin, which I directed. Then she said she’d like to do a festival around it. And what happened was that we got a bit of funding for that and there’s a program somewhere where for three weeks we did Voices the play, everyday there was a concert before it where you got people like Jam Today and Frankie Armstrong, Victoria Wood and loads of other people. Julie Parker did workshops. Barbara Britton, who’s an artist and Mary Moore arranged crafts and art exhibitions, Ria Naval did photography. I directed the play and did the overall administration and booked the theatre groups. There was also a crèche that went with the workshops and it was like every space in the Drill Hall was used for every minute of the day.
Susan: Brilliant.
Kate: People came with backpacks from all over the world and had to dump them in the space somewhere – they’d read about it – and when you see the calendar, it’s just pages and pages of listings.
Anne Engel
Starting Mrs Worthington’s Daughters
Anne: We decided we would throw the rule book out. And the rule book, which was the rule book about collectives – which by that time had evolved into a practice, there was a practice about what you did and what you didn’t do – chucking that out. We would be a production company and we would hire in, and we would retain the power, and we would hire in actors, crew, directors, designers and all that, as and when we needed them. The company would have a mission to rediscover work, forgotten work by women, and we had a wonderful time. We all got tickets to the Reading Room at the British Museum and we went and pored over the Lord Chancellor’s collection, you know, sometimes opening these parcels that hadn’t been touched. I think The Oracle, Stacey [Charlesworth] and I found, and that’s what we started off with.
Susan: So you were looking through the catalogues and finding…
Anne: Yeah, yeah, yeah, literally when we found names of women playwrights, we’d have a look. We’d go through piles of stuff. I mean, that’s when my stuff of reading plays for the Royal Court stood me in good stead because I’d had a lot of background in that. And we decided it was based on friendship, that we wanted to work with people we wanted to work with, and that was the most important thing, apart from, you know, the mission of the company
The Legacy
Anne: We had such freedom because we were being paid and we were supported – you know, we had official support, which is now so hard to get – in The Women’s Theatre Group as a regularly funded organization, which was for six, seven years? We had the freedom to take risks and experiment. In Mrs Worthington’s Daughters we used the experiences of all of those experiments with form to look at how, look at employment practices and that was very exciting work, and that informed my later career choices a lot, you know, actually looking at ways to work, which I think is one of the key areas that I’ve taken with me in my career, you know, ways of working and ways of ensuring that people have productive and happy working lives that fit around the rest of their lives.
On tour with Gay Sweatshop
Noel: But there were always incidents with Gay Sweatshop. I mean, when we were doing The Dear Love of Comrades at the Birmingham Rep and we were staying in Birmingham and we were making our way to a gay night club. We’d obviously had been followed from the theatre. We were walking along and this van burst open and all these guys came with iron bars and attacked us. A lot of people got hospitalized. Things like that were always happening on Gay Sweatshop tours. That was a very extreme – you know the attack by the gang in Birmingham, but you know right from the start Gay Sweatshop would turn up and the person running the B&B had discovered who the company was saying you can’t come in here. That was always happening, that was quite unique amongst the theatre companies at the time. I think we just sort of took it as part of the deal really . When we did that show Iceberg, when the women and the men were joined together. - we did the political cabaret in ‘78? We took it to Northern Ireland and Ian Paisley’s party organized a torch-lit parade on the venue, at night holding flaming torches and singing hymns and we had to be protected by bouncers. And then all the students sat down outside and there was a riot. We’d perform the play with all the bouncers around. I think we were more afraid of the bouncers than Ian Paisley’s lot. But that’s where the phrase, do you remember SOS, Save Ulster from Sodomy? Well that was because of Gay Sweatshop. We’d come to sodomize Northern Ireland. Yeah, things like that were happening all of the time.
Susan: How did the police take that? Did they take it seriously?
Noel: They were fine. Absolutely, Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, you know, the fact that around that period, you know, I am being very subjective and looking at certain plays of mine, As Time Goes By, Dear Love of Comrades, Poppies, Gay Sweatshop was a new writing company that toured all sorts of venues, including repertory theatres and including big European tours, and was seen as a leading new writing company, and I think that said a lot really of where the company was at and where the public perception of homosexuality was at.
The Arts Lab Drury Lane
Jim: The main building was a gallery, a cinema in the basement with no seats, it was just foam rubber and carpeting. And then the first floor was a restaurant, which we also used for site productions. And then in the back were the dressing rooms and I also lived in the back. In various corners of the building people lived. In the cinema, people lived in the cinema and the projection booths, what have you. It went, from Drury Lane it went all the way, I don’t know if you know the building, where it’s, in the back of Drury Lane, where it’s, adult education classes are back there. City Lit – it went all the way back to City Lit. A depth of 40, 50 metres long or 60, maybe a 100 metres, it’s a long building. And then just suddenly, without warning, 'without fanfare it opened', and of course word of mouth went whoosh, like that. Then all of London and all of western Europe started coming. I wrote duplicated letters, it was duplicating machines then, to a Who’s Who in British Theatre, Who’s Who in British cinema and asked them to be patrons, at £50 a year I think you could be patrons, or a member for £2 or £5, a student member was £1. We got about £30,000 rolled in for that. A lot of people became patrons like Peter Brook and Tom Stoppard, he gave me a £50 cheque, and many people gave £50 cheques. I remember Berkoff coming in one day, he was like a young boy saying can I produce a play I’ve written in here, and I said, ‘Yes, when do you want to do it?’ and he said, ‘Well’, I said, ‘Next week?’ He said, ‘That’s a little soon, how about 10 days from now?’ ‘Okay’, I said, ‘10 days from now. You’re scheduled, 8 o’clock, Theatre One’. He wrote about it in his autobiography and said he was completely shocked, fully expecting a no and suddenly had to do it. So I did his first production. There were all these little theatre companies, there were dozens of little companies that were using this, of course, we talked about him earlier, the mime [artist] Lindsay Kemp, and the People Show and there was a women, Nancy [Meckler] she started… Freehold, and Pip Simmons, David Hare, the Brighton people – the Combination people, they started coming, everybody starting coming. Then Arts Labs started opening up in Birmingham, and Manchester and all other cities in Britain started creating art. And it was really exciting times. We really felt that we do anything.
Clive Barker and using theatre games
It all began with Clive [Barker]. At that time he was, he was going round the country looking for- I mean he worked with Joan of course. He was one of the key people working with Joan, Joan Littlewood. I’d been to one or two of her shows and I mean, she was God as far as I was concerned, you know. And this guy turns up who’d been working with Joan Littlewood. I think I must have been in Swaffham when I first met him, I’m trying to remember…I mean he just influenced my life totally. When he started the group, the theatre group, I talked to Clive about how, if it was your first session that you had with a group, what would you do with them? And he said, ‘Oh I’d play games.’ And he told me one or two games that he played, and I borrowed Dorothy’s Girl Guide, Games for Girl Guides book and studied that, and I went to the first session with this theatre group, the young people’s theatre group and I had no idea what was going to happen. I thought, oh we’ll try playing a few games and see what happens. And I suddenly found that….all at once they were talking about games they’d known as kids, and you know, for weeks we just played games. I mean it was the opposite result from what I’d expected, I thought I would try ‘em out with games and see if we can get warmed up and do something… and it worked the other way around, I mean we played games and then we started inventing new games, and the games eventually were turned into pieces – the first pieces of theatre I had ever did with the groups, both in Shrewsbury and in Bradford, arose out of games.
Bryony Lavery
Female Trouble at the Arts
Bryony: So Caroline Eves came and we threw this thing together and it started in the tiniest place, I can’t remember, it somewhere off the Strand. But then it moved to the Arts Theatre and we were going to give women a good night out and that was the brief of that. So it was, we just made people laugh. We had far too little time to do it, to write it. I mean the last sketch, we needed a bit, we needed about ten more minutes work and they said well, we can’t learn it. Well I said okay, I’ll think of a way of writing something that we don’t have to learn, and we simply had this sketch where we’d say, ‘Wait a minute, there’s a message from women from the past,’ and they were literally on rolls of paper and they’d read them out, and we kept it like that, but the very first time they scarcely knew what was written on it. I think people just wanted a good time. They were three very different people and they just did a number of sketches and songs.
Skills-sharing collective
Ruth: And it was a skills-sharing collective. Skill- sharing collective meant you swapped roles and generally, as it evolved, it meant you didn’t do what you were good at. So, for example, there was a band, and we swapped instruments in the band and you would teach your colleagues to play the instrument that you were good at. And we were very proud of the fact, and I think this was marvelous, this was probably one of the best things we did, we could take any group of young people, and in a two-hour workshop we could make them sound like a band. So we were very proud, we could actually give them just the rudiments so that they could just be cool and play, which was fantastic. But in terms of the band it meant that I took up the saxophone for this, because I had played the French horn at school which is absolutely useless in a band, and it meant I didn’t play the saxophone very much because I was endlessly teaching someone else to play the saxophone, and then I got reasonably good at drums, actually, so then I didn’t play drums very much either. Then the bass guitar I quite liked, so I didn’t get to do that after a bit.
Susan: There were a lot of frustrated people.
Ruth: Yeah, no exactly, but then we would also swap roles. It tended to be that I would do administration for one tour, and then maybe write, and then I’d perform the next time. I was rotten at performing. But so, skills-sharing, multicultural, socialist, feminist collective.
Susan: Absolutely.
Ruth: This was completely, naturally, what you did in those days
Designing Female Transport and with Monstrous Regiment
Andrea: The thing is that I came back with the reputation that I’d been working with the Jane Howells and all of this, and that reputation of the theatre [Northcott Theatre, Exeter] went before me. So as soon as I came back I had people ringing, offering me work. And the first one was at the Old Half Moon at the synagogue in Alie Street, and that was Ron Daniels who’s now or was a very big director. And that totally was off the back of what I had been doing at the Northcott. So I did Female Transport as my first show and that was at Alie Street at the Half Moon, and because of my training at the Northcott – I mean you know we’d design, but we had to build and paint, I just learned how to do theatre. So Alie Street, I did the same automatically without thinking. So we’d rehearse in the space all day and then at night I’d build the set, Chris [her husband] occasionally came and helped me, and you’d just stay up all night and then for breakfast you went down Brick Lane and had breakfast, and it was very hands on. And theatre was, I fear it is not as much now, but you know we did do everything, and certainly Female Transport was a huge success. I got more work from the Half Moon. Monstrous [Regiment] was very soon after that. I went to those early meetings with Chris Bowler and Gilly Hanna and all of that and we started Monstrous. The first play was Scum which took us a year to put together. The writers were Claire Luckham and Chris Bond. It was Claire Luckham really but I can’t remember at what point it was decided that it was both of them. So they rehearsed with the writers coming in and out and improvised an idea and they’d go away and write it, so there’d be a gap then. And we had very little money so the set – in fact on Scum I did a lot of the designing while it was being written. So I’d turn up with all these sketch-books of ideas, which I talked to Claire and Chris about and sometimes they’d incorporate bits in and sometimes they didn’t. And then there must have been a gap, it’s a bit like Joint Stock used to work, there’d be a gap where people went away and did their own things. But certainly set-wise and costume-wise, because it was set in a laundry, we needed vast amounts of costumes, and we just spent months looking for things for nothing, and in those days it was possible. We went to one, an amazing sort of expensive trendy shop somewhere and they gave us bags of stuff that they didn’t want, so you’d open them up and there would old Victorian night dresses in, which at that point nobody wanted, so we just spend time accumulating, and then you’d be doing other bits of work as well.
Oval House Print Shop and South Circular magazine
Chris: I sort of became slowly aware of all the action groups and all the groups that were working for…like the Troops Out movements and the Legal Centres that were opening up and the things that were going on at that time. So we became unionised and although we still produced work for all the fringe groups, theatre fringe groups, they were considered bread and butter really, and also a lot of them were politicised anyway. Young Vic and Royal Court we did a lot of work for and we had this kind of tiered costing thing of whoever could pay the most actually subsidised people who couldn’t afford anything. So we did a lot of free stuff and a lot of stuff that we charged a lot for and then there were all this stuff in between. And obviously all the Oval stuff was done for free because they gave us the space. We also became the main printers for Putney and Peckham Labour Party. So we did all the election stuff which was great earner, which was brilliant, and we started to publish some magazines and books ourselves. We met a guy who illustrated the Beginners Guide books and he needed an outlet for cartoon series, so we produced cartoon books. The first one was called Intellectual Bull and then Urban Paranoia was the other one, they were little magazines. Then anybody who was going abroad would take a stash with them and spread them around. We had stuff in Calcutta and Europe. And a magazine called South Circular which we produced sort of news coverage of Left of the Labour Party basically. We printed them ourselves, we pasted them up ourselves. A lot of people gave us stories, quite good stories, scoops and things. They came out every two weeks and distributed the food co-ops, the newsman on the corner by the station [Oval tube] we gave a stack to, and them sometimes we forgot to collect the money, it was all a bit haphazard. It was good fun and after awhile people wanted to know when the next issue was coming out. We had a circulation of about a 1,000. I was the photographer of the magazine and I ran a music page. It was all South London bands at the time – Ian Drury. The knack I used was to kind of, right from the first phone call, I’d notate everything and then transcribe it, as it was, straight into the magazine. So with everything. Some of the band we would get absolutely sponko going around there and we ended up with this tape full of, ‘Ah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah’ – all this sort of stuff going on, you know, which was all transcribed and people loved it. They were relishing for the next edition.
Natasha Morgan
Letter written in anger
Natasha: And we were sort of really negotiating around childcare, and if he [Dusty Hughes] was in, I was going to be out and if I was out, he was going to be in. And we were not meeting at all and he was saying, Well, I wasn’t earning, therefore… you know this whole sort of thing of childcare isn’t paid for then it doesn’t sort of count as real work. I wrote a letter to him, which I never sent, which is called Letter Written in Anger, which I have subsequently read at various, sort of, functions and it’s about this thing of needing a room of my own. And it lists what has to be done in the house. What needs doing. It lists the priorities, and you know, it lists Number One, Number Two, and finally, it says, if in all this we manage to get time to do something that is beyond mere day-to-day accountancy, perhaps we might find some way, in which we might possibly meet. He and I spent so much time trying to survive in our own worlds that there was no time for us to find out where we were. And I wrote that letter whilst Lily, I mean in order to write it, I had had to leave her in her pram, in the garden, long beyond rest time, and I was still in my dressing gown, and it was three o’clock in the afternoon, and it was snowing. And it’s like, how can we solve this? I think what I liked about the letter was it says this is the problem, what can we do about it? It doesn’t say, and therefore… You know, it wasn’t a campaigning letter, it was, 'Is there anywhere to go from here?'
People Show at Chapter Arts, Cardiff
Natasha: We did it at the Chapter [Arts] in Cardiff, so that would have been January ’79 because I had her [Lily] in September ’78. So I went back, she was not even four months old, and we were performing in the Chapter. We had lodgings that were about twenty minutes walk from the Chapter. There was a lot of snow, there was a good eight inches of snow. I’d a pram, a baby, a day’s worth of nappies, food, everything that had to be taken to the Chapter every day. I was lucky in that the room that I had in the lodgings that we had, had a gas fire which wasn’t attached to a meter, so I could keep it on all night, and she slept in the bed with me. Tony Jackson was in the show, he joined us and Tony Jackson is someone who worked with the People Show before, he lived in Newcastle, and he had MS, and he couldn’t walk very well. Then he came with me because he could lean on the pram, so there was Tony Jackson with a walking stick leaning on the pram, and me and the baby and all that. So we, we were a sort of theatre in ourselves.
Susan: Yes
Natasha: The show, it was an ambient show that moved throughout the Chapter Arts Center, which was an old school, and it started in this room, which was quite a cold room, but it had a fireplace, so I lit a fire. So there was a fire, and it was me and Tony in the room, and Lily, the baby. Lily was by the fire, actually by the open fire, a bit like a sort of baby Jesus thing in a way, it was slightly nativity scene. So I found myself dressing in a rather sort of Mother Mary sort of way. So I was Mother Mary if you like, and there was Baby Jesus, and then there was Tony, this sort of punk, S&M, Newcastle poet who was dressed as a baby. So people came in and they glimpsed this and the moved off somewhere else. Tony and I and Lily joined them somewhere else along the line where I was pushing the pram and Tony was hobbling after us shouting. Sort of something else happened, there was a outdoor sequence and that was the end, and then I’d have to pack everything back into the pram and go back home, fall asleep, and give her her eleven o’clock feed and her four o’clock in the morning feed.
Julie Parker
Touring with Gay Sweatshop
Julie: There was the women’s company [Gay Sweatshop] and the men’s company. So we would wiz off and we’d meet up with them to do double bills of Anyone Women Can and Mr. X on alternate nights, and the very famous bit when we went over to Ireland and we played the Project Arts Centre, which was being run at the time by Peter and Jim Sheridan, and we had bomb threats, and we were arrested by the Garda and the theatre was mobbed. And we’d go to places in England and again the local right-wing would come out and picket and threaten, and there’d be all the letters in the papers, and people heckling in the audience, and then, there’d be all of the women, and where the men were concerned, the men, who would come up to you and talk to you afterwards and who were in tears at the show and said, ‘That’s me, that’s my story, that’s my life,’ and ‘I’ve never met people like you before.’ People would come out and you would understand why you were doing it.
Eileen Pollock
Debating women’s roles in theatre
Eileen: We actually went into debate with each other, amongst ourselves, about our role in the theatre and our role as actors – what we could do and what we couldn’t do. Should we only ever be mothers, grandmothers and da, da, da? Now again to give him his due Gavin [Richards], he did have one woman being a convener in a factory, a very powerful woman. He produced The Mother, and so we had The Mother, Brecht’s Mother. There were always strong women, but we were still subservient to the idea of, ‘the only way to tell the story of the world is through the eyes of men.’
Susan: It seems also linked into the politic of the time within the Left, where women’s issues had to kind of wait until after the Revolution.
Eileen: Oh, absolutely, ‘When,’ like Alex Glasgow, ‘When the last pub closes the Revolution starts. When the Revolution’s over we can talk about the women’s issues.’ Yes, very much so, and we bought that for a long time, and the men in the company, when we started getting together with the women, felt undermined, I think because they thought, ‘Why should you have, like a women’s…?' we didn’t call it caucus because we didn’t know the word, but ‘a women’s caucus and a meeting without men. What have you got to talk about that we can’t be party to?’ And it was difficult at the time to gather your ideas and your rationale, to reason for yourselves as to why it was necessary for you to talk amongst yourselves and report back if you like, but not have the men there. It was not because we were slagging the men off, it was just because we needed to talk amongst ourselves.
Mustapha Matura and 1970s plays from Black writers
Roland: How a lot of it came about was, in his usual way, Ed Berman said, ‘We’re going to a Black and White Power season, Roland.’ ‘Black and White Power Ed, what’s this?’ ‘Both peoples want power so we’ll give shows about them,’ and they were all American. I sad, ‘This is ridiculous, you’re doing a Black and White Power season and you haven’t got an indigenous black writer,’ which to his…I mean he was right…it was difficult, there was difficulty in finding… [any indigenous black writers]. We did Chiaroscuro by Israel Horowitz. He did a couple of plays himself and then, I had from The Electronic Nigger and the other of Ed Bullin’s plays at the Ambience, I made a great friendship with Stefan Kalipha which I still have. I’ve done more plays with him than any other actor. Anyway, I said, ‘Stefan, we’ve got to find someone who’s from the
Jacqueline Rudet
Money to Live at the Royal Court
Susan: In terms of the production Money to Live though, it came first didn’t it?
Jacqueline: Yeah.
Susan: How did that one come about? Did that get commissioned by the Black Theatre Co-op?
Jacqueline: That was commissioned… yeah, the Black Theatre Co-op, and it was done at the Royal Court. Max Stafford Clarke wasn’t it? Yeah. Gordon Case directed Money to Live. That was fun. That was an interesting play for me because it was very real to a Black woman trying to find herself and trying to make money that she could look after… and in a different standard of life, but that was the only way she could achieve it really. It was an interesting production and it was different, it was new, it was a play that many women could identify with. I think even in those days. I’d met a lot of women that had, who were, striptease artists or were prostitutes, who wanted to make money to live. And sometimes we can get on our very, very high moral attitude, but there are people who have to do anything to make money, and that’s where the whole theme came from really.
Adele Salem
Spare Tyre, Equal Rights, Equity Women’s Committee
Adele Salem: I’d seen their advert in Time Out and I was very nervous about contacting this feminist theatre company, but I was quite excited and I wanted to find out more about it. So I went along and got involved, and they were doing this amazing work with this woman called Suzie Orbach who’d written a book called Fat is a Feminist Issue and it started to turn my thinking around. I started to become politicized on women’s image, why we behaved certain ways, why it was acceptable to be this way, not acceptable to be that way. The show that we did was called How Do I Look? So it began to question the whole image thing, women’s image, why we dress in a certain way, to please, to charm, to be attractive. Small touring show, perhaps about six of us. It had Clare Chapman in it and Clare had been one of the original founding members of the Women’s Theatre Group, so she was quite, a sort of, politicized person. And part of that, later on in the Women’s Theatre Group, part of that politicization was that we should be paid properly as actors and as women, workers. So, thankfully, it was quite unusual, you know. Because when I joined the Women’s Theatre Group, I had a paid job for two and a half years. For a young actress, twenty-six years old, I guess I was, that’s quite a nice thing, I was able to get a mortgage. You know, no a bad thing really, at that age, I got my first flat in Hackney. So we were determined to, make sure our working conditions were right. That was also a part of a strong movement within Equity. The Women’s campaign for real equality in Equity, and things like that. The Women’s Committee in Equity. We were trying to campaign for more parts for women. But Spare Tyre was doing this type of political theatre, where you went into, and again, the types of places that we toured to were dramatically different. We went to some really poor areas in Sheffield and Bradford, and places like that, but there were some real, good, political women’s groups that invited us there, you know, that were campaigning for women’s issues and on all sorts of things like women’s reproductive rights and it seemed to be a very energetic time. There were lots of small campaign groups like that and they supported women’s theatre groups because they invited them to these various places and the other thing that supported the women’s theatre groups and the alternative theatre groups was GLA of course. The Greater London…GLC, sorry, GLC. That gave a lot of small grants out to support gay and women’s theatre, so there was this great, fantastic, mushrooming of small theatre companies.
Nabil Shaban
Content and style of early Graeae work
Nabil: Side Show at the
The influence of Bill Gaskill
Max: And the third influence then, I suppose was Bill Gaskill and the Court. Now Bill came up to Edinburgh and saw a couple of plays I’d done, he was very impressed that men took their clothes off as well as women, I seem to remember, and he asked us down to the Come Together Festival. However, we didn’t have a play in our repertoire to bring, so we didn’t take part in that festival, but I did make a friendship with Bill, and later we did bring some things down to the Theatre Upstairs, a play of Stanley Eveling’s, which was very successful, and indeed we had a band – this was La Mama’s influence really – a band in Edinburgh who were part of the Traverse Workshop Company and they were a band who already had a certain following. A kind of folk/rock band called Breads Lovin’ Dreams …and they and their very skilled lead guitarist were part of our company. That guaranteed that the Traverse Workshop Company got terrific houses in
Women finding their identity and voice through creativity
Lily Susan Todd: I think, we were all of us, I mean the Street Theatre Group and those groups who were starting to try to make performance in the street or elsewhere, or indeed within various alternative theatre routes like the first Women’s Season at the Almost Free Theatre in Soho, I think we were all really, really sort of groping for an identity as women creatives. I think we were looking to make a space within which we could work as creative women and find our themes, really, find our ideas, and find our themes. There wasn’t a coherent intellectual background, or coherent theory, it was just a bunch of women coming together, bunches of women, groups of women coming together to do things with a majority of women, within those groupings.
Women’s Liberation meetings and The Women’s Street Theatre Group
Lily: The period between 1971 and ’73, or ’70 and ’73 was very active from the feminist point of view. It was when everything began to kick off. A woman I knew who was a very active communist took me along to something called the Women’s Liberation Workshop, to a meeting. And it was a group of women from all over Europe and America, and they were kind of giving papers, little papers, reports on the Women’s Movement in America and Holland and you know, and she said I think really needed to know about this, so I went along and I was quite astonished to discover something so organised, something that existed in really quite an organized network way. And so Buzz [Goodbody] and I got talking, and at some point after that we went along to a meeting at Jane Arden’s house. Jane Arden was very rich and had a beautiful house in Little Venice. There she held some kind of Soiree. Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven? Yes, that was Jane. I began to know about those kinds of things dimly, and at the meeting at Jane’s house, a group of slightly disaffected, Left-wing women got themselves into a sort of bunch, slightly saying, ‘these bloody rich women’ you know, ‘arsing about doing bits of whatever it is they’re doing’, we were rather self-righteous, it certainly wasn’t political enough, and this group consisted of Michele Roberts, the now revered, national treasure novelist, and Dinah Brook, who was also a novelist, Alison Fell, another novelist, a journalist, who was then had not long left Leeds Art School, Buzz, myself, I think that was about it. A group of people that sort of assembled itself and we began to meet and through those meetings which were sort of our version of consciousness raising meetings, we decided that we’d form some kind of street theatre, guerilla theatre, and we called ourselves, inventively, The Women’s Street Theatre Group. We began to do, sort of street cartoons, and so on, largely inspired by Alison, who’d been to art school and had, had much more idea about sort of performance events, Buzz and I had no idea about any of that theatre, no idea at all, so we were introduced to the idea of performance events and we did a series of events, one or two of which were quite bold. We did an event at The Miss World Contest, and there’s a photograph of this in the not very long lived magazine Seven Days, and there’s this very nice photograph of this line of women standing in the dark with lit up nipples and crotches with little lights flashing on and off.
Michelene Wandor
Women’s Liberation meetings and conferences
Michelene: It was quite a domesticated encounter because my kids were at a nursery school up the road, and I’d met a woman who had moved in down the road, and she had twins who were the same age as my eldest, Adam, and they were at the same nursery school, and so basically the kids got friendly. I met her in the street. She was already quite in touch with sort of, lefty, arty people, and she’d moved from Islington and she was part of one of the first Women’s Liberation groups in this country. I think they were four in London at that point, and when she moved to live here, she, I can’t remember quite how it worked, but anyway, she kind of set up a group in her house. She’d split up from her husband with her three kids, and I started to go to meetings in her house, and started meeting women who I had, you know, never met anyone like that before, and we were reading lots of mainly American stuff because there wasn’t really any English stuff. And there were, in this group, there were I think at least two women who were American who had come to live here, who were against the Vietnam War. I don’t know if there were any draft-dodging husbands, there may have been. So the influence of American thinking, which post-Betty Friedan, was already much more developed than here, and then there was the first Women’s Liberation conference at Ruskin College in Oxford in 1970, which I went to, and out of that came the Body Politic which was the first collection of Women’s Liberation writings published in this country, which I ended up editing.
Hilary Westlake
Lumiere & Son working process
Hilary: The material that we did, and I would say even when I continued on to do the shows, I think, were mainly to do with the sort of dark insides of people and their desires, and their appetites and their dreams. I think that was certainly the area that the sort of people that we depicted, if there were any characters, there were always something peculiar about them. I think in terms of my relationship with the material, I think that Dave [Gale] and I would talk an awful lot about what we were doing, so it wasn’t that he would write a play on his own and then deliver it, far from it. I think what I was getting more skilful at and that would also help Dave in his writing, I was quite good at bringing out what people could perform, you know their persona, their characteristics, what would… you know, because I think we never really thought that we worked with actors. We sort of worked with odd people, people that had some… some performing… something that they could perform within the sort of parameters of Dave’s writing and what I was interesting in doing. Quite a lot of the things that I’d be doing would be to try and see how this could come out by doing improvisations on talking, on moving, on jokes, we used to use a lot of jokes. So that was something that was developing over the time. I would also… we used to use pre-recorded music then, that was before we worked with composers, so I would spend quite a long time getting the right music. So I’d do quite a lot of stuff with choreography and music, and design, design was quite high up on our list. And so yes, we were beginning to define our spaces. I used to do stuff – I think it was something I used at drama school, we were taught Laban, Laban efforts where it divides the components of movement into fast, slow, direct, indirect, and heavy and light, and I used to do a lot of stuff on that to do with emotions and do with text. So often characters would come out of the person, so they’re not actually seeing a character that’s distant to them that they are going to inhabit in any way. I would set up something like that and if something worked then we would take that out. I also did stuff where you’d do extremes of emotion, either with text or without text. So attitudes would come out from there. So that sort of thing, I’d do workshops. Sometimes if things came out Dave would incorporate that into his writing. Although really the scripts weren’t improvised, except for the street work, which was quite so to a certain extent. Quite a lot of the material and the characteristics of the performers would come out in these exercises that I’d set up and Dave might incorporate some of those into the script, into the text.
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