Joan Littlewood's Theatre: Politics, Processes and Performance

This research will provide a radical new approach to and reassessment of the work of the theatre director Joan Littlewood (1914-2002). There is limited academic scrutiny of Littlewood's wide-ranging theatrical and cultural practice, despite the fact that she is widely regarded as one of the most innovative and influential directors of the twentieth century. This project will address the relative absence of Littlewood from theatre scholarship through the completion of a critically informed, and academically rigorous study of her creative practice from the 1930s to the 1970s. Drawing on extensive archival research and contemporary critical theories on community, space, ethics, cultural democracy and citizenship, this project will facilitate a developed understanding of the political, social and cultural significance of Littlewood's creative practice. Utilising current concerns with theatricality, representation and performitivity, the project will also offer new insights into Littlewood's aesthetic innovations such as her focus on the ensemble, group formations, popular cultural forms and the live performance event. Throughout there will be a concern to situate Littlewood's output in relation to wider political, cultural, theatrical and institutional conditions. However, rather than focusing on a traditional linear, historical approach, this project will adopt a thematic perspective to tease out and examine some of the central concerns that preoccupied Littlewood and re-surfaced in various theatrical forms throughout her career. This will involve a consideration of key themes and an interrogation of the ways that Littlewood experimented with how to represent, stage and perform them throughout her career. This analysis will focus on firstly, her treatment of the capitalist, imperialist and technological forces that govern modern warfare; the ethics of warfare and the humanitarian consequences of war for individuals, communities and civilisation. Secondly, her adaptations of classics that focus on the role of the ensemble over the individual, action over verse and topical interpretation over faithful preservation. A key question in this instance will be how staging, representational and interpretative strategies resonated with contemporary political issues around power, authority, class and community. The third area for investigation centres on depictions of working-class environments and characters and how these representations can be analysed in terms of authenticity, nostalgia and wider narratives of class, community and the nation. In addition to the focus on these familiar aspects of Littlewood's theatrical output, a key driver of this research project is a desire to insert and interrogate key areas of Littlewood's cultural practice such as the Fun Palace, Mobile Fair and community regeneration projects that are largely overlooked in theatre scholarship. These projects raise important questions around cultural democracy, citizenship, community ethics, play, pleasure and individual, community and national identities. They offer fascinating objects for study given current inter-disciplinary concerns with place, spatial relations and identity politics and deserve a place within the canon of work associated with Littlewood's role as a creative innovator.