Word: littlewoods
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...play, when it first turned up, was just "30 pages of unprintable dialogue." Another was a draft mailed in for criticism by a 19-year-old Lancashire girl. Yet each had all the racy, rowdy, down-to-life vitality that Producer-Director Joan Littlewood is forever seeking. After helping the authors to shape their work, she staged both plays-Brendan Behan's The Hostage and Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey - in her small. 512-seat Theater Royal in the waterfront London slum district called Stratford East. Both won so much praise that they eventually moved from...
...years Joan Littlewood's Theater Workshop has turned from a semi-impoverished repertory company into a money-coining enterprise. Wolf Manko-witz' Make Me an Offer, ex-Convict Frank Norman's Fings Ain't What They Used to Be, and five other Workshop plays have succeeded in the big time. None of this particularly impresses Joan Littlewood. who thinks that both the West End and Broadway are "contemptible as art and unsuccessful as business." Her avowed aim is "to break up the teacup theater...
...Exuberance. In reaction to the gentle, polite, French-doors-and-tennis-rackets comedy that has long been the West End's mirror of English life, Joan Littlewood likes to fill her theater with the smell of cold porridge and soft coal. her stage with people of small means and great imagination. She likes her characters to rub hips with spivs, tarts, pansies and drunks, in whose vernacular a whore is a brass and a pimp is a ponce (one song in Fings Ain't What They Used to Be is called The Student Ponce). But while a Tennessee...
...much less a play than a dramatization of its playwright: sprawling, shocking, howlingly off-key, marvelously in tune, humane and hilarious. What story there is turns on a young English soldier held as a hostage in a Dublin brothel against the Belfast hanging of an Irish patriot. Under Joan Littlewood's brilliant direction, this proves story enough to provide a real center of feeling among all the vaudeville tricks, freak-show tactics, music-hall gags and ditties that stuff out the evening. As the whores and queers and strangies cavort, as irreverent lyrics make butts of everything, as wisecracks...
...only good deal is one that shows everyone a profit," Cambridge-educated Wolf Mankowitz has made a good deal indeed for the British theater. He has brought it a bubbling British enthusiasm that pays off at the box office whether his shows are being polished in Director Joan Littlewood's East End Theater Royal or bargaining for big money on the other side of town. Even in the West End his productions are usually low budget. "Good characters don't cost you any more to create," he argues. "Good lines don't cost any more. Heart doesn...