ABSTRACT
Joan Littlewood's (1914–2002) maintained a consistent commitment, as did her founding partner Ewan MacColl (Jimmie Miller), to working-class politics at all stages of her theatrical career, from the inception of an indoor theatre idea with MacColl (Theatre Action, 1934) in Manchester, to the Theatre Workshop's renowned cabaret satire of the Great War, Oh What a Lovely War (1963) in London. Theatre Workshop, as a dispossessed, underfunded working-class ensemble, ideologically shunned all norms of middle-class entertainment; instead they toured the miners’ towns and distressed areas, taking theatre to the people. The Theatre Workshop gained fame only after transferring five productions from 1956 onwards, from their base at Theatre Royal at Stratford, East London to various theatres in the West End, although their highly experimental, corporal and carnivalesque stage had been welcomed in foreign festivals in Scotland, Scandinavia and Eastern European countries much earlier than the West End recognition. The middle-class reception of Littlewood's work in theatre downplayed her commitment to the left-wing politics and tended to regard the post-settlement period as the period when her work flourished unhampered by MacColl's communistic ideologies, however the document displayed attests to the assurance of her class politics and its shaping her perspective of life and her art in theatre.
