Theatre Workshop

Theatre Workshop is a theatre group noted primarily for its long-serving director, Joan Littlewood. Many actors of the 1950s and 1960s received their training and first exposure with the company, many of its productions were transferred to theatres in the West End, and some, such as Oh, What a Lovely War! and A Taste of Honey, were made into films.

Joan Littlewood and Ewan MacColl met and married in 1934, while both were working with the Theatre of Action. They started their own collaboration developing radio plays for the BBC, taking scripts and cast from local workers. However, both MI5 and the Special Branch maintained a watch on the couple because of their support for the Communist Party of Great Britain. Littlewood was precluded from working for the BBC as a children's programme presenter and some of MacColl's work was banned from broadcast.

In the late 1930s Littlewood and MacColl formed an acting troupe called the Theatre Union. This was dissolved in 1940, but in 1945 many of its former members joined Joan Littlewood's new venture, the Theatre Workshop. In 1948 the company toured Czechoslovakia and Sweden.

Touring was not successful for the company, and in 1953 Joan Littlewood took the gamble of taking a lease on a permanent base at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, London. The theatre was derelict, no funds were available for renovation, and the actors cleaned and painted the auditorium between rehearsals. To save money the cast and crew slept in the dressing rooms (while Littlewood went back to her home in Blackheath). The theatre opened on 2 February 1953 with Twelfth Night.

MacColl had not supported the move to London, and left the company to concentrate on folk music. With Littlewood, as director, Gerry Raffles (1928–75) as manager and John Bury as designer, the Theatre Workshop continued to present a mixed programme of classics and modern plays with contemporary themes. The cast and crew (again excluding Littlewood, who was then living with Raffles) lived and worked as a commune, sharing the many tasks associated with running and maintaining a theatre, and with a duty roster for "chef of the week".

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