Joan's own recollection of Clive Barker was that ‘You could only do three things.
What follows is not a dutiful obituary but a highly personal memoir of the years that followed, and provides an ironic contrast between Joan's own published recollections and the experience of one of her ‘slags’ – liable to be called on to do anything and everything. Clive Barker, Co-Editor of NTQ, became a member of Littlewood's Theatre Workshop company in 1955, shortly after the change from a touring policy to a building-based company at the Theatre Royal, Stratford, had led to the departure of Ewan MacColl and others of the original group, and subsequently to the displacement of other members as critical success led to West End transfers. Not only do they establish atmosphere, theme, and character link and divide characters undercut sentimentality and hypocrisy satirise society and celebrate love, sexuality, youth, and fun but, in doing so, they provide a unity of purpose and theme for the play which replaces the more traditional unity of action.įor many, the death of Joan Littlewood on 20 September 2002 at the age of 87 marked the end of a theatrical era – though in practice she had lived an increasingly reclusive life following her move to France and the death of her partner Gerry Raffles in 1975, interrupted only in 1994 by the publication of an autobiography, Joan'sīook. In The Hostage, the increased reliance on song and dance to convey more diverse and subtle political concerns leads to greater complexity in their use.
In An Giall, the counterpoise of religion, destructive nationalism, and life-celebrating songs and dances subtly establishes and develops its central theme: the doomed struggle of youth, love, and joy to survive in a death-oriented society. Thus, they provide a thematic structural underpinning, supporting and, at the same time, commenting on the essential unity of the plays' actions as they guide the audience's response to their themes. In Brendan Behan's An Giall and The Hostage, song and dance establish atmosphere and character, comment ironically on the action, relate the characters to one another in a union of society's outcasts, and valorize life, love, healthy and open sexuality, and mutual comfort over the rules and regulations (and those who live by them) of a repressive, hypocritical, moribund, even murderous society. He promptly supplied information on Joan Littlewood and the productions of Brendan Behan plays from first-hand experience.’ There follow some of the informative and humorous exchanges between Clive and June, who was awarded her doctoral degree later in 2005.
Concluding the ‘Acknowledgments’ of the thesis, June wrote: ‘Above all my heartfelt gratitude for the dozens of emails, letters, and articles Clive Barker shared with me. His sudden death deprived him of that pleasure. An email sent on 21 February 2005 informed June that Clive was looking forward to ‘seeing the sun go down on Galway Bay’.
Clive had accepted the position of external examiner for the thesis with the viva voce to take place in Galway – a city Clive had never visited. As a result of that first letter, Clive and June began a correspondence – exchanging questions, notes, published and unpublished material, with a final email to June dated 4 March 2005, less than two weeks before his death on 17 March. While preparing her doctoral thesis, Text and Collaboration: an Examination of the Roles of Joan Littlewood and Theatre Workshop in the Genesis and Production of Brendan Behan's ‘The Hostage’, at the National University of Ireland, Galway, June Favre wrote to Clive praising the article ‘Closing Joan's Book: Some Personal Footnotes’ (NTQ, May 2003). Clive Barker often wrote about Joan Littlewood and his time at Theatre Workshop with a mixture of warmth and bewilderment at her unorthodox methods.
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