Punishing the outsiders: Theatre Workshop and the Arts Council

Abstract

Numerous analyses have documented the Arts Council's refusal to provide Theatre Workshop with an adequate subsidy, which, among other things, forced the company to abandon its revolutionary training programme. However, few have examined the reasons for its behaviour. This article calls for a re-evaluation of the Council's treatment of the company by analysing it through the lens of Bourdieusian sociology. It argues that the Council withheld money as a way of punishing the group for its countercultural practices and for developing a method of training actors that attacked the conventions of the British theatre in the 1940s and 1950s. Furthermore, this article cross-references the Arts Council's files with records of MI5's systematic surveillance of the company for the first time to identify the political motivations that also contributed to this behaviour. In both instances, it reveals a concentrated effort against Littlewood and her training programme that led ultimately to the exclusion of Theatre Workshop from the British theatre.

Keywords::

• Theatre Workshop
• Arts Council
• British theatre
• symbolic violence
• communism

Notes

^1. Littlewood ran the training programme with MacColl until he left the group in 1953, after which she ran it alone with the assistance of Jean Newlove.

^2. The exceptions here are Holdsworth and Rufford, although the latter examines only the Arts Council's refusal to support Littlewood's later Fun Palace Project and pays no attention to its treatment of Theatre Workshop.

^3. Littlewood and MacColl were active members of the Communist Party of Great Britain but severed ties with it during World War II after being blacklisted by the BBC (BBC Report to MI5, 7 April 1941, Records of the Security Service, KV 2/2757). See also Records of the Security Service, KV 2/3178–80.

^4. Maria Shevtsova has pioneered the development of Bourdieu's theories in relation to the theatre. See, for example, Shevtsova 2009.

^5. The Council awarded the Royal Ballet School an annual grant of £15,000 from 1955, while in 1958 it launched a special report into opera training, which resulted in the Council-supported London Opera Centre (opened in 1963) and funding for the National School of Opera (see Arts Council Annual Reports 1955–1956, 1958–1959, 1961–1962).

^6. The school's current prospectus still cites the legacy of Littlewood and advertises a curriculum that incorporates many of the training methods she pioneered (East 15 2013).