By Al McCall
Not many people know of Ewan MacColl. Those who do remember him as a folk singer and partner of Peggy Seeger.
As a songwriter, MacColl is recognised as the author of "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face", "Dirty Old Town", "The Shoals of Herring", "Freeborn Man" and "The Manchester Rambler". But before he became an established folk singer and leader of the folk song revival in Britain, he was an extraordinarily innovative playwright and director.
After an elementary education, MacColl left school in 1930. He worked at a variety of temporary jobs: motor-mechanic, factory worker, builders' labourer, street-singer. In the same year he joined the Workers' Theatre, leaving it later to form his own agit-prop street-performing group, the Red Megaphones.
After taking part in the hunger marches and the battles of the unemployed (1932-33), he joined forces in 1934 with Joan Littlewood, a young actor just out of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts.
They married and set up a workers' experimental theatre in Manchester — the Theatre of Action.
During this period, MacColl wrote a number of short sketches and dramatic poems for the theatre. In 1935, he and Joan moved to London and formed a workers' dramatic school. This venture was to provide the basis for the training methods which were later to be used in Theatre Workshop.
Returning to the north of England in 1936, MacColl and Littlewood formed Theatre Union. This group described itself as a "theatre of the people" and made considerable impact upon audiences throughout the industrial north-east between 1936 and 1939.
Its most notable productions, directed jointly by MacColl and Littlewood, were The Good Soldier Schweik (adapted by MacColl from Hasek's novel) and a living newspaper, Last Edition (written by MacColl).
Last Edition was a highly successful play, dealing with the political events leading up to the Munich pact and using the episodic form which MacColl was to employ in many of his later plays. In 1939 it was stopped by the police, and MacColl and Littlewood were arrested and charged with "disturbing the peace". They were both heavily fined and barred from taking part in any kind of theatrical activity for the next two years.
The small group of dedicated and talented members of Theatre Union formulated plans for a future theatre and embarked upon intensive study of theatrical techniques.
Despite the mobilisation caused by World War II, study courses, reading lists and books were circulated among the group — most of whom were now in uniform — so that by the war's end there was a small body of theatre activists who, between them, possessed a considerable body of knowledge on matters relating to theatre.
By August 1945, a sufficient number of them had returned home. By pooling their army gratuities, it became possible to launch the group later known as Theatre Workshop. This group travelled through most of 1945-1952, with MacColl writing most of its repertoire.
The intention of Theatre Workshop was to create theatrical techniques sufficiently flexible to reflect the dynamic of social change. MacColl, as its major writer and theorist, insisted that merely changing the class background of the hero or introducing technical and stylistic innovations was inadequate for creating popular theatre.
For him, the problem was a multi-dimensional one which could be solved only by walking on a series of different fronts simultaneously. If the theatre was to play an important role in the lives of people, then it needed to develop techniques to rival the efficiency of the complex machinery working people handle every day in the course of their work.
In addition, he declared, the problem is one of poetics. The dramatic writer must attempt to close the enormous gap which exists between our literary and oral traditions.
He/she does not do this by acting merely as an amplifier for everyday speech, but by analysing the speech rhythms, idioms and nuances of everyday conversation, and then crystallising them in the way that Shakespeare and Ben Jonson did.
George Bernard Shaw once quipped that, other than himself, MacColl was the best living playwright in Britain. While Shaw was wont to pontificate so often in his day, it is unfortunate that, until the recent publication of some of his plays, MacColl's achievements in the theatre have been forgotten.
Many of his experimental plays go into the realm of dramatic philosophical dialogues. There is no attempt to deceive the audience into believing that they are overhearing a "real" conversation. Rather the reverse is true; by stressing particular speech rhythms, varieties of idiom and types of cadences, MacColl constantly sought to change the perspectives of action; he never allowed the actor-audience relationship to become static. These concepts were also evident in his songwriting.
When Theatre Workshop defected to the West End, there to enjoy the huge critical and commercial success that greeted the antiwar musical, Oh what a lovely war!, MacColl turned his attention to traditional music.
With Alan Lomax, Bert Lloyd, Seamus Ennis and others, he founded the Ballads and Blues Club, later to become the famed Singers Club — the grand-daddy of the ubiquitous "folk" club. The club opened in 1953 and closed in 1991.
In 1956, he met Peggy Seeger and they embarked on a working partnership conducting workshops and touring Britain and abroad until his death in 1989. MacColl and Seeger collected extensively from traditional singers in Britain.
In addition to books of their own songs and various small collections, they produced two anthologies of the music of Britain's nomadic people: Travellers' Songs of England and Scotland and Doomsday in the Afternoon.
With Howard Goorney, MacColl co-authored Agit-prop to Theatre Workshop, a book of political play scripts and reminiscences of Theatre Workshop. The Ewan MacColl Song Book is to be published this year.