{"id":3213,"date":"2017-04-12T16:26:40","date_gmt":"2017-04-12T15:26:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodvale.com\/?p=3213"},"modified":"2017-04-12T16:26:40","modified_gmt":"2017-04-12T15:26:40","slug":"ann-jellicoe-a-lifelong-knack-for-reinvention","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/ann-jellicoe-a-lifelong-knack-for-reinvention\/","title":{"rendered":"Ann Jellicoe – A lifelong knack for reinvention"},"content":{"rendered":"

The trail-blazing dramatist Ann Jellicoe<\/strong> will be 90 this year. Drawing on a candid interview Jellicoe gave to the British Library in 2005, Ines Cavill<\/strong> looks back at a rich creative life characterised by bold innovation and canny reinvention\u2014an imaginative capacity to adapt to changing personal and professional circumstances that would forge new theatrical forms in the process.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Born in Middlesborough in 1927, Jellicoe loved performance and writing from a young age. She adored her junior dance class and creating charades at school. \u2018From when I was four years old I wanted to go into the theatre, I didn\u2019t have an easy childhood, my parents separated and the world of fantasy struck me early\u2014that you could go into another situation\u2026.I would lie awake the day before a charade had to be put on at school and in my head I would write everything, the whole dialogue\u2019.<\/p>\n

She went on to the Central School of Speech and Drama where a key stimulus was improvisation, \u2018there was a remarkable teacher\u2014I remember seeing another student improvising a dream where he was playing a trumpet that turned into a bird and flew away… improvisation was the start of something quite new, it was like a door\u2014an opening into a cavern you could explore\u2019.<\/p>\n

Despite having been a star student first acting jobs eluded her till friends got her a place in repertory in Aberystwyth, \u2018I came out with Central\u2019s chief prize but not being a pretty girl\u2014in an age when we hadn\u2019t had the Berliner Ensemble where plain girls were allowed to be interesting\u2014I didn\u2019t immediately get work\u2019. But Jellicoe was just plain passionate about all aspects of theatre and would soon be more involved in creating plays than acting in them. In 1949 she was commissioned to make a fascinating study of the relationship between acting and the theatre\u2019s architecture. Unconscious Influences on the Theatre<\/em> led her to work with \u2018Open Stage\u2019 and at the Sunday (Cockpit) Theatre Club she would produce and direct plays that explored this form, including a first one-act play of her own.<\/p>\n

Jellicoe\u2019s big career breakthrough came in 1955 when she was the runner up in The Observer<\/em>\u2019s playwriting competition\u2014a search for new talent by their acclaimed theatre critic Kenneth Tynan. \u2018It was wonderful! The phone rang and within 24 hours you were having lunch with the directors of the Royal Court Theatre and their designer is coming round to your room with a model\u2026 it was unbelievable\u2019. At The Royal Court she would be the only woman in its innovative Writers\u2019 Workshop.<\/p>\n

Her radical winning play The Sport of My Mad Mother<\/em> took its title from the Hindu religious saying \u2018All creation is the sport of my mad mother Kali\u2019. Set in Cockney London it used absurdist dialogue and physical theatre to weave a fantastical tale of young misfits. Initially a commercial failure that lasted only 14 performances, it was later performed around the world in many languages and is now considered ripe for a British revival. The Guardian<\/em> theatre critic Michael Billington wrote in March 2014, \u2018it\u2019s a mind-blowing piece that combines social anarchy with verbal jazz and ends with a triumphant hymn to female fertility\u2026 The Knack<\/em> also deserves another look, but it is this one that showed her to be a radical theatrical pioneer\u2019.<\/p>\n

With typical responsiveness Jellicoe changed tack in the face of this initial blow to her confidence\u2014with starry Sixties results. \u2018The reception of that play was like being cannoned into a brick wall, so I thought I better write a comedy\u2019. That 1962 comedy, The Knack<\/em>, was a massive hit at The Royal Court and Off Broadway where it would play 685 shows under the direction of Mike Nichols.\u00a0 \u2018Without doubt it was the most exciting time of my life. The 60s were beginning to swing and anything seemed possible at The Court. I wrote The Knack<\/em> whose characters all grew from people I knew. Rita Tushingham was wonderful, she could mime anything, just do it off the top of her head. George Devine, the artistic director, was an extraordinary man\u2014referring to the title of my first play he once said \u201cI regard myself as your mad uncle\u201d\u2019. The Knack<\/em> also gave her a memorable telephonic run-in with The Lord Chamberlain looking to exercise the last reprimands of the dying censorship powers from the 1843 Theatres Act; \u2018Oh haw haw haw Miss Jellicoe I\u2019m afraid this is going to be a rather difficult conversation\u2019, so it went something along the lines of \u2018If I take out \u201cbum\u201d will you allow so and so?\u2019 Occasionally somebody did walk out of The Knack<\/em> and they were heard to say in the foyer \u2018But mother, I can\u2019t hear anything dirty!\u2019. And although the play\u2019s focus is the sexual competition among three roommates when a provincial young woman enters their London world, Jellicoe insists \u2018it seems to be about sex\u2014what it\u2019s really about is how people should treat other people\u2019.<\/p>\n

The Knack<\/em>\u2019s star continued to rise with its successful adaptation to the big screen in 1965, winning the Palme D\u2019Or<\/em> at that year\u2019s Cannes Film Festival. Director Richard Lester was between making A Hard Day\u2019s Night<\/em> and Help<\/em>, putting The Knack<\/em> in a pivotal Sixties stylistic spot\u2014it\u2019s full of French New Wave influences and Lester\u2019s visual trademarks like subtitles and shot repetition. It even features three icons\u2014Jane Birkin, Jacqueline Bisset and Charlotte Rampling\u2014making their cinematic debuts as extras. Rita Tushingham revives her central role as Nancy, the contemporary young woman whose wit and warmth would chime with 1966\u2019s Georgy Girl<\/em>. The shy schoolteacher Colin, so desperate to gain his lodger\u2019s \u2018knack\u2019 with the opposite sex, is played by a young Michael Crawford honing the accident-prone persona that would become Frank Spencer in the BBC sitcom Some Mothers Do \u2018Ave \u2018Em<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The Knack<\/em> was partly based on Jellicoe\u2019s second husband Roger Mayne, whose stunning street photography mirrored her \u2018theatre of demonstration\u2019; a shared intention to show not tell. \u2018Roger had a house like Colin\u2019s, I was living with him and he had a lodger like Tom and a hilarious character just like Tolen who obviously tried to make a pass at me and he got nowhere! We moved from \u2018The Knack<\/em>\u2019 house on Addison Ave to a very nice house in Richmond because you couldn\u2019t have brought a child up there. We also had a cottage in Dorset, an absolutely idyllic place with roses round the door and thatch\u2014we would pile everything into the car at any opportunity and we so hated going back to London. I just got fed up with London and I assumed I would just go on writing plays…\u2019<\/p>\n

They made the permanent move to Colway Manor in Lyme in 1975 after her last role at The Royal Court as literary manager promoting women playwrights including Caryl Churchill. But how was Jellicoe to go on writing plays? She enjoyed creating dramas for younger children (a series of \u2018Jelliplays\u2019) that were attuned to the ages of their son and daughter, Tom and Katkin, and as they settled in school in Lyme she imagined a much more ambitious production, The Reckoning<\/em>. It proved too big for a secondary school to stage and as it grew to involve an eighty-strong local cast of all ages a powerful template emerged from this first Community Play: an original work written for and about a particular community, performed in shared space for audience and cast and staged by a professional production team. Jellicoe went on to form the Colway Theatre Trust and produce two decades of work exploring this form from Dorset to Denmark.<\/p>\n

\u2018And so I lived happily ever after and did I don\u2019t know how many plays…\u2019<\/p>\n

As part of the Sixties theme within this year\u2019s From Page to Screen Film Festival in Bridport there will be a screening of The Knack<\/em> at the Bridport Arts Centre at 2pm on Sunday April 23. Ann Jellicoe will reflect on the original play and its adaptation with her daughter Katkin Tremayne and there will be a display of her late husband Roger Mayne\u2019s photographs from the play\u2014retrospectives of his work are also currently on show at the Photographers\u2019 Gallery in London and at the Thelma Hulbert Gallery in Honiton.<\/p>\n

But looking forward, it is the spirit of community theatre that Jellicoe nurtured in West Dorset which continues to thrive. The Dorchester Community Plays Association have announced that their 7th play will be a new commission by the playwright Stephanie Dale. In Lyme Regis the Monmouth Community Play will be staged at the Marine Theatre and seafront in July. Bridport is producing the very next piece of community theatre, FLEA!<\/em> at The Electric Palace 23-27 May\u2014written by Andrew Dickson who first encountered the town through the early Community Play The Poor Man\u2019s Friend<\/em>.<\/p>\n

These three current local productions reflect the enduring influence of a creative visionary who has enabled so many to see differently.<\/p>\n

\u2018That white horse you see in the park could be a zebra synchronised with the railings….\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The trail-blazing dramatist Ann Jellicoe will be 90 this year. Drawing on a candid interview Jellicoe gave to the British Library in 2005, Ines Cavill looks back at a rich creative life characterised by bold innovation and canny reinvention\u2014an imaginative capacity to adapt to changing personal and professional circumstances that would forge new theatrical forms […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[72],"class_list":["post-3213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-arts","tag-ines-cavill"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3213"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3213\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}