Littlewood, Joan

Born 1914 in London. British director and theatrical figure.

Littlewood studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. She and E. MacColl founded Theater Union, an amateur troupe that functioned between 1935 and 1939, and Theater Workshop (1945), a professional troupe that toured the cities of Great Britain and Western Europe.

In 1953 the workshop rented space at the Theater Royal in the London suburb of Stratford; Littlewood continues to work there (with hiatuses). Her outstanding productions have included Behan’s The Quare Fellow (1956) and The Hostage (1958), Shakespeare’s Macbeth (in contemporary dress; performed in Moscow, 1957), Delaney’s A Taste of Honey (1958), Chilton’s Oh What a Lovely War! (1963), Garson’s MacBird! (1967), Ingraham and Wells’ Mrs. Wilson’s Diary (1968), and the musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat (1972) by T. Rice and E. Weber.

Littlewood, an innovative director oriented toward mass audiences, uses sharp satirical generalizations in her productions and struggles against routine commercial theater in Britain.