Joan Plowright was a dynamic force for change in British theatre
Joan Plowright, who has died aged 95, was not only a remarkable actor but a dynamic force for change in British theatre. In her work at the Royal Court in the 1950s she symbolised a new working-class energy, although in reality she was the daughter of a Lincolnshire newspaper editor, and through her marriage to Laurence Olivier, she helped to shape the newly founded National Theatre company in the 1960s. There’s a choice moment in the film Nothing Like a Dame when she says she has the burden of bearing two titles, dame and baroness, to which Maggie Smith sardonically replies, “Joan, darling, you’ll just have to wrestle with it.” But wrestle with it she did and she never lost the earthiness that was part of her inheritance.
Her attitude to theatre also stemmed from her training at the Old Vic theatre school, which was set up in the bomb-damaged Waterloo Road building in London in the freezing winter of 1947: at a time when many drama academies resembled superior finishing schools, this one, under the tuition of Michel Saint-Denis, instilled a rigorous Stanislavskian approach to acting. For Plowright, this bore fruit when she became a founding member of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court in 1956. She instantly made her mark in Wycherley’s The Country Wife and Ionesco’s The Chairs and The Lesson, alongside George Devine, but it was her performance as Beatie Bryant in Arnold Wesker’s Roots in 1959 that marked her out as a star. She not only understood perfectly how the daughter of Norfolk farmworkers achieved self-realisation: when she leapt on to a chair it was, as noted at the time, “the image of the working class breaking in to a new life”.
Plowright’s meeting with and subsequent marriage to Olivier not only changed her own life but also had a direct impact on British theatre. Olivier represented the theatrical establishment and Plowright the new radical generation. It was Plowright who persuaded Olivier to hire Kenneth Tynan as literary manager of the National Theatre company in 1963 and it is no accident that the first directors Olivier engaged were John Dexter and William Gaskill, both graduates of the Royal Court. As Gaskill himself wrote: “When Larry married Joan he also married her interest in new theatre and her loyalties to the actors and directors with whom she had worked.”
Plowright herself made great strides as an actor at this time. Having been the voice of new drama – and she had won a Tony for her Broadway performance in A Taste of Honey in 1960 – she now showed her mastery of the classics. At the National, she was bright-eyed and downright as Shaw’s Saint Joan, as Maggie Hobson in Hobson’s Choice and as Hilde Wangel in The Master Builder. But it was her Sonya in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya – first at Chichester and then in the opening season of the National at the Old Vic – that she shook hands with greatness. She understood that Chekhov’s plays are about enduring unhappiness with fortitude. Her delivery of Sonya’s final speech – “When the time comes, we shall die without a murmur … we shall see a light that is bright and lovely and beautiful … we shall rest” – had a resilient optimism that left a whole audience shaken and stirred.
While thriving as an actor, Plowright also sought to galvanise the National. Irked by the lack of female dramatists, she commissioned four female novelists to write plays for an experimental season at London’s Jeannetta Cochrane theatre and directed one of them herself – Maureen Duffy’s Rites, which in 1969 transferred to the Old Vic. But, although Olivier proposed her as a possible successor to himself at the National, the board would have none of it: indeed, its chairman, Lord Chandos, once intemperately described Plowright to me as “a red”.
Even if she never became a director, Plowright enjoyed a busy career as an actor after Olivier left the National. She worked happily with her favoured directors. She played Katharina in The Taming of the Shrew for Jonathan Miller at Chichester. She was Rebecca West in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm for Robin Phillips at Greenwich. She did a West End season with Lindsay Anderson, playing Madame Arkadina in The Seagull. For one of her oldest friends, Franco Zeffirelli, she appeared in Eduardo de Filippo’s Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Filumena as well as the movie Tea With Mussolini. But it was her performance in Nuria Espert’s production of Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba in 1986 that showed her at her finest. As the servant to a tyrannical mistress, she combined the practicality of a household drudge with a desperate longing for life and gaiety.
Plowright did some fine work in her later years, winning a Golden Globe for her performance in Mike Newell’s film Enchanted April, but she was forced to give up acting when she suffered macular degeneration and became blind. But the imprint of her great performances, in Wesker, Chekhov and Lorca, remains strong and she was unquestionably a force for good in her championship of the new, the bold and the innovative. Theatrical power, in her time, was mainly invested in men, but Plowright was herself an agent of change.
