What is theatre for?

By Irving Wardle

Towards the end of 1955 I gave up my job washing dishes in a South Kensington guest house and started reviewing plays in the Times. As a scullion I had done a fair amount of writing, most of it gloomily introspective, and the pleasure of exchanging that for writing about events was intense. An exhibition of hand-painted eggs, for instance; or an Indian hypnotist who specialised in snipping off the end of your tongue and handing it round a group of observers before sticking it back on again. These were the audition assignments that brought in a flow of freelance jobs and released me from the kitchen.

It was a marvellous escape. It got me into circuses, and variety shows, and comedies in ancient Greek, and into an old Yiddish theatre where a Cossack whom I’d just seen leading a brutal pogrom squatted beside me in the stalls to explain the plot, and led me to an adjoining shop in the interval where he offered to stuff my pockets with chocolate. That was all enjoyable, but I would have been happy seeing anything that allowed me to make a living by writing. Before long, though, I noticed that something special was going on. I was the lowest of the low on the Times arts page, but when Joan Littlewood launched Brendan Behan’s "The Quare Fellow" or the Berliner Ensemble made its London debut, it was I who was sent to sweep up these trivia while A.V. Cookman, my silver-haired senior, strode into the night to match his wits against some taxing West End comedy-thriller. I can still hear the sound of his scratching pen, and his high-table voice hissing, "It’s a bugger, it’s a bugger."