Subject: RE: Which Town is MacColl's Dirty Old Town?
From:
Roger the Skiffler
Date: 23 Feb 04 - 10:02 AM
This from Peggy Seeger's website implies he served:
...Last Edition (written by MacColl). This highly successful play dealt with the political events leading up to the Munich pact and used the episodic form which MacColl was later to extend in his experimental post-war play, Uranium 235. In 1939, Last Edition was stopped by the police and MacColl and Littlewood were arrested and charged with disturbing the 'peace'. They were both heavily fined and bound over - that is, 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 on intensive studies of theatre art and techniques. World War II began and within a few weeks the group had been scattered to the four corners of the earth and were serving with various military forces. Consequently, most of the training had to be done by correspondence. Nevertheless, study courses, reading lists, books, etc., were circulated consistently throughout the whole period of the war, and there soon existed a small body of farflung students who between them possessed a considerable corpus of knowledge on matters relating to specialised theatre studies. For example, one member made a study of the Attic theatre, and even went to the extent of learning to read Aeschuylus and Socrates in the original Greek; another specialised in studying the Commedia del Arte and still another concentrated on the Chinese theatre.
By August 1945, a sufficient number of them had returned home and, by pooling their Army gratuities, it became possible to launch the group now known as Theatre Workshop. The ideas which formed this group were the result of the ten years which MacColl and Littlewood had devoted to various theatrical experiments. Up till this period they had directed the plays jointly, but now the functions were divided: Littlewood was to direct the rehearsals and produce the plays while MacColl was to write plays suitable for the group, train the actors and, to a large extent, formulate new training techniques. During this period, he wrote eleven plays. Theatre Workshop travelled from 1945-1952 and a number of MacColl's plays were performed abroad and translated into German, French, Polish and Russian. By this time, enamoured with the Lallans movement in Scotland, he (like many other Scots-born writers) had changed his name from Jimmie Miller to Ewan MacColl, a name by which he was known for the rest of his life.
RtS
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