Howard Goorney
An actor and co-founder of Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop in 1945
Peter Rankin
Guardian newspaper Mon 16 Apr 2007 19.40 AEST
In 1937 Howard Goorney, then a 16-year-old clerk in an accountant's office in Altrincham, went to Manchester to see Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna. The play is about a group of villagers banding together against the depredations of a tyrannical soldier, and this production was by Joan Littlewood (obituary, September 23 2002) and Jimmy Miller (later Ewan MacColl) of the Theatre Union, founded in 1936.
The Spanish civil war was raging. It was the era of the Popular Front, and the 17th-century play was the Theatre Union's second presentation. Littlewood and Miller had declared that the Union would present its work "particularly to that section of the public which has been starved theatrically, plays of social significance... all that is most vital in the repertoire of the world's theatre".
Howard, who has died aged 85, was then a Young Communist, and he liked what he saw at Theatre Union. The following year, he read in the Manchester Guardian that the company was auditioning. He applied, and was cast by Littlewood in The Good Soldier Schweik. The 17-year-old played an old shepherd, who, in her words, turned out to be the oldest man who ever lived.
Thus did the accountancy clerk, swept into the revolutionary training methods of Littlewood and MacColl, become an actor. Those two people were to colour Howard's career for 30 years and indeed the rest of his life, which encompassed many stage parts and more than 60 television and film appearances. Littlewood's passion was commedia dell'arte at which Howard, with his gift for physical comedy, excelled.
Born into a Jewish family in Cheetham, Manchester, the son of a textile agent, Howard was educated at the local high school. After the outbreak of the second world war, he was working at the Manchester Victoria Memorial Jewish Hospital. Firewatching one evening, waiting to meet his then girlfriend, he heard sirens, rushed to the hospital and spent that night pulling the living, and the dead, from the wrecked building. He never spoke of it; the event was, for Littlewood, a reference point about Howard. Called up he was assigned to an armoured regiment - but, flatfooted - he never saw the inside of a tank.
Then, in 1945 Howard received a letter from Littlewood. It instructed him to get demobbed - and get back. Some fervent praying to a single candle did the trick. Classified an "A2 psychopathic personality of the artistic type", he was given an honourable discharge.
Back in Manchester, Howard became one of the founding members of the Theatre Workshop with Littlewood, MacColl, Rosalie Williams, David Scase (obituary, March 11 2003), John Bury, Gerry Raffles - he and Howard were childhood friends - and Bill Davidson. Soon he was rehearsing the role of the rogue Sganarelle in MacColl's adaptation of Molière's The Flying Doctor.
It premiered, as part of a double bill, at the Kendal girls' high school that August. A perk of the part, in an era of rationing, was getting to eat a raw egg nightly. For two months the production toured the region and later it was performed in one-night stands around Britain, and in Czechoslovakia, Sweden and Norway. A Prague critic described him as "full of gaiety, wit, movement and untiring happiness".
As everyone in Theatre Workshop did everything, Howard became business manager and company secretary. The latter required sending fund-raising letters to the famous, the sympathetic and the Arts Council, which proved to be, as it was for many years, unresponsive. Meanwhile Howard continued to add to his repertoire of old men. After Sganarelle, he played Don Perlimplin in Federico García Lorca's The Love of Don Perlimplin.
In 1953, the company, which had played everywhere from Butlin's in Filey to the Comedy Theatre in London, settled at the then derelict Theatre Royal Stratford East in the capital. Soon after, MacColl moved away, but Howard remained loyal to MacColl's writing. In what Littlewood described as her best period, Howard came to the forefront. In 1953, he was Subtle in The Alchemist, by her beloved Ben Jonson, and that year too, as the lead in The Christmas Carol, he deployed his special gift, to play both the old, and the young Scrooge. In 1954, as John of Gaunt in Richard II (Harry H Corbett was the king) he stayed up, night after night, working, under Littlewood's tutelage, on his long, anger-filled: "This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle..."
In 1956 he absented himself from the rehearsals for Brendan Behan's The Quare Fellow. It looked, he thought, too much like hard work. He did get to play the hangman in a revival soon after.
There was still more work to be done on Behan's next play, The Hostage (1958). It barely existed and had to be pieced together from Behan's stories. Howard played Pat, the caretaker of a lodging house-cum-brothel, keeping some order. With interruptions coming from Behan during performances, this was sometimes difficult, sometimes glorious, depending on how much Behan had drunk that night. It was Howard's happiest time on stage.
In 1964, Littlewood left, returning to Stratford East three years later having narrowly failed to create her dream Fun Palace. But she persisted in that vision and as part of this, Bob Grant and Brian Murphy, along with Howard, mounted in 1967 a tiny late-night farce, Badin the Bold by Courteline. Howard convulsed the audience as an aging functionary who got his tie caught in the roller of his typewriter.
In 1967, when Richard Ingrams and John Wells needed a Maharishi-type guru for Mrs Wilson's Diary, their lampoon of the then Labour government, it was a loinclothed Howard who ended up on Harold Wilson's grand piano. He was also Dr Melrose, a physician so tired he couldn't keep awake while listening to Wilson's lungs, and fell asleep on his chest.
This was the last bow at Stratford East of "my pure thread of gold" as Littlewood called him. In 1973 she directed her last Stratford production and in the summer of 1975 Raffles, her partner, died.
Howard's screen work began in the late 1950s and took in Z Cars, The Avengers, All Creatures Great and Small, Peak Practice and EastEnders. He lent his superbly lugubrious features to Fiddler on the Roof (1971) and was Bob the Turnkey in Little Dorrit (1988). At the National Theatre, he was Bob in promenade performances of Lark Rise to Candleford (1978-79) and played Noah in The Mysteries (1983).
In 1981 his Theatre Workshop Story was published. Active in Equity and CND, Howard was latterly a supporter of the Stop The War Coalition.
It is as the most comically gloomy of actors that Howard will be best remembered. During rehearsals of Henry IV, his disconsolate wanderings around the stage as Pistol, hitting characters on the head with a balloon at the end of a stick, reduced Littlewood to tears of laughter. She was still, she recalled, wiping them away in bed that night.
Howard is survived by his wife, Stella and his two children, Matthew and Alice.
· Howard Goorney, actor, born May 11 1921; died March 29 2007
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Independent
Howard Goorney
Oldest survivor of Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop and her 'pure gold thread'
Tuesday, 17 April 2007
Howard Jacob Goorney, actor: born Manchester 11 May 1921; married 1957 Stella Riley (one son, one daughter); died Bath 29 March 2007.
In the years immediately prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, some trail-blazing radical theatre work was to be found far from London. In and around Manchester, particularly, the young firebrand Joan Littlewood had directed rarities such as Ernst Toller's Expressionist drama of the Bavarian rising Masses and Man, and collaborated with Jimmie Miller - later Ewan MacColl, to whom she was for a time stormily married - on his agitprop John Bullion and on Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna.
In 1938 they received a copy of Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Schweik in the stiff Erwin Piscator version which MacColl heavily reworked for Littlewood's Theatre Union company. When they advertised the production plans, they were joined by an army of actors and technicians, reinforced by some Central European refugees and a shy boy of 17 from Higher Crumpsall, Howard Goorney. With European civilisation on a knife-edge, the play was immensely resonant; Goorney's work and total commitment impressed his director, usually niggardly with her praise ("He is my pure gold thread," she said once of him).
Devoted to Littlewood's style of work, Goorney remained crucial to her ensemble ideals for over 30 years, while she in turn was like a surrogate mother to him when adolescent. On one occasion, she and the girls in the company decided that his melancholy appearance (a lifelong trait) was because he had just fallen in love but was likely for immediate call-up; they arranged a love-nest with a gas fire, Guinness, Bix Beiderbecke record and condoms (two) thoughtfully provided. Anxious next day for the result, they were disappointed when Goorney shook his head: "The sirens went just as I was getting down to it. I had to make for the hospital - I was on fire-guard duty." What Goorney kept from all but Littlewood was that the nurses' home has been hit and that all night he had been bringing out the dead.
Towards the end of the war, with Goorney in the Army, Littlewood let him know that she was planning a new company almost immediately. Knowing he was unlikely to be demobbed for some months, Goorney put on one of his best performances to simulate nervous collapse, convincing enough to army shrinks to merit an honourable discharge ("a psychopathic personality of the 'artistic' type" was the diagnosis) and he was able to join the embryo company, a founder member (and until his death the oldest survivor) of the outfit first called the Workshop, before becoming Theatre Workshop.
In 1947 Goorney and Gerry Raffles, the company's new young manager and before long Littlewood's lover and then partner until his death, took part in a Combined Services tour of Germany, from where Goorney wrote vivid letters to Littlewood describing eye-opening productions and state-subsidised houses.
Returning to Littlewood, Goorney went into MacColl's ballad opera Johnnie Noble (1947), the story of a Hull fisherman using traditional music of the North-East; this was a major success, notably for a powerful scene involving Goorney as one of the unit manning a Bofors gun under shattering aerial bombardment.
Based for a period in Kendal, Theatre Workshop continued with classes, summer schools and rehearsals for MacColl's The Flying Doctor, an effective shotgun marriage of Molière and Marx Brothers comedy, with Goorney giving a performance of bristling comedic energy as Sganarelle. His work continued to grow; he was especially inventively impressive in the title-role of the cuckolded husband in Lorca's Don Perlimplin, popular on all the company's tours, often difficult for an unsubsidised venture (funding bodies for years tended to be woefully indifferent, even hostile, to Theatre Workshop's supposedly "anarchic" methods, although in truth few companies were more disciplined).
Often additionally taking on much fund-raising administrative work, Goorney was a key player in the launch of Uranium 235 (originally produced in Newcastle in 1946), MacColl's anti- nuclear play that created a considerable stir, particularly for a mesmerising atomic ballet sequence. The production, ceaselessly inventive under Littlewood, toured widely (the company even played Billy Butlin's Filey holiday camp, appearing after the wrestlers), and, backed financially by Michael Redgrave and Sam Wanamaker, who had seen the company's work when touring themselves, marked Theatre Workshop's first London exposure (Embassy, 1952) to politely baffled notices (metropolitan critics were unfamiliar with this kind of work, much ahead of its time and at a polar extreme from London theatres' then prevailing politesse).
Plans for a permanent base in a converted David Lewis building in Liverpool fell through, as did hopes of a home in Manchester. The company's tours abroad were always successful and, despite often desperate financial times, they were buoyed up at home by audience reaction to such productions as Littlewood's buoyant but also astringent Le Malade Imaginaire (with Goorney a pungent Purgon) which delighted the 1952 Edinburgh Festival.
Theatre Workshop's peripatetic life finally ceased when Raffles found and negotiated a lease on the shabby old Theatre Royal at Stratford, E15, as the company's base, although many of the company often slept in the stalls or dressing rooms to save money.
The glory years, with Goorney a linch-pin member of the company, were not slow in arriving. An outstanding early production was The Alchemist (1953) - Ben Jonson's lucid mind and rich language resonated for Littlewood - in which Goorney as Subtle formed a fizzingly agile double act with Harry H. Corbett's Face, with subsequent highlights including a revelatory Richard II (with Goorney hauntingly suggesting power become frail and fallible as John of Gaunt), A Christmas Carol (a pinched, costive Scrooge), Volpone (a vivid study of avarice as Corbaccio) and The Government Inspector (with Goorney's venal Mayor a stand-out amid a whole gallery of fine character studies).
Goorney played in the premiere of Brendan Behan's Irish prison-set The Quare Fellow (not a single Irishman in the cast) which transferred to the West End (Comedy, 1956). Also, with the company, he helped Littlewood to lick Behan's initially sketchy and even inchoate The Hostage into shape. Helped, too, by an early strikingly simple set by Sean Kenny and ebullient performances including Goorney's hilarious old rebel of 1916 who believes that revolutionaries are not what they used to be, The Hostage opened triumphantly and then in turn transferred to Shaftesbury Avenue and in 1961 to Broadway.
Success, money, the dispersal of actors with commercial transfers and publicity all soured Littlewood's dream of a genuine permanent ensemble and she left E15 for a period of travel and work abroad. The ever-loyal Goorney, with other core members of the Littlewood "family" - Barbara Windsor, James Booth - joined her for the sadly misbegotten Lionel Bart musical Twang! (Shaftesbury, 1965), a sorry mess based on the Robin Hood legend and a predictable head-on collision of West End commercialism and Theatre Workshop's improvisatory explorations. Littlewood walked out of the show late in rehearsals and only rarely, particularly after Raffles's death, returned to Stratford.
Goorney's reputation as a superb character actor ensured a regular post-Theatre Workshop career. In the West End he played Moses in Sir John Gielgud's glitteringly star-studded H.M. Tennent production of The School for Scandal (Haymarket), investing the moneylender with an unusually effective asperity. He had a distinguished period in the 1970s for the National Theatre, working most regularly for Bill Bryden, who directed him in the promenade production of Lark Rise to Candleford, The Mysteries, Don Quixote with Paul Scofield, and the powerful production of O'Neill's sea-plays of The Long Voyage Home.
Another O'Neill play - the short rarity of Hughie - saw what was perhaps Goorney's finest South Bank appearance, even in a part which, although onstage throughout, had comparatively little to say. In Hayden Griffin's lovingly realistic bum hotel's seedy foyer, Goorney seemed almost part of the design as the night clerk behind the desk, finally coming to life with a sort of creaky alacrity, more than holding his own with Stacy Keach in the other, much showier, all-talking role. It was an object lesson in concentration and listening on stage.
Later in life, Goorney and his wife moved to Bath and he occasionally appeared at the nearby Bristol Old Vic. Also in regional theatre he gave a beautifully dignified performance as Billy Rice, the old music-hall headliner in John Osborne's The Entertainer (Salisbury Playhouse) and a richly detailed study of the antique dealer Solomon in Arthur Miller's The Price (Manchester Library).
Goorney's film career consisted largely of supporting Jewish roles - Norman Jewison's Fiddler on the Roof (1971), most notably - while he also impressed in Christine's Edzard's Little Dorrit (1988). On television he made many appearances, working until comparatively recently on such series as Bramwell and Waking the Dead, and also featuring in Mel Smith's Blackball (2003).
The crowded years with Littlewood were vividly covered in Goorney's book The Theatre Workshop Story (1981), which is happily scheduled for reissue later this year.
Alan Strachan
Internet Links for Howard Goorney
IMDb (Internet Broadway Database)
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