Ann Jellicoe

Ann Jellicoe was born on the 15th of July 1927 in Middlesbrough, North Yorkshire and studied acting at London's Central School of Speech and Drama. She had wanted to be an actress since the age of four, when she took a dancing class. She fell in love with performance and was engaged in theatricals during her school days. Ann Jellicoe is an English playwright and theatrical director who's best known for her 1962 play "The Knack", which was adapted into the 1965 film The Knack... and How to Get It (1965) by director Richard Lester, and for promoting the idea of "community plays". Her first tentative efforts at writing were creating dialogue in her head for charades. At the Central School of Speech and Drama, a class in improvisation whetted her appetite for making up dialogue. She also was exposed to the dramatist Christopher Fry, who was invited in the school to talk to the students about playwriting. After she graduated from the Central School, she did her apprenticeship as a thespian in a repertory theatre in Aberystwyth,Wales. She was a plain girl in a time when young actresses were expected to be good-looking and were not allowed to be interesting, before the impact of Bertolt Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble on English theatre, a revolution she would be part of. It was friends who got her her first job at Aberystwyth, and after that was over, she bounced around between acting gigs and tried her hand at directing. She also taught acting. Jellicoe established and ran the experimental Cockpit Theatre at the Little Theatre Club. She began her career as a dramatist with a one-act play written to implement her own innovative ideas of the theatre that was included in a showcase she was directing. Her breakthrough was the play "The Sport of My Mad Mother", written for a 1955 competition for aspiring playwrights sponsored by "The Observer" newspaper, overseen by critic Kenneth Tynan. The play, which used absurdist dialogue and physical theater to tell the story of juvenile delinquents, won third prize . The initial production was staged by the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre. Company founder George Devine directed the play. Tasking himself with the mission of creating a new type of theater that broke with the class-bound complacency of the commercial West End theater, Devine also directed John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1959) in 1956, the play that heralded the arrival of "The Angry Young Man" who forever changed English theater. Eschewing plot, Jellicoe's drama embraced absurdity and unconventional theatrical devices. In contrast, "Look Back in Anger", which started the revolution in the London theater, was conventional in plot and dialog. Jellicoe's technique sought to involve the audience more directly. "The Sport of My Mad Mother" was a commercial flop in its initial run, and it also failed to win over the critics. This was not seen as a bad thing by Devine and others at the Royal Court, as they were in a war against conventional theater whose foot-soldiers were stodgy Establishment critics. Working with Devine at the Royal Court was a great experience for Jellicoe as Devine loved writers, believing that it was writers who would change the English theater. In 1955, he had declared the English Stage Company to be a "writer's theatre". There was a writers group at the Royal Court that influenced the development of her drama. She even met her second husband, the photographer Roger Mayne, at the Royal Court. The sole woman member of the Royal Court's Writers Workshop, she continued to write, earning a reputation as someone who knew about the younger generation as her plays focused on young people. "The Sport of My Mad Mother" was re-staged many times and was revised by the author in 1962 That was the year she had her greatest success, when the Royal Court staged her play "The Knack" starring Rita Tushingham, who also would star in the 1965 film. Jellicoe had decided to write a sex comedy after the discouraging reception of her first play. Developed under the aegis of the Royal Court's writers group, "The Knack" is autobiographical, with her second husband Roger, whom she lived with for a while before marriage, being the mode for the character of Colin. "The Knack", directed by Mike Nichols, was a hit when it was staged Off-Broadway in New York in 1964, running for 685 performances. Jellicoe never had another huge success like "The Knack", for instead of following it up with a similar work, the Royal Court stated her play "The Rising Generation", which had been written before the "Knack" for the Girl Guides, who had wanted a play about teenagers, and "Shelley", an historical play about the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. She eventually became literary manager of the Royal Court in the period 1973-5, where she promoted women playwrights, including Caryl Churchill. She had two children with her husband Roger, and wrote several children's plays, plays about children in which children would act the parts, as part of an evolution as dramatist that was as a result of raising her own kids. She wrote the first of children's plays (known as Jellieplays) in Dorset, where they had moved in the early '70s to get away from the decay of London which accelerated under 'Edward Heath''s ministry. The first children's play was written for a small comprehensive school, but the teacher who normally staged plays with the schoolchildren felt threatened, and the school backed out of putting on the play. Through her involvement with South West Arts' Drama Committee, she had become acquainted with the Medium Fair Theatre Company, which put on community plays. (It has since disbanded.) She approached Medium Fair and they staged her first children's play. It involved a cast of 80, including children from the school that had originally rejected it (the teacher who had stymied the production had moved on). In this iteration of a community play, it involves many members of a community, not just the cast but the crew and community members who sign on for various jobs like selling refreshments during the intermission. In 1978, she launched the Colway Theatre Trust, which evolved into the Claque Theatre, to promote the concept of community plays. As the concept evolved, a community play is written about a particular group of people and the issues they face. It is written and staged, employing locals, in no more than 18 months. The Colway/Claque Theatre has produced 30 community plays in all. The community play movement was instrumental in bringing more women into the theater, providing a vehicle for women dramatists.