‘What Have We Got to Do with Fun?’: Littlewood, Price, and the Policy Makers

Abstract

Joan Littlewood blamed anti-socialist prejudice for Theatre Workshop's hostile treatment by the Arts Council. Yet her failure to secure the Council's backing for the Fun Palace – an open-ended project for an arts, entertainment, and education centre she developed with architect Cedric Price – may be better expressed as a collision between anarchy and bureaucracy. Following Nadine Holdsworth's 1997 article for New Theatre Quarterly, ‘“They'd Have Pissed on My Grave”: the Arts Council and Theatre Workshop’, in this article Juliet Rufford argues that the project fell victim to a form of programme censorship because it broke the rules of culture and professionalism as defined by the major funding body for the arts. The concept of ‘fun’ is seen as vital to understanding the cynicism of the policy makers towards Price and Littlewood's proposals, but also as driving explorations of intermediality, interactive performance, and performative architecture that have since been taken up successfully by artists working within and beyond the subsidized sector. Juliet Rufford is a post-doctoral research associate at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and is co-convenor of the International Federation of Theatre Research's Theatre Architecture Working Group. She has written on theatre architecture, site-specific performance, scenography, and the politics of space for publications including Contemporary Theatre Review and the Journal of Architectural Education.