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.
