Company name: Gay Sweatshop Theatre Company
Founders: Roger Baker, Lawrence Collinson, Alan Wakeman, Drew Griffiths, Gordon MacDonald, Gerald Chapman, John Roman Baker.
Established: 1974
Purpose: ‘To make heterosexuals aware of the oppression they exercise or tolerate, and expose and end media misrepresentations of homosexuals.’
Current Status: Disbanded by the Board in 1997
Area of Work: Gay and Lesbian, New Writing
Policy: ‘To counteract the prevailing perception in mainstream theatre of what homosexuals were like, therefore providing a more realistic image for the public and to increase the general awareness of the oppression of sexuality, both gay and straight, the impact it has on people’s lives and the society that reinforces it.’ (1975 Manifesto)
Structure: The company was as a collective from 1974 to 1978 when it became a company limited by guarantee run by Artistic Directors. The Artistic Directorship of the company was shared between a voluntary panel of six. All other staff were employed for single productions, e.g. Designers, actors & production staff. From 1991 until its closure the company was led by two Artistic Directors.
Funding: Originally financially self-supported, relying on the voluntary work of it’s members and project funding. In 1976/77 they received funding from the Gulbenkian Foundation. From 1977 to 1981 they received project/touring funding from the Arts Council of Great Britain and the Regional Arts Associations. In 1981 the company was forced to close due to the suspension of funding. In 1984 the Arts Council of Great Britain granted them a touring subsidy. In 1985 they received an annual grant from the Greater London Arts Association (GLAA) which enabled them to maintain an office and two paid staff. There was further funding from the Greater London Council for the Gay Times Arts Festivals in 1985 and 1987. At the same time Noel Greig was successful in getting charity status for the company which meant that it could develop a fundraising scheme (POSH – Pals of Sweatshop). In 1989, led by David Benedict, the company applied to the Arts Council for annual funding and a Board was subsequently recruited and two permanent Artistic Directors (James Neale Kennerley and Lois Weaver).
Based: The company office was originally run from Drew Griffiths’ front room in Marius Road, Balham. They moved to an office above London Friend in Upper Street, Islington. From 1984-88 they operated from Noel Greig’s house in West Hampstead and moved into permanent office space in 1989.
Performance Venues: The ICA, The Drill Hall, Theatre and Arts Centres. Working men’s clubs, Theatre Festivals, Women’s Festivals, Gay Rallies. The company toured nationally to middle and small-scale venues, and internationally to Holland Germany and Belgium and around Europe.
Audiences: Gay Sweatshop’s sell-out founding season at Inter-Action’s Almost-Free Theatre in February 1975 had full houses of mainstream lunch-hour theatre-goers provided by members of the Ambiance Lunch-hour Theatre Club. This inaugural season was so successful that several of the plays transferred to other theatres – including Thinking Straight by Lawrence Collinson and Ships by Alan Wakeman. This first season finally ended in June when Inter-Action needed their theatre back. As Gay Sweatshop was entirely created by volunteers it had no money but managed to subsist somehow as a touring company with a political agenda and smaller mainly gay and lesbian audiences until Arts Council funding was obtained in 1977.
Company work and process:
In 1973 Inter-Action staged a Women’s Season of plays at the Almost Free Theatre. In 1974 Inter-Action advertised for gay writers to submit plays with a view to starting a gay company and in 1975 Gay Sweatshop was formed, staging the season Homosexual Acts. Following the company’s initial success, more plays were commissioned and they were invited to perform a lunchtime season at the ICA. In 1976 Gay Sweatshop wanted to involve equal numbers of men and women in the company, and as a step towards that, they invited Mary Moore, Kate Crutchley and Jill Posener to join the company with Any Woman Can (see Mary Moore’s video extract). The company embarked on a tour in 1976 of Any Woman Can and the company’s first devised play Mister X, including to Ireland where they encountered controversy at the Project Arts Centre. In 1977 they were awarded funding by the Arts Council. That same year the company split into men’s and women’s companies.
In 1977 Noel Greig joined the company and co-scripted the show As Time Goes By, which was a major success. Philip Osment joined the company the same year as a performer. In the same year, some of the women in the company were centrally involved in setting up the Women’s Festival (see Julie Parker’s quote and Kate Crutchley’s audio extract) at the Drill Hall (then Action Space), leading to the company’s close association with the Drill Hall. Following the success of the Women’s Festival the men in the company were invited by the Drill Hall to stage a gay, male festival, the Gay Times Festival. In 1978, Gay News magazine published a number of statements from Gay Sweatshop members titled, Why I’m in Gay Sweatshop. In 1979 the men’s company produced Dear Love of Comrades and Iceberg was devised as a mixed company. On the Dear Love of Comrades tour the company was victim of a queer-bashing attack. The company continued to produce shows until 1981 when it closed for two years due to lack of funding in a climate of funding cuts and political oppression under Margaret Thatcher. It was revived in 1983 to produce Noel Greig’s Poppies.
In 1984 Drew Griffiths was murdered. In 1985 and 1987 Gay Sweatshop hosted two gay New Writing festivals Gay Sweatshop Times Ten Festival and Gay Sweatshop Times Twelve Festival. In 1987 Gerald Chapman actor and playwright died of an AIDS related disease (see Noel Greig’s video extract). After his death, the Gerald Chapman Trainee Director Award was set up at the Royal Court Theatre. The same year Noel Greig resigned but still remained close to the company, in 1989 writing Paradise Now and Then with music by Richard Coles. In 1988 the company was instrumental in setting up the Arts Lobby to oppose Section 28. This was also the year of the first Gay Sweatshop play by a Black writer: Twice Over by Jackie Kay. The company worked as a collective throughout much of its existence but in 1991 the Arts Council insisted that they employ a male and a female Artistic Director: Lois Weaver and James Neale-Kennerly. The company closed in 1997 due to lack of funding.
Personal appraisals and thoughts:
Roger Baker: ‘Why a gay theatre group? This is a question that has been asked many times since the existence of Gay Sweatshop became known. The idea that homosexuals might identify themselves and concentrate energy in one particular area is still greeted with bewilderment, apprehension and, sometimes, scorn. The very reality of such reactions is, in fact, an answer to the question.’
Nancy Diuguid: ‘We hope to make an artistic contribution to the theatrical scene; if we can attract people to us, professional theatre people and others, who are not ashamed of being gay, then we shall have made a political contribution also.’
Philip Osment: ‘In many ways the five members of the company were like ambassadors for the Gay movement and it was crucial that they were themselves gay. Through travelling around the country with the play [Mister X], holding discussion and providing Gay News and gay publications on the book stall, the company became part of the of a network of media and were forging links with people all over the country. Sometimes the performances provided the first impetus for the setting up of a local gay group because it brought people together, or it helped local groups to gain new members and consolidate their activities. Often campaigns against the company would backfire, as happened in Golder’s Green, and people who might otherwise have sat on the fence would be politicised by seeing intolerance and prejudice masquerading as morality and decency.’ (Four Plays and a Company)
See Kate Crutchley‘s video quote on Care and Control.
See Julie Parker‘s audio quote on touring with Gay Sweatshop.
See Richard Sandells’s tribute to fundraiser Ags Irwin and their work together.
Kate Owen: ‘I joined the new G.S.Management Committee after Poppies in 1984. It was both an honour and a poisoned chalice! At first it was just three chaps and myself, and then Tierl Thompson joined. It was such a difficult time for gay people in the UK because there had been the beginning of a ‘Liberation’ for some of us, which was followed by ‘The Gay Plague’ and Clause 28. Gay Sweatshop was mentioned in the debate in the House of Commons [Clause 28], Neil Kinnock‘s office wanted him photographed on our This Island’s Mine set, and Ian McKellen wanted to be in the show. By the time that I left in 1990 we had produced an enormous amount of work, which had toured all over This Island. Was it ‘the best time of our lives’?
And today in 2014, Gay Marriage became legal in the UK for the first time.’
Simon Callow: ‘Passing By was my first experience of political theatre. Though in essence a very sweet account of a passing love affair between two young men, it was utterly radical in offering no apology or explanation for the affair – it was just an affair, like any other. The effect on the predominantly gay audience was sensational – they wept, not because it was sad, but because it was the first time they’d seen their own lives represented on stage without inverted commas, with neither remorse nor disgust. Mart Crowley’s Boys’ in the Band – ‘Show me a happy homosexual and I’ll show you a gay corpse’ – had been packing them in, gay and straight, in the West End only a couple of years before: the acceptable face of homosexuality – brittle anguished, self-loathing. Passing By was the antidote to this seductive but poisonous brew. I was shaken by the effect the play had on the audience…. It provoked in it’s audience a huge collective sigh, as if sloughing off a centuries- old interdict. The defensive, the reflective, the self-protective mask was shed, and shy, tender, loving emotion flowed gently round the tiny auditorium. The slight play had the power, like a great popular song, of speaking directly not only to, but for, its auditors.’
Reviews:
Ships
‘...a clever, humorous, shrewdly observed almost-sexual encounter’ (The Guardian 1975)
Thinking Straight
‘…a buoyant funny piece of Gay agitprop… it communicated itself immediately to the audience and went like a bomb (in the English sense).’ (Time Out 1975)
Mister X
‘Mister X’ has already been controversial and performances have been heckled by outraged vicars, but clearly sexational journalism can no longer halt them in their tracks.’ (Time Out 1976)
Any Woman Can
‘The significance of the play was that it went beyond the individual level arguing that homosexual relationships are as valid as heterosexual ones and problematical only in terms of society’s prevailing values! The evening brought together theatre and audience in a dynamic interaction, to consider a significant social question, linking sexual oppression with the wider oppression of women in our society.’ (The Morning Star 1976)
Read more reviews here
Productions:
Interviewee reference: Kate Crutchley, Noel Greig, Bryony Lavery, Mary Moore, Julie Parker, Michelene Wandor, Philip Osment, Kate Owen.
Existing archive material: Archive material held in the Royal Holloway University archives and can be found at the Noel Greig archive, Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance.
Bibliography:
Eros and Civilisation by Herbert Marcuse (Sphere Books Ltd, GB 1969)
With Downcast Gays: Aspects of Homosexual Self-Oppression by Andrew Hodges and David Hutte (Pomegranate Press, London 1974)
Homosexual Acts. A Volume of Gay Plays. Ambiance/ Almost Free Playscripts 1. Edited By Ed Berman (Inter-Action Inprint, London.)
Strike While the Iron is Hot by Michelene Wandor (Journeyman Press, London 1980)
Carry On Understudies; Theatre and Sexual Politics by Michelene Wandor (Eyre Methuen, London 1981)
Gay Sweatshop Four plays and a company by Philip Osment (Methuen Drama, London 1989)
Not in Front of the Audience: Homosexuality of Stage by Nicholas de Jongh (Routledge, London 1992)
Contemporary Feminist Theatres: To Each Her Own by Lizbeth Goodman (Routledge, Oxon 1993)
Shakespeare’s Queer Children. Sexual Politics and Contemporary Culture by Kate Chedgzoy (Manchester University Press, Manchester 1995)
My Life in Pieces by Simon Callow (Nick Hern Books Limited, London 2010)
Acknowledgements: This webpage was assembled with the generous help of the members of Gay Sweatshop – Kate Crutchley, Noel Greig, Bryony Lavery, Julie Parker and especially, Philip Osment. We are enormously grateful to them for contributing their personal collections of images, scripts and assorted ephemera, as well as their reflections and time. This page has been written and constructed by Ray Malone. November 2013
This creation of this page was supported by the National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund