Transcript

Jude Kelly:

I think once you recognize that some people have got barriers and some people have got fewer, if any, you can either think, “Well, great. I’m glad I’m on the side of the ones that have got fewer barriers, hooray,” or you can feel a sense of injustice on behalf of everybody else. And I felt the latter.

Jude Kelly:

We are not going to get systemic change if we simply rely on law because law doesn’t change culture. And we’re not going to get systemic change if we only operate from top down. However well-meaning white women there are, if white women, for example, think, well, all they need to do is pull the feminist strings that they’ve got and the world will get better, it won’t. This needs to be something that’s about a whole community, whole involvement, and how you maintain that conversation.

Jude Kelly:

Because none of us have ever been outside the matrix we’re in, we don’t ever have the ability to go, “You know how it looks like that?” Or, “You know how that when you see it like that?” Because we’ve never seen this world of equality, so we’ve no way of modeling this. We can only muddle our way around, trying to ease off the combination of straight jacket and security blankets that we’ve got.

Aleks Krotoski:

Wait, hold onto this. Dude, this is fantastic. This is amazing material. Hello, you are listening to Standing on the Shoulders, a podcast about giants, not the kind you run into in fairytales, but the more metaphorical and the inspirational kind, whose beefy symbolic shoulders, you can stand on to reach for greater heights, whose vision helps you to see a dazzlingly clear path ahead.

Aleks Krotoski:

Across these episodes, you’ll be hearing stories of a number of thinkers and innovators, visionaries who somehow manage to see a world that others can’t, that tell us about the key moments that shaped their professional journeys. And they’ll talk about the inspirational giant, whose work inspired them the most. It’s hosted by me, Aleks Krotoski, and it’s supported by Pearson.

Aleks Krotoski:

Our guest today is Jude Kelly. Over more than three decades, she has run art centers and founded festivals. She’s directed more than 100 plays. She’s acted, and she’s even spent some time as a folk singer. Her work has appeared at the Royal Theater Company in London’s West End and the Châtalet in Paris.

Aleks Krotoski:

She was 26 years old when she took on the role of artistic director at the Battersea Arts Centre. Then she had 12 years at Britain’s biggest cultural institution, the Southbank Centre in Central London. In 2010, Jude took a sidestep and she started her own thing, the Women of the World Festival, which celebrates the achievements of women and girls.

Aleks Krotoski:

Jude talked to us about finding and fostering revolutionary theater, and how she came to own her own power as a woman, and how she decided to inspire other women to do so too. And she talked to us about the influence of a woman that many refer to as the Mother of Modern Theater. But first she told me about growing up in the 1950s in Liverpool and about the Beatles connection in her life.

Jude Kelly:

Bill Pobjoy, who we kept in touch with each other until he died two years ago, he became my head teacher when I was 14. He was the first head teacher in the UK to ban corporal punishment. He liked the fact that I was a rebellious, difficult girl. Because I was. I didn’t want to obey people. I didn’t want to do what I was told all the time. But I didn’t know what to do with this energy. I was getting into trouble. I was shoplifting and I was bunking off school. I was hiking off with people too old for me and singing in concerts around the country. I was really badly behaved.

Jude Kelly:

He intervened really and said, “Look, I can see that you really love plays and you love drama, everything. Why don’t you start your own drama club at lunchtime?” He basically said, “You need to take responsibility for your life now and here’s a huge opportunity.” So he gave me the hall at lunchtime. Can you imagine? That’s an amazing thing to do.

Jude Kelly:

The people I was doing it with was Clive Barker, the horror writer, and Sue Bickley the opera singer. They weren’t all that then. That’s what they all became. Les Dennis, the comedian. There was a whole group of us. I used to create improvisational plays at lunchtime and then I suppose probably force everybody to come and see them.

Aleks Krotoski:

The lunch hour wasn’t Jude’s first experience with performance. She had had her start in theater direction quite a lot earlier. When she was five years old, she used to put on plays in her backyard because she wanted to be in charge.

Jude Kelly:

Because up until that point, you were in somebody else’s play. And as a girl and as a small girl, I was usually the person being tied up and put in the corner to be rescued, while everybody else rode about on pretend horses, and shot people, and did wonderful things, et cetera. I began to realize that, unless you’re in control of the story, you are going to be told what to do, probably with not a speaking part. So I wanted to say, “No, I’m not going to be in somebody else’s story. I’m going to try and shape other people’s stories, including my own.”

Aleks Krotoski:

Her parents encouraged the budding director and the family spent their free time at Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre.

Jude Kelly:

It was quite radical. It put on new plays. It put on new versions of old plays, so it would do Julius Caesar, but really, really modern. And again, I was really struck by the fact that this particular theater was trying to say, “You can do Shakespeare, but you can make it relevant to a group of young women in Liverpool. Or if there isn’t a play that is about us, let’s commission our own plays.”

Aleks Krotoski:

This was a revolutionary time in the theater as well because theater was being taken out of traditional theater buildings. But also the ways of creating theater was evolving. It was no longer a top down relationship. You didn’t have Google to look up how to do improvisational theater. You didn’t have Google to necessarily tell you like, “These are some really good theater exercises for us to do as we develop our lunchtime drama plays.” You had to make it up. Can you tell me a little bit about what your inspirations were for that? How you decided that certain things would be a good way to move forward in creating and directing place?

Jude Kelly:

It’s true that I had no role models. Until I went to university to do drama, I didn’t know any theater directors except the one that was running the Everyman in Liverpool. I didn’t know what it looked like. As I started playing around with, “What are the themes that I really think we should be talking about?”

Jude Kelly:

I realized that what I wanted to try to do was not romances or comedies, although you can include that in what you’re doing, but actually I was really interested in tackling taboo subjects that people find difficult to talk about, issues to do with conflict, issues to do with justice. That makes me sound incredibly worthy as a teenager, and I probably was a bit. But I wanted to use drama to speak about really big feelings inside humans that can be volatile, can be explosive, can be violent or can be amazing.

Aleks Krotoski:

Jude’s earliest experiments in theater making were inspired by her awareness of difference, starting with her own identity.

Jude Kelly:

So you can tell from my name Kelly, that my background is Irish Catholic. But actually my father, who was one of 14 children, married my mother, who is from German Protestant background. Instantly in Liverpool, that really meant something because Protestants and Catholics didn’t really engage. Hence we have two football teams and two cathedrals. So I grew up knowing that there were divides that you had to create dialogue in order to create bridges. My family were always trying to create bridges between Catholic and Protestant parts of our family.

Aleks Krotoski:

It wasn’t just her own difference than inspired her though. She was raised in a neighborhood that celebrated diversity.

Jude Kelly:

Then we lived in Upper Parliament Street in Liverpool. My ballet classes were in the African Centre, which was in Chinatown, and all the kids who did the ballet were from all of these different backgrounds. When my father passed his first set of exams in the civil service, we moved house. We moved to a different place in Liverpool. Then I went to Norah Button’s dancing school. She was Miss Liverpool 1962, actually. Nobody was black. Nobody was Chinese. It was in a church hall where the church goers were all white.

Jude Kelly:

So I realized that suddenly I lost friends, but I’d also lost a sense of excitement because Chinatown was exciting. The African Centre was exciting and we were exciting in it. We were all finding out about each other in a very real way. Then it became something that was much more monocultural. At five and six, you have no way of articulating that, but it was a sense of loss.

Aleks Krotoski:

Jude was a sensitive enough kid to recognize the loss and later it powered a lot of her professional work. She chose spaces and plays that tackled class segregation, and she gave a voice to working class stories and to perspectives. She recognized the gender dynamics of education and of opportunity, and rather than relax into her own upwardly mobile place in society, she chose to use her power of privilege for people who couldn’t.

Jude Kelly:

I think once you recognize that some people have got barriers and some people have got fewer, if any, you can either think, “Well great. I’m glad I’m on the side of the ones that have got fewer barriers, hooray,” or you can feel a sense of injustice on behalf of everybody else, and I felt the latter. I felt this is unjust.

Jude Kelly:

It wasn’t that I felt guilty, but I thought, “I don’t want to use my storytelling and all the things I want to do in art and just for this group of people that I’ve ended up being amongst. I want to go back and include everybody else.” And I think I’ve been trying to do that ever since.

Aleks Krotoski:

You can find this strong social and moral core throughout Jude’s 30 year career. The work that she is the most proud of was driven by a sense of social purpose. She landed on themes of homelessness and domestic violence, which did not get much time in theaters back then. She traveled to Russia during the Glasnost years to research Sarcophagus, which was a play written in the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. She went to Nigeria during the military dictatorship of Sani Abacha and auditioned actors in secret for a play written by Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka. When activist and writer, Ken Saro-Wiwa was hanged. The play became a shrine for Nigerians around the world.

Aleks Krotoski:

Then there was her Olivier winning multimedia retelling of Singing in the Rain. Most people would stop there and congratulate themselves on a stellar career. Instead, Jude founded the Women of the World Festival in 2010-

Jude Kelly:

Which are now in many countries.

Aleks Krotoski:

What are the WOW Women of the World Festivals? What are they?

Jude Kelly:

They’re public celebrations of everything that girls and women have achieved in history very much based around the cities or the towns and the culture of that place, but drawing on women’s experiences from right across the world. They’re celebratory because we need the stamina for optimism, but they’re also bold because we need to have the courage to make changes happen still. And they are multi-formed in the sense that they cover all subjects. They are totally intergenerational, interracial. They cover all areas of women’s lives. It’s an opportunity for us to come together in a way that allows us to join up the dots about our lives.

Aleks Krotoski:

Jude says that one of the things that she tries to do with her festival is to get rid of all of the barriers that usually trip up social interaction, that class of the race, the gender privilege, that can grease the social wheels for some people and totally jam them up for others.

Jude Kelly:

When you go into a festival that’s celebrating girls and women, what you don’t want to do is mirror the world of inequality by producing a status written event. We don’t have a model of what equality looks like in the world for women or for anybody else for that matter. We haven’t got one. We’re inside a matrix with very, very clear lines. As far as women are concerned, they’re inside patriarchy.

Jude Kelly:

So if we want to imagine what it could be like, the joy, the liberation, the extraordinary benefit that would be ours, and ours to share with others if we had equality. Somehow you have to conjure up the sense of that, even if it’s only for a few days. This festival model allows people to really move amongst each other, make choices, have conversations that they wouldn’t expect to have, and that produces a sense of optimism and a sense of, “Well, why isn’t it like this more often?” So it isn’t just having a nice time then go away again. It’s also having a nice time and realize that it’s up to you to mirror this in your daily life.

Aleks Krotoski:

When Judy talked about wanting to go beyond making sure everyone had a nice time, I was reminded of one of my favorite festivals, the Saint Christopher’s Day Festival of Spitalfields in London. It was the one day, every year that hierarchy was turned on its head. When kings swapped roles with beggars, so both could be reminded of how it feels to have power and privilege. I asked whether that was what she was aiming for with the Women of the World Festival. It gave permission to be free from the things in society that keep us down.

Jude Kelly:

How do you seek out even more voices that are neglected? How do you take an issue like domestic violence that’s been add one year and say, “Okay, what are the practical measures that we’re going to do for next year to demonstrate, well, what could progress look like?”

Jude Kelly:

This isn’t about a glib fix, or just a moment of spontaneous joy and then out. I go back to this idea of welcome. We are not going to get systemic change if we simply rely on law because law doesn’t change culture. And we’re not going to get systemic change if we only operate from top down, however well-meaning white women there are. If white women, for example, think, well, all they need to do is pull the feminist strings that they’ve got and the world will get better, it won’t.

Jude Kelly:

This needs to be something that’s about a whole community, whole involvement, and how you maintain that conversation after a festival is over. So it’s consciousness raising. They’ll be bumping into women weightlifters giving displays. They’ll be bumping into stand up comedy. They’ll be bumping into music. And then they’ll be going into big sessions that really look at, “What do we mean when we say that women have less economic power than men? What does that actually look like as fact?”

Jude Kelly:

So it’s to give women a kind of comprehensive sense that, whether they are a woman of color, trying to deal with multiple issues of disadvantage, or that a woman who thinks she’s reached the pinnacle of her ambition as a white FTSE 100 board member, of which there are a scattering number, but actually we need girls and women to understand that every single one of us are part of a system, which is not equal for women. And therefore, we are part of a moment in time when we have to all put our shoulders to the wheel to make change happen for each of us and for everyone.

Aleks Krotoski:

Which is why Jude decided to put her shoulder to the wheel and start a festival that would inspire change for all women. She prepared for this moment, like other pivotal moments of her career, by defining her purpose, checking her hubris and ego, and hurling herself into it. In this case, there was one more thing that made Women of the World happen. June’s very own WOW woman. Jude first heard about her when she studied drama at Birmingham University in 1975.

Jude Kelly:

When I went to university, within the first months, I said to the tutors, “So I’m going to direct. How can I start directing?” They said, “Well, you’re not allowed to direct until you’re in the third form, the third year.” And I said, “Well, I’ve only come here to direct. So why can’t I?” And they said, I remember this. I’ll never forget it, “And anyway what do you mean you want to be a director? There are only three women directors. There’s Jo Knight, who’s a lesbian, there’s Joan Littlewood, who’s retired, and there’s Buzz Goodbody, who’s just killed herself. Which would you like to be?”

Jude Kelly:

That’s what specifically, and that moment of challenging hostility, when you thought, “This man doesn’t actually want me to succeed. He doesn’t want me to have my dream come true.” That was such a shock and it was a good shock. It was a good shock because I thought, “Whoa, I had no idea.”

Aleks Krotoski:

Tell me the first time you saw a photograph of Joan Littlewood, can you describe what your response was to that picture? And also, what she looked like for people who’ve never seen her?

Jude Kelly:

When I heard this phrase, “Joan Littlewood, who’s retired,” I started to research her. If you see a picture of her, she’s a pixie-ish looking wizened face. Because, of course, by the time people are famous, that’s when they get their photographs taken and that [inaudible 00:19:11] when they’re older. She always wore a worker’s cap and she was a heavy smoker. So she had a kind of wrinkled, small, impish face with this cap rammed down over her curly brown hair. Not glamorous at all, but with an incredible reputation by that time, but retired, already retired. So I never got to meet her until much, much later on in my life. And didn’t get to see any of her work live.

Jude Kelly:

I started reading about what she’d done. Famously, she took theater into an area of East London, Stratford, very working class, poor area, not unlike the area that I grew up with when I was a little girl, and she put on plays. When she couldn’t find plays that suited that community, she commissioned plays.

Aleks Krotoski:

Plays like A Taste of Honey, which featured some very transgressive elements of kitchen sink drama for the time, out of wedlock pregnancies, marriages of convenience, homosexuality. This was 1958. Well before the Beatles shocked the world with their trademark long hair. But for Jude, all of Littlewood’s plays exposed the real social issues that the not so gilded classes faced at this time. And she brought them to the people that they were about, far from the glitz and the glamor of London’s West End.

Jude Kelly:

She took over an old vaudeville musical theater, and which again, symbolically belongs to the people in terms of its form. She said, “And this is going to be for us again.” Up until the point that she went to this theater, she had actually got a very good career with the BBC as a director of drama. She was highly intelligent, extremely able, very well reviewed, but the thrust of all her work from when she was a teenager onwards was theater for the people, of the people, for the people.

Jude Kelly:

Now, very few people, and certainly women, were doing anything like that. Although theater was apparently going through a revolution, an awful lot of it was still operating… You’d exchange one male voice for a different male voice. Okay, that male voice might be more working class or talking about something slightly different, but essentially it wasn’t reaching new audiences. She wanted to reach new audiences and she wanted to bring women’s stories more to the front.

Aleks Krotoski:

Jude says that when they got together, Littlewood turned out to be exactly, as she imagined.

Jude Kelly:

When I did finally meet her, I realized what a mischievous person she was. She was very subversive in everything that she did. She liked to undo authority, and undo certainty, and create unexpected moments offstage as well as on. But she was so influential because she stated her idealism right up front about her belief in humans deserving and needing culture. And she went out and did it. It wasn’t just a theory.

Aleks Krotoski:

When you met her in person, you say that she was mischievous, and people describe people who are mischievous as having a twinkle in their eye, or a manner about them. Can you describe what that manner was, whether there was a physical tell or a social tell that really drew you in, and made you feel like you wanted to play? Because that’s what you do with people who are mischievous.

Jude Kelly:

Yeah. She was tiny. I’m five foot two, she’s probably usually four foot 11. She had been retired by that time about 20 years, so she really wasn’t playing inside theater any longer. But she asked me lots of provocative questions about the play that she’d just seen, that I directed. And she was interested in needling me in the way that a kind of a grandma might tease a grandchild.

Jude Kelly:

I also think she was disappointed maybe in life. I don’t mean disappointed necessarily in her life, but I think, like a lot of people who wanted radical change, it never comes very quickly, and sometimes it loops back on itself. And so I got the impression that she was both mischievous, but also had sadness. I would understand that because, although she was part of making amazing changes happen in theater and in cultural life generally, and I would say that she was one of the most significant figures.

Jude Kelly:

Interestingly, if you ask people about theater, they’ll often mention Peter Brook as a guru about theater. She was just as much of a guru. I think because she’s a woman, and because she was dealing as well with more forgotten communities, I would say that she already knew that her legacy would be harder to retain.

Aleks Krotoski:

Did you ever reflect on what it was that you started to do with the inspiring figure of Littlewood into your own self? Did you start to dress like her? Did you develop that kind of needling question? Was there anything that you started to find in yourself that was like, “Ah, yes, of course. She’s inspired me. I want to be like her, and therefore, I’m going to do these things like her”?

Jude Kelly:

Well, it’s amazing, isn’t it? If I’d ever watched her working in a rehearsal room and seen her methods, I could imagine I might’ve been very influenced by that. Because from what I understand anecdotally, she was so individual in her approach to actors and to the rehearsal room, the atmosphere of that, I think that would have had a big influence. I’m sad that I never got to see that.

Jude Kelly:

I couldn’t imitate her or dress like her. She’s just so different from me in so many ways. I certainly couldn’t chain smoke like she did. But I think the thing that I was inspired to do was be braver. I don’t believe that anybody doesn’t give a toss. People do care what people think, but often they are compelled to throw those feelings to one side in order to do the greater thing that they have to get on with.

Jude Kelly:

I think that she had lots of battles about money. She had lots of battles about things, and she became an embattled person in some way. I’ve tried not to do that. So in some respect, I’ve been inspired by trying to make sure that I didn’t damage myself as much as some of the pioneers, who I think had to be damaged almost because they were dealing with such tough, unyielding terrain. People who went before us to make a pathway, but at the end road, we are so grateful to them. We must be.

Jude Kelly:

But the thing that I was so aware of her is that she just never pretended that she didn’t believe in what she believed in. She didn’t compromise in how she described it. She didn’t kowtow to anybody. She got on and she did it.

Aleks Krotoski:

To find out more about Jude Kelly and possibly how to attend one of her WOW Fests, go to judekellystudios.com. You can find more on Joan Littlewood and her company on the British library’s website, under the title, An Introduction to Joan Littlewood’s Theater Practice.

Aleks Krotoski:

For show notes and links to stories mentioned in this episode, go to standingontheshoulders.net. Standing on the Shoulders is a Storythings production. This episode was written and produced by Shruti Ravindran. Our audio engineer and sound design was by Kenya Scarlett. Additional interviews were by Eloise Stevens. Social media by Kate Norton. Artwork by Darren Garrett and Eden Brackenbury. Our executive producers are Hugh Garry and Caroline Leery. It’s supported by Pearson, and it’s hosted by me, Aleks Krotoski.

Aleks Krotoski:

It takes a lot of time and a big team of people to make this podcast, more than most people would imagine. So if you like the show, please go to Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or wherever you go to get your podcast fix, and rate it. It really does help people to discover us.

Aleks Krotoski:

On our next episode:

Anab Jain:

There’s no fresh start, like you press a button and say, “Yeah, refresh.” It’s not going to happen. It’s going to be standing on the bones of our actions and decisions that we’re making today. I think if we are able to liberate ourselves from this shiny future idea, we might benefit a lot.

Aleks Krotoski:

Thanks for listening.