In 1967, the critic Kenneth Tynan predicted that “when the annals of the British theater in the middle years of the century come to be written,” Joan Littlewood's “name will lead all the rest” (209). If Tynan's prediction ever comes true, Robert Leach will deserve no small part of the credit. His study of Littlewood and the Theatre Workshop is the first comprehensive account to be written from outside the company (it is preceded by Littlewood's fascinating but unreliable autobiography, Joan's Book, and the actor Howard Goorney's The Theatre Workshop Story, an excellent history drawn largely from interviews with former members of the company). Along with Nadine Holdsworth's introductory guide, Joan Littlewood (New York, 2006), Leach's book provides a strong foundation for further studies of the company and its productions.

The Theatre Workshop's most famous production was Oh What a Lovely War (1963), a company-devised montage of the First World War that loosely follows the conventions of a seaside “pierrot show,” a turn-of-the-century British popular theater form. “I am one of those who saw Oh What a Lovely War as a student,” Leach explains in his preface, “and found that the experience made a difference for the rest of my life.” The production had a twofold effect: first, it “helped us to re-think the narratives of history and of our own times; second, it unveiled a kind of theatre that we had never conceived of before” (ix). These two ideas set the course for everything that follows: each of the book's five chronological sections begins with chapters relating the history (and historical context) of the company, followed by chapters addressing specific themes (“The Plays of Ewan MacColl,” “The Theatre Workshop Actor”). Despite the vast scope of Leach's undertaking, his writing remains sharp and light on its feet, and the book's structure allows the narrative and analysis to coexist without either being subordinated to the other.

The history begins on 1 May 1931, with the debut of the “Red Megaphones” (cofounded by Ewan MacColl) on a coal cart in Manchester. After two years of performing outdoors for picket lines and dole queues, Red Megaphones absorbed the theories of lighting designer Adolphe Appia, moved indoors, renamed themselves “Theatre of Action,” and began to conceive the “theatre of synthesis” (25) between lighting, dance, and drama, which Theatre Workshop would make famous. A few months later, MacColl met Joan Littlewood while they were recording a British Broadcasting Corporation radio documentary, and the two began collaborating. The Theatre of Action was followed by Theatre Union, which disbanded during World War II, to be reconstituted in 1945 as Theatre Workshop. After eight years of near-constant touring, Theatre Workshop moved to the Stratford East Theatre Royal in East London, and MacColl, who regarded this as a sellout to the London critics, drifted away from theater and joined Britain's folk music scene.

Throughout this succession of companies, Leach teases out three lines of continuity: an affinity with continental practitioners and theorists, a focus on physical training for actors, and copious research by actors (according to Littlewood herself, “it was considered mere philandering to read latter-day classics, let alone modern plays, unless you’d acquired a thorough grounding in the ancients” [35]). “Politics” is conspicuously absent from this list, but Leach argues convincingly that the political stance of the Theatre of Action differed widely from that of Theatre Workshop, shifting from class warfare in the 1930s to a broader (and perhaps softer) social critique in the 1950s, when the company became, in Leach's words, “the Fool to Britain's King Complacency” (151).

Littlewood's engagement with other drama theorists and practitioners outstripped any of her contemporaries in Britain, with the possible exception of Peter Brook. At the heart of her practice were Stanislavski and the movement specialist Rudolf Laban. Littlewood synthesized Laban's physical “efforts” with Stanislavski's “units” and “objectives,” a happy marriage encapsulated by Laban's observation that “man moves in order to satisfy a need” (93). Leach also addresses the influences of Leon Moussinac (author of The New Movement in the Theatre), Vsevolod Meyerhold, Emile Jacques-Dalcroze (creator of “eurhythmics”), and others. It is notable that while Brecht is present in the book (and Leach points out that MacColl was reading Brecht's plays as early as 1933), he is only one presence among many, and Leach avoids the lazy genuflection toward Brecht as British theater's Prometheus. Brecht was clearly not Littlewood's “inspiration,” but her contemporary.

Theatre Workshop's interest in European theater was reciprocated, and the company enjoyed much greater success outside Britain than in it. In 1955, they paid their own way to the Paris International Festival, caused a sensation with Jonson's Volpone, and ha as facsimiles of Littlewood's notes for movement exercises. The book also glitters with intriguing facts: I was fascinated to learn, for instance, that Chico Marx advised the company during rehearsals for Molière's The Flying Doctor (1945).

Leach's subtitle, Joan Littlewood and the Making of Modern British Theatre, promises a great deal, and in the final chapter he admits that “Theatre Workshop changed—and failed to change—British theatre in extraordinary ways” (203). But this equivocation does not belittle Littlewood's achievements. For example, Leach points out that it was she who “abolished the fourth wall” (175) from the British stage (though he fails to mention that in British popular theater the wall had never been erected in the first place). He also points out her too-rarely acknowledged work as a pioneer of both theater-in-education and fringe theater.

Littlewood was notoriously impatient with record keeping—theater, after all, is not a document but an event—and this seems to have discouraged writers from studying her work. Now that Leach has surveyed the territory, there is no longer any excuse not to give Littlewood and Theatre Workshop the attention they deserve.