Perhaps playmaker would be a better word than playwright or dramatist to describe Joan Littlewood, but certainly the word director is not adequate. In the cinema it is taken for granted that often the director not only collaborates with the writer but...

IF IT were not for Joan Littlewood's imaginative stagecraft, writes Frank Gray [further to the obituary by Alan Strachan, 23 September ], Brendan Behan's name might never have joined the pantheon of those writers and playwrights, led by John Osborne and Samuel Beckett, who...

Joan Littlewood. Nadine Holdsworth. Routledge. [pounds sterling]55.00. 168 pages. ISBN 0-415-33886-7. David Edgar has spoken recently of Joan Littlewood as a 'maverick'. The term is rarely used as a compliment. The suggestion is that Joan Littlewood's radical vitality was too challenging to...