Sparrows Can’t Sing (1963) was the only feature film directed by\udthe late and much lamented Joan Littlewood. Set and filmed in\udthe East End, where she worked for many years, the film deserves\udmore attention than it has hitherto received. Littlewood’s career\udspanned documentary (radio recordings made with Ewan MacColl\udin the North of England in the 1930s) to directing for the stage\udand the running of the Theatre Royal in London’s Stratford East,\udoften selecting material which aroused memories in local audiences\ud(Leach 2006: 142). Many of the actors trained in her Theatre\udWorkshop subsequently became better known for their appearances\udon film and television. Littlewood herself directed hardly any material\udfor the screen: Sparrows Can’t Sing and a 1964 series of television\udcommercials for the British Egg Marketing Board, starring Theatre\udWorkshop’s Avis Bunnage, were rare excursions into an area of practice\udwhich she found constraining and unamenable (Gable 1980: 32).\udThe hybridity and singularity of Littlewood’s feature may answer,\udin some degree, for its subsequent neglect. However, Sparrows Can’t\udSing makes a significant contribution to a group of films made in\udBritain in the 1960s which comment generally on changes in the\udurban and social fabric. It is especially worthy of consideration,\udI shall argue, for the use which Littlewood made of a particular\udcommunity’s attitudes – sentimental and critical – to such changes and\udfor its amalgamation of an attachment to documentary techniques\ud(recording an aural landscape on location) with a preference for nonnaturalistic\uddelivery in performance.
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