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Lionel Bart – ‘real chutzpah’ |
Light-fingered Lionel and a twist in the tale of Oliver!
Simon Wroe reveals the debt Lionel Bart owed to the Unity Theatre – an amazing pool of talent where he nicked some of his hit tunes from fellow troupers
CLOAK and dagger subterfuge in the theatre is usually seen on the stage or in the sharp-tongued memoirs which follow. Lionel Bart’s Oliver! may be the exception that rule: a show where the shadowy manoeuvres behind its creation actually trump the events on-stage.
Since its premiere at the New London Theatre (now the Noel Coward) in 1960, Bart’s musical about the ragged fortunes of a young orphan, based loosely on Dickens’s Oliver Twist, has been a huge hit. Audiences and critics adore it (a Cameron Mackintosh production of the show is currently playing to packed houses in the West End), and the mere mention makes theatreland accountants histrionic.
Everybody knows the story of Oliver! Few know the true story behind it. Bart, an East End boy turned impresario who cobbled the show together without being able to read a note of music, unquestionably deserves much of the credit; but he did not do it alone, as the Underground posters and billboard hoardings would have you believe.
The origins of one of England’s great musicals can be traced to a converted church hall in Goldington Street, King’s Cross, home of the socialist Unity Theatre until fire razed it to the ground in 1975.
It was here in 1956 that a young art school dropout called Lionel Begleiter (accounts of why he changed his surname to Bart vary) first found work as an actor, singer, and, above all, composer.
Recently it has come to light that Bart found a lot more than that at the Unity. At least two tunes in Oliver! – “Come Back Soon” and “Boy For Sale” – were stolen or borrowed, depending on one’s sense of humour, from the revue songs of Jack Grossman, a peer and collaborator of Bart’s at the theatre. Another Unity colleague, Joan Clarke, wrote the book of the musical (the storylines and the dialogue not in song).
Harry Landis, the former president of Equity and current chairman of the Unity Trust, claims Bart gave Clarke a percentage of the royalties from Oliver!, in an out of court settlement.
“She [Clarke] wanted her share of the copyright and she threatened him with the law. He did a deal with her: if she kept shtum he’d give her royalties. He wasn’t worried about the money, he just wanted his name on the poster,” Landis explains.
Colin Chambers’ The Story of Unity Theatre, one of the very few books on the subject, makes only a backhanded reference to the controversy, describing Clarke as “a close associate of Lionel Bart, with whom she later fell out”.
Bart’s pick-pocketing habits went largely uncommented on because of the unique spirit of the Unity, says Grossman, now a retired documentary film-maker living in Brighton.
“Unity was on a shoestring – it wasn’t litigiously minded. They were anxious to put on stuff. It was an antithesis to West End theatre, which at the time was Anyone for Tennis? It was a fairly unique place, an amateur theatre that set professional standards and introduced people like Brecht to Britain. It was a bit haphazard but it worked,” he says.
“Lionel was a one-finger merchant on the piano and I wasn’t much better. None of us were musicians. Lionel cut his theatrical teeth at Unity.”
The acclaimed Hampstead actor Julian Glover, a former Unity player from the same period who stars – by complete coincidence – in the current West End revival of Oliver!, also believes Bart owes a debt to the left-leaning theatre.
“It [Unity] has been forgotten in certain quarters and certainly Lionel did nothing to promote it,” he says. “He could have said ‘I owe everything I am to Unity Theatre’, but he never did. He could have given them a bit of money when he was spending money all over the world. But that was his business. He certainly owes his first showcase to Unity. That’s where he started writing songs.”
As a 17-year-old “middle-class Fabian socialist”, Glover performed in Cinderella and Turn It Up, even singing one of the tunes which Bart pinched.
“I think Jack [Grossman]’s been rather good about it,” says Glover. “He’s just swallowed the pill and got on with his life. Lionel nicked stuff but they [Unity] all say that’s the way it went.
“That’s showbusiness,” he adds.
When Grossman started at the theatre in the mid-1950s – the same time as Bart – it had a reputation on the left. Paul Robeson had turned down West End offers to appear in a Unity production free of charge; a portrayal of the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, had caused outcry in the Commons; and the theatre shared its building, and its programming, with a coterie of political dissidents upstairs.
“It wasn’t obligatory to be a member of the Communist Party, although there was a committee that used to attempt to vet the kind of material that went on. People like Bill Owen (another Unity stalwart) were completely independent; they were on the Left but would tell the coterie to piss off if they got too obstructive,” he says.
The Unity Theatre archives, now held in the V&A’s Theatre Museum Collection in Olympia, reveal a strange mix of Russian authors, Brecht plays (Unity were the first company in the UK to put on his plays), and Cockney singalongs. Future stars of the stage and screen such as Alfie Bass, Warren Mitchell and Michael Gambon feature regularly in the billing.
In a political panto version of Cinderella, Bart is cast as an Ugly Sister; the tune of a Grossman song from the show, “Be A Man, John Bull”, goes on to be “Come Back Soon” in Oliver!
A series of box-office flops (Blitz! and Twang!!) and a destructively expensive lifestyle – “If Lionel had a weekend with a boyfriend he would buy them a sportscar,” says Landis – eventually forced Bart to sell all his rights to Oliver!, shortly before it was turned into a major motion picture. (In a twist of fate, Joan Clarke apparently made a small fortune from her share of the film rights.) He died penniless, of cancer, in 1999.
A year earlier, Grossman met him by chance at a dinner party. “By the way Jack,” Bart said to him, “you wrote some good stuff didn’t you? I think I pinched some of it.”
“My wife’s jaw dropped,” Grossman remembers. “But Lionel was like that, he had real chutzpah. You couldn’t dislike the guy. He followed it up – typical Lionel – by saying ‘Yeah I think I pinched some of my own stuff too’. What can you do but laugh?” |
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