Did Clive Barker Write The Hostage?

Abstract

Clive Barker often wrote about Joan Littlewood and his time at Theatre Workshop with a mixture of warmth and bewilderment at her unorthodox methods. While preparing her doctoral thesis, Text and Collaboration: an Examination of the Roles of Joan Littlewood and Theatre Workshop in the Genesis and Production of Brendan Behan's ‘The Hostage’, at the National University of Ireland, Galway, June Favre wrote to Clive praising the article ‘Closing Joan's Book: Some Personal Footnotes’ (NTQ, May 2003). As a result of that first letter, Clive and June began a correspondence – exchanging questions, notes, published and unpublished material, with a final email to June dated 4 March 2005, less than two weeks before his death on 17 March. Clive had accepted the position of external examiner for the thesis with the viva voce to take place 10 May 2005 in Galway – a city Clive had never visited. An email sent on 21 February 2005 informed June that Clive was looking forward to ‘seeing the sun go down on Galway Bay’. His sudden death deprived him of that pleasure. Concluding the ‘Acknowledgments’ of the thesis, June wrote: ‘Above all my heartfelt gratitude for the dozens of emails, letters, and articles Clive Barker shared with me. He promptly supplied information on Joan Littlewood and the productions of Brendan Behan plays from first-hand experience.’ There follow some of the informative and humorous exchanges between Clive and June, who was awarded her doctoral degree later in 2005.