Howard Goorney

Howard Jacob Goorney, actor: born Manchester 11 May 1921; married 1957 Stella Riley (one son, one daughter); died Bath 29 March 2007.

In the years immediately prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, some trail-blazing radical theatre work was to be found far from London. In and around Manchester, particularly, the young firebrand Joan Littlewood had directed rarities such as Ernst Toller's Expressionist drama of the Bavarian rising Masses and Man, and collaborated with Jimmie Miller - later Ewan MacColl, to whom she was for a time stormily married - on his agitprop John Bullion and on Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna.

In 1938 they received a copy of Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Schweik in the stiff Erwin Piscator version which MacColl heavily reworked for Littlewood's Theatre Union company. When they advertised the production plans, they were joined by an army of actors and technicians, reinforced by some Central European refugees and a shy boy of 17 from Higher Crumpsall, Howard Goorney. With European civilisation on a knife-edge, the play was immensely resonant; Goorney's work and total commitment impressed his director, usually niggardly with her praise ("He is my pure gold thread," she said once of him).

Devoted to Littlewood's style of work, Goorney remained crucial to her ensemble ideals for over 30 years, while she in turn was like a surrogate mother to him when adolescent. On one occasion, she and the girls in the company decided that his melancholy appearance (a lifelong trait) was because he had just fallen in love but was likely for immediate call-up; they arranged a love-nest with a gas fire, Guinness, Bix Beiderbecke record and condoms (two) thoughtfully provided. Anxious next day for the result, they were disappointed when Goorney shook his head: "The sirens went just as I was getting down to it. I had to make for the hospital - I was on fire-guard duty." What Goorney kept from all but Littlewood was that the nurses' home has been hit and that all night he had been bringing out the dead.

Towards the end of the war, with Goorney in the Army, Littlewood let him know that she was planning a new company almost immediately. Knowing he was unlikely to be demobbed for some months, Goorney put on one of his best performances to simulate nervous collapse, convincing enough to army shrinks to merit an honourable discharge ("a psychopathic personality of the 'artistic' type" was the diagnosis) and he was able to join the embryo company, a founder member (and until his death the oldest survivor) of the outfit first called the Workshop, before becoming Theatre Workshop.

In 1947 Goorney and Gerry Raffles, the company's new young manager and before long Littlewood's lover and then partner until his death, took part in a Combined Services tour of Germany, from where Goorney wrote vivid letters to Littlewood describing eye-opening productions and state-subsidised houses.

Returning to Littlewood, Goorney went into MacColl's ballad opera Johnnie Noble (1947), the story of a Hull fisherman using traditional music of the North-East; this was a major success, notably for a powerful scene involving Goorney as one of the unit manning a Bofors gun under shattering aerial bombardment.

Based for a period in Kendal, Theatre Workshop continued with classes, summer schools and rehearsals for MacColl's The Flying Doctor, an effective shotgun marriage of Molière and Marx Brothers comedy, with Goorney giving a performance of bristling comedic energy as Sganarelle. His work continued to grow; he was especially inventively impressive in the title-role of the cuckolded husband in Lorca's Don Perlimplin, popular on all the company's tours, often difficult for an unsubsidised venture (funding bodies for years tended to be woefully indifferent, even hostile, to Theatre Workshop's supposedly "anarchic" methods, although in truth few companies were more disciplined).

Often additionally taking on much fund-raising administrative work, Goorney was a key player in the launch of Uranium 235 (originally produced in Newcastle in 1946), MacColl's anti- nuclear play that created a considerable stir, particularly for a mesmerising atomic ballet sequence. The production, ceaselessly inventive under Littlewood, toured widely (the company even played Billy Butlin's Filey holiday camp, appearing after the wrestlers), and, backed financially by Michael Redgrave and Sam Wanamaker, who had seen the company's work when touring themselves, marked Theatre Workshop's first London exposure (Embassy, 1952) to politely baffled notices (metropolitan critics were unfamiliar with this kind of work, much ahead of its time and at a polar extreme from London theatres' then prevailing politesse).

Plans for a permanent base in a converted David Lewis building in Liverpool fell through, as did hopes of a home in Manchester. The company's tours abroad were always successful and, despite often desperate financial times, they were buoyed up at home by audience reaction to such productions as Littlewood's buoyant but also astringent Le Malade Imaginaire (with Goorney a pungent Purgon) which delighted the 1952 Edinburgh Festival.

Theatre Workshop's peripatetic life finally ceased when Raffles found and negotiated a lease on the shabby old Theatre Royal at Stratford, E15, as the company's base, although many of the company often slept in the stalls or dressing rooms to save money.

The glory years, with Goorney a linch-pin member of the company, were not slow in arriving. An outstanding early production was The Alchemist (1953) - Ben Jonson's lucid mind and rich language resonated for Littlewood - in which Goorney as Subtle formed a fizzingly agile double act with Harry H. Corbett's Face, with subsequent highlights including a revelatory Richard II (with Goorney hauntingly suggesting power become frail and fallible as John of Gaunt), A Christmas Carol (a pinched, costive Scrooge), Volpone (a vivid study of avarice as Corbaccio) and The Government Inspector (with Goorney's venal Mayor a stand-out amid a whole gallery of fine character studies).

Goorney played in the premiere of Brendan Behan's Irish prison-set The Quare Fellow (not a single Irishman in the cast) which transferred to the West End (Comedy, 1956). Also, with the company, he helped Littlewood to lick Behan's initially sketchy and even inchoate The Hostage into shape. Helped, too, by an early strikingly simple set by Sean Kenny and ebullient performances including Goorney's hilarious old rebel of 1916 who believes that revolutionaries are not what they used to be, The Hostage opened triumphantly and then in turn transferred to Shaftesbury Avenue and in 1961 to Broadway.

Success, money, the dispersal of actors with commercial transfers and publicity all soured Littlewood's dream of a genuine permanent ensemble and she left E15 for a period of travel and work abroad. The ever-loyal Goorney, with other core members of the Littlewood "family" - Barbara Windsor, James Booth - joined her for the sadly misbegotten Lionel Bart musical Twang! (Shaftesbury, 1965), a sorry mess based on the Robin Hood legend and a predictable head-on collision of West End commercialism and Theatre Workshop's improvisatory explorations. Littlewood walked out of the show late in rehearsals and only rarely, particularly after Raffles's death, returned to Stratford.

Goorney's reputation as a superb character actor ensured a regular post-Theatre Workshop career. In the West End he played Moses in Sir John Gielgud's glitteringly star-studded H.M. Tennent production of The School for Scandal (Haymarket), investing the moneylender with an unusually effective asperity. He had a distinguished period in the 1970s for the National Theatre, working most regularly for Bill Bryden, who directed him in the promenade production of Lark Rise to Candleford, The Mysteries, Don Quixote with Paul Scofield, and the powerful production of O'Neill's sea-plays of The Long Voyage Home.

Another O'Neill play - the short rarity of Hughie - saw what was perhaps Goorney's finest South Bank appearance, even in a part which, although onstage throughout, had comparatively little to say. In Hayden Griffin's lovingly realistic bum hotel's seedy foyer, Goorney seemed almost part of the design as the night clerk behind the desk, finally coming to life with a sort of creaky alacrity, more than holding his own with Stacy Keach in the other, much showier, all-talking role. It was an object lesson in concentration and listening on stage.

Later in life, Goorney and his wife moved to Bath and he occasionally appeared at the nearby Bristol Old Vic. Also in regional theatre he gave a beautifully dignified performance as Billy Rice, the old music-hall headliner in John Osborne's The Entertainer (Salisbury Playhouse) and a richly detailed study of the antique dealer Solomon in Arthur Miller's The Price (Manchester Library).

Goorney's film career consisted largely of supporting Jewish roles - Norman Jewison's Fiddler on the Roof (1971), most notably - while he also impressed in Christine's Edzard's Little Dorrit (1988). On television he made many appearances, working until comparatively recently on such series as Bramwell and Waking the Dead, and also featuring in Mel Smith's Blackball (2003).

The crowded years with Littlewood were vividly covered in Goorney's book The Theatre Workshop Story (1981), which is happily scheduled for reissue later this year.

Alan Strachan