Welcome to John Haynes Photography. On this website you will find a selection of images from my photographic career. Additionally, there is an exclusive and extensive archive of my work in the British theatre between 1970 and the present day. Feel free to browse around my photographs and take a look at my albums in the Gallery page and contact me for further information regarding my work.
I like very much a story which John Haynes has often told me about himself and the Royal Court Theatre. It has nothing to do with theatre photographs, but it says a lot about the Royal Court – and himself. It happened in January 1962. John was ‘on the board’ (operating the lighting) during a technical rehearsal for Tony Richardson’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; on the stage or sitting waiting in the stalls was the typical young Royal Court company of those days: Colin Blakely (playing Bottom), Alfie Lynch (Puck), Lynn Redgrave, Rita Tushingham, David Warner, Ronnie Barker, Nicol Williamson, Samantha Eggar, Corin Redgrave . . . (How the names recall the epoch!) Jocelyn Herbert, no doubt, was wandering around with a paintbrush, touching up bits of the set. Suddenly Tony’s voice rang out. ‘John Osborne’s being interviewed on television: we must see it. Who wants to come?’ He wasn’t just talking to the actors or to his friends; he was talking to everybody. ‘Come back to Woodfall: we can watch it there.’ And off they all trooped to the offices of Woodfall Films in Curzon Street and watched with great amusement while John Osborne elaborated the theme of ‘Damn You, England!’ or some other outrageous, witty, ‘angry’ anti-establishment declaration. ‘I knew I’d found a home,’ says John Haynes.
The Royal Court, you will soon see, bulks large in this book; and not just because it is where John Haynes first started taking pictures of plays. It must bulk large in the life and work of anyone who was lucky enough to work there in its golden age – the late fifties, the sixties, the early seventies. For it was a theatre unlike any other, not just in its abundance of talent, but in its unique freedom from the triviality, the competitiveness, the camp and deprecating cynicism which, alas, ran through so much London theatre. Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop out at Stratford was of course another dissident group, but of quite a different character. Joan was defiantly proletarian, unliterary, ‘socialist’. By contrast the Royal Court of George Devine and Tony Richardson was middle-class (not ‘bourgeois’), respectful of tradition, radical rather than revolutionary, ‘humanist’. And perhaps even more strongly resented. Certainly just as many seats were noisily vacated, just as many exit doors slammed during first nights in Sloane Square as at Stratford East.
Young John Haynes was not around for those first heady days at the Court: almost certainly he was unaware of them. There was nothing theatrical – or photographic – about his background. His father had driven a bus for London Transport and retired to St Leonards; John discovered the theatre through the weekly rep performance by the Penguin Players at the Bexhill Pavilion. A play which struck him particularly was Priestley’s Mr Kettle and Mrs Moon – whose London premiere, oddly enough, had been directed by the young Tony Richardson. Its theme of an impetuous rejection of suburban life perhaps influenced John: he came to London and worked for three years in offices. He saw The Mousetrap.
He did his National Service as a dog-handler with the RAF Police. In Singapore he started to read plays: The Importance of Being Earnest, Shaw, Noel Coward, things like that. Demobbed in London, he got himself taken on – still without any conscious intention – as a stage hand at the Palace Theatre. He shifted scenery for musicals; he trained a follow-spot on Benny Hill. But something told him that this was not the kind of theatre in which he could happily spend his life. What he had read or heard about the Royal Court stirred his interest. He wrote and asked for a job. He got one. It meant demoting from ‘first dayman’ to ‘second dayman’ and it meant a drop in salary. But he took it.
And about this time something else happened, just as crucial. He was given a book of photographs by Cartier-Bresson, The Europeans, and his eyes were opened. He decided to be a photographer. His father gave him a Leica and he started roaming the streets, trying to capture significant fragments of living. To make some extra money, he took portraits of actors; but that he did not enjoy. Then Keith Johnstone, who ran a mime class at the Court, suggested he take a few pictures of these. George Devine came along sometimes to talk about a subject dear to his heart: the use of the mask. And so the first picture in this book was taken, a touching and characteristic portrait of the man to whom we owe, more than to anyone else, the achievement of the Royal Court. The man to whom (as he put it) the theatre was a temple, not a whorehouse. It is the kind of portrait John Haynes takes best: a personality revealed in action, the artist exposed.
The conjunction of his two prime influences did not, however, lead John directly to taking pictures of plays. He got married – he met his wife Jane, an actress, when she was attending Keith Johnstone’s class – and he had to earn a living. For two years he worked as a staff photographer for The Sunday Times, where you were (in his words) ‘out there in the front line, living on your nerves.’ But the pursuit of politicians, strikers and headline personalities proved not much more congenial than the follow-spot at the Palace: John is neither a thruster nor a manipulator. There are times, though, when the theatre calls for persistence, insistence and a tough hide, so probably the experience was good for him. Anyway, when the Royal Court decided in 1971 to appoint a regular theatre photographer, he had enough confidence to apply for the job. He got it. His first assignment was David Storey’s Home, which I was directing with that unequalled cast, a play with almost no action and a great deal of poetry. John’s pictures were simple, responsive, unerring – the theatrical experience exactly. He had found his métier.
Photographers have a hard time in the theatre. Their opportunities, you may think, are rich. What effects of lighting and decor offer themselves! What expressive plasticity! What personalities, what emotions, what moments of gaiety, pathos, violence! . . . Alas, all too often these apparently limitless possibilities create only frustration for the photographers of theatre. They are there, and they must never forget it, for a practical purpose, generally one sufficiently defined by the word ‘publicity’. Pictures are wanted for the press – and will the artistes please stand a bit closer together, otherwise those on the edges are likely to find themselves cropped out of the group. Pictures are wanted for display outside the theatre, to entice passing trade. Pictures are wanted to satisfy the players, who naturally want to look good. Whether directors or managements value the photographer’s contribution depends on how much they care about permanence in this most transient of the arts. Generally they don’t care very much. (And they don’t pay very much either.)
Time is the photographer’s worst enemy. Usually they have to work in those tense, crowded hours between dress rehearsal and first performance, when tempers are short and nerves are strained. Nowadays they will be lucky if they are given a session to themselves on stage and with the actors, and if they are it will be too short – particularly if the production involves changes of scene and costume. No wonder the custom has grown more prevalent for the pictures to be taken during dress rehearsals, from the auditorium. This at least ensures authenticity, spontaneity. But there are dangers, too. More than one star has broken suddenly in the middle of a scene, peered angrily into the darkness where the photographer is busily clicking away, and shouted: ‘Get that damned cameraman out of here!’
Most theatre photographers now – and John Haynes is no exception – work with 35mm cameras, hand-held most of the time, and with available light, i.e. the lighting designed for the production. They will very likely persuade the chief electrician to bump up his levels a bit, but gone are the days when every shot was carefully composed and specially lit. This is another aspect of the freedom won by the 1956 revolution, pioneered like so much else by the Royal Court. I remember vividly Julie Hamilton’s pictures, daring now, of Angus Wilson’s The Mulberry Bush, which opened the Court’s first season. Full of life, informal and unposed, they were the first professional theatre pictures taken on 35mm I had ever seen – quite possibly they were the first altogether. They reflected brilliantly and refreshingly the new styles of writing and playing, direct, contemporary, unglossed, which were invading the stage. Gone was the shop-window elegance of grouping and posture which had come to reflect an, in the main, snobby and artificial West End style. This was a theatre in which a young photographer with Cartier-Bresson leanings could feel he had a place.
Admittedly there has been a small loss with the huge gain. We don’t often get full-stage shots of contemporary productions, with the characters in their settings, as you would see them from a centre stall or the front of the circle. (There are only two, I think, in this book.) Today’s photographers are not interested in such pictures, chiefly I suppose because newspapers would not print them. And it is worth remembering the special effect on theatre pictures of the general use of available light. Fast film can capture the actors satisfactorily enough; but there is rarely enough light on decor to record the stage picture as the audience sees it. Low-key images are the result, with the actors highlit in a more dramatic way than they are in performance. What we see is a concentration, an intensification of the theatrical moment.
The photographer’s role in the theatre has, in fact, become more personal, more creative, less that of a recorder or a glamoriser. For The Sunday Times John Haynes worked as a journalist: he went out to find the pictures he was ordered to get. When he returned to the Court he found himself expected to function as an artist, which fortunately he had been without exactly knowing it. From the start he was encouraged to take time, and he was lucky enough to be photographing the work of an author to whom he responded so deeply. The ‘still, sad’ (sometimes raucous) ‘music of humanity’ which is what makes Home such a great play, as well as the special genius of its performers, struck a chord in John which resounds in his photographs: and I would say the same of his pictures of The Changing Room, Life Class and Early Days. Indeed, his imagination was so stirred by this contact with David Storey’s peculiarly Northern world of poetry that he set off north himself and made a lovely set of pictures which he showed in an exhibition at the Court. Nothing – and everything – to do with the theatre. Perhaps one day he will make a book of them.
John Haynes’ photographs show, as any collection of stage pictures must, an extraordinary and attractive variety. But in the best of them there is always this acute, tender human response: he is not a pictorialist or a publicist, he is an artist. Of course this book is an anthology. John has enough pictures to fill these pages many times over; and there are many theatres in London where he did not work, many productions over these years which he was not invited to photograph. But not many of our finest players have escaped him. Here they nearly all are, holding the mirror up to our time and our nature with the accuracy and courage with which actors and actresses are so generously gifted. God bless them!
I have often wondered at the different images people have of the theatre, and the difference of their experience of it. It can speak with so many voices, such different accents. It can be trivial and it can be wise; it can soothe and it can disturb; it can flatter and it can teach. To one distinguished director, who was not speaking in anger, it is a ‘whorehouse’. To George Devine it was a ‘temple’ – remembering that a temple is a place for joy as well as reverence. In all its variety, the London theatre seems to me to embody most distinctly these two traditions: the tradition of show and the tradition of truth. Some productions illustrate; critics call this ‘conceptual theatre’ and they like it because they find it easy to write about, bright pupils sitting down before exam papers. But some productions offer the challenge of feeling, of involvement. This is the theatre of experience, and it is not easy to write about. It is a theatre I recognise and honour. These pictures make me glad to have been a part of it.
— Lindsay Anderson
Introduction to Taking the Stage by John Haynes, 1986