In the 1950s Joan Littlewood revolutionised the presentation of theatre at Stratford, so it would seem only natural that Stratford now stages a bio-musical of her life and work. There’s just one problem: wrong Stratford.

The disjunction reverberates through Sam Kenyon’s play and Erica Whyman’s production. At Stratford in east London Littlewood, as the prime mover in Theatre Workshop, set up a base in the Theatre Royal and made work that entertained working people in a popular style without either sermonising or copping out from serious content. The high culture she so reviled is in some ways best embodied by the Royal Shakespeare Company, in whose Stratford-upon-Avon home her shade moves hesitantly.

Kenyon tries to animate some of Littlewood’s temperamental prickles by having Clare Burt as a more or less constant Joan cast, direct and argue with a succession of transitory Joans. (The first such avatar appears initially to be picked from the audience.) But this doesn’t animate them. In her personal life, Littlewood’s relationships with Ewan MacColl (as he wasn’t then known) and then her life partner Gerry Raffles are portrayed principally in terms of each man’s serial infidelities rather than the pair’s interaction. The company’s work is recounted, explained, described and represented, but there is no sense of what it was actually like.

This is a crippling shortcoming in the second half, when Stratford East successes such as Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow and The Hostage, Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste Of Honey and Lionel Bart’s Fings Ain’t What They Used T’Be are more or less all dealt with in a single extended musical number. (The style of the songs suggests a writer who knows what music-hall is but can’t quite bring himself to write it. And let’s note that this work about an opinionated woman whose own work involved getting women onstage out from under the male thumb is written by a man.) The last sensation of Littlewood’s theatrical career, Oh! What A Lovely War, is likewise a matter of description rather than impression. The story, like Littlewood’s life, simply peters out with Raffles’ death 27 years before her own. It’s an informative, enlightening evening, but of Littlewood’s own totem of fun, despite much labour, there’s precious little.

Written for the Financial Times.