This chapter emerges from a strange silence where there should be so much more noise. We are beckoned by ghosts slipping in and out of theatre history without any real literature about their material working practices, or indeed any other kind of literature by theatre cleaners or even about theatre cleaning. Since ghosts are always around in the theatre, we must acknowledge at the stage door the ghost of theatre director Joan Littlewood (who no one would want to piss off) standing with a broom. The now legendary story of Barbara Windsor’s first audition at Stratford East, saw the actor confuse Littlewood for the theatre’s charlady, though the director assured her ‘you got the job at the door’ (Windsor). In fact, everyone – including the actors – cleaned at Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop, and, perhaps not unrelatedly, Littlewood had herself worked her way through drama school (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts) as a cleaner. If theatres are full of ghosts, those who laboured in them surely leave an echo. We cannot properly address the material working practices of the industry without acknowledging their part in it. Imagine a theatre without cleaners: litter-strewn aisles, sticky floors and spilled drinks, the stage space left uncleared of detritus, rodent droppings all over the place, the bars left to pile up with dirty glasses, and best not mention the toilets. Their role is critical: without cleaners, theatre cannot operate. After a brief and unpleasant interlude, say two to three days tops, the working processes of theatre – rehearsals, technical runs, opening nights – grind to a halt. Yet despite cleaning’s fundamental role, it is barely seen. The disappearing labour of cleaning echoes the ephemeral nature of theatrical performance: as soon as it is done, it needs doing again. Front-of-house teams like ushers and ice-cream sellers remain a continuous if undervalued form of theatre’s operating system, but since they are there when the audience are, their work is noticed if not fully appreciated. Other backstage theatre workers might be unseen by the audience, but the results of quick changes and set transformation make the performance. Some theatre workers’ labour is often physically inscribed onto the building, even decades after it was made unnecessary or less onerous by electrification. Permanent alterations to theatre buildings leave behind traces of work: trapdoors, rigging and fly towers that dropped in elaborate scenery, or pulley systems that flew up Peter Pans, had to be operated by someone. Cleaners’ work is erased as soon as the audience enter the theatre, and the only way an audience might really notice it is if it is not done: the cleanliness of the theatre is assumed and invisible.

Until someone finds some of it, we do not have examples of writing by theatre cleaners. To be clear, I am sure that such writing existed and probably still survives, but for now there is no body of literature to explore. The presence of this chapter within this collection might seem curious: yet a celebration of H. Gustav Klaus’s pioneering work in attending to working-class literature, and its ‘alternative and discontinuous traditions that might contain recalcitrant elements’ that could upset dominant ideology (Klaus, p. 1) opens space to think about what we are to do when there is no surviving tradition. How can we reconcile the ‘constant action’ of ‘lab’ring hands’ which may have historically prevented access not only to literacy but also to the requisite cultural and social capital necessary for such writing to be produced, performed and above all preserved? Whose notebooks with scribbled thoughts and ideas gets posthumously preserved, and who gets the man-with-a-van house clearance service? The words of those on the margins of literacy may have been preserved in other forms, court records or in interviews with journalists. Theatre cleaners will have written (or have been written for) whether or not we can currently locate that writing, but in the meantime, I want to consider the labour of cleaning in new ways. Theatre is a socially produced art form, and the work theatre cleaners do matters to its existence.

Theatre historians usually have very little choice than to work with the ephemeral, the missing and poorly documented – there is not much else to go on. Well into the twentieth century, text-based records are more likely to be preserved than extensive images or any kind of filmed snippets. Scripts, newspaper clippings, and perhaps a programme or the occasional set of production photos might be the only documents that represent a theatrical event. Not unrelatedly, the labour of writing has been elevated for practical, archival and indeed ideological reasons at the cost of other kinds of work. Labour dismissed as craft, or worse still, as manual labour, is therefore ‘unimportant’. The faulty assumption, which hardly needs reiterating here, goes, anyone can mop a floor, hardly anyone can write a play. Copyright and intellectual property laws have further established matrices to distinguish what counts as important or lasting creative work – work which morally belongs to its originator after the point of sale – from the temporary, repetitive work which is apparently completed solely through physical activity. The history of theatre has been largely told through writers as enactors of creative and cultural change, with some attention to theatre architects, designers and, more latterly, performers, but categorically not through the role of the cleaner.

The hidden work of cleaning theatres has received vanishingly little academic attention. Writing in 1994, Tracy C. Davis notes that ‘to date no one has examined the structures and traditions of backstage labor by asking basic questions about the sociopolitical organization of the work’ (p. 32). Davis goes on to explore Covent Garden’s 1821 season, noting that theatre cleaning had become ‘a female occupation’ (p. 34). Jim Davis’s 1990 article on the troubled status of London’s East End theatres in the 1840s notes an 1858 report from the newly appointed ‘Examiner of Plays and Inspector of Theatres’, which remarked on theatre managers’ responsibility to render their houses ‘cleanly’ (p. 235). He notes that theatre reports condemned women’s lack of knowledge of appropriate hygiene practices: ‘The women employed are not strong enough to cleanse such floors – and go the wrong way to work’ (quoted, at p. 241). The report suggests a man be employed and the whole enterprise be treated like a ship’s deck to ensure cleanliness. Clearly, there is a great deal of research to be done in tracing the labour practices involved and the assumptions around gender here, beyond the kind of theoretical positioning I am exploring. Other approaches have considered staging cleaning in live performance art or contemporary theatre: Charles Spence’s work on scent considers performances which use cleaning fluids to create a particular olfactory environment (2021). Live artist ‘The Vacuum Cleaner’ (James Leadbitter) has also been considered, for his piece Cleaning Up After Capitalism, in which he ‘literally clean[s] the public spaces of Wall Street and the City of London’ (Greer, p. 28). Unsurprisingly, work on Joan Littlewood has considered the presence of cleaners. Nadine Holdsworth, in her biography of Littlewood, notes that ‘theatre-making is a collaborative process that relies not on the vision of one person but the creative engagement of many: performers, designers, technicians, playwrights, producers and the people who make the event of theatre possible: theatre managers, box office staff and cleaner’ (Holdsworth, p. 2). Indeed, though there was little to go around, Littlewood shared profits with the entire company including the ‘boilerman and cleaner’ (Anon., 2002). Holdsworth notes that ‘there are points […] when it is tricky to distinguish exactly what Littlewood was responsible for as her tentacles stretched far beyond the parameters traditionally associated with the director figure’ (p. 2). When we come to talk about theatre cleaners, I intend to borrow this image, since it sets up the idea that we may find certain characters far beyond where we expect them to be.

Despite their relative absence in scholarship, theatre cleaners are represented across a surprising range of cultural forms, perhaps most famously in Norman Rockwell’s 1946 painting, ‘Charwomen in Theater’, which depicts two cleaners in a movie theatre taking a moment’s rest to read the cinema programme. Film has had a long fascination with cleaners: whether revealing the cleaner’s untapped intellectual potential in Good Will Hunting (1997); or their romantic potential, in romcoms like Maid in Manhattan (2002), or the romantic fantasy The Shape of Water (2017). Luis Aguiar notes that these kinds of representations have created ‘An aestheticized image of cleaners [which] is repeatedly substituted for the real conditions of cleaners’ work’ (p. 68). More grisly crime scene cleaning is the subject of multiple films including Cleaner (2007), Sunshine Cleaning (2008) and TV series like The Cleaner (BBC, 2021). Elsewhere, social activism through film-making has considered the experiences of Global Majority people and/or immigrant populations: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Fear Eats the Soul (1974), Sergio Arau’s A Day Without a Mexican (2004), Ken Loach’s Bread and Roses (2000), or Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things (2002). Children’s films have also responded to these trends: Wall-E (2008) is a robot who essentially cleans up after the waste humans have subjected the planet to – and even Mary Poppins cleans, albeit with magic. Film and TV have been used as a medium to reveal and protest the working conditions of cleaners; for example, the 2021 TV series Maid (Netflix), or the Berwick Street Collective’s documentary film, Nightcleaners (1975), which raised awareness of the real conditions for women working nightshifts.

The specific work of theatre cleaning has also been less frequently depicted in films: US director Harold Shaw’s early British film, The Two Columbines (1914), depicts the tragic tale of a former dancer turned impoverished charlady. The earnestly sentimental film, prepared ‘with a view to catching the Christmas audiences’, is about ‘the career of a once-pretty Columbine, who, having experienced poverty and hardship, ended her life as a theatre cleaner’ (East, p. 290). Tragedy befalls her when she decides to re-perform the same dance routine that caused her career-ending injury, as a gift for her daughter to brighten their meagre Christmas. She is fatally overcome in the process, as she tragically recalls what the intertitles call the ‘light of other days’ (Sargeant, p. 36). Somewhat later, Judy Garland’s 1943 star vehicle, Presenting Lily Mars, also features a cleaner. Garland’s small-town-girl-trying-to-make-it-on-Broadway character is inspired by a meeting with an older and wiser theatre cleaner (Connie Gilchrist). Gilchrist’s cleaner sings an inspirational song, ‘Every Little Moment’, to cheer on the young performer.

Theatre itself has had a long love story with depicting all types of cleaners: charwomen or ‘scrub ladies’ were an enduring trope of music hall and in turn variety theatre and pantomime. Theatre has a similarly long relationship with washerwomen, albeit one beyond the scope of this chapter. The charwoman trope is closely tied to drag performance traditions: one 1860s advertisement for performer Frank Hill, notes the praise he had received for his ‘gin partial charwoman’ (The Era, 5 July 1868, p. 1). The character endured for many years: Arthur Lucan’s ‘Old Mother Riley’ character started on stage and was continued for decades across radio and film (from the mid-1930s to mid-1950s), when taken up by Roy Rolland who continued the character well into the 1980s. Drag here is frequently across gender and class: charladies might be portrayed as a born-and-bred East Ender, as someone who has fallen on hard times, or a woman who is a little too fond of alcohol. In more serious theatre traditions, working-class actors could be typecast as charlady characters, something Gordon Rogoff notes was only challenged in British theatre after John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956): ‘[Before then] if you came from the bleak wastes of the North or from the Rhondda Valley in Wales you were automatically limited to comic char-ladies or wizened postmen’ (p. 33). If British theatre can have a problem with class, it will have a problem with class.

Women also played ‘chars’. The infamous character Mrs Mopp, created by Dorothy Summers (with her euphemistic catchphrase, ‘Can I do you now sir?’), rose to radio stardom on the BBC wartime programme It’s That Man Again, and remained a lingering presence in sketch comedy. On TV, Carol Burnett’s singing (but silent) charwoman who ‘never had a name and […] never spoke’ (‘CEMA’) was the star of Burnett’s sketch show. Though Burnett’s charlady was not specifically a stage charwoman, one 1973 sketch did have her attempting to clean up after ballet dancers Edward Villella and Lucette Aldous. Again, playing across both gender and class, Monty Python returned to charladies, not least in their Mrs Sartre, Mrs Premise and Mrs Conclusion characters, with the idea of inappropriate – albeit surreal – knowledge. Python also used the theatre cleaner trope; Michael Palin appears as a theatre cleaner turned merchandise seller at the credits of The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball (1981). Other comedians drew from the success of the cleaner trope: Ken Dodd’s ‘Tickling Stick’ feather duster originates from music hall cleaner props, and on his death in 2018, fans left both flowers and dusters outside his Liverpool house.

Clearly, within this plethora of cleaners, the specific stage cleaner/charlady trope also perseveres. Ida Laurie was praised for her ‘unexaggerated sketch of the conventional stage charwoman’ (The Era, 6 October 1906, p. 14). There are numerous mentions of theatre charwoman acts in variety theatre reports in the early 1900s, and she prevails into the beginning of revues (somewhere between short sketches and fully fledged plays/musicals). Such sketches tend to nod and wink at the structure of the theatre: the leading lady is ill, so the theatre’s cleaning lady appears just in time to play the big part and save the day. Reports of a 1903 sketch ‘The Little Charwoman’ explain its plot: a theatre’s cleaner comes ‘bashfully to the rescue’ when the star is taken unwell and gives such a good performance her salary is raised from ‘two shillings a week and beer money’ to £20 (Music Hall and Theatre Review, 20 November 1903, p. 10). A decade later, Sewell Collins’s music-hall playlet, The Scrub Lady, continues to play on the mistaken identity trope; the producer and director wait for the star who is to play the cleaner, who they doubt to be capable of such a downtrodden part. The star arrives disguised as the theatre’s cleaner, and after convincing the others, can reveal herself to be the true performer who has deceived them with her talent (Sporting Life, 28 February 1913, p. 7).

Stage depictions of theatre cleaners frequently revolve around mistaken identity plots, or the cleaner’s disguised identity. One review of a performer called Miss Mary Moran, who ‘as the theatre cleaner and afterwards the leading lady, proves herself an artist of a very high standard’ (Belfast News-Letter, 18 July 1916, p. 2). Equally possible is the charwoman’s incorrect assessment of their own identity: one of Wilkie Bard’s acts was an impersonation of ‘a stage charwoman who herself has histrionic aspirations’ (The Era, 13 September 1916, p. 23). Such tropes still appear in theatrical reports of variety in the 1930s, and were apparently appreciated by audiences, keeping them ‘in merry mood’ (The Era, 26 March 1930, p. 4; later accounts in The Era, 20 October 1938, p. 11). Amateur theatre productions of the period also employed the trope: one report of Bashley’s Women’s Institute theatricals report ‘Mrs Feltham’s turn’ as the ‘Theatre Cleaner’ (New Milton Advertiser, 25 January 1936, p. 6).

Real theatre cleaners remain frustratingly hard to access and even finding their names is a trial. Very occasionally names do slip through. One record of an anniversary celebration at the Bedford Theatre in 1949 notes that a cleaner from the 1890s – Mrs Dibbles – met the present cleaner, Mrs Diggs (Daily News, London, 18 October 1949, p. 3). There are glimpses of women at work. One short film introduction to the wartime work of CEMA (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts) depicts a cleaner momentarily distracted from her work by a rehearsal of The Merry Wives of Windsor (‘CEMA’). Cleaners being distracted – or not – is a common thread. In 1895, The Stage reports on a copyright premiere performance of Bernard Shaw’s Candida, given to secure the UK and international rights: ‘There were only two persons as the audience, excepting the theatre cleaners, who were busy and noisy with their sweeping’ (4 April 1895, p. 14). Fifty years later, one pantomime publicity photo similarly captures real but unnamed theatre ‘charladies’ smiling and meeting the pantomime dame (outfitted as a cleaner) at the Alexandra Theatre Birmingham (Evening Dispatch, 14 December 1953, p. 1).

There are many adverts for cleaners which reveal the desired qualities managers had for them, and the habitual gendering of such work as female: one advert in 1891 calls for ‘two respectable women as cleaners at Theatre Royal, mother and daughter preferred’ (Leicester Daily Post, 11 February 1891, p. 1). An advert in 1892 in the Gloucester Citizen requests a ‘strong, middle-aged woman, without encumbrance. Wanted as Cleaner’ for the theatre in the town (2 March 1892, p. 4). Men do sometimes appear in these adverts: one advert requires ‘a strong couple (man and wife), no family, as Cleaners in a theatre in Leeds: must be strict abstainers and trustworthy’ (Yorkshire Evening News, 24 February 1914, p. 2). Adverts often emphasise the physicality of the job: ‘Wanted Women Cleaners must be willing and active’ (Aberdeen Evening Express, 30 January 1918, p. 4).

Searching in newspapers and periodicals necessarily reveals more newsworthy incidents, so the occupational hazards faced by theatre cleaners are preserved. One terrible incident at Liverpool’s Star Theatre of Varieties is recorded, when ‘the iron curtain […] fell suddenly today and killed a charwoman. Tonight’s performance has been abandoned in consequence’ (Coventry Evening Telegraph, 26 December 1896, p. 3). There are several accounts of charwomen raising the alarm for fires (see Hucknall Morning Star, 1 February 1895, p. 2), and discovering corpses and even murder victims left in the building (The Scotsman, 21 November 1929, p. 14; Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, 9 August 1919, p. 24). Other much lighter stories reflect theatre cleaners’ struggles with the audience: ‘[cinema] theatre cleaners dread the green pea season, because it is no uncommon thing for women to bring a bag of peas which they shell while watching the pictures. And they drop the empty “swads” on the floor’ (Newark Advertiser, 7 February 1929, p. 15).

Elsewhere, contemporary attitudes to cleaners are revealed, perhaps accidentally, such as in the sarcastic note that playwrights occupied ‘a position midway between theatre charwoman and the theatre cat’ (The Referee, 1899, p. 11). Cleaners’ economic status is also reported. In 1895, the Pall Mall Gazette reports on concerns over slum clearance, about what would happen to the 3,000 ‘very poor people’ being moved out of Clare Market: ‘Out of all this number probably nine in every ten are either employed in Covent-garden or as theatre cleaners or as office cleaners in Lincoln’s inn’ (8 October 1895, p. 2). After the death of Edward VII, Lloyds reported on the theatre cleaners who had experienced ‘a sudden and complete stoppage of wage earning’ (8 May 1910, p. 1), noting that very few theatre managers managed to give their workers a half wage. The most detailed economic description of theatre cleaners’ work lays out what their labours involved:

The housemaids, or in theatrical language the cleaners of a theatre, if an average were taken of London theatres, would number a dozen. Every day the whole of the auditorium has to be swept and dusted, and the actors’ dressing rooms cleaned and made ready for their occupation at night. The work is under the superintendence of a housekeeper who gets a salary of at least £3 a week, while each cleaner gets about £1. (Longford Journal, 24 December 1910, p. 7)

Tragic, or at least pathetic, depictions of cleaning illustrate the underlying sentiment that The Two Columbines exploits. Winslow Forbes’s description of auditions at Daly’s Theatre recounts the tale of an elderly woman who, on being turned down, begged for ‘something to do to earn a living’, offering to ‘do anything, even clean the floors’ (1944, p. 41). One 1899 anonymous ten-verse poem, published in the theatre pages of the Empire News & The Umpire, performs the skit of the theatre cleaner who sits outside charitable society for working in the theatre at all: ‘No, mem, the district-visitor don’t call on the likes of me | And the clergyman’s missus keeps away – I’m “theatrical” don’t you see’ (27 January 1899, p. 7). Her ‘sin’ was cleaning the theatres on Sunday morning, which cannot have been entirely implausible given the poem’s place within a theatrical section of the paper.

Some of the reports reveal similar concerns about cleaners knowing their place, whether in terms of class or in the theatre’s hierarchy. The most repeated anecdote is perhaps that of Anthony Burgess, who relates, from the Abbey Theatre, that their cleaner famously ‘complained to Lady Gregory about the filth of The Playboy of the Western World. “Isn’t Synge [the playwright] a bloody old smutty for using the word ‘shift’ in his bloody old play”’ (p. 128). Elsewhere, other cleaners might end up in the wrong bit of the theatre. One story reports a mill manager’s wife’s trip to the theatre and how, not wanting to spend too much, she buys a ticket for the circle, only to notice her own charwoman in the more expensive seats of the dress circle. The Accrington Observer and Times reports she ‘received an economic shock. There was [her] charwoman sitting in the dress circle, munching surreptitiously from a half-hidden paper of fish and chips’. The next day, the manager’s wife confronts her cleaner, who tells her employer that she’s got a good family income coming in, ‘and I don’t see why I can’t enjoy misel’ sometimes’ (9 March 1920, p. 2). Cleaners might wander into the wrong bit of the stage: one account of King George V seeing Aida at the opera, reports he was surprised at the laughter, only to understand when ‘a theatre charlady working behind the stage had mistaken the cheese cloth [on stage gauze] for one of the back drops [the very back scenery cloth] and was sauntering across the stage’ (Westminster Gazette, 13 June 1925, p. 8).

In such stories cleaners might resist being put into their expected place: one 1913 story of an actor being mistaken for a theatre cleaner when she was stood in the wings reports she was told off by a stagehand for being in the wrong place. She recalled being startled but, putting on the Cockney dialect she used in the play, told him: ‘Ah’ve as much roight ’ere as you’. The stagehand threatened to report her to the management until he realised his mistake (Sevenoaks Chronicle and Kentish Advertiser, 11 July 1913, p. 7). Cleaners’ apparent brusque attitudes were a source of great comedy. When a lion reportedly broke free of its cage at the Coliseum, one theatre cleaner was scrubbing a dress room and looked up and saw the roaming animal: ‘Thinking it was an acrobat dressed up for a comic performance all she said was, “Go away, go away! Can’t you see I’m busy!” And the lion went’ (Dundee Courier, 25 October 1928, p. 4).

The crediting of theatre cleaners as part of the community of the theatre production is unusual. One history of the Players Theatre reflects both a moment of working-class resistance and later crediting: ‘The Director was interviewing Ann before she became the theatre cleaner. “Right, Mrs Jones”, he told her. “We’ll try you for a week and see if you suit us.” “Right, Mr Sachs, and I’ll see if you suit me”’ (Anon., 1943, p. 18). One Ann Jones is at least listed in the ‘Helpers’ section in the account of all those who worked at the theatre (Anon., 1943, p. 118). Joan Littlewood credited her cleaners in the programmes, a fact widely written about at the time (see Bristol Evening Post, 18 September 1957, p. 10).

Elsewhere another thread of reporting reveals cleaners doing more than they are expected to or having unexpected knowledge that becomes vital to the running of the theatre. One incident in Glasgow was reported in the national press, regarding a young woman cleaner who had ended up conducting the Chauve-Souris Company [a choir with orchestra]. As the newspaper recounted, the company was struggling to find a pianist for rehearsals, and so the cleaner ‘went on to the stage and offered her help. She played the piano and led the singing, and in the course of an impromptu rehearsal provided the Russians with free and genuine tuition’. She was then booked by the company to be ‘their instructress in Scottish melodies’ (Daily Herald, 28 February 1927, p. 1). In her autobiography, Julie Walters recounted how Winnie, the Everyman Theatre cleaner, ‘put many an actor through their paces when it came to learning the Liverpool lingo’. On their meeting Winnie asked, ‘So you want educatin’, do you?’ Walters recalls, ‘she took me through my speeches, writing them phonetically’ (2009, pp. 171–2). The Abbey Theatre reappears in other anecdotes about cleaners: Barney, their one-time theatre cleaner, is described as ‘a gentle, silent, beautiful old man who, with a sad sense of care, carried out his cleaning duties by day’ (de Valois, p. 109). By night, Barney worked as the prompter, sitting by the side of the stage delivering forgotten lines, working on a range of plays from Shaw to Yeats’s Plays for Dancers. Again at the Abbey, in earlier years, Bernard Shaw’s contemporaneous description of Lady Gregory as the ‘Charwoman of the Abbey’ (because she did everything and took on all tasks), is perhaps the richest way of conceptualising these threads. Cleaners have held a multiplicity of often invisible and unrecognised roles in theatrical productions.

If there is no literature, there is a working tradition that shows how working-class women and men who fulfilled the role of theatre cleaners disrupted certain social niceties. The cleaners we have encountered were uncontainable and asserted their right to the space of the theatre, whether that be in the face of the lion or badly costumed acrobat, or of the class structures which subjected them to what was clearly very low paid, dangerous, and physically demanding work. They sat in the wrong place, ate the wrong food, knew things that they were not supposed to, ignored things that seemed valuable to others, all while being entirely vital to the running of theatre. So what if we were to read the iterative and embodied practice of cleaning and of restoring the empty space as an act of writing the blank page on which theatrical performance must take place. A radical reconceptualising of their labour will entail addressing why we have failed as theatre historians to adequately incorporate such working practices within the history of the form. How might we consider the work contemporary cleaning staff carry out, particularly after our shared experiences of Covid-19, and the subsequent emphasis on clean and safe spaces? Joan Littlewood’s ghostly figure, with her broom, reminds us that untroubled class-based expectations can limit the revolutionary potential of theatre makers. Without proper acknowledgement of what women’s ‘lab’ring hands’ have been doing, theatre history is not complete. We had better clean up our act.