Sparrows Can't Sing

Pity Joan Littlewood left no filmed record of her major Theatre Workshop productions, which shook semi-moribund classics such as Arden of Faversham and Edward II into dazzling life, and bore witness to the most excitingly inventive imagination in the British theatre of the '50s. This one was distinctly minor, a Cockney chortle about a merchant seaman (Booth) who comes back to his native Stepney to find his wife (Windsor) living with another man. Much bouncy good humour, but no real pace or incisiveness, as he tangles with perky local characters in trying to persuade her to come back, while the real locations simply point up the sitcom phoniness.