• IN the letter (Unity Theatre has real history and their are more ‘survivors’, October 7) a sentence reads: “However our open policy of introducing young actors created our downfall.”

That pertains to coming straight off the street on to the Unity Theatre’s stage. Without that policy some actors we know today would have had no chance of showing their skills.

I go much further back to the era of Lionel Bart, when he first started at Unity from the street.

Unity Theatre management kicked him out when he presented a play he had written, and which he insisted on producing when asked to alter the theme and some of the dialogue.

Refusing, he was told to go to the West-End, which he did, as we all know now through his musical Oliver.

Lionel had written some very stirring songs while at Unity but this wasn’t taken into consideration with the usual, emotional, all-hell-breaking-loose, in theatre land.

There have always been attempted takeovers of Unity, sometimes for commercial reasons by those who thought they could run the theatre better, and the usual anarchist groups.

I recall, Cliff Fenn, who lived in the theatre for security reasons, driving out one anarchist group at the point of a knife. After that actors still came off the street.

Unity, after the tragic fire in 1975, didn’t fail because of the lack of venues. It failed through not keeping up its working-class politics.

After the fire the music hall group within the theatre became too dominant and serious plays written by its members stopped being produced. But it was also a sign of the times with the left in decline.

Producing the obscurantist Harold Pinter and the over-written work of George Bernard Shaw was part of this decline.

WILSON JOHN HAIRE
Lulot Gardens, N19