Download Harley Granville Barker and the Quest for an English National

Schemes and Dreams: Harley Granville Barker and the Quest for an English National
Theatre
by
Richard St. Peter, B.A., M.F.A
A Dissertation
In
Theatre
Submitted to the Graduate Faculty
of Texas Tech University in
Partial Fulfillment of
the Requirements for
the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Approved
Dr. Bill Gelber
Chair of Committee
Dr. Linda Donahue
Dr. Jonathan Marks
Dr. Michael Stoune
Dr. Anthony Haigh
Dominick Casdonte
Interim Dean of the Graduate School
December, 2013
Copyright 2013, Richard St. Peter
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It has been my considerable delight to discover that the dissertation process is
very much like the collaborative act of creating a piece of theatre. I have a number of
people to whom I am extremely grateful for their support, encouragement, and guidance
as I navigated the waters of this process.
I want to thank Dean Carol Edwards of the College of Visual and Performing Arts
for all of the assistance in conducting my research and for supporting two trips to
London.
I offer my sincere thanks and gratitude to my dissertation committee: Dr. Linda
Donahue, Dr. Jonathan Marks, Dr. Michael Stoune, and Dr. Anthony Haigh. I also have
nothing but praise and admiration for my committee chair, Dr. Bill Gelber. My meeting
with Dr. Gelber in the fall of 2009 was one of the main reasons why I decided to come to
Texas Tech University, and I have enjoyed getting to work closely with him for the last
three years. This dissertation could not have happened without his firm, steady, and
supportive guidance, and I am immensely grateful.
I am immeasurably grateful to Professor Steven Dykes, Director of the American
Theatre Arts program at Rose Bruford College in London. I am also grateful to Professor
Michael Earley, Principal of Rose Bruford College for his assistance in putting me in
contact with Sir Richard Eyre.
My time communicating with Sir Richard Eyre – both via email and during an inperson interview at Jerwood Space in London – has represented a highlight of my career.
Sir Richard has been wonderfully open and candid in his responses to my many questions
regarding Granville Barker and the National Theatre.
ii Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
I am especially grateful to my kitchen cabinet of Benny Sato Ambush and Dr.
Naum Panovski for their support in encouraging me to come back to school to pursue my
Ph.D. I am also grateful to Charles Edward Pogue – lover of British theatre, raconteur,
and professional gentleman of leisure – for all the wonderful conversations about theatre
in London and for stoking my passion for the subject.
I have to thank the staff of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Blythe House for
their patience and assistance during my research trip to London. They were incredibly
patient and helpful to a novice researcher who wasn’t always quite sure what he was
searching for.
I am extremely fortunate to have the love of a wonderful father, Richard St. Peter,
Sr., who kept my spirits from flagging and provided emotional, intellectual, and financial
assistance during my time at Texas Tech University.
I also want to thank my brother-in-law and sister-in-law Matt and Kate Fleeman
for letting us occasionally retreat to Dallas for much needed rest and relaxation and for
their constant encouragement.
I could not have accomplished any of this without the unflagging support and love
of my wife, Lara St. Peter, and my two wonderful children Olivia and Aidan. Everything
I do, I do for them. Lara and I have had an incredible adventure for the last twenty years,
and I share this milestone wholeheartedly with her.
Finally this dissertation is dedicated to the memory and wisdom of my late, great
friend, colleague, and brother-in-arms, Jack Parrish (1953 – 2009). Jack gave me the
courage and the push I needed to begin this process and I miss him every single day.
iii TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………..ii
ABSTRACT…………………..…………………………………………………………..v
INTRODUCTION……….……………………………………………………………....1
CHAPTER ONE (ENTER GRANVILLE BARKER)…………………….................14
CHAPTER TWO (A HOUSE FOR SHAKESPEARE)…………………..………….31
CHAPTER THREE (THE THOUSAND PERFORMANCES)………......................68
CHAPTER FOUR (THE NATIONAL DEBATE)……………...………………......102
CHAPTER FIVE (BARKER’S SECOND ACT)……………………………............138
CHAPTER SIX (BARKER’S LEGACY)…………………………….……….……..169
BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………..……………178
APPENDIX ONE: INTERVIEW WITH SIR RICHARD EYRE…………...……..183
APPENDIX TWO: GRANVILLE BARKER’S PRODUCTIONS………...………191
iv Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
ABSTRACT
Harley Granville Barker, early twentieth-century director, playwright, producer,
and educator, was a visionary who directly and indirectly influenced the modern National
Theatre of Great Britain, arguably the most successful English-speaking theatre in the
world. His writings – primarily his co-authoring of A National Theatre: Schemes and
Estimates with critic William Archer – gave the national theatre movement a practical
road map. In addition to his writings, Barker’s work as a director ushered in the modern
era of directing Shakespeare and his legendary “Thousand Performance” seasons at the
Royal Court Theatre introduced the New Drama to a public audience for the first time.
v Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
INTRODUCTION
On January 17, 2013 the London newspaper The Guardian ran a piece in its Arts
Section written by Matt Trueman with the headline “National Theatre to Smash Records
with Eight Plays Open in London.” The piece was really a snapshot examining the
juggernaut the National Theatre has become. Trueman examined each of the National
Theatre’s record four productions running in the West End – War Horse; One Man, Two
Guvnors; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time; and Untold Stories –while
simultaneously previewing the four plays in its Spring season in its three-theatre complex
on the South Bank. With these eight productions running concurrently, the National
Theatre now had the ability to sell approximately 40,000 tickets per week in London,
more than double its highest previous total. As of this writing, the National Theatre is in
the process of opening an office in New York City to oversee commercial transfers from
London (Trueman1). The artistic output is staggering. As it celebrates its fiftieth
anniversary season, the National Theatre of Great Britain is arguably the most influential
English-speaking theatre in the world, and British theatre remains as a kind of last
outpost of imperial power. That was far from the case a century ago. I will argue that the
one individual who was responsible for showing how a controversial and long-delayed
National Theatre could function was Harley Granville Barker1. As Richard Eyre and
Nicholas Wright point out in Changing Stages, their landmark 2000 retrospect of British
theatre in the twentieth century:
1
I will refer throughout this document to Harley Granville Barker as Granville Barker or simply Barker, omitting the hyphen he added to his name around 1918. He made his name and reputation in the theatre as “Granville Barker” and for consistency sake that is how I shall refer to him unless quoting directly from other sources. 1 All theatre has a tendency to decline to the condition of the superficial and
silly. Every now and then someone comes along, shakes it up and
demonstrates that it’s an art to be fought for and to be unembarrassed
about taking seriously. At the beginning of the twentieth century in
Britain it was someone whose influence, if not whose name, has resonated
throughout the entire century: Harley Granville Barker. He possessed a
passionate certainty about the importance of the theatre and the need to
revise its form, its content and the way it was managed. (Eyre and Wright
28)
Harley Granville Barker first came to my notice at the same time Dr. Anthony Haigh
came into my life. In 2004 I had recently been appointed as the Artistic Director of
Kentucky’s Actors Guild of Lexington. Upon my arrival, I immediately began scouting
talent to help build the professional aspirations of my theatre, and one of the first people I
met was Dr. Haigh. In his position as Chair of the Drama Department at Centre College
in Danville, Kentucky, and through his leadership as President of the Southeastern
Theatre Conference, Dr. Haigh was uniquely situated to serve as an asset for Actors
Guild of Lexington. It was through Dr. Haigh that I met and formed a relationship with
Steven Dykes, Director of the American Theatre Arts program at Rose Bruford College
in London, Dr. Haigh’s alma mater. In 2006 we initiated a three-way exchange program
between Centre College, Rose Bruford College, and Actors Guild of Lexington that led to
my teaching as a guest lecturer at Rose Bruford and started my immersion in British
theatre.
2 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
On my initial visit to London, the first two theatres I attended were the National
Theatre of Great Britain and the Royal Court Theatre. To say that I fell in love with both
of these theatres would be an understatement. I have always been a voracious reader of
all things theatre history, and I began to read everything I could about both theatres: the
histories, the great productions, the leadership of each theatre, anything I could find.
These resources, which will influence this study, include Peter Hall’s Making an
Exhibition of Myself: The Autobiography of Peter Hall, Peter Hall’s Diaries, Richard
Eyre’s National Service: Dairy of a Decade at the National Theatre, and Eyre’s
autobiography Utopia and Other Places. Other influential works include Power Plays:
The Life and Times of Peter Hall by Stephen Fay, William Gaskill’s A Sense of
Direction: Life at the Royal Court, and Ruth Little and Emily McLaughlin’s The Royal
Court: Inside and Out. The more I read of the history of these two institutions and the
history of twentieth century British theatre in general, the more one name kept appearing,
and one that kept intriguing me: Harley Granville Barker. He is mentioned three times in
Eyre’s National Service, including Eyre’s admission that “…I revere (well worship)
Granville Barker…” (75). Writing about Barker in his diaries, Peter Hall articulates what
will be a major focus of this present work: “Granville Barker was one of the masters of
the theatre. How can [his emphasis] it be that he was ignored during his lifetime;
respected by intellectuals, but condemned by indifference from everybody else?
Meantime the egocentric entertainer, G.B. Shaw, was attracting all the limelight. No
wonder Barker went bitter” (Hall 404). Ignored by whom? What did Hall mean by
Barker going bitter? I revere Richard Eyre and Peter Hall, and I wanted to find out more
3 about this mysterious Harley Granville Barker figure: who he was, what he did or did not
accomplish, and what he would come to represent for modern British theatre, if anything.
By the time I decided to pursue my Ph.D. studies, I had a general idea that I
wanted to write about Barker. I also became more and more interested in the intersecting
histories of the National Theatre and the Royal Court. As I researched further, it was
clear that the histories of these two great theatres are inextricably linked by the influence
of Harley Granville Barker. There is a connection between Barker’s work as a director
and writer at the Royal Court and his attempts to establish a national theatre. The national
theatre battle was a major fight in Barker’s lifetime, and the failure to establish one was
considered one of Barker’s great defeats. Yet as this study will seek to show, the fact that
Barker was even a player in the national theatre debate at the age of 26 is remarkable; his
ideas and experiences running the Royal Court would provide the framework whereby
the National Theatre was ultimately established at the Old Vic in 1963. That, combined
with the influence of Barker’s protégés in regional reps throughout the United Kingdom,
really makes Barker, as Eyre suggests “the father of modern British theatre” (Eyre 1).
The question of how influential was Harley Granville Barker on the development
of an English National Theatre provides the framework for my study as I move from
Barker’s work and accomplishments in his lifetime, to the eventual establishment of the
National Theatre.
There has been a great deal of writing done on the more than century-long fight to
establish a national theatre and on Harley Granville Barker. There have been four major
biographies written on Barker – C. B. Purdom’s Granville Barker (1956), Elmer W.
Salenius’s Harley Granville Barker (1982), Eric Salmon’s Granville Barker: A Secret
4 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
Life (1983), and Dennis Kennedy’s Granville Barker and the Dream of Theatre (1985).
While each work has its individual strengths and weaknesses, Purdom and Kennedy are
the most valuable for this present study. Purdom was a contemporary and colleague of
Barker’s, and his biography is one of the landmark works that helped establish the myth
of Barker as the “Lost Leader.” Kennedy’s work is the most balanced and purely
academic study of Barker’s work and subsequent influence. Salenius’s study is less
valuable as it focuses more on Barker the playwright, and Salmon’s work is curiously
lacking in the necessary academic impartiality. With careful selection, the four works
will serve as the foundational information for Chapter One, which will focus on Barker’s
biography and early stage work.
Chapter Two will shift focus to the roiling years of National Theatre debate,
which very nearly match Barker’s lifetime. While the earliest known call for an English
National Theatre dates to Effingham Wilson’s pamphlet in 1848, the debate really begins
in earnest in 1879 with influential poet and educational reformer Matthew Arnold’s essay
“The French Play in London.” This chapter will examine the years 1879 - 1914, with
sharper focus being given to the Edwardian era (1901 - 1910) and up to the start of World
War I. A number of important sources will be used to help foreground this era, providing
not only a framework for the national theatre debate but for the workings of Edwardian
theatre in general. The most important work for this chapter is John Elsom and Nicholas
Tomalin’s The History of the National Theatre (1978). Rewritten by Elsom following the
untimely death of Tomalin, The History of the National Theatre succinctly summarizes
the nineteenth-century debate and seeks to determine why the movement proved
ultimately unsuccessful prior to the start of World War I.
5 If the theatre is always reflective of and responsive to the times when it is
produced, it is necessary to have a brief overview of what the Edwardian world looked
like. Two important studies will help to place the Edwardian theatre within the context of
its times: Edwardian England, edited by Donald Read and Edwardian England: 1901 –
1914, edited by Simon Nowell-Smith; both provide an historical overview of the era. The
Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre, edited by Kerry Powell,
provides an incisive general view of the theatre in those respective eras. Two outstanding
first-person accounts will also be referred to: W. MacQueen Pope’s witty memoir
Carriages at Eleven (1947) and A.E. Wilson’s Edwardian Theatre (1951), which is
supplemented by J.C. Trewin’s interview-heavy Edwardian theatre “home book” The
Edwardian Theatre (1976).
Perhaps the most compelling argument in favor of the establishment of a national
theatre focused on the need to provide a suitable stage to develop a native drama. As
Barker wrote to Archer in 1903:
It seems to me that we may have to wait a very long time for the National
Theatre to come, and then when it comes we may have no modern
National Drama to put in it…Without doubt the National Theatre will
come, but as Ibsen has leavened the whole English Theatre during the past
fifteen years, so we ought to be getting some more leaven ready for the
National Theatre for when it does come.
(Salmon ed 42)
If there was going to be a National Theatre, there needed to be worthwhile National
drama for its stage.
6 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
In hindsight, the figure who came to dominate the era is George Bernard Shaw.
Anyone who wishes to study Shaw has to pick and choose carefully from an incredibly
crowded field. This work will feature two major sources on Shaw – Michael Holroyd’s
second volume of his definitive Shaw study Bernard Shaw (volume 2 is subtitled The
Pursuit of Power 1898-1918) and Leon Hugo’s concentrated study Edwardian Shaw: The
Writer and his Age, which will contextualize his work as the native component of the
“New Drama” at the Royal Court during the Vedrenne/Barker management. Playwright
Henry Arthur Jones provides a contemporary counterpoint to Shaw. His important 1913
collection of essays, lectures, and speeches, The Foundations of a National Drama, work
to broaden Barker’s arguments for the necessity of a national theatre. One final but
extremely important study to be cited in this work is the outstanding Origins of English
Dramatic Modernism, 1870-1914. Edited by Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe and Gregory F.
Teague, this study contextualizes the new movement of modernism and how it came to
be a genre of English drama.
While the argument in favor of a national theatre begins in earnest in 1879, prior
to 1904 many of its proponents were scholars or amateurs with no practical experience in
the theatre. Even Shaw was better known as a brilliant critic than as a playwright. What
the movement lacked was a Théâtre Antoine or Deutsches Theater to point to as a
possible model. In 1903, Barker, in partnership with William Archer, composed Schemes
and Estimates for a National Theatre. This privately published “Blue Book” was created
with the hope of enticing a potential wealthy donor to endow a building to house the
proposed National Theatre. The Blue Book is the major focus of Chapter Three.
7 At almost the exact same time, Barker hatched the scheme to produce a season of
the New Drama at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square. Chapter Three focuses on
what follows: the history-making “Thousand Performances” at the Royal Court and the
successes and failures of the Court Theatre venture, the so-called Vedrenne/Barker
management. Their success producing the new drama at the Court Theatre allowed for a
new generation of native playwrights to have their voices heard for the first time. While
Shaw was the standard bearer, other writers, including John Galsworthy, St. John Hankin,
Elizabeth Robbins, and Barker himself, decisively proved there was an audience for new
writers exploring new forms and ideas. With the Court’s success, a national theatre, if
and when it was to be established, would have access to a group of playwrights not
previously discovered. An outstanding primary source of their work is Desmond
MacCarthy’s 1907 critical assessment The Court Theatre, 1904-1907: A Commentary
and Criticism. I also reference a number of primary documents from my January 2013
research trip to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
The Vedrenne/Barker management has gone down in theatre history as a kind of
paradigm shift. Suddenly there was a fault line between what came before and what
would follow. I will argue that, in actuality, what the Court represented was the birth of
avant-garde theatre in London. At its height, the Vedrenne/Barker management paled in
comparison to the popularity and resources of the likes of Herbert Beerbohm Tree and
George Alexander. Where it ultimately proved most successful was in the final
introduction of the New Drama to London. While other groups before the Court Theatre
had presented plays by the likes of Ibsen – J.T. Grein’s Stage Society for example – the
Court differed through the implementation of an extensive rehearsal period and by
8 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
committing to short runs versus one-night-only engagements that amounted to little more
than slap-dash productions. The Court proved there was an audience that could support
many – although not all – of these new playwrights, in particular Shaw, and that the
venture was worth sustaining.
Unfortunately, in 1908 the Vedrenne/Barker management decided to move from
the cramped Court Theatre – with its lack of wing space and storage, and seating capacity
of approximately 600 – to the Savoy Theatre in the heart of the commercial West End.
The Savoy was approximately twice the size of the Court, and for a variety of reasons
discussed in Chapter Four, the scheme collapsed under the weight of the West End move.
From 1908 - 1914 Barker was really at his peak as a director2, and he moved from the
failure of the Savoy to artistically triumphant seasons at both the St. James Theatre and
the Duke of York. On a larger scale, the years 1908 - 1914 witnessed the most
momentum the National Theatre movement would have prior to the end of World War II.
Barker and his disciples remained in the foreground of the National Theatre debate, and
other prominent voices, such as Henry Arthur Jones, joined in the call for a National
Theatre. While Barker achieved a measure of artistic success at the St. James and the
Duke of York between 1908 and 1911, each venture ended in financial failure. One of
his most prominent supporters, George Bernard Shaw, summed up the struggles of
keeping these various ventures going: “The receipts barely kept us going and left no
reserves with which to nurse new authors into new reputations…so the firm went down
with its colors flying, leaving us with a proved certainty that no National Theatre in
2
This study will refer to the role of “director” as we call it now as opposed to “producer” which would have been the familiar term for Barker’s theatre and indeed for the theatre of most of the first half of the twentieth century. 9 London devoted to the art of the theatre at its best can bear the burden of London rents
and London rates” (qtd. in Jackson 27). The members of the movement then began to
look outside of London.
In 1911 Barker made an important trip to Germany, where he observed firsthand
the workings of Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater and recognized for the first time the
value and necessity of state subsidy. As Barker was visiting the continent, regional
repertory in the UK was undergoing a revolutionary change. Influenced in large part by
the Court Theatre and the success of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, regional repertories
began to establish themselves as viable alternatives to the long-standing typical music
hall or three-tiered touring system from London established during the Victorian era. The
regional reps were devoted to presenting the New Drama in cities like Glasgow,
Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester. Almost simultaneously, the question was
called in Parliament to establish a National Theatre and a national drama school in
London and, while the debate went throughout much of the summer of 1913, the question
was narrowly defeated. Despite the defeat, supporters of the National Theatre movement
were heartened by the progress, and the joint Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre
Committee – an amalgamation of various groups associated with the National Theatre
movement, including Barker, Shaw, and Archer, the Old Vic, and the Shakespeare
Memorial Theatre at Stratford – began fundraising in earnest and secured an initial
donation of £70,0003 to purchase the necessary land where the theatre would eventually
be built.
3
Approximately £6.5 (or $10.3 million US) in 2013 according to http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-­‐1633409/Historic-­‐inflation-­‐calculator-­‐value-­‐money-­‐
changed-­‐1900.html 10 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
In the meantime, from 1912 to 1914, Barker had his greatest successes as a
director, once again at the Savoy Theatre, where he staged three Shakespearean
productions (The Winter’s Tale, Twelfth Night, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream) that
brought him international acclaim as a director. If the National Theatre seemed
inevitable, it also seemed equally inevitable that Harley Granville Barker would be its
first Artistic Director. He had successfully proven himself capable of running a theatre,
he had helped to introduce a host of new writers for the theatre, and most importantly, he
had reinvented the staging of Shakespeare for a new century. While Barker was preparing
to transfer A Midsummer Night’s Dream to New York, however, Gavrilo Princip
assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and plunged Europe into a war that
would derail both the plans for a national theatre and Granville Barker’s active work in
the theatre.
Chapter Five of this study will focus on the years immediately following the First
World War as Barker moved from theatre practitioner to scholar. While he was not
nearly as active in professional theatre as he was prior to the war, he remained a
passionate and eloquent partisan for a National Theatre. From his position as chair of the
newly formed British Drama League, Barker was able to maintain an active participation
in the national theatre debate even though he had for the most part removed himself from
the professional practice of theatre. In three major works Barker continued to push for its
establishment: 1922’s The Exemplary Theatre, his 1930 revision of Schemes and
Estimates, now simply entitled The National Theatre, and his series of American lectures
published in 1945 under the title The Use of the Drama. Each of these volumes, along
with his better-known Prefaces to Shakespeare, echoed and expanded on Barker’s
11 practical work in the theatre. He remained unswerving in his desire to see a National
Theatre take root in London, and the failure to do so probably amounted to his biggest
career disappointment.
In the years 1918 to 1963 a new generation of players and pretenders maneuvered
to establish a National Theatre in London. At the same time, the revolutionary
generation that helped redefine regional rep in the UK was dying out due to a lack of
state and local subsidy and the arrival of the cheaper commodity that is cinema. A
regional theatre explosion that began in approximately 1910 ground to a halt by 1923,
and suddenly the draw of new media opportunities in the capital forced more and more
actors out of the regions and into London. Finally in 1949, Parliament passed the
National Theatre Act and, even though it would be another fourteen years before the
National Theatre was launched at the Old Vic and 27 years before Peter Hall led the
company into its new home on the South Bank, the long battle was finally won. By 1949,
Harley Granville Barker had been dead for three years.
Chapter Six summarizes my arguments and also expands on what I think Barker’s
major influences are on the present National Theatre. His role in reinventing
Shakespeare has been echoed on the stages of the National Theatre now for half a century
as directors deconstruct and reinterpret classic plays. His advocacy for education and his
championing of the native playwright are all borne out at the modern National Theatre.
With a few exceptions – the lack of a permanent resident company being the major one –
today’s National Theatre clearly resembles the influential ideas of Granville Barker. It is
my argument that the single most important facet Barker brought to the National Theatre
debate was a face. He personified the movement; he achieved a measure of success with
12 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
the New Drama; and he proved there were the beginnings of a reliable audience
interested in something other than spectacle and the music hall. He began to articulate
the need for public subsidy at a time when most other supporters were still searching for
an Elizabethan-style patron. Barker provided action for the words of others: Shaw,
Archer, and Edward Gordon Craig included. Through his work at the Court Theatre, he
provided a platform whereby other artists proved themselves, leading to a proliferation of
Court Theatre alumni working in and running regional reps throughout the UK. While
his influence was greatly eclipsed by the “egocentric entertainer” Shaw – not to mention
Shaw’s brilliant plays – he should not be forgotten as the driving force that ultimately
proved that, with proper support, a National Theatre could indeed flourish in London.
History may have recorded that he lost the battle for a National Theatre, but I will argue
that without his influence, the National Theatre war may well have never been won. To
do that, one must start at the beginning.
13 CHAPTER ONE
ENTER GRANVILLE BARKER
The National Theatre of Great Britain, situated on the south bank of London's
River Thames, has rightly become the pre-eminent theatre of Great Britain, and some
would argue, the most important theatre in the world. How it came into being and how it
was shaped was a process that was a hundred years in the making. Many theatrical
pioneers and well-meaning proponents of Britain's cultural heritage had a hand in
defining the National Theatre we have today, but perhaps one man, Harley Granville
Barker, was instrumental in its creation.
For more than forty years Harley Granville Barker was the most visible proponent of the
establishment of a national theatre in England. He would be the earliest true theatre
professional to champion the cause of a national theatre and would provide the
framework by which a national theatre could eventually be launched and sustained. A
director, playwright, scholar, and actor, he would become one of the towering figures of
modern British theatre in the first half of the twentieth century, but one of the least
remembered. To understand why Harley Granville Barker would ultimately become an
early proponent of what is essentially avant-garde theatre in London, it is necessary to
understand his background, his collaborations with George Bernard Shaw, William
Archer, and Gilbert Murray, and the environment in which he achieved his earliest
success. Despite experiencing a great deal of acclaim as a young actor, Barker would
quickly sour on contemporary theatre practices, and his search for new ways of creating
theatre would align him with the newly formed Stage Society and bring him to the
attention of Shaw, Archer, and Murray.
14 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
Harley Granville Barker was born in London on November 25, 1877. While his
earliest biographer C.B. Purdom points out that details of his childhood are scarce, and
that Barker himself refused to speak or write about his youth, there are still many details
of his family life that are known. Barker’s father, Albert James Barker, was from an old
English family that traced its lineage back to the thirteenth century. The elder Barker’s
occupation was listed as “Gentleman” on Barker’s birth certificate and, despite his long
family lineage, he appears to have not had much success in life. According to Purdom,
the elder Barker described himself as something of an architect, and he apparently
scraped out a living by converting houses in to flats in busy London neighborhoods and
then either renting or selling them. He appears to have not had much of an impact on
Barker’s life; whenever Barker acknowledged or referred to a family member, it was
always his mother.
Albert James Barker married Mary Elisabeth Bozzi-Granville on February 12,
1877, almost exactly nine months before Barker’s birth. The newly married Mrs. Barker
was twenty-eight, seven years older than her husband, and of mixed English-Italian
descent. Under the stage name Miss Granville, she achieved minor celebrity on the stage
as a poetry reciter and bird-mimic. According to Purdom: “[S]he was a fair, stocky,
charming, sentimental woman; her large repertoire consisted of popular poems; she was
something of a success on the public platform in this country and America at a time when
poetry recitals were a regular form of cultural entertainment” (Purdom 8-9). Mrs.
Barker’s career was managed by her husband, and from an early age she took the young
Barker on tour with her, eschewing a formal education for the child in exchange for an
education on stage. Evidently preternaturally intelligent, Barker began reciting poems
15 from the stage from an early age, graduating to bits and pieces of Shakespeare, including
an especially intense pre-teen version of “To be or not to be.” While Barker apparently
never set foot in a formal classroom, he was steeped in poetry and Shakespeare, and read
voraciously. Shortly after Barker’s death in 1946, George Bernard Shaw summed up his
education and comportment in a remembrance penned as a kind of eulogy for him:
He had a strong strain of Italian blood in him, and looked as if he had stepped
out of a picture by Benozzo Gozzoli. He had a wide literary culture and a
fastidiously delicate taste in every branch of art. He could write in a too precious
but exquisitely fine style. He was self-willed, restlessly industrious, sober and
quite sane. He had Shakespear (sic) and Dickens at his fingers end. Altogether
the most cultivated person whom circumstances had driven into the theatre at that
time. (qtd. in Purdom 10)
For Shaw to glean that impression of Barker as “the most cultivated person” of a
collection of impressive individuals including Gilbert Murray, William Archer, and even
Shaw himself, speaks volumes about the lengths Barker travelled to essentially selfeducate.
Barker made his first recorded appearance in a play at Harrogate in the spring of
1891. The thirteen-year-old Barker appeared as Dr. Grimstone in Edward Rose’s longforgotten adaptation of a story called Vice Versa, organized by Charles F. Dawson. 1891
also marked the year he was sent to Sarah Thorne’s theatrical school at Margate, where
he received a few months education geared toward life on the stage and, as near as
anyone can tell, his only formal education of any sort. While at the school, Barker
appeared in several productions supervised by Thorne at the Theatre Royal, Margate,
16 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
most notably playing Paris in a production of Romeo and Juliet. He also struck up a
friendship with the older actor Berte Thomas, with whom he would eventually co-author
several early plays. In effect, the decade of the 1890s would serve as a kind of
apprenticeship for Barker. He would work with many of the leading lights of late
Victorian theatre and would come to develop many of the ideas that would drive his work
in the theatre for the rest of his life.
As will become clear in Chapter Two, the 1890s were a pivotal decade in the
development of modern British theatre. For more than three centuries, the British theatre
had been a brutally competitive, purely market-driven industry. The theatre Barker
entered was dominated by short, haphazard rehearsals, long runs of hits, or early
withdrawals of flops. The actor-manager tradition, personified by the likes of Henry
Irving, dominated the stage. Star-actors were very often supported by a few character
actors and rounded out by amateurs – or pick-up players if they were on tour. By age
fourteen Barker was making his living as a touring player, and he eventually made his
London debut in 1892 playing the 3rd Young Man in Charles Brookfield’s musicalcomedy The Poets and the Puppets. He next appeared in Brookfield’s play To-day and
then disappeared from the London stage for several years. As with Shakespeare three
centuries earlier, there has been much conjecture regarding these missing years, but more
than likely Barker was honing his acting skills in the regions. In short order, he
resurfaced in late 1894/early 1895 and in quick succession toured with a series of minor
actor-managers, including A.B. Tapping, Lewis Waller, and several others before he
joined Ben Greet’s Shakespeare and Old English Comedy Company as a seventeen-yearold. In Greet’s company, he once again played Paris in Romeo and Juliet, this time
17 opposite a young Lillah McCarthy, his future wife, as Juliet. From 1895 to 1900, he
accelerated his stage apprenticeship, assuming larger roles in better-regarded companies.
He appeared onstage with Charles Hawtrey and Edward Gordon Craig and eventually
found his way into the company of Mrs. Patrick Campbell. His joining of “Mrs. Pat’s”
company brought him into contact with perhaps the three most important individuals of
his career: William Archer, Gilbert Murray, and George Bernard Shaw.
Barker’s earliest correspondence with William Archer dates from 1898 when the
twenty-year-old Barker sent one of the plays, co-written with Berte Thomas (The
Weather-Hen), to Archer for possible production by the Stage Society. Archer, born in
Scotland and twenty-two years Barker’s senior, was already a well-established figure in
London literary. Widely regarded as the person who introduced the plays of Ibsen to
English-speaking audiences (by 1898 he had translated six of Ibsen’s plays), he had also
made a name for himself by editing and publishing the dramatic criticism of William
Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt. In 1882 he had published English Dramatists of Today and had
been a prominent dramatic critic since the late 1870s. Archer had served as chief theatre
critic of the London Figaro from 1878 to 1881 and since 1884 had been the theatre critic
at The World, where he would remain until 1906. As we will see in Chapter Two, Archer
was one of the earliest critics to echo Matthew Arnold’s call for an English national
theatre. Although Archer was much older than Barker, like Shaw he took an almost
immediate liking to the ambitious young would-be reformer of the stage.
Barker’s reasoning for sending Archer his manuscript stemmed from the fact that
in 1897 Archer had launched the New Century Theatre. Modeled largely on André
Antoine’s Théâtre Libre in Paris and J.T. Grein’s Independent Theatre in London, the
18 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
New Century theatre was meant to provide production opportunities to plays of artistic
merit but limited commercial appeal. Evidently Archer turned down Barker and
Thomas’s play but apparently gave some encouraging feedback in a letter since lost.
Barker responded to Archer on April 12, 1898:
Will you allow me to thank you very kindly for your letter…and as your
kindly criticism appears mainly to me in the light of a question will you
forgive me if I answer it, more I fear for my own satisfaction than
expecting you to take this interest. I so far bow to your decision as to the
play’s unsuitability to the public that I may say my friend Thomas and
myself have been quite of that mind since the play was in embryo. I fear
that with the refusal by the “New Century” our last definite hope of
production vanishes. Therefore should you, with the “longer record
behind you,” ever think fit to change that decision the “Weather-Hen”
would – as matters now stand – be very much at your service. I need
hardly say this. (qtd in Salmon, 38-39)
Barker’s deferential tone with Archer would later change as their relationship developed,
but at this early juncture it is clearly Archer who is the senior partner and sounding board
for many of Barker’s early schemes.
As the apprenticeship stage of Barker’s career continued, he began appearing less
and less in the repressively commercial theatre of the West End of London and
gravitating more to what would today be considered fringe-type theatres. Despite his
early acclaim as an actor, one of Barker’s biographers, Eric Salmon, believed Barker
developed a distinct distaste for the profession almost immediately (26) – and sought
19 other forms of theatre work. Indeed, in his earliest correspondence with Archer, not only
does Barker attempt to get feedback on his plays but also queried Archer on whether he
should try his hand at theatre criticism. In spite of this attitude, in 1899, Barker made his
biggest splash to date, appearing in the title role in the iconoclastic William Poel’s
production of Shakespeare’s Richard II. The following year Barker found his first true
artistic home with the establishment of the Stage Society.
The Stage Society was inaugurated in 1900 and, like Archer’s by then defunct
New Century and J.T. Grein’s Independent before that, had the express goal of providing
production to non-commercial but artistically worthy plays. Barker appeared in one of
their first productions when he played the role of Erik Bratsberg in Ibsen’s League of
Youth, which was produced by Charles Charrington at the Vaudeville Theatre. He
appeared in a number of productions and eventually came to the attention of another
critic/fledgling playwright, who was looking to cast a particularly difficult role in his new
play. That playwright was George Bernard Shaw and the play was Candida. Shaw later
remembered, “I saw him in Hauptmann’s Friedensfest and immediately jumped at him
for the poet in Candida. His performance of this part – a very difficult one to cast – was,
humanly speaking, perfect” (qtd. in Salmon 27). As with all things Shaw, the truth is not
quite that simple. According to Michael Holroyd, Barker had been recommended for the
role of Marchbanks to Shaw by Charles Charrington; however, Shaw had his mind set
unalterably on the actor Henry Edmonds:
“I have often seen Granville Barker act,” he assured Charrington, “and as I
cannot remember him in the least and I can remember Esmond, I conclude
that Esmond is the better man. I am prepared for a struggle on your part
20 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
and Janet’s (Achurch) to induce me to consent to everything most ruinous
to both of us. But I WON’T. Unless I can get a Eugene of Esmond’s
standing, the play shall not be done. (qtd in Holroyd 91)
The following day, at Charrington’s insistence, Shaw attended the Stage Society
production of the Hauptmann piece, which prompted Shaw to write within twenty-four
hours to Charrington: “…I withdraw my observations concerning G.B., whom I certainly
never saw before…he will be an excellent and rather more interesting substitute” (qtd in
Holroyd 91). Candida would be the start of perhaps the most important partnership in the
English theatre since Burbage and Shakespeare and, thanks in large part to Barker’s
efforts, Bernard Shaw would become the dominating figure of this era.
Since Michael Holroyd’s biography of Shaw spans three volumes, it will be
impossible to do him biographical justice in a short space here. I shall, however, attempt
to provide a thumbnail sketch of who Shaw was when he first came into contact with
Barker around the turn of the twentieth century. Bernard Shaw, as he preferred to be
called, was born in Dublin in 1856 and moved to London at the age of nineteen in April
1876. There was a longstanding rumor/legend that Shaw was actually Barker’s
illegitimate father, a rumor that persisted well into the 1970s, as members of the
Edwardian-era theatre community were still alive. When Shaw arrived in London, he
moved in with his mother and sister at 13, Victoria Grove, SW. Barker was born at 3a,
Sheffield Terrace, W8, no more than a fifteen-minute walk from Shaw’s residence. Like
Barker, Shaw’s early years in London involved performing in stage shows as a piano
player for his mother and sister and occasionally performing as a singer as well.
21 It has been speculated that Shaw could have appeared in any number of variety
shows that Barker’s mother appeared in – being billed as Miss Granville – and Eric
Salmon even surmises the following: “Shaw performed at local concerts shortly after
arriving in London. He met other performers. One of them could easily have been a lady
who lived just across Kensington from him and who earned a little by giving poetry
recitals and imitating bird-song” (Salmon 6). Of course this proves nothing, but there are
several very famous photos of Shaw and Barker together, and it would not be a leap to
imagine a familial relationship when regarding the resemblance. There is a very famous
photo of Lillah McCarthy and Barker as Ann Whitefield and Jack Tanner in Shaw’s Man
and Superman where Barker made himself up to look like Shaw on purpose, and the
resemblance is eerie. C.B. Purdom hints at the potential relationship as well, again using
their striking resemblance as a potential clue: “Shaw was vivacious and exhilarating, tall
and lean, with a white face, pale blue eyes, reddish hair and a straggling beard. Barker,
too, had reddish hair, not so red as Shaw’s, nor was he so tall as Shaw, but very thin, with
dark eyes and irrepressible vitality” (Purdom 10). Salmon gives the final word on the
matter to playwright St. John Irving who, in his 1956 book Bernard Shaw: His Life, Work
and Friends, debunks the legend in the most wonderful way possible: “Inevitably, no
doubt, a legend ran round London that Granville-Barker was G.B.S.’s son, though no
mother was ever mentioned. When I first heard it, I suggested to my informant that the
strongest refutal of it was G.B.S.’s failure to boast about it, as he certainly would have
done, had it been true” (qtd. in Salmon 4). Whether or not Shaw was Barker’s biological
father – and he always claimed he was physically incapable of having children – there
can be no doubt that as theatre artists they had a father-son bond for years.
22 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
Shaw’s early years in London, indeed most of the 1880s, were marked by a string
of artistic and literary failures. By the end of the 1880s he had written five novels, all of
which had been rejected by London publishing houses, despite the fact that three of them
were printed by Socialist magazines. He was active in the Socialist movement, becoming
an early prominent member of the Fabian Society, but he longed for greatness, success,
and influence. Throughout his long life, he balanced between being an outlandish, brash,
outwardly confident man of the people and an inwardly self-doubting, insecure Irishman
desperate for acceptance in the right London circles. With his novel-writing producing
one failure after another and an abortive attempt made at playwriting with William
Archer in 1885, a desperate Shaw turned to journalism to eke out a living. It was as a
journalist that he slowly began to find his voice. “ G.B.S.,” a brash, caustically
opinionated raconteur, provided a radical and subversive point of view to scandalize
London readers on a daily basis. He quickly became a world-class music critic, writing
for The Star from 1888 to 1889 before moving to The World from 1890 to 1894. Finally,
from 1895 to 1898, he became the chief drama critic for the Saturday Review and, much
in the way the 1890s served as a theatrical apprenticeship for Barker, the much older
Shaw also used the 1890s to discover and refine his voice.
Shaw’s opinions were considered by many to be revolutionary, and as a critic he
was one of the earliest and staunchest defenders of both Wagner in music and Ibsen in the
theatre. He relished the opportunities to deal out his opinions, and his writings positively
drip with a kind of self-satisfied intellect, one that enjoyed tweaking the prevailing
sensibilities of the day. For a man who was becoming more and more involved with the
London theatre scene, as both critic and struggling playwright, he also delighted to attack
23 the iconic figure of William Shakespeare at the slightest opportunity. Leon Hugo
describes in rich detail the irascible nature of Shaw’s criticism:
His contrariness was put on display in practically every notice he wrote,
but nowhere was it more breathtaking, one could say insolent, than in his
periodic attacks on Shakespeare. These were designed to test the tolerance
of the tolerant, the blood pressure of the bellicose. “With the single
exception of Homer,” G.B.S. declared one memorable Sunday morning, in
the course of a review of Cymbeline, “there is no eminent writer, not even
Sir Walter Scott, whom I despise so entirely as I despise Shakespear (sic)
when I measure my mind against his. (3)
Reading his take on Shakespeare, one gets the sense of his purposefully provocative
cheekiness leaping from the page: “To read Cymbeline and to think of Goethe, of
Wagner, of Ibsen, is, for me, to imperil the habit of studied moderation of statement
which years of public responsibility as a journalist have made almost second nature to
me” (qtd. in Hugo 3). In reality, however, it was not the Shakespeare’s texts Shaw was
taking delight in attacking, it was the mutilated productions of the likes of Henry Irving
he was denigrating.
Much like Barker and Archer, Shaw was patently unsatisfied with the present
state of London theatre and was desperate for an outlet for his work as a playwright. He
spent the 1890s writing a series of plays that struggled to find productions. In January
1901, although extremely well known as a critic, Shaw the playwright was still in his
artistic infancy. Writing to the actor Frederick Kerr, Shaw lamented the fact that his
work was not being successfully received by managers or the public:
24 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
For the last eight or nine years, I have written plays whenever anyone
asked me to – ten in all. Not one of these plays has been produced by the
people for whom they were written; in fact, except for a few scratch
matinees, a provincial tour which had to take a play of mine because it
could get nothing else, a flutter at a suburban theatre, and the shows of
forlorn hopes like the Independent Theatre etc. etc., they have not been
produced at all. Nobody was to blame; but the fact remains that nothing
ever came off. Managers very seldom know what they want. They
sometimes thought they wanted a play by me until they saw the prompt
book; and then they knew well enough that they didn’t want that. So I
published the plays, and gave up the theatre as a bad job. (qtd. in Hugo 4)
In point of fact, he felt that he was a great, if misunderstood, playwright, writing for a
theatre that did not, as yet, exist.
While many critics have claimed that either Archer or Shaw urged Barker to take
on the Court Theatre management in 1904, in fact it is probably due more to the influence
of the third member of Barker’s theatre friendships, Gilbert Murray. Like Archer and
Shaw, Murray was older than Barker but closer in age to Barker than the other two. Born
in Sydney, Australia in 1866, Murray was very much a product of the English
Establishment. His father was Sir Terence Murray, and his mother was a cousin of
celebrated playwright and librettist Sir W.S. Gilbert. He was educated at Merchant
Taylor’s School and St. John’s College, Oxford, and by the age of twenty-two, he was
already a Fellow of New College. He was immensely proficient with all things related to
Greek antiquities, and at twenty-three he was already being described as “[t]he most
25 accomplished Greek scholar of the day” (Salmon ed. 197). In 1889 he accepted the
position of Chair of Greek at the University of Glasgow, and married Lady Mary
Howard.
Both Murray and Lady Mary had a deep and abiding interest in the arts, literature,
and humanistic activities, and Murray was something of a modern-day Renaissance man.
In addition to his scholarly and artistic activities, Murray was active politically his entire
life. He would go on to be one of the founders of the League of Nations following World
War I, and he would chair its executive council from 1923 to 1938. Following the
Second World War, he would serve as joint president and then as president of the United
Nations Association until the late 1950s. For our purposes, Barker first met Murray in
1899 when one of Murray’s original plays, Carlyon Sahib, was produced by Mrs. Patrick
Campbell’s company and featured the twenty-one-year-old Barker in the part of Selim.
Apparently Barker and Murray hit it off immediately. They met right as Murray
was giving up his teaching position at the University of Glasgow due to stress from
overwork and was looking for a second act to his career. Always a passionate lover of
the theatre, Murray combined his two major interests, Ancient Greece and theatre, and
began translating classical Greek texts. At first he did this solely for academic purposes,
using the texts to make his lectures more interesting. It was only after the failure of
Carlyon Sahib and an original Greek play of his called Andromache that Murray took
Shaw’s advice and decided to publish his translation of Euripides’s Hippolytus in hopes
of securing a production. Barker seized on the play, and its production in May 1904 at
the Lyric Theatre served as the spark that would ultimately launch the Court Theatre
season that autumn.
26 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
William Archer, Bernard Shaw, and Gilbert Murray would each play important
roles in Barker’s subsequent rise to prominence after the turn of the century. Archer
provided Barker access to the budding avant-garde theatre community he so desperately
wished to join, Shaw would provide money, materials, and a kind of badgering advice for
years; but Murray would provide a friendship with Barker than neither of the other two
ever matched. Following the First World War and Barker’s withdrawal from active
theatre work, he severed all contact with Shaw, and with Archer he maintained a cordial,
if business-like, tone in his correspondence until Archer’s death in 1924. With Murray,
however, the friendship remained. The tone of their correspondence, always filled with
warmth and mutual admiration, did not change. Just eight months prior to Barker’s death
in 1946, he sent Murray a birthday letter, the final surviving letter between the two of
them. It reads in part:
So you’re 80! – and I gather that if you didn’t go out of your way to
tumble downstairs no-one would suspect it. But I begin to claim quite an
acquaintance with you. Do you remember a one armed Pathan who did a
turn of pretty sound work for you sometime in the last century at
Glasgow? Sir, was that not I? And though my memory isn’t what it was
(I’m more eightyish than you, I suspect) I can look out of window here
and be appropriately reminded of:
Bird of the sea rocks, of the bursting spray,
O, halcyon bird!
That wheelest crying, crying on the way…
27 --- though there I may stick. A good chorus! (qtd. in Salmon 297 298)
Their friendship would span more than four decades and would appear to never waver.
All of that was in the future, however, for the then twenty-four-year-old Barker and
thirty-five-year-old Murray when they embarked on their production of Hippolytus at the
Lyric Theatre in April 1904.
Critic, journalist, scholar, and man of the theatre: Archer, Shaw, Murray, and
Barker would, from approximately 1899 to the start of World War I in 1914, combine to
launch the New Drama and New Theatre in London. Eric Salmon encapsulates
wonderfully their relationships to each other and what it meant for the theatre at the time:
It needs to be remembered that Barker, Archer, Shaw, and Murray formed
a close-knit and sympathetic group in the first two decades of the
twentieth century. All were dedicated to, and were part of, the “new
theater;” all made brilliant contributions to it, in various ways; and there
were strong ties of a personal sort between them. There were also
multiple connections of a practical kind. Shaw’s very first attempt at playwriting (Widower’s House) began as a collaboration with Archer, who
supplied the plot and worked out the construction but repudiated the play
when he saw what Shaw had done with the dialogue in the first two acts.
Gilbert Murray, as all the world now knows, was the model for Cusins in
Major Barbara. Barker mounted and presented the first productions of
several major Shaw plays (including Major Barbara, in which
he himself played the Murray part) and also Murray’s vastly important
28 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
translations of Euripides. Archer made the first English translations of
many of Ibsen’s plays and Shaw was one of Ibsen’s stoutest early
defenders in England, at a time when defense was, artistically as well as
socially speaking, urgently necessary. Barker, coming on the scene only
slightly later, directed several distinguished Ibsen productions and was
involved in some of the “second wave” controversies about the Norwegian
dramatist. The community of interest between these four – critic,
playwright, scholar, and homme de théâtre – was a
vivid and powerful force. It would, indeed, be difficult to cite, in the
history of British theater since that time, so impressive and forceful a
combination of individual contributions. (114-115)
Individually Archer, Shaw, and Murray would have left their mark in their respective
fields. It is their coalescing around Barker that helps provide them with their theatrical
immortality. Salmon’s point about Barker as “homme de théâtre” is in fact the single
most crucial point to this present study. Prior to Barker, most of the great reformers of
the theatre, both on the continent and in England, had in fact come from the ranks of the
amateur. European names such as Duke Georg of Saxe-Meinengen, André Antoine, Otto
Brahm, Alfred Jarry, Adolph Appia, and even that most celebrated reformer Konstantin
Stanislavski, all gravitated to the theatre from other fields and areas of life. In England,
many of the reformers came from the ranks of criticism and journalism: George Moore,
J.T. Grein, William Archer, and Bernard Shaw included. With the exception of Edward
Gordon Craig, who was something of a theatrical drop-out, only Harley Granville Barker
was a true professional theatre practitioner. He would become the focal point of a
29 theatrical revolution that would begin in earnest with Matthew Arnold’s 1879 call for a
national theatre. His practical and theoretical work, in conjunction with Archer, Shaw,
Murray, and others, would provide the roadmap necessary for the establishment of a
national theatre in London. It would be a long and winding road before the destination
was reached, a culmination of a long journey that began well before Barker was born. If
the English theatre needed reforming, it was the contention of this eclectic group of
visionaries that reform could happen only on the stages of a national theatre.
Unfortunately England was a country lacking a national theatre, an oversight that was
first commented on in the mid-nineteenth century. As I will discuss in Chapter Two, the
debate for a national theatre really began to take shape in 1879 when the influential critic
and educational reformer Matthew Arnold published an essay in response to the highly
successful visit of Sarah Bernhardt and the Comédie-Française to London. That essay,
“The French Play in London,” would clearly articulate the benefits and advantages of a
native national theatre modeled on the Comédie Française. This essay would, combined
with Barker’s experience working in the commercial theatre of London, form the basis
for the highly influential document that would help provide a path to the ultimate
establishment of a national theatre, Barker and Archer’s A National Theatre: Schemes
and Estimates.
30 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
CHAPTER TWO
A HOUSE FOR SHAKESPEARE
The battle for a national theatre in London would commence in the midnineteenth century and sputter along in fits and starts for more than half a century.
Would-be reformers and well-intentioned critics would make periodic calls for the need
for a national theatre or a “house for Shakespeare.” It was not until Granville Barker and
William Archer provided a standard, however, that the soldiers in favor of a national
theatre would have a concrete, practical plan to rally around. This chapter will examine
the beginnings of the national theatre debate up to and including the publication of
Archer and Barker’s seminal document The National Theatre: Scheme and Estimates.
Many of these early calls for a national theatre were made by individuals not working in
professional theatre at the time. While there would be sporadic support from the theatre
profession and even a kind of de facto national theatre at the Lyceum under Henry Irving,
it really took Barker getting actively involved before a document like The National
Theatre could be produced.
The more than century-long fight to establish a national theatre in England seems
in retrospect to be the result of a curious oversight on the part of the British Empire.
National theatres are a uniquely European phenomenon, the oldest national theatre dating
from 1680 with the establishment by Louis XIV of the Comédie-Française in Paris.
Much like what would be ultimately desired for Shakespeare in England, the ComédieFrançaise was established primarily to stage the plays of the great French dramatists
Molière, Racine, and Corneille. Austria followed the French example in 1741 with the
establishment by Empress Maria Theresa of the Burgtheater in Vienna. Even in
31 Germany, where no nation actually existed, the Hamburg National Theatre was
established with the goal of attempting to create an actual nation. The founders of the
German speaking theatres took their challenge of nationhood seriously, using their stages
to extol the virtues of the German people. A committee of theatre practitioners from the
Hamburg National Theatre met regularly to discuss issues of repertoire and dramaturgy,
and they posed a series of questions that almost served as the development of a mission
statement in the guise of a growing nationalist sensibility: “What is a national stage in
the true sense of the word? How can a theatre become a national stage? And is there
really already a German theatre that can be called a national stage?” (qtd. in Wilmer 13).
This search for a cultural or political identity on the world stage seemed not to
have been a concern for the people of England. Despite the loss of her American
colonies in the eighteenth century, England remained the dominant European political
and economic power for three quarters of the nineteenth century, following Napoleon’s
final defeat at Waterloo, until the Empire staggered out of the century following costly
colonial wars in South Africa. The major parts of the cultural hegemony of the British
Empire were the world-wide acceptance of the plays of Shakespeare and a progressive
education system that guaranteed a quality work force. With France’s native dramatists
being possible exceptions, Shakespeare was largely seen as the preeminent dramatist
throughout most of Europe. The Germans and Russians practically adopted him as their
own national poets, and Victorian Britain took great pride in exporting his work abroad.
At home, it was an altogether different matter. Advances in printing made it possible for
Shakespeare to evolve from theatre to literature and, as the century progressed, seeing
Shakespeare at the theatre became an opportunity largely to see a star-driven vehicle.
32 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
Gary Taylor has T.S. Eliot sum up the problem of popular Shakespeare in the nineteenth
century: “’[w]e do not know Shakespeare, we only know Sir J. Forbes-Robertson’s
Hamlet, and Irving’s Shylock, and so on. As ‘strained through the nineteenth century,’
Shakespeare ‘has been dwarfed to the dimension of a part for this or that actor.’
Shakespeare had to be saved from actors” (Taylor 267).
The attempts to “save Shakespeare” and build a special home for him are first
articulated in the mid-nineteenth century by two very different men. As early as 1832,
Parliament formed a committee at the urging of Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton – better
known now as the novelist and playwright Bulwer-Lytton – to examine the impact of
breaking up the monopoly held by the two “Theatres Royal” – the Drury Lane and
Covent Garden. While Lytton was resolutely in favor of breaking the monopoly – which
would subsequently occur with the Theatres Act of 1843 – he was also sensitive to the
desire to protect the theatres associated with Garrick, Sheridan, Kemble, Macready, and
most especially Shakespeare, from the onslaught of competition from new and lesserrank theatres. Lytton’s committee would propose that the Drury Lane and Covent
Garden Theatres, in exchange for surrendering their monopolies, would be given tax
concessions as a way of providing protection from competition:
Your Committee are therefore of the opinion that, in consideration
of the current belief in the probable duration of the monopoly, and
the ruinous expenses entailed by a system too long permitted, it should,
from the date of the licensing of other theatres for the performances of
regular drama, be respectfully recommended to H.M Government to
remit the fragment of taxes upon these two theatres [thus providing the
33 means whereby] it is probable that those theatres…may retain such a
pre-eminence over other competitors, that the assistance afforded them
will not only be of service to individuals, but, through the drama, to the
public itself. (qtd. in Elsom and Tomalin 9)
Lytton even pushed into new territory by floating the idea of state subsidy: “Your
Committee have the greater willingness to recommend to the Government that this small
pecuniary sacrifice, since it appears…that the French Government devotes little short of
£80,0004 to the support of theatres in Paris” (qtd. in Elsom and Tomalin 9). As it worked
out, the patents were abolished, but no governmental support would be forthcoming for
nearly another century. Lytton would continue to push for a national theatre for the rest
of his life, and as the first Victorian noble to support the cause, it would remain linked to
his family well into the twentieth century and culminate with his grandson Victor
Alexander becoming Chair of the Old Vic in 1946 at a time when the Old Vic would
align itself with the national theatre cause.
While Lytton was pushing for reform to the theatre in government and in the
ranks of Victorian high society, he was soon joined by a decidedly radical member of the
Victorian middle class. Effingham Wilson would become the first man to propose a
national theatre that bears any recognizable resemblance to what would ultimately be
created. Wilson was a London publisher and bookseller who made a name for himself by
championing numerous liberal causes and for having a keen eye for talent. Dismissed by
The Times of London as “The Radical Bookseller of the Royal Exchange,” Wilson had a
certain notoriety in London society. He once kicked a corrupt Lord Mayor of London
4
Approximately £58,000,000 or nearly $94,000,000 based on 2010 estimates according to http://www.measuringworth.com/ppoweruk/result. 34 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
down his staircase and was threatened with a horsewhipping by the Duke of York’s aidede-camp, but he was an ardent supporter of what we would now consider progressive
causes. He championed Tennyson and Browning when they were both young
unpublished poets. He believed passionately in knowledge and in the free exchange of
ideas, and he thought the theatre in general, and Shakespeare in particular, was an ideal
place for the acquisition of knowledge. In 1848, he published the first of two pamphlets
that would each have the same title: A House for Shakespeare: A Proposition for the
Consideration of the Nation.
The genesis for A House for Shakespeare came about as the first of several
strategic partnerships between interests in London and Shakespeare’s birthplace
Stratford-Upon-Avon5. Wilson had discovered that a group of public-spirited individuals
had begun a subscription campaign to buy for the nation what was thought to have been
Shakespeare’s birthplace at Stratford. He approached the group – known as the
Shakespeare Committee – with his pamphlet, which proposed that rather than buying
Shakespeare’s supposed birthplace, it would be more ideal to build a proper theatre for
the performing of his plays as a gift to the nation. In their book The History of the
National Theatre, John Elsom and Nicholas Tomalin reprint Wilson’s six-point summary
of his proposal:
1. that the Committee formed for the purpose of preserving to the
nation the house in which our ‘poet of all time’ had birth, having
satisfactorily effected that object, should now be dissolved,
2. that, it being generally acknowledged that the human mind
5
Referred to from here on simply as Stratford. 35 receives most quickly and retains most durably, impressions made
by dramatic representations, the importance and expediency are
suggested by purchasing by national subscriptions, on the part of
and for the people, some theatre wherein the works of Shakespeare,
the ‘world’s greatest moral teacher,’ may be constantly performed,
3. that the said theatre should be opened at such reasonable charge as
shall be within the reach of all,
4. that the most able manager and best working company should be
engaged and constantly retained; and that only one five-act drama should
be performed in the course of one evening,
5. that the Government for the time being, or any other body of men
agreed upon, should hold the said theatre in trust for the nation, appointing
a committee for the management of the same,
6. that the said National Theatre should be made to act as a great and true
dramatic school, at which alike the poet and the performer, the creator and
the embroiderer (in the highest walks of the dramatic and histrionic arts),
should receive their diplomas, living genius and talent being so fostered
and sustained. (10)
Although Wilson quickly became disillusioned and moved on to other causes, his
proposal would forever serve as the beginning point in discussions of what a proposed
national theatre should look like. Public support, education, egalitarianism, moral highmindedness, artistic excellence, and the training of future practitioners would all be
encoded into Barker and Archer’s Scheme and Estimates a half century later, and with the
36 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
exception of the theatre school, one could argue that the National Theatre of Great Britain
today resembles much of what Wilson was seeking in the mid-nineteenth century.
Of course it didn’t happen. The first major setback to the national theatre
movement occurred for a variety of reasons. The Crimean War broke out in 1853, the
first of three wars to derail momentum for a national theatre. At the same time, the
theatre itself still faced an uphill battle in the area of public perception and moral
authority. In 1852 The Times of London rebuked Queen Victoria for attending a
production of Dion Boucicault’s The Corsican Brothers, and the stolid Victorian middle
class still largely considered the theatre the province of whores, pickpockets, vagabonds,
and thieves. It would not be until the end of the nineteenth century – around the time
Henry Irving was knighted for his services to the theatre – that middle-class parents
began to see theatre as a respectable trade for their sons and daughters to pursue, and
even then it would face a grudging acceptance at best. What is ironic about this highminded disregard for the theatre was that it was occurring at a time when British culture
was institutionalizing. In 1824 Parliament had granted the National Gallery £60,000 to
buy a collection of paintings, which was followed swiftly by the National Gallery moving
from its original home in Pall Mall to its current location in Trafalgar Square. The
building of the new gallery was financed largely through public subscription. As the
century of industry churned on, more great public buildings came into being: the Houses
of Parliament were completed in 1857 and the Royal Albert Hall in 1871. Kristen Guest,
in her article “Class, Culture and Colonialism: the Struggle for an English National
Theatre, 1879-1913” in the Journal of Victorian Culture, makes the case for cultural
enshrinement as a testament to British industrial might:
37 During this time, the nation's cultural inheritance was enshrined in institutions
such as the National Portrait Gallery (1856), and in large-scale scholarly efforts
like the Oxford English Dictionary (1857) and Dictionary of National Biography
(1882). Such monuments helped not only to define a uniquely British character
but also to buttress England's position as a global power, underwriting its claims
to economic dominance and imperial leadership by placing before the public
artifacts of its glorious past. (Guest 282)
So why didn’t the theatre take its place alongside these other cultural achievements? I
think a major reason – beyond the inherent class prejudice – has to do with the very
nature of theatre. By definition it is perhaps the most ephemeral of all the arts, and in an
era featuring only crude photography difficult to set up and shoot, theatre was literally
here today, gone tonight. Effingham Wilson died in 1868 and Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton
would follow him in 1873. Even though the establishment of a national theatre was still a
further ninety years away, these two men fired the first shots in the war to establish such
an institution. The next shots would be fired following a visit to London by Sarah
Bernhardt.
In 1879 the Comédie-Française came to London for a season and took up
residency in the Gaiety Theatre while their building in Paris was undergoing major
renovations. Their season was an enormous critical and commercial success. Many
critics and historians point to that London season as the point in which Sarah Bernhardt
became an international star. One of the main commentators enraptured by Bernhardt
was Matthew Arnold, perhaps the most influential cultural critic of his day. He used the
success of the French company’s visit as an opportunity to essentially compare and
38 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
contrast the states of French and English theatre. His essay “The French Play in London”
was published in the August 1879 issue of the Nineteenth Century, and it has become a
major document in the history of the development of the National Theatre of Great
Britain.
Arnold believed that the Comédie-Française was the perfect example of what
could be achieved by developing a national company, one supported and subsidized by
the state. While the British system of theatre was beholden to a kind of merciless
capitalism that only rewarded the survival of the fittest, the Comédie-Française was
liberated from the chains of box-office servitude through the French government’s
ongoing support. Arnold was so enraptured by the French company that he proposed
London should have two national companies – one located in the East End and one
located in the West End. He also believed that commercial pressure prevented managers
from supporting the development of a native drama beyond the eighteenth century and
that a national theatre, again freed from box office pressure, could identify and encourage
new writers for the stage. He appealed to the sense of English pride every Englishman
must feel – if the French could make the Comédie-Française thrive by featuring the work
of “second rate writers” such as Molière and Victor Hugo, how great could a national
theatre situated in the land of Shakespeare be?
In concluding his essay, Arnold passionately rephrased Effingham Wilson’s
argument from the previous generation:
Forget your clap-trap and believe that the State, the nation in its collective
and corporate character, does well to concern itself about an influence
so important to national life and manners as the theatre. Form a company
39 out of materials ready to hand in your many good actors or actors of
promise. Give them a theatre in the West End. Let them have a grant from
our Science and Art Department; let some intelligent and accomplished
man like our friend, Mr. Piggot, your present Examiner of Plays, be joined
to them as Commissioner from the Department, to see that the conditions
of the grant are observed.6 Let the conditions of the grant be that a
repertory is agreed upon…and that pieces from this repertory are played a
certain number of times in each session; as to new pieces, let your
Company use its discretion. Let a school of dramatic elocution and
declamation be instituted with your company…When your institution in
the West of London becomes a success, plan a second of its kind in the
East. The people will have a theatre; then make it a good one…The
theatre is irresistible; organize the theatre. (240-241)
Arnold’s vision of the organizing of the theatre followed hard on Wilson’s call, and for
the first time a voice from inside the theatre profession would lend his support to this call.
Henry Irving would speak out in favor of a national theatre as well, but curiously – or
perhaps not surprisingly considering his star status – his call would be much more
conservative than what Arnold was pushing for and would articulate the fault line in the
profession. A generation later this fault line would serve as the dividing point that would
find the likes of Herbert Beerbohm Tree on one side and Harley Granville Barker
resolutely on the other.
6
Elsom and Tomalin quote Mr. E. Smythe Piggot, Examiner of Plays, as stating, “I have studied Ibsen’s plays pretty carefully and all the characters in Ibsen’s plays appear to me morally degraded.” So thankfully in this respect, Arnold’s call to action did not come true. 40 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
Whereas Arnold favored a national theatre cocooned away from the pressures of
the commercial theatre, Irving felt strongly that a national theatre must be responsive to
the same commercial pressures managers in the West End faced. The differences
between Arnold and Irving’s points of view can be summarized by their individual
philosophies regarding art in general and the theatre in particular. Arnold felt that art
should serve as a criticism of life whereas Irving felt that art – including the theatre –
should reflect popular opinion. How would these competing ideas play out on stage?
Clearly the choice of repertoire would be greatly impacted. If one is critical of society –
either by holding up a mirror or using a hammer to smash the mirror – one may expect to
be playing to smaller houses. Arnold’s ideas clearly are in line with the practitioners of
what will be the New Drama at the turn of the twentieth century. Irving, while perhaps
the greatest actor of his age, clearly knew he had to “sing for his supper,” and he
expected any theatre to have to do the same:
As the National Theatre must compete with private enterprise, and be with
regard to its means of achieving prosperity weighted with a scrupulosity
which might not belong to its rivals, it should be so strong as to be able to
merge, in its steady average gain, temporary losses, and its body should be
sufficiently large to attempt and achieve success in every worthy branch of
histrionic art. (qtd. in Brereton 258)
Another fundamental difference between Arnold and Irving was in the makeup, or lack
thereof, of a permanent company. Arnold felt a permanent company was the only way to
properly support a national theatre. The nation’s greatest actors – supported by up-andcoming younger actors trained by the drama school attached to the theatre – would strut
41 and fret on the Nation’s stage. Irving, always a practical man of the theatre, favored a
less permanent company. In his idea, “stars” would be free to come and go – playing part
of their time at the National Theatre and part in more lucrative engagements either in the
commercial West End or on tour. Indeed just a year after her appearance in London,
Bernhardt would establish her own management following the Comédie-Française’s
refusal to allow her to play Hamlet.
It is not so surprising that these two very different men – one a player and one a
critic – would in essence propose two different ideas of what a national theatre should
look like. What is interesting, however, is that the ultimate realization of the National
Theatre would in effect be a synthesis of their ideas into a workable unit. The national
theatre movement desperately needed a practical person of the theatre, experienced in all
areas of the field, to help shape what in playable terms this theatre would actually look
like. Henry Irving succeeded beautifully in the commercial theatre of his time. He ran
the Lyceum Theatre from 1878-1899, and his productions of Shakespeare would acquire
him first a national and then an international reputation. For Irving, the system wasn’t
broken so why should it require fixing? The national theatre movement required a theatre
practitioner who was every bit Irving’s equal but was disillusioned with the opportunities
afforded to him. In Harley Granville Barker, the national theatre revolution would find
its foot soldier, and at the Royal Court Theatre, a model would be established that would
show how a national theatre could support the New Drama, provide a platform for native
voices, present serious high-minded theatre, and provide a glimpse of what was
ultimately to arrive on the South Bank.
42 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
Matthew Arnold had presciently hit upon the Comédie-Française as a possible
model for a national theatre in his essay of 1879. By the 1880s, however, Henry Irving’s
Lyceum Theatre had become a kind of de-facto national theatre, one that allowed Irving
to build an international reputation and find box-office success with the plays of
Shakespeare at a time when most London theatres were content to run a string of
melodramas and operettas. The Lyceum was a purely commercial entity – it received no
subsidy of any kind – and as such was largely free from bureaucratic control. In 1895,
Irving was knighted for his services to theatre, the first purely theatrical figure to earn a
knighthood, although he was nearing the end of his run at the Lyceum. Irving’s final
years exposed the fallacy of treating the Lyceum as a national theatre. As his acting
came to be seen as “old fashioned” and out of style, the box office at the Lyceum
plummeted, forcing Irving to invest his own money to keep the enterprise working.
When that failed, and when it became apparent that there was no succession plan at the
Lyceum following Irving’s departure, the notion that this was England’s national theatre
became sadly laughable, and the once-majestic theatre was eventually converted to a
dance hall.
If not Sir Henry, then who? Harley Granville Barker and George Bernard Shaw
had each spent the decade of the 1890s in their own kind of respective apprenticeships.
By the turn of the century, the twenty-three-year-old Barker had already established a
reputation as a first-rate actor on the London stage, and the much older Shaw was slowly
making the transition from journalist-critic to playwright. In September 1900, Shaw
wrote to Barker: “My only misgiving with regard to you is as to whether the Stage, in its
present miserable condition, is good enough for you: you are sure to take to authorship or
43 something of the kind” (qtd. in Kennedy 10). The “present miserable condition” of the
stage, as Shaw had dubbed it, had already begun to wear on Barker. The ad hoc nature of
pick-up casts and extremely short rehearsal periods were deeply unsatisfying to Barker as
were the scripts he was working with as an actor. As a consequence he began to gravitate
to the new private theatres – temporary enterprises set up to circumvent the censorship of
the Lord Chamberlain – in order to work on more challenging material.
If the 1890s would serve as Barker’s apprentice decade as an actor, his maturation
as what would be considered a modern director was much quicker. Barker became
involved early on with the Stage Society – a theatre formed in 1899 by theatre
progressives such as Frederick Whelen, W. Lee Matthews, Sydney Oliver, and Hector
Thompson and described by Dennis Kennedy as a group of “Impossibilists” (7) – and
quickly assumed a lead role in the ad hoc company. The Stage Society was loosely
modeled on J.T. Grein’s Independent Theatre, which ran from 1891 – 1897 and existed
solely to produce works considered not commercially viable for the West End. The Stage
Society, which would exist in various forms for nearly forty years, proclaimed that its
purpose “…was to mount productions of plays of worth and merit which seemed unlikely
to be considered for production by the ordinary commercial theatre” (Salmon 60).
Due to the nature of the Stage Society’s set-up, many of the plays were only
given a few performances and in many cases only a single performance on a Sunday
afternoon or evening or on a weekday afternoon. The company would rent a commercial
theatre for their performances, and rehearsals would be scheduled around whatever
production was running in the theatre at the time. The Stage Society always used
professional actors and directors, often some of the finest in London, and Barker was one
44 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
of the first major players to associate with the Society. In 1900 alone he would act in
four pieces—Ibsen’s The League of Youth, Hauptmann’s Friedenfest, and two pieces by
Shaw, Candida and Captain Brassbound’s Conversion—and direct three other
productions for the Society. It is interesting to note that while Shaw thought Barker’s
performance as the poet Eugene Marchbanks was “practically perfect” in Candida, he
was far from satisfied with Barker’s take on the American naval Captain Kearney in
Captain Brassbound’s Conversion. In two separate letters to Barker, dated December 6
and 7, 1900, Shaw laments: “Unless you can make the acquaintance of a real American
and live with him night and day for the next week, the part will ruin you. It’s not a
question of acting: it’s a question of intonation. Where are we to get a captain if you give
it up Heaven only knows; but I would rather have the play postponed than let you,
unwarned, misfire after your previous bulls eye” (qtd. in Purdom 6). The next day Shaw
wrote to Barker:
I believe you must play the fatheaded captain after all; but by the Lord it
will be a disgraceful outrage on nature. You are about as fit to play him as
I am to write Besant’s novels. Your divine gifts of youth, delicacy and
distinction will be murdered; and so will the part. However, I can’t write
in another Eugene for you; and you will have to do the captain with your
head... No: you’ve got to play the captain, spite of dead cats, bottles,
turnips, putrid eggs, and authors. Kismet! (qtd. in Purdom 7-8)
From the very early days of their relationship, the letters between Barker and Shaw
shimmer with a frankness and honesty that one finds refreshing in the theatre world.
They argue, cajole, threaten and harangue each other, but do so with unceasing affection
45 and respect. And while Barker would find success in many of the roles written for him
by Shaw, he was turning his attention increasingly toward what would ultimately become
known as directing.
In April 1900 Barker was entrusted with his first directing opportunity. He
directed a triple bill of Maeterlinck’s Interior and The Death of Tintagiles, along with
“Fiona MacLeod’s” The House of Usna— “Fiona MacLeod” being a pseudonym for
Stage Society president William Sharp. The choice of material for Barker is very
interesting given his youth and complete lack of experience as a director. As Dennis
Kennedy explains:
Maeterlinck was an important writer for the European Free Stage
movement in the nineties, principally because his misty symbolism
provided an alternative to the dominant theatrical style, but had rarely
been seen in London. The House of Usna, a treatment of the Concobar
legend, was heavily influenced by the Belgian dramatist and by Yeats. It
is a mournful threnody for Dierdre set against ruined backgrounds “vague
in the moonlight” and, like the Maeterlinck plays, gives wide scope to the
director. (9)
Unfortunately nothing is known of the single performance of this triple bill. The Stage
Society did not allow critics to view their productions in their early years and no
significant details remain of the production. What is readily apparent in choice of
material for Barker, however, and what would be seen alongside Shaw at the Court
Theatre was the Symbolist style of material. While many, if not all, of Barker’s English
contemporaries were attempting to work in the dominant vogue of social realism, Barker
46 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
would remain comfortably in the style of Lugné-Poe and the Symbolists as opposed to
Antoine, Brahm, and the Social Realists.
Sometime in 1903, a rumor began floating that the Scottish-American
industrialist Andrew Carnegie might be interested in endowing a substantial theatre in
London. A committee was formed to consider the steps needed to create a national
theatre or even a modest proposal for Carnegie to consider. Members of the committee
included William Archer, A.C. Bradley, and Gilbert Murray, and one of the final
members added was Harley Granville Barker. In his book The Exemplary Theatre,
written and subsequently revised more than twenty years later, Barker recalled his early
involvement with the committee, “I trust I sat silent. I was impatient – the scheme
seemed likely to be long in coming to birth. I am sure I looked forward to a national
theatre in being within the next year or two” (v-vi). Archer channeled that impatience by
getting Barker to agree to draw up a document that would be practical in nature and
would set forth the conditions and requirements necessary for a national theatre to be
successful. What followed was A National Theatre: Scheme and Estimates, privately
produced in 1904 and ultimately revised and publicly published in 1907.
A National Theatre: Schemes and Estimates might be the greatest combination of
white paper, mission statement, vision statement, and strategic plan ever created for a
nonexistent theatre. Referred to among the committee members as the “Blue Book,” it
was conservative, careful, prudent, and filled with financial figures. Elsom and Tomalin
describe the impact the Blue Book had: “Archer and Barker’s A National Theatre:
Scheme and Estimates transformed the vague and lofty dreams of (Ephingham) Wilson
and (Matthew) Arnold into an enterprise which looked eminently reasonable, well-
47 substantiated and, above all, practical” (28). It is a lengthy and detailed document; the
American version, printed in 1908, runs to over two hundred pages. It opens with a long
quote from Matthew Arnold’s essay “The French Play in London.” It is followed by an
endorsement from a wide variety of leading English theatrical names that reads:
Having read carefully and considered this scheme for a national theatre,
we desire to express our belief that such an institution is urgently needed,
and that it could in all probability be successfully established on the
general lines here indicated.
It is signed by Henry Irving, Squire Bancroft, J.M. Barrie, Helen d’Oyly Carte, John
Hare, Henry Arthur Jones, and Arthur Wing Pinero. (i)
The Blue Book contains a series of prefaces written by Barker and Archer as well
as an American preface and a postscript-prologue at the beginning of the book. It is then
followed by twelve sections and a five-part appendix in which the entire institution is
spelled out in exacting detail. In the prefaces the authors take great care in spelling out
what a national theatre should be:
An enterprise on a large scale – short of extravagance or ostentation –
would have far greater chance of succeeding and establishing itself in a
permanent and honourable position than an enterprise on a small scale,
however ably conducted. It is essential to break away, completely and
unequivocally, from the ideals and traditions of the profit-seeking stage;
and it is essential that the new system should have sufficient resources to
give it time to establish itself and take hold upon the public. Moreover the
National Theatre must be its own advertisement, must impose itself on
48 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
public notice, not by poster and column advertisements in the newspapers,
but by the very fact of its ample, dignified and liberal existence. (xviixviii)
William Archer, progressive critic and co-founder of the New Century Theatre, and
Harley Granville Barker, mover and shaker in the Stage Society, also took great pains to
assuage any fears right from the beginning about the type of theatre they envisioned the
National Theatre being:
There must be no possibility of mistaking it for one of those pioneer
theatres which have been so numerous as of late years, here and
elsewhere, and have in their way done valuable work. It must not even
have the air of appealing to a specially literary and cultured class. It must
be visibly and unmistakably a popular institution, making a large appeal to
the whole community. So manifest does this appear to us that we would
strongly deprecate any effort on a small scale, until it shall be absolutely
apparent that no effort on the scale here indicated is within the range of
practical policies. A struggling enterprise, with narrow resources, might
prove a mere stumbling block in the path of theatrical progress at large.
Its failure would be disastrous, and its partial success only less so. (xviii)
This is the quandary that Barker would never be able to solve. In order to be successful,
a national theatre would have to thrive on a large scale. Up to this point, all of his
experience had created in him an artist who desired to operate on a smaller canvass.
Barker was never fully able to navigate this dichotomy, and it would shadow him
throughout his career. In point of fact he did want a smaller operation. “I prefer
49 addressing minorities,” he wrote in a 1909 article called “Repertory Theatres” in New
Quarterly, “One can make them hear better” (qtd. in Booth and Kaplan142). He could
never quite conceive of a way in which a large-scale theatre could successfully play the
kind of repertory that attracted him as a director. In 1918, he would write to his soon-tobe second wife Helen Huntington, “I do believe my present loathing for the theatre is
loathing for the audience. I have never loved them” (qtd. in Salmon 123). This was the
major reason he turned down the opportunity to launch an endowed repertory theatre in
the United States envisioned largely on the principles spelled out in the Blue Book.
The scheme was nicknamed “The Millionaires Theatre;” situated in New York
and largely modeled on his success at the Court Theatre, the venture seemed to
incorporate everything Barker and Archer wrote about in the Blue Book. In a May, 1907
letter to Archer, Barker wrote, “America looks rather real at the moment and it would be
the correct sequel to the blue book if we went together” (Salmon 54). Everything about
the proposed operation was right except for the gargantuan size of the proscenium theatre
being built on Central Park West between 62nd and 63rd Streets in Manhattan. In the
same letter to Archer, Barker already expressed his concern about the size of the theatre,
“I’m sending a letter to Otto Kahn7 telling him the theatre is too big and the proscenium
is too wide” (54). All intimacy would be lost in the playing; he recognized that and
predicted the venture’s demise upon turning it down.8
7
Otto Kahn was the ringleader of the group of wealthy men spearheading the Millionaire’s Theatre. 8
The Millionaire’s Theatre, called the New Theatre, would open in 1909 under the direction of Winthrop Ames and would cease operations within three years. It would be rechristened the Century Theatre and sputter with commercial productions until it was ultimately demolished in 1930. 50 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
In the same year he was writing to Archer about an intellectual audience, he was
writing about something entirely different in the Blue Book, in part obviously out of
necessity in seeking funding for his project. This struggle between the desire to run a
small theatre and the need to see if he could successfully launch a national theatre would
be the constant battle he would fight for the next decade and would haunt him in the
years following his withdrawal from active work in the theatre.
At this point, it is necessary to look at the Blue Book in some detail to ascertain
why it made such a lasting impact on the national theatre debate. The book itself is
divided into twelve sections and details the following:
Section I is subtitled “The Scope of Enquiry.”This section discusses everything
from how large the endowment should be to the necessity of constructing a new theatre
building for the operation and how much that will cost. Three crucial details are spelled
out at the very beginning. For the theatre even to get off the ground, it is necessary for a
site to be determined, a building to be constructed, and a guarantee fund to be established.
Barker and Archer were hopeful that the government, either the Parliament or the London
County Council, could be convinced to donate a proper site for the theatre if they could
raise the necessary funds to pay for the construction of the theatre and the establishment
of the guarantee fund. In the event that a suitable site would not be donated or sold at a
considerable discount, Section I suggests that the purchase price for a site would range
from £50,000 to £100,000. They split the difference at £75,000 and then estimated that
construction of the theatre would run to about £80,000. They then spelled out the need
for a £150,000 Guarantee Fund to launch the theatre. They felt that the total startup cost
51 for the theatre, as spelled out in the following sections, would amount to somewhere
between £330,000 and £380,000.9
Section II examines the necessary personnel for the running of the theatre,
including the makeup of a Board of Trustees and a general staff. Barker and Archer
suggest a board made up of leaders from the University of Oxford, the University of
Cambridge, the University of London, the Royal Academy, two members from the
London County Council, prominent donors, and one or two “men of the theatre” (their
examples were Sir Henry Irving, Sir Squire Bancroft, Sir John Hare, or Sir W.S. Gilbert),
all named by Royal nomination and taken under the advice of the Prime Minister. The
general staff would consist of five officials: The Director, the Literary Manager, The
Business Manager, the Solicitor, and the Reading Committee Man.10 The Director would
“…[h]ave absolute control of everything in and about the Theatre, engagement of actors,
casting of parts, etc., etc., excepting only the selection of plays (my emphasis). For this
purpose, he would have one vote in a Reading Committee of three, to be hereafter
provided for. In all other matters, there would be no appeal from the authority of the
Director, except to the Trustees” (12-13). For this, the Director would be paid an annual
salary of £2,000, and the total salaries of the entire staff would equate to £4,600
annually.11
9
Amounts to between £34million and £39 million (or $54,000,000 and $63,000,000) in 2013 or just under half the current National Theatre budget. 10
The current staff of the National Theatre consists of over seven hundred people. 11
Comparable to approximately £205,000 and £470,000 (or $330,000 and $760,000) respectively in 2013 terms. 52 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
Section III dealt specifically with the makeup of the proposed company. Barker
desired a company made up of forty-two actors and twenty-four actresses. It was his
intention that twelve of the actors and eight of the actresses would be young and
unknown and that the remainder of the company, thirty actors and eighteen actresses,
would be artists of established reputations. There is a footnote in the document that
compares the proposed makeup of the National Theatre company with the present
complement of actors in the Comédie-Française. The Comédie-Française company in
1903 was comprised of fifteen male and nine female Sociétaires – essentially
shareholders and senior members of the company – and fourteen male and seventeen
female Pensionnaires, or junior company members appointed annually, for a total
company of fifty-five compared to Barker’s sixty-six. Barker justified the larger
company by claiming that the repertoire of the Comédie-Française rarely required such
large-sized casts as those found in Shakespeare tragedies or history plays. The top
proposed annual fees for actors came to £900 based on a guarantee of seventy-five
performances, with further income available for additional performances up to 100 total.
The maximum amount an actor would make at the National Theatre would be £1400.
The minimum fee for actors in the smallest roles with the least developed reputation
would be £313 for a maximum of 126 performances. Given the era, it is obvious actresses
would be paid less. The maximum fee for an actress would top out at £1155 based on 91
performances. The minimum for the actresses came out to £272 for a total of 72
performances.12 The total proposed salary for the company of sixty-six would average out
12
In 2013 terms the salaries ranged from a low end figure of approximately £28,000 ($45,000) to a top figure of approximately £145,000 ($234,000). 53 to approximately £28,000 annually, equal to just under £3 million or $4.8 million in 2013
figures.
Section IV is the longest and perhaps the most important section of the Blue Book
in that it deals specifically with the repertoire of the proposed theatre. Barker and Archer
begin Section IV by attempting to disarm the reader as to their intentions:
A few words must be said as to the composition of the repertory for our
specimen season. And here, at the outset, there is a misconception to be
guarded against. It is not an “advanced” theatre that we are designing.
The great subsidized theatres of the Continent are not “advanced” theatres.
It is not their business to be far ahead of the time, but to be well abreast of
it. Sometimes, no doubt (as in the case of the Berlin Schauspielhaus), they
fail even in that duty; but as a rule they perform it reasonably well. They
follow, more or less cautiously, more or less eclectically, in the wake of
the “advanced” theatres; and that is as it should be. Outposts are
necessary to the army of progress; but no army can be all
outposts; and where the main body is out of touch with its pioneers, they
pioneer in vain. The Theatre we have here in view forms part, and an
indispensable part, of the main army of progress. It will neither compete
with the outpost theatres nor relieve them of their functions. It is the
business of the outpost to press on, to try this path and that, sometimes to
blunder, and find themselves in an untenable position, or in a “No
Thoroughfare.” The main body, profiting by their experience, tries to
54 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
avoid their errors; and through this division of labour the general advance
goes on steadily and securely, with no risk of a serious set-back. (36-37)
This was not going to be an avant-garde theatre. Barker and Archer take great pains to
encourage the reader to look past their respective track records and consider the fact that
they understand they are working on a different field of battle, to continue their military
metaphor. As they write a few paragraphs later; “The main principles we had in view, in
sketching our specimen repertory, were that is should be national, representative, and
popular” (37).
What would the proposed repertory look like? As it turns out, Barker and Archer
initially proposed a kind of “greatest hits” of the English drama. Moving through British
history, it would contain a generous helping of Shakespeare, nine productions in all in the
initial season: The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, As You Like It, Titus Andronicus,
Troilus and Cressida, Timon of Athens, Pericles, and the three parts of Henry VI. They
also proposed Ben Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour as the “least experimental” (40) of
the other dozen Elizabethan and Jacobean plays considered by writers other than
Shakespeare. They considered that the plays of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries would require careful handling for “notorious reasons” (40) but settled on
Congreve’s Love for Love. The later eighteenth century presented greater opportunities
as the theatre became more conservative. Barker and Archer favored Richard Brinsley
Sheridan’s The Critic as a representative choice before moving into the nineteenth
century and then the Victorian era. “The choice of a play to represent the first half of the
nineteenth century was by no means easy, though the embarrassment was scarcely due to
riches” (41). They almost reluctantly settled on Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Money (1840).
55 They also represented the Victorian era with what they considered the mid-Victorian
era’s “one masterpiece” in Thomas William Robertson’s Caste (1867). To be
sandwiched between these two apparent compromise plays would be Arthur Wing
Pinero’s delightful Trelawney of the ‘Wells’ (1898) over his earlier, almost Ibsen-esque
“Woman with a Past” play The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. Money masquerades Dickensesque social commentary set in a drawing room comedy world replete with asides and
misunderstandings, and concludes, as all comedies must, with the right people marrying
each other.
Robertson would serve as an important influence on Shaw, and Caste represented
an early example of social realism dressed up as a Victorian comedy. Of all their
Victorian choices, Trelawny of the ‘Wells’ remains the one play still found in modern
repertoires.13 Trelawny of the ‘Wells’ is set in the theatre world of the 1860s and tells the
story of Rose Trelawny, a popular star of melodramas, who decides to give up her career
to marry her sweetheart in order to appease his conservative family. She quickly finds
life with his family unbearable and attempts to return to the theatre, only to discover that
her time in the “real” world has sapped all her theatrical talent.
Pinero brings Barker and Archer resolutely up to the modern day in terms of
choosing a repertory for their proposed theatre. Once again they went to great lengths to
assuage any potential fears about foisting the so-called “New Drama” onto unsuspecting
audiences:
We have purposely excluded from this specimen repertory all plays of the
class which may be called disputable, designing to show that there was
13
An adaptation of the play by Patrick Marber was produced at the Donmar Warehouse in 2013. It was directed by Joe Wright. 56 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
ample material at the command of the Theatre without travelling beyond
the range of universally accepted classics, and modern works which have
proved its attractiveness for the English public. For this reason the names
of Tolstoy, Gorky, Ibsen, Björnson, Hauptmann, D’Annunzio, and
Bernard Shaw do not figure in our list of authors. (44)
It was their fervent belief that it would only be a matter of time before these writers – and
interestingly they make no mention anywhere of Chekhov and Strindberg – would be
accepted at leading theatres in London. Certainly in the case of Shaw, the venture at the
Royal Court would in very short time prove him to be the dominant playwright of the
first half of the twentieth century. Perhaps the most modern play included in the
proposed repertory was William Butler Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen (1892), which
they included not only for what they considered its “rare beauty” (43) but ”…[b]ecause
we felt that the representative character of the repertory demanded that the new Irish
drama should hold an honourable place in it” (43).
Even this sentiment must be viewed
with a note of caution. As Kristen Guest points out in her article “Culture, Class, and
Colonialism: The Struggle for an English National Theatre, 1879 – 1913” in the Autumn
2006 Journal of Victorian Culture:
Such special attention to The Countess Cathleen on the related grounds of
‘rare beauty’ and a desire to ‘honour’ the Irish drama seems, at first
glance, to be a critical recognition of Irish cultural nationalism.
Understood in light of other selections for Schemes and Estimates,
however, the inclusion of a work that had been written explicitly to
support an Irish National Theatre suggests an instance of what Katie
57 Trumpener has described as ‘colonial tilt’: a means by which resistance to
empire is appropriated, neutralized, and redirected in support of an
imperial agenda. By claiming The Countess Cathleen for the British
canon, Archer and Barker not only negated its place in Irish cultural
nationalism, they also sidestepped anxieties about Home Rule by
appealing to the play’s aesthetic merits as if they transcended the specifics
of place and time. (291-292)
The National Theatre could, in fact, serve as a kind of bastion of British Imperial
hegemony by simply absorbing into its repertory a uniquely nationalistic play from
Ireland. It was a careful and calculated choice, one aimed at satisfying the image of
British dominance being played up to potential supporters of the theatre.
The remainder of Section IV deals exclusively with scheduling the repertory and
justifying how the National Theatre would function as a true repertory theatre, something
not seen at this time in English theatre. In the initial repertory, there were to be 326
performances devoted to English plays as opposed to 37 of foreign plays. 106
performances would be of new plays, 257 would be revivals. 124 performances would be
devoted to Shakespeare alone, 34 would be of old English plays other than Shakespeare,
and there would be 62 performances of recent English plays (48).
Section V is devoted exclusively to front-of-house expenses, including
concessions and preshow entertainment. Details included proposed salaries for the frontof-house manager, box-office manager, and three clerks. There were also allowances for
an assistant to the Director, firemen on standby, housekeepers and cleaners, twelve
ushers, and eight cloakroom attendants. Total proposed expenses on all front-of-house
58 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
staff came in at £3,377 – or approximately £350,000 or $565,000 in 2013 terms. There
would also be a musical director and twenty-four bandsmen on salary at a total rate of
£3,900 per annum.
Section VI details the total production expenses required for the theatre, including
everyone from a stage manager and head prompter to scene shop and wardrobe staff.
Properties and electrics are included as well, as are two “Producers” or, in effect, resident
directors. They write, “Of the two Producers, one would be mainly employed upon
rhetorical and costume plays, the other upon modern and realistic plays” (68). They give
no indication of having anyone in particular in mind for either of these positions. It
seems the splitting of the duties is done more for the sake of convenience than for any
real aesthetic desire. They spell out in great detail the distinction between the Director of
the National Theatre and the individual Producers; the Director will cast all productions
but in consultation with the individual Producers, and the Director is responsible for
overseeing everything and as such may attend early rehearsals but must reserve his
critical comments until a later time. The Producer will have control over everything
related to his play until the scene- and dress rehearsals begin, at which point the Stage
Manager shall take control. There may be no alteration to any texts without consultation
between the Director and the Producer, and in the case of modern plays, playwrights will
exercise their rights to the fullest. The total expenses for all personnel related to
production were estimated at £10,277 – or the equivalent of £1.06 million or $1.7 million
in 2013.
Section VII is devoted to all production-related expenses, including scenery,
costumes, lighting and advertising. In Section I, Barker and Archer had mentioned the
59 need for a donor to supply the theatre with an initial outlay of £20,000 to allow the
theatre to be fully stocked with appropriate materials for scenery, costumes, properties
and advertising. While they refer to that initial figure in Section VII, they ultimately
conclude that a “normal” season could be budgeted at approximately £16,500 (£1.7
million or $2.7 million in 2013) with the largest expenses coming from scenery and
historical costumes.
Section VIII is devoted to determining the size of the theatre proper. After
discussing the seating inventory of a number of London theatres ranging in size from the
Drury Lane (3,500) to the Shaftesbury (1,800) to the Savoy (1,150), they fix the seating
capacity of the new National Theatre ultimately at 1,550. Barker would eventually
reconsider his thinking about the theatre and would ultimately, years later, come to the
conclusion that what were really required were two theatre spaces: one for classical work
on a more epic scale and then a smaller, more intimate theatre for modern and
experimental work. At the time of the original publication, however, there would only be
one stage in the National Theatre. In addition to comparing the seating inventory of a
number of local theatres, they also looked to the Continent for guidance. They estimated
that both the Théâtre-Français and the Odéon in Paris had a seating capacity of
approximately 1,200. They also looked at four theatres in Vienna: the Deutsches
Volkstheater (1873), the Burgtheater (1474), the Raimund-Theater (1607), and the
Kaiserjubilaums-Theater (1885). Two other theatres considered were the Neues
Deutsches Theater in Prague (approximately 1800) and the National Theater in
Christiania (1400). They then fixed the prices for all the various seats and determined
60 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
that a completely sold-out house could generate approximately £30014 of ticket revenue
per performance.
Section IX deals exclusively with playwrights and royalty agreements for new
plays or revivals. After determining potential earnings based on royalty agreements,
Barker and Archer spelled out in detail the potential advantages of playwrights working
for the National Theatre. The idea of a true ensemble meant a playwright would not have
to write specifically for a “star” actor or actress-manager. He or she could write for the
company in a way that was not seen in London at that time. For example, “Were The
School for Scandal a new play, the practical equality of the four parts – Sir Peter and
Lady Teazle, Joseph and Charles Surface – would, under present conditions, almost
certainly exclude it from the stage” (92).
A house playwright for the National Theatre would also likely minimize the risk
of absolute failure due to the large number of subscribers that would grow with the
theatre. This would guarantee decent-sized houses and basically a good paycheck. The
third advantage of such a position was that a play in the National Theatre repertory would
stand a good chance of having a long life in the repertory –“of maintaining its place on
the stage for an indefinite number of years” (92) – thereby guaranteeing the dramatist the
new idea of residuals. Barker and Archer also pointed out that the success of the
National Theatre would leverage opportunities for municipal and regional theatres
throughout the country, thereby creating greater opportunities for dramatists to have their
work on stages throughout the Empire, on the Continent, and in America as well. The
National Theatre could in effect launch dramatists to worldwide acclaim.
14
£31,000 or $50,000 in 2013 61 Section X focuses on an area that the National Theatre in any era has never been
able to fully capture. That was on the establishment of a training school for actors. They
begin the section by refusing to be drawn into a debate with the reader as to whether or
not acting could even be taught. They actually allow that, in fact, it probably could not
be taught, but that certain elements of the actor’s craft could be improved and that actors
in even the smallest roles on stage at the National Theatre would need to master certain
skills. They do not break down any finances for the training school, as it was their belief
that it could be made to be self-sufficient. They did believe that an endowment could still
be established that would serve three distinct purposes:
1. The establishment of Scholarships for students of notable promise and
of limited means.
2. The enlargement of the teaching staff, so as to enable the School (in a
manner to be hereafter indicated) to fulfill all the functions of a Dramatic
College.
3. The provision of a specially suitable building, fitting with all desirable
appliances, in a specially convenient locality. (97)
The Director of the National Theatre would be in charge of the school nominally, but he
would have the ability to appoint a lieutenant to oversee the day-to-day running of the
school.
The two main philosophies that would govern the proposed training school are
interesting to examine at a time (1904) when Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree was opening his
acting school, which would ultimately evolve into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art
(RADA), and as Stanislavski was codifying his thinking regarding actor training. The
62 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
proposed National Theatre training school was almost vocational in its scope, desiring to
train actors ready to step onto any stage in the Empire:
In the conduct of the School, two main principles should be observed: -1. Each pupil should be bound to apprentice himself, as it were, to a
certain minimum course of study, for which he should pay in advance a
large proportion, at any rate, of the fees, to be forfeited in the event of his
not completing the course. Some precaution would be necessary to insure
that the advantages of the School should not be abused by the mere trifler
and dilettante, who thinks it would be pleasant to dabble in a calling which
he imagines to be an easy and idle one.
2. The second principle follows from what we have said above as to the
limits within which the teaching of acting is desirable. It is that training
should, as far as possible, be analytic rather than synthetic – that the
constituent parts of acting, rather than acting itself, should be the subject
of instruction. The teaching of acting, either in a studio or at rehearsal, is
too apt to mean simply coaching a young actor by an old actor in
antiquated methods. With a little experience, an actor will learn to pick
and choose among the virtues and vices of an over-developed style. But a
tyro is apt to absorb only the vices, since they are so easy to imitate. What
should first be taught in the School are several accomplishments which,
mastered perfectly and used instinctively, go to make an actor complete in
the technique of his art – voice-production, elocution, the speaking of
verse, gesture, dancing and fencing. The rehearsing of parts should be
63 confined to the second half of the training. Individual coaching should be
entirely excluded. (97-98)
The National Theatre has never been able to establish a training school and has even had
difficulties creating relationships with established universities. I asked Richard Eyre
about this issue during my interview with him and he said that during his time as Director
of the National Theatre (1987-1997) they reached out to a number of universities to no
avail.15 There is a kind of systematic distrust between the profession and the academy in
England, and it starts almost from the beginning, Tree’s success with RADA
notwithstanding.
Section XI is a general summary of all expenses estimated for a typical season.
Based on their estimates of expenses at £64,982 not including author’s fees, and their
commitment to the actor’s pension fund, they estimate the need to bring in an average of
just over £196 per performance – based on 363 total performances – to break even. They
conclude that for a typical London theatre that might be considered a lofty box-office
take but make the argument that a true repertory theatre will actually lessen expenses
after the initial run of the play and once royalties are paid off. If one considers the total
seating capacity of 1,550 and total box office revenue calculated on a complete sell-out at
£345, then ultimately the National Theatre would need to play at an average capacity of
just over 60% -- 930 per performance – to break even.16 Barker and Archer conclude
Section XI with a summary of what the “natural order” of progression should be for
15
See Appendix 1 16
As a point of comparison in 1990, Richard Eyre wrote in his diaries that the NT budgets at 75% capacity in all three auditoriums to break even, meaning that the NT had to attract over 1,800 for all three spaces to reach that capacity or double the 1903-­‐04 estimates. 64 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
creating the theatre envisioned in their Blue Book. They outline a scenario whereby a
lead donor announces his intentions to build a theatre provided the ideal site could be
located and secured. In a sense, this donor would be the lead figure in their thinking, his
willingness to build a theatre would then lead to a further donor or group of donors to
secure the necessary site. As a potential hedge for Andrew Carnegie, they conclude
Section XI by stating their awareness that a single donor with enough means could
undertake all the major steps – site, building, and Guarantee Fund – on his own, and this
would immensely simplify things.
The final section of the Blue Book details the Guarantee Fund and reminds the
reader that this entire scheme is predicated on two main criteria, “1. that the Theatre
Building should be provided, free of rent, taxes and insurance premium, and cost of
upkeep; 2. that a Guarantee Fund should be raised to assure, for a certain period at any
rate, the solvency of the institution” (112). The Guarantee Fund is meant to serve almost
as what we would consider a modern endowment. Barker and Archer go into detail to
once again summarize all the potential expenses and plan for a season of dismal box
office returns. Under their worst-case scenario, they plan for a deficit of £42,000 with a
more realistic figure in the neighborhood of £7,000. In a bit of role playing for their
readers, they assume the absolute worst possible outcome for the theatre; a three-year
deficit that necessitates the Trustees firing the Director after the first year and replacing
him with a new Director. Even then, after three years the theatre would be facing an
accumulated deficit of £90,000, drawing down the Guarantee Fund to £60,000. In this
scenario, Barker and Archer posit that the Trustees would have two possible decisions to
make going forward. “(A) It might be quite clear that, in spite of the large deficits, the
65 Theatre was taking root, acquiring prestige, giving a valuable stimulus to theatrical life in
general. In that case the Trustees would doubtless continue the Director in office, and ask
him to go on as he had begun” (114-115). That is the best-case scenario, option B is what
we would consider the nuclear option in modern parlance. “(B) They continue: “The
position of the Theatre might be entirely dubious, and the possibility of a further
reduction in the yearly deficit problematical. The Statutes would probably permit the
Trustees, in the event of absolute disaster, to wind up the enterprise after three seasons;
and a party of the Trustees might wish to regard the existing state of affairs as absolutely
disastrous, and to throw up the sponge” (115). They then spell out a procedure whereby
the enterprise could be wound down and dissolved and detail how any remaining funds
from the Guarantee would be paid out.
The Blue Book concludes with a rather detailed appendix that spells out
everything from a draft of statutes and regulations – by-laws – to pension fund
suggestions and subscription and booking systems. It also includes a section on casting
the repertory season with the proposed company, and concludes with some ideas on
creating and maintaining a theatrical endowment and a summary of speeches and articles
in support of the national theatre scheme. Such prominent figures as Henry Arthur Jones,
Arthur Wing Pinero, and John Hare have extracts from speeches or articles they have
written in support of the scheme. It concludes with two articles from Archer: “The Case
for a National Theatre” written in The Monthly Review in July 1902 and “What Can Be
Done for the Drama?” from the March 1900 Anglo-Saxon Review.
A National Theatre: Schemes and Estimates had an immediate impact on the
national theatre debate. For the first time since the calls for a national theatre were heard
66 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
in the mid-nineteenth century, someone had taken the time to really hammer out the ideas
and costs associated with such an endeavor. Although Andrew Carnegie would
ultimately not respond to the proposal, the Blue Book became a permanent part of the
argument well into the 1930s. When first produced, its co-author Harley Granville
Barker was still relatively untested on the national stage. He of course had some
triumphs as an actor, but he wasn’t held in the esteem of a Herbert Beerbohm Tree or a
Johnston Forbes-Roberston. He was a playwright of promise but had none of the success
that a Pinero had, and he certainly had not been a manager of a theatre and had no track
record as producer. As he had written to Archer, he longed for a repertory theatre of his
own to run. He was bursting with energy, enthusiasm, and well-thought-out practical
ideas for making a true repertory theatre in London work. Little did he know that, thanks
in part to William Archer, he was about to get his chance to put his theories into practice,
and the theatre he would do so in was the one he had written about the year before: the
Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square.
67 CHAPTER THREE
THE THOUSAND PERFORMANCES
Had Granville Barker only produced the Blue Book with William Archer, that
may have been enough to afford him a footnote in the history of Edwardian theatre.
What made him legendary, however, were the three seasons from 1904 to 1907 he spent
directing the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square. It was here that he introduced the
new drama to a public audience for the first time, really established the role of the
director in England, and enabled Bernard Shaw to become the dominant playwright of the
era. These nearly three years of activity have gone down in the annals of modern British
theatre history as a seismic shifting point, with a number of commentators dating the
birth of modern British theatre to the work done at the Court. The accomplishments of
the so-called “Thousand Performances” would forever solidify Shaw’s reputation as the
dramatist of his age, finally provide a secure foothold in London for the New Drama, and
through the work of Granville Barker, establish the role of the director in the Englishspeaking theatre. Vedrenne and Barker’s decision to move their operations from the
Court Theatre to the Savoy for the 1908 season would have disastrous consequences for
the management team, but it would also thrust Barker back into the national theatre
battle.
The Court Theatre seasons in retrospect happened almost as an accident of
history. As noted in the previous chapter, Barker had written to William Archer early in
1903 asking for a meeting to detail his scheme of taking the Court Theatre and running a
stock season of non-commercial drama. He was hoping to create something in London
that in his estimation was sorely lacking, namely a true repertory theatre. Of course his
68 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
initial interest in the Court came to no avail, chiefly because he had no means of securing
a £5,000 guarantee to lease the space. His choice of the Court Theatre, however, made
some strategic sense when examined against the backdrop of the contemporary theatrical
landscape. The Royal Court Theatre, which had been rebuilt in 1888, was a small, outof-the-way theatre located outside the West End circle in Sloane Square. Its seating
capacity was approximately 600, and it was hampered by an almost complete lack of
wing space and insufficient storage space. Originally built as a chapel, the theatre
struggled for years until it was taken over first by Marie Litton and then by John Hare.
The small stage space and lack of appropriate stage machinery made the Court wholly
unsuited to the spectacle-driven melodrama so popular for the age. Hare in particular
realized the theatre was better suited for small-cast comedies and farces. W.S. Gilbert
was one of the house dramatists, and from the 1880s, the theatre became associated with
Arthur Wing Pinero, who had several of his plays premiere there including The
Magistrate (1886), Dandy Dick (1887), and Trelawny of the ‘Wells’ (1898).
Armed with the experiences of being a successful actor and budding director,
Harley Granville Barker, young, idealistic, and indefatigable, set out to literally reinvent
modern British theatre. On April 21, 1903 he wrote a letter to William Archer that would
become a seminal document in the reformation of the Edwardian stage. I reprint it here
in its entirety as a way of providing an insight into Barker’s thoughts and dreams and also
because the letter would serve as a kind of blueprint for the forthcoming Schemes and
Estimates:
Dear Mr. Archer,
69 I want to trouble you with a rather long letter. Do you think there is
anything in this idea? To take the Court Theatre for six months or a year
and to run there a stock season of the uncommercial Drama: Hauptmann –
Sudermann – Ibsen – Maeterlinck – Schnitzler – Shaw – Brieux, etc.
Not necessarily plays untried in England.
A fresh production every fortnight.
Not necessarily a stock company.
The highest price five or six shillings.
To be worked mainly as a subscription theatre.
One would require a guarantee of £5,00017 -- if possible 50 people
putting down £100 each.
I think the working expenses should be kept to £250 a week. I would
stake everything upon plays and acting – not attempt “productions.”
It seems to me that we may wait a very long time for our National Theatre,
and that when it comes we may have no modern drama to put in it. We
must get vital drama from somewhere, and if we can’t create it we must
import it first.
I think there is a class of intellectual would-be playgoers who are
profoundly bored by the theatre as it is. Matinée productions don’t touch
these people (who are all workers) and Sunday evening is expensive and
incapable of expansion.
17
The equivalent of £483,950 or just over $782,000 in 2013 figures or about 10% of the current budget of the Royal Court Theatre. 70 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
Our actors – and worse still our actresses – are becoming demoralised by
lack of intellectual work – the continual demand for nothing but smartness
and prettiness.
I think the Independent Theatre – the New Century – The Stage Society –
have prepared the ground, and the time is ripe for starting a theatre upon
these lines, upon a regular – however unpretending – basis.
And above all unless some effective pioneer work is done very soon, some
play will be produced with twopenn’orth of idea and three penn’orth of
technique, will be acclaimed as a masterpiece and all real progress will be
set back for another ten or fifteen years.
As far as I can judge there are a great number of people interested in the
pioneer drama than ever there were and it seems to me that the regular
managers are more timid and conservative than ever.
There’ll be nothing new to you in all this – but this idea has been with me
very strongly lately. If I am right and the time is ripe and passes unnoticed
it will be a thousand pities.
Without doubt the National Theatre will come, but as Ibsen has leavened
the whole English Theatre during the past fifteen years, so we ought to be
getting some more leaven ready for the National Theatre when it does
come.
I have a scheme in rather more detail than I have put it here. Of course the
guarantee of £5,000 is the practically insurmountable obstacle.
Please forgive this “epistle.”
71 Very Sincerely Yours,
H. Granville Barker. (qtd. in Salmon
41-42)
It is all right there. One year prior to the establishment of the Vedrenne/Barker
management of the Court Theatre, the twenty-six year old Barker had planned it all out.
What young, ambitious theatre practitioner has not written a letter or had a conversation
like this at some point early in their career? Barker’s letter to Archer is ultimately as
important to the reformation of the Edwardian stage as the famous meeting of
Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko was to the development of the Russian stage.
At the heart of the letter is the clear-eyed vision of a very serious theatre thinker. Not
only is Barker wanting to establish an artistic home at the Court, he is also hoping to use
it as a viable model for what an English national theatre may ultimately look like. The
major difference in his Court Theatre scheme and previous attempts such as the Stage
Society was the idea that this should be a public theatre, not one kept afloat by private
memberships. While subscribers would make up the primary audience base, Barker’s
intent on inexpensive public tickets – “the highest price five or six shillings” – made his
model theatre resolutely more in the tradition of the Moscow Art Theatre as opposed to a
private theatre such as Paris’s Théâtre Libre. Having a public theatre would give him a
base of operations to do battle against the censorship he was already chafing against.
Running productions for two weeks would give them the opportunity to be reviewed by
the press and to hopefully find that “intellectual audience” he claimed was starving for
new forms.
72 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
Of course the £5,000 barrier seemed insurmountable, and exactly one week later
Barker wrote again to Archer, stating in part:
I have been meaning to write and thank you for coming and having that
long talk with me. It is helpful to me in my impatience to get under the
wing of your knowledge and experience sometimes. I don’t think my
“Court Theatre” scheme will come to anything and it is perhaps better that
it should not. But I do hope the National Theatre will hurry up and that it
will fall into Liberal or even Radical hands and deliver us to some extent
from the manager with the wooden head and the stage manager with the
iron hand before another generation of actors (mine in this case) has gone
to the devil artistically. (qtd. in Salmon 43)
There is no further record of what was said in the meeting between Archer and Barker,
although it is worth noting that prior to 1903, Barker had very little to say in his
correspondence about the national theatre battle. Once he fell under Archer’s influence,
he quickly joined the fight and proved to be one of the most visible champions for the
creation of a national theatre. His first step in this battle was to create the most important
document in the history of the national theatre campaign.
The Court Theatre in 1903 had come under the management control of J.H. Leigh,
a wealthy business-man/amateur actor who had acquired the lease on the Court with the
idea of providing a series of “Shakespeare Representations” designed to showcase not
only Shakespeare but also his actress/wife Thyrza Norman. Leigh launched his scheme
in the fall of 1903, and the results were less than promising. Poor reviews and scant
attendance led to Leigh reconsidering his plans, and he decided he needed a real theatre
73 professional to help guide his program. As so often happens in the theatre, Barker was
tapped for the job based on someone else’s recommendation, that someone being William
Archer. Leigh reached out to Archer early in 1904, and Archer immediately
recommended Barker to oversee Leigh’s next production, The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
Barker readily agreed with the proviso that he be allowed to simultaneously present six
matinée performances of Candida as well. Barker would reprise his role as Marchbanks
and also take on the not-so-obvious-for-him part of Speed in The Two Gentlemen of
Verona. Barker’s production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona opened at the Court
Theatre on April 21, 1904, almost a year to the day after Barker’s letter to Archer
detailing his Court Theatre scheme. The Candida matinées ran into May, at which point
Barker was also engaged at the Lyric Theatre to direct Gilbert Murray’s new translation
of Euripides’s Hippolytus. These three productions, The Two Gentlemen of Verona,
Candida, and Hippolytus were all critically and commercially successful, and the
common denominator running through all of them was Granville Barker.
J.H. Leigh was becoming more and more intrigued by Barker’s ideas on theatre,
and the confluence of Archer, Barker, Shaw, and Murray gave the Court Theatre an
imprimatur it had previously lacked. During the summer of 1904 Barker proposed a
continuation of the matinée scheme to begin in the fall. Leigh provided the final piece of
the puzzle by engaging his general manager, John Eugene Vedrenne, to oversee the
business side of the Court Theatre. Vedrenne would serve as Barker’s business partner
during the Court Theatre seasons and again in a limited capacity at the Savoy. Born in
1867 and nearly ten years older than Barker, Vedrenne came to the theatre by way of the
business world. Raised in a shipbuilding family and fluent in a number of languages,
74 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
most especially Spanish, Vedrenne has served time as a Spanish Vice-Consul in Cardiff
and as a Spanish Consul in Newport, Monmouthshire. At some point Vedrenne decided
to leave the shipbuilding and political worlds and turn his attention to the stage. In an
April 1904 interview in The Era, Vedrenne spelled out how he moved from commerce to
theatre:
I liked the work and found so much to interest me, but – there is nearly
always a but of some sort in all consulships – I found many points
afterward that made me glad to start on another career. And that career
was the stage. It is, so to speak, after my own heart. Ever a constant
theatregoer, I soon got to know many actor managers associated with
theatre and a number of travelling companies. (1)
Vedrenne got his start with a manager of concerts and operas named Schulz Curtius and
credits Curtius with teaching him the ins and outs of the business of theatre. Described
by J.C. Trewin as “obsessively punctual” (74), Vedrenne was a shrewd business-man
unafraid of playing on people’s sympathies. In his wonderfully witty Edwardian theatre
memoir, W. MacQueen-Pope details what was one of Vedrenne’s favorite negotiating
tactics, what MacQueen-Pope called the “open hand, open heart” (194) method of
negotiating:
He would almost weep when terms were being discussed. You gathered
from what he said that he had no margin of profit and that the demand you
had made would make all the difference to him between solvency and
bankruptcy. He would take you into his confidence – he would, in his
own phrase, “lay his cards on the table.” He would speak gently and
75 pityingly of risks, of the terrible gamble of a production, of the mutability
of human affairs, and in his strange voice carried a covert hint of tears. He
would offer you – if you were an actor – what was known as “summer
terms” – salaries taken at a time when most theatres were closed. But he
would stress the fairness. He would declare he would not bind you, he
would not stand in the way. As soon as a better offer came along – if any
– you could have your release and take that salary which you now began
to regard yourself as extortionate. Far be it from him to hold you up, to
prevent you getting what he knew was your real worth, but which he, a
poor man taking such risks, could not afford. You took his terms and very
seldom did you leave that play before the end of the run. Those cards on
the table were mostly trumps. (194)
Vedrenne immersed himself in all areas of theatre, not only in dealing with actors and
dramatists but with the understanding of running buildings as well. In The Era interview
he talked candidly about the needs for such an immersion:
As you can imagine, having decided to keep the line I had adopted, I was
tireless in my endeavours to make myself thoroughly conversant with all
the lights and shades, all the important points, of the theatrical and musical
professions, from every point of view. The outsider, I know – I mean the
man who is just the pleasure-seeker and little more – apart from his own
duties does not realize that to succeed with the drama and with a theatre
one requires to have a greater knowledge of the world and a calmer
acquaintance and acceptance of business tact than in any other calling. (1)
76 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
These characteristics would make Vedrenne the perfect complement to Barker. Barker
was an extraordinarily disciplined artist who would work tirelessly to achieve the
smallest detail onstage, and while he was conscious of the fact that budgets were
extremely tight at the Court, he could sometimes get lost in those details and lose sight of
that fact. Vedrenne was able to manage the books, and he had the wherewithal to be able
to say “no” to Granville Barker when it was necessary. The Court Theatre was able to
succeed because Barker and Vedrenne managed a careful tightrope act with performances
and budgets. As Dennis Kennedy rightly points out, “Had Barker followed his natural
inclination and spent money unchecked by circumstances or Vedrenne, the project would
have collapsed after a few months” (21).
So what, finally, was the “project” of the Court Theatre? Initially it was nothing
more than a series of matinées that simply resembled other ad hoc efforts to change the
London theatre. Instead of evening performances, productions were scheduled for twoweek matinées to be performed on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday while the Court
continued to perform already scheduled fare in the evenings. Oddly enough, the most
outspoken naysayer at the beginning of the venture was the one individual who would
ultimately benefit the most from it, Bernard Shaw. Before the launch of the venture, he
wrote to Barker; “Unless every advertisement is headed TUESDAYS THURSDAYS and
FRIDAYS in colossal print the scheme will fail because people will get confused about
the dates, which are perfectly idiotic” (qtd. in Purdom ed. 20). By this time, Shaw was
contemplating abandoning the London theatre altogether and turning his attention to
Dublin and the newly launched Abbey Theatre.
77 The Abbey was founded in 1904 by William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, and
Edward Martyn based on almost the same principles Barker was advocating at the Court
(albeit with different political objectives). The goal in founding the Irish Literary Theatre
was to “[c]reate in Dublin ‘a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature…with that
freedom to experiment which is not found in theatres of England.’ They would produce
no play ‘which could not hope to succeed as a book,’ Yeats wrote, since they must
‘escape the stupefying memory of the theatre of commerce which clung to London’s
West End” (Holyrod 81). This is where Shaw’s attention was when he derided the Court
Theatre in August 1904 as “a sort of political farce, of no use to anybody but cranks”
(qtd. in Holyrod 83). The Abbey Theatre fired Shaw’s latent Irish nationalism, and he
decided to write a play that would focus on the always troublesome Irish question, or as
he put it in his author’s introduction, “The object of the play is to teach Irish people the
value of an Englishman as well as to shew the Englishman his own absurdities.” The play
was presented to the Abbey Theatre under the working title Rule Britannia and was
greeted in Dublin with a profound shrug of collective shoulders. Yeats wrote to Shaw, “I
thought in reading the first act that you had forgotten Ireland, but I found in the other acts
it is the only subject on which you are entirely serious.” Lady Gregory responded, “I
have seen Shaw’s play; it acts very much better than one could have foreseen, but it is
immensely long…it is fundamentally ugly and shapeless, but it certainly keeps everybody
amused” (Yeats and Lady Gregory both qtd. in Hugo, 130-131). Because the Abbey
flatly refused to produce what would become John Bull’s Other Island, Shaw was forced
to turn back to the Court and presenting them with the play that would signal a new start
both for Shaw and the Court Theatre.
78 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
While Shaw was negotiating with the Abbey Theatre and the Court Theatre,
Barker needed a play to launch his management of the theatre in the October 1904. He
had finally convinced Shaw of the possibilities of John Bull’s Other Island, but Shaw,
ever the pragmatic Socialist, refused to give the play to the Court until Parliament was in
session. Barker initially proposed to open John Bull’s Other Island on October 18, 1904,
but Shaw refused, writing to Vedrenne; “It has only just occurred to me that it would be
very bad business to produce Rule Britannia (the working title of the play at the time)
before Parliament meets again…you will sell a lot of stalls to the political people; and the
Irish M.P.s will fill the pit” (qtd. in Kennedy 22). Instead it was agreed upon that the
play would open in November, and Barker decided to officially launch the
Vedrenne/Barker Court Theatre management with a remount of his May production of
Gilbert Murray’s translation of Hippolytus. While critical response to the opening
production was mixed, the decision to launch with a Greek tragedy was revolutionary in
and of itself. Euripides, as translated by Gilbert Murray, would be the second-mostproduced playwright during the three seasons at the Court, and the idea of ushering in
new acting styles for the New Drama by using 2,300-year-old Greek tragedies was a
brilliant, if perhaps fortuitous, stroke of ingenuity. The most in-depth contemporary
account of the Court Theatre seasons was published in early 1907 by the brilliant scholar
and critic Desmond MacCarthy. It was called The Court Theatre, 1904 – 1907; a
Commentary and Criticism, and in it MacCarthy sums up the aims of presenting the
Greek drama at the Court:
It will be well to state, before going any further, what the aim of the Court
Theatre management has been in reviving these Greek plays. Mr. Gilbert
79 Murray’s rare and beautiful translations of Euripides proved that, in the
hands of a poet and a scholar, the old Greek dramas could be refashioned
into plays which the English reader might enjoy and understand with the
same close, effortless sympathy with which he might follow the work of a
modern imagination. The performances at the Court Theatre were
attempts to carry the feat of transfusion one step further; Mr. Murray had
turned Euripides into an English poet-dramatist; Messrs. Vedrenne and
Barker tried what could be done towards naturalizing him on the English
stage. (10)
For generations prior to this, Greek drama had been relegated to the realm of scholarship.
Euripides and his ilk were where one learned the classics and Greek and Latin in the
classroom. The idea of presenting these works on stage as viable plays for production
was all but unheard of. The Court ushered Euripides into the twentieth century as a
“modern” playwright, one with strikingly modern relevancy.
After Hippolytus had completed its scheduled run of six matinée performances, it
was finally time to premiere John Bull’s Other Island. The premiere of the play would
firmly establish the political, social, and artistic aims of the Court Theatre under Barker’s
leadership, and from the outset it was what could be considered an enormous success.
Opening on November 1, 1904, John Bull’s Other Island received what could charitably
be described as mixed reviews from the daily press. The first play of Shaw’s to premiere
prior to publication since Widower’s Houses, and running nearly four hours in length,
was attacked by some in the press (including the champion of the New Drama William
Archer) as “not a play.” A. B. Walkley, one of the Edwardian era’s most prolific critics,
80 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
articulated the opposition to John Bull’s Other Island in his review in The Times of
London:
The play is a disappointment because of its willful, perverse disregard of
anything like construction. It is written on the “go-as-you-please”
principle, without beginning, middle or end…There is no reason why the
play should end when it does – except that Mr. Shaw has had enough of it.
We wish he had got tired sooner. (qtd. in Hugo 133)
Defenders of the play over looked the loose plot configuration and remarked more than
favorably on the production itself. As MacCarthy pointed out; “It is a play with hardly
any story, with no climax, without the vestige of a plot, and without anything like an
ending, in fact without one of the qualities of the ‘well-constructed’ play; yet it is
nevertheless an absolute success” (73). The success of the matinée performances was
credited in large part to the skillful cast Barker assembled18, many of whom were not
considered major West End names at that point. MacCarthy writes of John Bull’s Other
Island; “Society, on the eve of a general election, came to laugh at Broadbent, and to
listen to brilliant discussions upon Irish and English character. They sat enthralled
through a play with no vestige of a plot, delighted by acting unlit by the light of a “star,”
which was obviously and incomparably the better for it” (xiii).
Society did indeed come out in droves for John Bull’s Other Island. Politicians
dealing with the complexities of the “Irish Question” came to see the play, and perhaps
its biggest fan was the Tory Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, who attended the next-to 18
Credit for “directing” the premiere of Shaw’s plays during this time has always been given to Shaw himself although Dennis Kennedy argues that at the very least the Court productions should be considered to have been co-­‐directed by Shaw and Barker but without doubt all the casting was done by Barker, albeit with Shaw’s approval. 81 the-last performance. When the play was revived in the spring, he returned to Sloane
Square three more times to see it again, once on his own, once with Leader of the
Opposition – and future Labour Prime Minister – Henry Campbell-Bannerman, and
finally with another future Labour Prime Minister, H.H. Asquith. But what finally and
completely put the Vedrenne/Barker Court Theatre management on the social map was a
command performance of John Bull’s Other Island given for King Edward VII on March
11, 1905. In what has become a legendary night in the annals of the Royal Court Theatre,
the large monarch laughed so hard at the “[l]ines written by a teetotal vegetarian
socialist” (Kennedy 24) that he broke his chair.
The broken chair was an agreeable trade-off for the Court Theatre, as this one
play established what was to be the theatre’s raison d’être. Serious drama, played by an
ensemble company, in as close to a repertory system as was possible, focused on limited
runs and a revolving repertoire. To his credit Barker could have continued to run John
Bull’s Other Island throughout the fall and winter of 1904-05, but he remained true to his
belief in the repertory system. After its initial six performances, John Bull’s Other Island
was withdrawn in favor of Maeterlinck’s Aglavaine and Selysette, which failed to attract
an audience and was met with a resounding shrug by the critics.
Following a revival of Candida, Barker produced an expensive flop for the
Christmas season of 1904. Prunella was the first Court Theatre production that featured
Barker in the role of playwright. A Pierrot play, written by Barker with music by
Laurence Housman, was intended as a holiday play for “Grown-Up Children” and, as
often happens when one attempts to produce for the not so lucrative “grown-up children”
crowd, the production failed to find an audience as it was slotted between two distinct
82 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
groups:, it was too juvenile for adults but too adult for children. J.T. Grein in The Sunday
Times summarized it by writing; “Not quite the right thing for a Christmas occasion, it
will not thrill the parents, and it will impel the little ones to ask awkward questions” (qtd.
in Kennedy 24).
Reading the preceding paragraphs one may get the impression that in his first
season Barker produced one hit (John Bull), one hit revival (Candida), and a handful of
flops (everything else), so why should we care about the work at the Court Theatre? I
would argue that Barker’s first season needs to be looked at through two distinct prisms.
In the first instance, in 1904 twenty-seven-year-old Granville Barker was a first-time
artistic director finding his way and seeking his audience. As he wrote to Gilbert Murray
on December 31, 1904 regarding Prunella; “The business is awful (Barker’s emphasis):
so bad that we seriously discussed today whether or not to close on Saturday and cut all
the loss we could…I cannot understand it – the people who come seem most enthusiastic,
but so few of them come. One can only conclude that it is a real failure” (qtd. in Salmon
207). It can be certain that anyone who has ever run a theatre has had the misfortune of
trying to figure out why small but enthusiastic audiences do not equate to larger
enthusiastic audiences. It is one thing to have a plan on paper but it is another to execute
it altogether. As 1904 rolled into 1905 there was serious concern about whether or not
the Court Theatre management would be able to continue.
The second prism one needs to examine Granville Barker’s Court Theatre
management is one that would be powerfully articulated by George Devine at the same
theatre a half-century later. “The right to fail” is not a phrase Barker would have ever
uttered in the era before subsidized theatres, but his notion of running a stock season of
83 “uncommercial” drama was precisely that: “uncommercial.” Even in a small venue like
the Court, it proved tough to develop an audience for the kind of work that most
interested him. It has been argued that once Shaw was finally embraced by the Court
audiences, his plays unbalanced the programming, and that is partly true. By the time the
Vedrenne/Barker management moved to the Savoy, Shaw’s plays had accounted for fully
71% of all the performances given by at the theatre. Eleven of Shaw’s plays would be
produced, and the next most produced playwright, as mentioned above, was Euripides
with a total of three. Shaw was the native playwright, albeit Irish, that Barker was
searching for when he wrote to Archer about having a national drama to put into a
national theatre. Upon his first revision of Schemes and Estimates, he included Shaw as
a playwright whose work absolutely deserved to be seen on the stages of an English
national theatre. He did this in part because the Court Theatre had created a new
audience of playgoers, too small at the time to sustain the eventual move to the Savoy,
but ultimately the audience that would provide a platform whereby modernist British
artists would launch their work.
What Barker and Vedrenne were attempting to accomplish at the Court could be
seen as a response to a speech given by playwright Henry Arthur Jones at Harvard
in 1906. In his speech, subsequently published under the title “Cornerstones of
Modern Drama,” Jones articulated seven major causes for what he described as
the moribund state of modern theatre in the English-speaking world in general but
in London in particular:
I have pointed out what I believe to be the underlying cause of the
intellectual degradation of the Anglo-American drama today. But
84 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
attendant on this primary cause, are those other secondary and
resultant causes and signs of degradation which we have glanced at
in comparing the English and French drama. I will repeat them in
the order of their importance:
1. The divorce of the English drama from English literature, of
which it is indeed the highest and most difficult form, and of which
it should be chief ornament. Accompanying this divorce of
literature and the drama is the contempt of English men of letters
and literary critics for the theatre; their utter ignorance of the
difficulties of the modern dramatist; their refusal to recognize
modern drama as literature, which refusal again reacts upon the
dramatist, and tends to lower the quality of his work, inasmuch as
we he left without encouragement, and without any appeal to high
standards of literature and good taste.
2. The general absence from the English Theatre and from modern
English plays of any sane, consistent or intelligible ideas about
morality; so that, while the inanities and indecencies of musical
comedy are sniggered at and applauded, the deepest permanent
passions of men and women are tabooed, and the serious dramatist
is bidden to keep his characters well within the compass of that
system of morality which is practised amongst wax dolls.
85 3. The divorce of the English drama from its sister arts; its
deposition from any assured place in the intellectual and artistic
life of the nation.
4. The absorption of the English drama into popular amusement;
the absence of any high standard whereby to judge acting or plays;
the absence of all great traditions; the absence of all pride in the
drama as a fine, and humane, and dignified art.
5. The want of a training school for actors – the want of any
means for giving promising novices a constant practice in varied
roles, so that they may gradually acquire a sure grip of their art,
and make the best of their natural gifts; and so that the author may
have a sufficient supply of competent actors to interpret his
characters in such as way that his play may be seen to advantage.
6. The elevation of incompetent actors and actresses into false
positions as stars; whereby, in the dearth of any high general level
of experienced and competent all-round acting, the possessor of a
pretty face or a fine physique is able to dominate the situation, and
to rule what plays shall be produced, and how they shall be cast
and mounted; the general lack of all interest in the play, or in the
author’s study of life and character, apart from their being the
vehicle of the star actor.
7. A widely-spread dependence upon translations and adaptations
of foreign plays, inasmuch as they can be bought at a cheap rate,
86 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
and, in the absence of any general care or knowledge as to what a
national drama should be, are just as likely to provide the leading
actor with a personal and pecuniary success, while they also
largely set him free from all obligations to that most objectionable
and interfering person, the author. (29-30)
While Mr. Jones may have protested a bit too much about the state of English theatre at
the time, it is clear that the Court Theatre was actively working against all of his points.
In setting a precedent that still holds true more than a century later, the dramatist was
supreme at the Royal Court Theatre. In developing his ideas on directing, Barker
recognized his first priority was to the text and having his ensemble live truthfully within
the demands of the text. And while the Court had the occasional guest star – Mrs. Patrick
Campbell as Hedda Gabler or Ellen Terry creating the role of Lady Cecily Wayneflete in
Captain Brassbound’s Conversion – the ensemble drove the productions. Working
without rehearsal pay – which would not become standard until the 1920s in London –
for only a guinea per performance, the regular Court Theatre company included actors
old and young, some who had been names in their youth and had aged into character
roles, some of whom were just starting out. Barker played in a number of productions
early on before moving almost exclusively to directing and writing. Other regular
company members included Lewis Casson, Lillah McCarthy (soon to become the first
Mrs. Barker), Norman McKinnel, Dennis Eadie, Robert Loraine, Ben Webster, Louis
Calvert, Edmund Gwenn, Ellen O’Malley, Nigel Playfair, Dorothy Minto, Laurence
Irving, Evelyn Weeden, Sarah Brooke, and A.E. Matthews. Lewis Casson and Nigel
Playfair would eventually be knighted for their services to the theatre. In addition to a
87 long and distinguished stage career, Edmund Gwenn would forever be immortalized as
Kris Kringle in the 1947film Miracle on 34th Street. Louis Calvert would have a career
renaissance at the Court after working with the likes of Henry Irving and Lillie Langtry
during the 1880s. A. E. Matthews would eventually receive an O.B.E.19 for his services
to the theatre and film. Robert Loraine would leave his stage career to become a pioneer
aviator, and by the end of World War I he would hold the rank of Lieutenant-General in
the Royal Air Force. It was by any definition an august company. A.B. Walkley, always
a tough critic and described by Michael Holroyd as something of a “reactionary,”
marveled at the acting featured at the Court: “There is no such all-round acting in London
as is nowadays seen at the Court theatre…Where all are excellent it is needless to single
out names” (qtd. in Holroyd 149).
Unfortunately the lack of a sustaining fund prevented the Court from initiating a
true repertory system as they lacked resources for creating and storing scenery, and they
were not able to secure a company large enough to spread out over several productions at
once. After the disaster of Prunella over Christmas, Barker opened the spring season in
February with the revival of John Bull’s Other Island that so delighted Arthur Balfour
and caused King Edward to break his chair. Vedrenne and Barker expanded the runs
from six matinée performances to nine and, following John Bull’s Other Island, they
presented a triple bill of Yeats’s The Pot of Broth, Schnitzler’s In the Hospital, and
Shaw’s How He Lied to Her Husband. They followed that with Hauptmann’s The
Thieves’ Comedy in March and The Trojan Women in April. Barker directed each piece,
and while the critical results were mixed, none of the complaints dealt with his
19
Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, two steps below a knighthood. 88 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
productions. He was proving adept at handling a wide range of material, all of which
constituted London premieres.
Following King Edward’s command performance, the Vedrenne/Barker
management took over the Court totally. They were no longer confined to just
performing matinées while another production played in the evening. They completed
their first season with basically a Shaw festival, beginning with a May Day revival of
John Bull’s Other Island playing in the evenings while You Never Can Tell played
matinées. You Never Can Tell was Shaw’s riposte to Wilde’s The Importance of Being
Earnest and featured Shaw’s dazzling wit and scathingly funny critique of turn-of-thecentury British society. These productions were followed in quick successions by
Candida, playing in the evenings for the first time followed by You Never Can Tell
moving to the evenings. The Court would also premiere what would become the biggest
hit of the first season – and one of Shaw’s greatest successes – Man and Superman. In
addition to being a hit for Shaw, it also provided Barker with one of his most notable
roles, that of John Tanner. In the theatre, where you are only as good as your last
productions, Man and Superman proved to be a brilliant capstone to Vedrenne and
Barker’s first year together. As Dennis Kennedy succinctly summarizes it, “It had been
annus mirabilis: twelve plays (three of them one-acts), practically speaking all new to
London, produced without subsidy, directed and acted with a sensitivity rarely seen
anywhere” (26). It had been an extraordinary season – created almost on the fly, and one
that saw Barker play major roles in all of the Shaw plays, as well as the Henchman in
Hippolytus and the protagonist in Prunella – for a total of 191 performances. He had also
assisted in the directing of the Shaw plays, directing the seven other productions on his
89 own and controlling the artistic side of the theatre, including play selection, casting,
music, and pre-show entertainment, and serving as the visible face of the company.
While the overall reception to the venture had been largely positive, there were
still some complainants. Chief among them was William Archer, in his season review of
the Court Theatre, who expressed concern that the Court should not “[b]ecome the
dramatic branch of the Fabian Society” (qtd. in Kennedy 26). Archer was calling out the
dominance of Shaw as the de facto house dramatist. The only other new English play
presented in the first season was the unfortunate flop Prunella, and while Shaw, Archer,
and others encouraged Barker to produce some of his own plays, either The Marrying of
Ann Leete or The Weather-Hen, Barker resisted in the first season. He was rightly
concerned that his work at the Court was already overexposing him as an old-fashioned
actor-manager; by adding his plays to the mix the Court it could have appeared that the
season was a Granville Barker vanity project. What was most encouraging about the first
season was that the New Drama was attracting a new audience.
Barker’s initial plan for the Court Theatre, as sketched out in his 1903 letter to
Archer, called for inexpensive ticket prices and a subscription audience that would
provide the theatre with a working capital for their productions. Unfortunately one does
not announce a new theatrical venture and then expect the onrush of patrons wishing to
part with their money to subscribe to this new venture. Audiences, then as now, are
tough to corral, and are much more apt to sit and wait for a company to prove itself. The
Vedrenne/Barker management was no different, and in its three short seasons, the
subscription audience Barker was hoping for never really materialized. Nor did the cheap
seats idea Barker mentioned in his initial letter to Archer prove workable, and the ticket
90 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
prices at the Court Theatre for those three seasons were comparable to what audiences
paid in the West End.
Who was coming to the Court Theatre and what were they expecting to see?
Barker had staked his venture on reaching that class of “intellectual would-be playgoers
who are profoundly bored by the theatre as it is” as he had written to Archer in his
famous 1903 letter. It was on those people that Barker placed his hopes, and in many
respects he found them. One does not train an audience over-night, and the audience that
ventured to Sloane Square to partake in the Court Theatre offerings as a whole was ready
for something new. This was what we might consider today an avant-garde audience.
They had little to no interest in the West End offerings described by A.E. Wilson:
The West End theatre might go on presenting pieces that were exactly in
accordance with what was regarded as representing popular taste, plays
which claimed attention because they dealt with amusing intrigue among
the best kind of people, plays about dukes and duchesses and High Society
in which manners and epigrams, settings and fashions were in the best of
taste, plays of picturesque romance in which the improbable was
performed with gallant flourishes, plays about a delightful if impossible
unreal world. (173-174)
The Royal Court Theatre rejected the West End model and provided for the first time in
London a theatre on par with the Théâtre Libre of André Antoine, the Freie Bühne of
Otto Brahm, and the Moscow Art Theatre of Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko.
Eschewing the long run in favor of shorter runs allowed for a more ready turnover of the
91 repertoire, and that kept audiences of varying sizes returning to Sloane Square. A small
segment of the audience quickly became loyalists.
Dennis Kennedy, in his article “The New Drama and the new audience,” quotes
from contemporary accounts on the makeup and passion of the Court audience; “‘The
plain fact is,’ said the Referee during the first Vedrenne-Barker season, ‘Mr. Vedrenne
has succeeded in drawing to the theatre a class of playgoer for whom too scant
consideration is shown by the theatrical managers; playgoers, I mean, with a purely
artistic taste for theatre’” (136). Shaw was quoted as saying the Court playgoers were not
an audience but “a congregation,” and Mario Borsa, writing in The English Stage of
Today, drew a sharp distinction between the Court audience and the general West End
theatregoing public; “The great British public, artless, coarse-minded, and dull-witted –
does not frequent the Court…the Court audiences are composed of persons of culture and
students, with a goodly percentage of society people” (136). The other interesting fact
about the Court audience is that it was overwhelming female. At a time when the local
press invariably addressed the playgoer with a male pronoun, the Court audience was
often composed of a 12:1 ratio of women to men. An unnamed critic in The Bystander
wrote in 1906:
The Court theatre is now become a cult. The matinée-goers are an
audience apart. A decade ago they would have been termed “Soulful.”
But the elect who crowd the productions at the Court Theatre are bizarre,
not so much in appearance and dress as in point of view…Outspokenness
brings no blush to their cheek. They are mostly women. (qtd. in Kennedy
137)
92 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
What the critics had not yet placed their fingers on was that this avant-garde audience
was in effect made up of women from a newly liberated middle-class that for the first
time in history allowed for a leisure class to emerge. The audience was described not as a
theatre-going crowd but as a lecture or sermon enthusiasts. They would go out dressed in
oversized hats for matinées that would provide them intellectual stimulation while their
husbands went off to work in the City of London or for the government in Westminster.
Even a generation sooner these women would have been forced to remain in the home,
taking care of their children and extended families. The industrial revolution and the
subsequent growth in British industry had provided what we would call today disposable
income. A middle-class woman of means was now able to attend lectures, readings,
sermons, and plays. For example, within the decade more than 25,000 people would
attend the Grafton Galleries exhibition that would introduce Post-Impressionism to
London. This was the audience Barker was seeking to cultivate at the Court, and he was
largely successful in doing so.
The 1905 - 1906 season at the Court firmly cemented the work in the history of
modern British theatre. While Barker was even busier than he was in the first season, he
focused more on directing and writing and less on acting. Once again John Bull’s Other
Island was used to kick-start the season, this time as the opening production in September
1905. By this time, Shaw appeared to have had enough of the Court squeezing
everything they could out of John Bull, and he wrote to Vedrenne that the production was
“An abominable, coarse, careless, play-for-laughs, third class suburban performance.
Tell the cast so!” (qtd. in Hugo 146). Vedrenne and Barker followed John Bull with St.
John Hankin’s The Return of the Prodigal. Hankin had been primarily a journalist before
93 turning to playwriting, and The Return of the Prodigal showed that Hankin had great
promise as a writer for the stage. His unfortunate suicide in 1909 would tragically cut
short that promise, and we are left with this play, described by Dennis Kennedy as
“[e]xcellent social satire, Oscar Wilde ten years later and without the sentiment…”(26).
The Hankin piece was followed by Barker’s first attempt at Ibsen, The Wild Duck, which
ran into the first week of November 1905. November of 1905 would be bracketed by two
enormously important and influential new plays. The beginning of November witnessed
the arrival of Barker’s masterpiece as a playwright, The Voysey Inheritance.
Barker’s brilliance as a dramatist has long been overshadowed by his work as a
theorist and director. While it is not the intent of this present work to attempt to reclaim
him as a dramatist of the first rank, it is important to consider the significance of The
Voysey Inheritance. A play about a family, father and son solicitors, and a searing
critique of contemporary Edwardian capitalism, The Voysey Inheritance deals with the
elder Voysey, who for years has followed his own father’s practice of embezzling money
from clients to prop up his comfortable upper-middle-class existence. As a trusted family
solicitor with a variety of investments for his clients, he has misused their trust to make
money for himself and his family while only paying the necessary interest to his clients.
At the beginning of the play he has informed his son Edward, who has been groomed to
take over the family business, of the true state of affairs. The father claims he has been
attempting to put them right; however, he flatly refuses to do so at the expense of his
family’s comfort. He suggests young Edward carry on in the same manner before dying
shortly thereafter. The moral dilemma occurs when Edward presents what he knows to
94 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
the rest of the family. Their reactions and that of his fiancée challenge Edward’s idealism
and sense of moral justice.
Richard Eyre, who directed a 1989 National Theatre production of The Voysey
Inheritance, describes the play as follows: “Voysey is a virtuoso display of stagecraft: the
writer showing that as director he can handle twelve speaking characters on stage at one
time, and that as actor he can deal with the most ambitious and unexpected modulations
of thought and feeling. I think he’s the English Chekhov” (77). Contemporary response
was just as enthusiastic. Desmond MacCarthy wrote, “The most remarkable feature of
The Voysey Inheritance is the skill with which the interest in a single situation is
maintained through four acts; that is the sign of fertility and not poverty of imagination
all who have ever tried to write know well. Its second great merit is the vividness with
which a large family is presented, each member of which is a distinct character” (27).
The play proved very popular during its November matinée run and was brought back in
early 1906 for evening performances. It is a play that rightfully deserves to be considered
a twentieth-century masterpiece, and though he clearly was influenced by Shaw and
Ibsen while he was writing it, The Voysey Inheritance represents the work of a complete
homme de théâtre. It represents the work of a playwright who truly understands there are
no small characters while simultaneously writing with the confidence of a person who
knows their stagecraft through and through. It is a remarkable play.
The second landmark production to arrive at the Court in November 1905 could
be considered the first play truly inspired by what Barker was attempting to accomplish.
Shaw’s Major Barbara was described as a discussion in three acts, and while it has had
many more major productions in the succeeding years, the initial response to it was the
95 exact opposite to that of The Voysey Inheritance. Derisively renamed by some critics as
“Arms and the Woman,” Major Barbara was soundly battered, much to Shaw’s great
disappointment. Leon Hugo sums up the critical backlash against the play by citing the
representative example of the unnamed critic in The Morning Post:
The Morning Post best testified to the shock, although some other papers
were not far behind it in the intensity of their reaction. Its anonymous
critic had a field day “disposing” of both Shaw and the play, beginning
with a general denunciation of the “lack of straight forward intelligible
purpose,” the “deliberate perversity” and “self-contradictory insincerity”
of Shaw’s work, before turning on Major Barbara. He touched on the
“pseudo-realism” of the characters, dwelt on Shaw’s “bad taste” in
resorting to biblical phrases in his text – “it is so bad that we wonder at its
escaping the notice of the censorship” – and denounced him as jeering at
everyone: he “keeps up his bitter gibes to the last,” and Barbara and others
“fall easy victims of the long-winded logic of the cynical capitalist.” All
in all, “its offences of bad taste and good feeling are of a kind not readily
to be forgiven.” (150)
Despite the critical backlash – and to be fair not all of it was terrible, as J.T. Grein and
Desmond MacCarthy among others wrote favorable notices about the play – the new
audience of the New Drama at the Court Theatre were overwhelmingly supportive of the
play. After wandering in a theatrical wilderness for years, Bernard Shaw suddenly found
himself fashionable, and many of the young audience members attending Court Theatre
productions found themselves joining the Fabian Society.
96 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
There were other successes in the second season. Ellen Terry made her
appearance in Captain Brassbound’s Conversion, Gilbert Murray’s translation of Electra
premiered, and the much-maligned Prunella was brought back in a non-holiday slot and
played to much better houses. As to be expected, not everything succeeded. A double
bill of plays by novelist Maurice Hewlett – Pan and the Young Shepherd and The
Youngest of the Angels – played to very small houses and was pulled off after only six
performances. R.V Harcourt’s A Question of Age fared even worse and was withdrawn
after only two performances, with its final four performances being replaced by a revival
of Major Barbara. What the second season clearly indicated was that the Court was
focusing its resources on native dramatists. Plays by Shaw, Barker, Hankin, Murray,
Harcourt, Frederick Fenn, and Hewlett suggested a conscious effort to kick-start a
homegrown dramatic movement. Again, what good would a national theatre be if there
was no national drama to put on its stage? And as successful as they had been with
Shaw, there was the recognition that Shaw alone could not fill the bill.
The third and final Court season continued this trend of the native dramatist.
Once again the season opened with a revival of John Bull’s Other Island, but it also
included Shavian works The Doctor’s Dilemma and Don Juan in Hell, as well as the first
public performances of The Philanderer and revivals of You Can Never Tell, and Man
and Superman. Other writers represented at the Court Theatre included John Galsworthy
(The Silver Box), St. John Hankin (The Charity that Began at Home), Cyril Harcourt (The
Reformer), John Masefield (The Camden Wonder), and Elizabeth Robins (Votes for
Women). Barker reduced his acting commitments even further, appearing in only three
plays in the final season and directing everything else. He was also working on a new
97 play (Waste), and he was spending more and more time away from the Court, much to the
chagrin of Vedrenne.
The final curtain came down on the Court Theatre management of J.E. Vedrenne
and Granville Barker on June 28, 1907 with a double bill of, appropriately enough,
Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell and The Man of Destiny. By the time they suspended their
operations at the Court and decided to make the move into the heart of the West End,
they had produced thirty-two plays for a total of 988 performances in a little less than
three years. The 988 performances would be immortalized in theatre history as the socalled “Thousand Performances,” and Barker and Vedrenne both felt as if they were on to
bigger and better things at the Savoy. Their accomplishments at the Court were
instantaneously legendary as both men were now famous. As W. MacQueen-Pope
summarizes:
They drew all London to Sloane Square. Those perfectly played
productions of (Shaw’s plays) made this country aware that a major
dramatist and a great one had come amongst them, that a new play form
and a new thought form had arrived. People criticized, argued, disliked,
objected, raved, enthused, gloried – but they went to the Court every time.
Shaw took his true place as a result of Vedrenne and Barker. A new thing
had begun to join the other marvels which were daily crowding on the
Edwardians – this new century was bringing new things with a vengeance
and the new thing it brought to the Theatre was Bernard Shaw – per
Vedrenne and Barker. John Galsworthy’s magnificent play, The Silver
Box, caused a sensation. St. John Hankin’s The Return of the Prodigal
98 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
was a promise which never matured. Elizabeth Robins’ Votes for Women
was a challenge which was eventually fulfilled. (195)
For A.E Wilson the difference between the offerings at the Court Theatre versus the
typical West End theatre was vast:
But the Court was different. Here the playgoer was invited to see
something that related more or less to his own everyday existence, in
which the common-or-garden folk of his kind were concerned, in which
recognisable people were represented in quite probable situations and
discussed problems that did concern the life of the human being. They
were being shown that there might be just as much interest in what
happened to a clerk or a charwoman as to a duke or a Mayfair hostess, and
that outside the restricted fashionable world there was Life itself to be
examined and explored and its social problems discussed. (174)
Wilson concludes his reminiscence of the Court Theatre by invoking its influence beyond
the theatre itself and into the commercial West End:
The movement naturally was not without its effect upon ordinary
commercial enterprise and to it must be traced the more adventurous
choice of plays subsequently shown in the Edwardian theatre by many
productions which, only a few years previously would have been shunned
by any manager who considered himself reasonably sane…Such was the
effect of the Vedrenne-Barker régime, which appeared a modest enough
enterprise when it began, which lasted only three years but was destined to
have a lasting effect upon our stage. If this has been the only contribution
99 to theatrical history during King Edward’s reign it would have made the
period notable and worthy of respect. (176)
While Barker was undoubtedly pleased with the success of the Court Theatre, the
opportunity to move to the Savoy was one he could not pass up. It gave him a chance to
prove his ideas in the heart of the West End. Vedrenne too was keen to move, as it was
his desire to prove that the New Drama could pay for itself. The expenses at the Court
Theatre had dramatically increased when they moved to playing in the evenings. They
were no longer able to offer only a guinea a performance, they actually had to pay rates
comparable to West End theatres despite having a much smaller house.
For a variety of reasons the Savoy season proved to be a disaster. As happens all
too common in the world of theatre, there is an assumption that larger theatres mean
larger audiences, and that is almost always proven to be false. At the Court Vedrenne
and Barker had a 600-seat house to fill; the Savoy was nearly double that size with
approximately 1,100 seats. The proscenium was also much larger, and the demand for
scenery grew in direct proportion to the loss of intimacy with the audience. The subtle
acting style the company had perfected at the Court – one that Shaw frequently
complained about—was in effect swallowed up in the Savoy. Finally the Court Theatre
had acquired a mystique in its somewhat out-of-the way Sloane Square location that
utterly failed to transfer to the Savoy. The grittiness of the little theatre made fashionable
audiences feel they were seeing something, if not dangerous, then possibly taboo.
Transferred to the heart of the West End, that sense of danger was lost. The VedrenneBarker team launched the Savoy season in August 1907, and by December of that year
they were all but broken up, crushed under a mountain of debt and acrimony that even
100 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
more than £5,000 worth of loans from Shaw could not solve. As the crisis escalated,
Barker withdrew more and more, leaving Vedrenne to hold off creditors for as long as he
could and severing their relationship forever. The Vedrenne-Barker partnership would
not last, but they had provided on a small scale a potential national theatre model, and
their work at the Savoy Theatre, short though it was, reinforced the idea that if the New
Drama was going to maintain a foothold in London, it would require subsidy to do so.
The battle for a national theatre continued to rage on.
101 CHAPTER FOUR
THE NATIONAL DEBATE
Prior to the start of World War I, the national theatre debate evolved from
newspaper columns and debates within the field of theatre to the parliamentary debates
for the National Theatre Resolution. While the Edwardian era would lose its namesake
with the death of King Edward VII in 1910, the sense of optimism and hope he
engendered would still continue right up until the outbreak of war in 1914. In the years
preceding the war, a number of Barker’s followers and protégés would find themselves
establishing theatres in the major cities of Great Britain, influenced largely by the Court
Theatre seasons and the nascent Abbey Theatre in Dublin. For a time, it seemed as if the
national theatre flower would bloom from the regional repertory theatre seed. Following
the war, Barker all but withdrew from active work in the theatre to focus on writing in
which he remained a passionate advocate for a national theatre and the New Drama. The
third war to interrupt the national theatre schemes would be World War II, and England
would emerge from it battered and exhausted, no longer a great power. It was with the
onset of the cradle-to-grave welfare state that the National Theatre Bill was finally passed
by Parliament in 1949, three years after the death of Harley Granville Barker.
Even though Granville Barker was monumentally busy during his management of
the Court Theatre, he stayed actively involved in the national theatre debate and was
always available to deliver copies of the Blue Book to anyone who had an interest and the
possible means for making a national theatre a reality. Shortly after the Court closed its
1905-06 season, Barker and other members of the theatrical establishment attended a
banquet at the Hotel Cecil in honor of Ellen Terry. The Chairman who organized the
102 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
event, a Tory junior M.P. then serving as Secretary of State for the Colonies, made an
after-dinner speech in honor of Terry and used the occasion to call for the establishment
of a national theatre. The Times of London reported on the chairman, Winston Churchill,
and the speech he made:
The great demonstration of admiration for Miss Terry which had been so
general of late, showed, Mr. Churchill thought, that the British were
sincere lovers of the drama, and were genuinely grateful to all who raised
its tone and quality in our country. He thought they ought to be very
grateful, because, we did not do much in England for the dramatic art. We
left it to shift for itself. We were content to let it be governed and guided,
to ebb and flow hither and thither, merely by chance and caprice, and to
regulate it, so far as the nation was concerned, only as a commercial
consideration. He could not help thinking that was a great pity. We did
not as in Germany or France, endeavour to sustain the drama by national
influence and by national agencies; and although he knew that this was a
subject on which opinions were widely divided, he considered it was a
pity, and even a folly, that we did not make some national effort to aid and
assist dramatic representation. [Cheers]. He was not going to decry the
great principle of self-interest. It was a very flexible principle, and it had
this advantage, that, as a motive power, it was almost universal. But, after
all, it was self-sacrifice and not self-interest which was the parent of the
arts. [Hear, hear]. He was one of those who held that it was the duty of the
State to be the generous but discriminating parent of the arts and sciences;
103 and if we could only divert national attention from the often senseless
process of territorial expansion, and the ugly apparatus of war, to those
more graceful and gentler flights of fancy and of ambition which were
associated with the theatre and the drama, we should more securely
vindicate our claim to be a civilized people. [Laughter and cheers]. Let
them think how money could always be easily obtained for any purpose
involving the destruction of life and property; let them think with what
excitement and interest this people witnessed the construction or
launching of a Dreadnaught. What a pity it was that some measure of that
interest could not be turned in the direction of launching, say, a National
Theatre? [Cheers]. He looked forward to some time when that reproach
upon us would be removed. He confessed to having the idea that a great
national theatre with branches in the large provincial cities, and with
connections, or similar sister bodies in the Colonies throughout the
Empire, would have a great effect on the solidarity of the Englishspeaking people all over the world. In the Shakespearian drama we had
links of gold, if we would only use them, which were strong enough to
resist the shocks and changes of time. We suffered because we did not
attempt more thoroughly to organize a great branch of human effort. Why
was it that we did not suffer more? It was because we had been
particularly fortunate in this, as in many other spheres of human activity.
The drama in England was sustained and supported by a comparatively
small number of gifted individuals, individuals of grace and power and
104 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
distinction, who in their own persons elevated and sustained the dramatic
art in this country. We owed, he thought, a great deal to Mr. Beerbohm
Tree [cheers] and to others who were gathered about this board that night,
but perhaps most of all we owed this great advantage to the guest of the
evening. [Loud cheers]. (1)
Churchill goes on to credit Terry and Henry Irving with keeping Shakespeare relevant
and popular on the stages of London in the 1870s and 1880s. He concluded with a
flourish, stating that Terry’s “personal gifts and powers” had “elevated and sustained the
quality and distinction of the theatrical art in England during long years when that duty
was somewhat discreditably neglected by the State” (1). It is important to remember that
any good politician will always make a speech calculated to get the maximum effect out
of his or her intended audience, and Churchill was nothing if not a masterful politician.
Was this simply just a matter of playing to the crowd? Barker decided at the very least it
was worth getting Churchill a copy of the Blue Book, as he stated in a letter to Churchill
shortly following the Terry Dinner:
Dear Winston Churchill,
Your improvement on the occasion of Sunday last was unexpected but
most welcome to at least two of your hearers. I could hardly refrain from
bestowing all my cheers on your remarks about State Patronage of the
Theatre, and Archer informed me that he was sorely tempted to abandon
his arrangements for his own speech and devote it to seconding your
remarks. You will understand this if you glance at the “Blue Book” I am
sending you. You won’t have time to more than glance at it nor perhaps is
105 there any need. But if you will keep it by you, then when the subject of
Repertory Theatre, State aided or otherwise, comes to the front next (it is
bound to do so sooner or later, and I hope sooner), you might like to be
posted in some of the technicalities of the subject. And we should like
you to be posted in them.
I am, Yours very faithfully,
H. Granville Barker. (qtd. in Whitworth 57)
History does not record a response from Churchill to Barker, but clearly for a member of
the government to have made such a speech suggests that by 1906 the national theatre
debate had moved into the zeitgeist.20
Simultaneously with Barker’s work at the Court Theatre, an august group of the
English Establishment had banded together in consideration of a proper memorial to
honor the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death in 1916. As early as 1905 a group known
as the Shakespeare Memorial Committee began meeting with the express purpose of
erecting a memorial to the Bard somewhere in London. With the support of King
Edward and the government, the group began the process of determining a suitable
location, and by 1908 had narrowed their choices down to five potential areas:
1. The Open Space between Constitution Hill and St. George’s Hospital
(Hyde Park Corner); 2. Lincoln’s Inn Fields; 3. The South Bank of the
Thames, near the sight of the new County Hall21; 4. The Green Park,
20
Eighty-­‐two years later, Churchill’s daughter Mary Soames would be appointed Chair of the National Theatre board and serve in that capacity for almost the entirety of Richard Eyre’s directorship of the theatre. 21
Almost the exact location of the present National Theatre 106 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
facing Piccadilly; 5. Park Crescent, at the top of Portland Place.
(Whitworth 47)
After much deliberation the group settled on the Portland Place location and began the
process of creating a design competition to determine the best possible monument to
Shakespeare and to securing the necessary funds to pay for the winning sculpture. The
Executive Committee of the Shakespeare Memorial Committee made a number of
recommendations to the General Committee, including that the form of the memorial
would be an architectural monument that would include a statue and that, for the
proposed competition, architects and sculptors should work together. They also
suggested an international committee be appointed and charged with raising £200,000 for
the purposes of paying for the monument and creating an endowment for the purposes of
furthering “Shakespearian aims” (Whitworth 49). What those aims were was not
articulated in their proposal to the full board, which was nevertheless accepted, and the
Shakespeare Memorial Committee excitedly made the announcement of their “Portland
Place” scheme to the world on March 5, 1908.
Geoffrey Whitworth – who shall figure in the next chapter – has written an
extraordinary account of the national theatre saga called The Making of the National
Theatre. Published shortly before his death in 1951, it provides a present-day scholar the
benefit of the contemporary hindsight that the National Theatre was a foregone
conclusion. The “Angry Young Men” of Sloane Square were five years away, Peter
Hall’s launching of the modern Royal Shakespeare Company was a decade away, and
Olivier’s inauguration of the National Theatre at the Old Vic was still twelve years away.
Whitworth’s book provides very little in the way of his commentary and instead focuses
107 almost wholly on primary documents or firsthand accounts of the events leading up to the
passage of the National Theatre Bill in Parliament in 1949. He does provide an incisive
examination of the eventual amalgamation of the Shakespeare Memorial Committee and
the National Theatre Committee to form the rather unwieldy sounding Shakespeare
Memorial National Theatre Committee of which Granville Barker would serve as a
prominent member. Whitworth suggests that the crucial error of the Shakespeare
Memorial Committee was to ignore the fact that perhaps the greatest single memorial to
the memory of Shakespeare would in fact be a modern national theatre.
Less than a week after their Portland Place announcement, the first broadside
against their plan was fired by Sir John Hare in The Times of London. Hare had been a
former manager of the Court Theatre and was one of the signatories to the preface of
Barker and Archer’s A National Theatre: Scheme and Estimates Blue Book. In his letter
to The Times, he commended the Shakespeare Memorial Committee for their desire to
honor the memory of Shakespeare but attempted to focus the issue less on granite and
more on words:
Shakespeare has, it seems to me, raised the most indestructible monument
to his genius by the works he left us, and it requires no blocks of stone or
marble to keep his memory green. But I venture to think that the
opportunity has offered itself to associate the name of our national poet,
who has enriched the literature of the world and brought imperishable
glory to the stage of his native land, with the founding of a national
theatre. Such an institution would at once remove the existing stigma of
our stage, rescue it from the chaos in which it finds itself, raise the
108 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
position of the drama in this country to the same dignity it obtains in
France, Germany, and Austria, and be a noble and lasting tribute to the
memory of one whose genius shed lustre on and whose life’s work was
devoted to it. (qtd. in Whitworth 65)
Hare’s appeal was one of a matter of national pride. As war clouds were slowly
gathering in Europe it was imperative that whatever could be found on the Continent
needed to be found in better order in the Empire.
Hare was not alone, as a deluge of letters flooded the press overwhelmingly in
opposition to the Portland Place plan. Almost immediately members of the Shakespeare
Memorial Committee – including Beerbohm Tree – began to reconsider their plan in light
of the vocal opposition. In response to the Shakespeare Memorial Committee, a second
committee was formed following a series of public meetings held at the Lyceum Theatre
investigating the feasibility of a national theatre. This committee was made up of a
number of members of the Establishment and the theatrical profession including Arthur
Wing Pinero, Granville Barker, Bernard Shaw, the Hon. Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton, Sir John
Hare, and others. This group created the so-called “Lyceum Resolutions,” which in
effect called for the following: the merging of the two committees; the creation of a
national theatre as a fitting memorial to Shakespeare; the organization of provincial cities
to support the national theatre scheme and to sell subscriptions to help pay for it; and
finally the creation of an executive committee to be empowered to meet with the Prime
Minister and the London County Council to seek their support in the creation of a
national theatre. The Executive Committee was chaired by the Right Hon. the Earl of
Lytton and included Sir John Hare, the Right Hon. Alfred Lyttelton, and Bernard Shaw
109 among others. With the formation of the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre
Committee it seemed as if at last serious progress would be made toward the creation of a
national theatre, and early on in their deliberations the Committee approved a blueprint
for the creation of the national theatre. Their approved illustrated blueprint was in fact
Barker and Archer’s Blue Book, supplemented with a section on considering the “pros
and cons” of creating a national theatre.
The “Pros and Cons” section of the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre
Committee’s illustrated blueprint attempted to anticipate potential arguments against the
plan and to refute them in writing straightaway. There were several pages of arguments
ranging from the fact that a national theatre represented the onset of socialism in the
Empire to the simple fact that the people of England did not want a national theatre.
These arguments were then answered by the authors. What is interesting in regard to
these arguments is that many of them are still prevalent today and will rear their heads
whenever the occasion to debate subsidy for the arts in the UK arises. Some examples of
the Pros and Cons argument/counter-argument included:
That the public do not want a National Theatre, and will not subscribe the
necessary funds.
That a great change has come over the public attitude in this manner
during the last few years; that this meeting (the Lyceum Resolutions) is a
test of the public’s wishes; that if the public do not want a theatre, a
theatre will not be built; that the public have readily subscribed greater
sums to less popular causes.
110 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
That the provinces would have no reason for interest in a National
Theatre.
That the National Theatre Company would play in the provinces as well as
in London, and that eventually municipal theatres would be founded in the
great provincial centres, in touch with the central institution.
That a building of ambitious architectural design might prove a ‘white
elephant’ and be turned to baser uses.
That such a building will not be erected until the need for it has been
thoroughly tested, and shown to be overwhelming.
That Shakespeare himself was the product of the unsubsidized stage.
That this argument would only hold good if the social, political,
educational, and theatrical conditions under which Shakespeare’s plays
were performed were the same now as then.
That good actors would not work for the salaries that a National Theatre
could afford to pay.
That the present nominally inflated weekly fees for actors do not represent
a permanent salary, and correspond to a far more modest guaranteed
income, for which many good actors would willingly exchange their
present conditions. Also that a National Theatre would gradually train its
own actors.
That is it against the traditions of this country to support artistic enterprise
from public funds.
111 That the National Gallery, and other public galleries, receive public
support.
That the public grant of a site would not be sufficient to make the
enterprise self-supporting, and that there is no precedent for granting one.
That the theatre would probably be self-supporting even without the grant
of a site; but that the Royal Academy, which has never paid anything for
its site makes a precedent in this respect, and has been self-supporting
ever since the first few years of its existence. (qtd. in Whitworth 68-70)
More than sixty years later, Peter Hall’s Diaries are full of attempts to answer these
various questions and arguments. In fact the eventual granting of the present site for the
National Theatre was fraught with seemingly simple problems such as determining who
would pay to run the heat and air conditioning in the building. The early Arts Council
grants for the National Theatre on the South Bank made no allowances for the
tremendous amount of money basic maintenance would cost, and early on Hall had to
battle to get the building taken care of like other public buildings in London. Arguments
about paying actors would persist well into Hall’s leadership of the National Theatre. His
July 22, 1979 diary entry regarding a letter to Margaret Thatcher opposing cuts to arts
funding includes a reference to actors essentially subsidizing the theatre by working there
for less money:
Arnold Goodman22 is drafting a letter to Mrs. Thatcher from us, the RSC,
and the two big opera companies about the proposed arts cuts. His point is
that everybody who works in the subsidised theatre subsidises a little bit
22
Chair of the NT Board at the time 112 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
themselves…and it’s more than a little bit for some – (John) Gielgud or
(Albert) Finney, for instance, work on half pay. (441)
As all of that remained in the future, the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre
Committee continued to focus its work on shoring up support for their proposal. An
interesting occurrence had taken place between 1904 when Barker and Archer first
privately published the Blue Book in hopes of enticing Andrew Carnegie to endow a
national theatre to the creation of the SMNTC in 1908. It became a seemingly foregone
conclusion that the State would subsidize the theatre in whatever form it took. It was still
to be largely supported through the selling of subscriptions, but State support was also
not only desired but expected. The Committee sought to gain favorable opinions for their
scheme, and those opinions came pouring in from theatre and non-theatre individuals
alike. Many of the opinions continued to attack the now-dead Portland Place scheme
while simultaneously calling on the State to subsidize the theatre.
Almost immediately the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre Committee
received a stroke of good fortune as Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton was able to secure an
anonymous contribution – from the German expatriate – now naturalized British
citizen—Carl Meyer – of £70,000, which gave the Committee an immediate sense of
legitimacy. Part of this money allowed them in 1909 to publish a document called The
Proposed Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre: An Illustrated Handbook (1909) that,
much like the Barker and Archer Blue Book of five years earlier, laid out their proposed
scheme in detail. In point of fact, the introduction of the Illustrated Handbook
acknowledged its debt to the Blue Book while at the same time codifying the
113 amalgamation between the Shakespeare Memorial Committee and the National Theatre
Committee:
It so happened that an elaborate and detailed scheme of this nature,
endorsed by Sir Henry Irving, Sir Squire Bancroft, Mr. J.M. Barrie, Mrs.
D’Oyly Carte, Sir John Hare, Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, and Sir Arthur
Pinero, was published just about that time when the Shakespeare
Memorial proposals were under discussion, and gave a stimulus to the
National Theatre movement. What more natural than that the two
radically similar ideas, each of which may be said to have included the
essential parts of the other, should unite to initiate a great national effort
towards their realization? (qtd. in Whitworth 83)
The Executive Committee – of which Barker was a member – identified six objects of the
Shakespeare National Theatre:
1. to keep the plays of Shakespeare in its repertory;
2. to revive whatever else is vital in English classical drama;
3. to prevent recent plays of great merit from falling into oblivion;
4. to produce new plays and to further the development of modern drama.
5. to produce translations of representative works of foreign drama,
ancient and modern;
6. to stimulate the art of acting through varied opportunities which it will
offer to the members of the company. (qtd. in Whitworth 83-85)
These six points may very well have been written by Barker himself. As the Illustrated
Handbook expands on each of these points, one sees the influence of Barker as it
114 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
responded to everything he was working against in the present English theatrical system.
Section three spoke out against the “[p]resent long-run system” as ruinous to new plays in
that it becomes impossible to revive them at a later date. Section four obliquely
addressed the New Drama that had gained in popularity during the Vedrenne/Barker
management of the Court. The section reads as if it came straight from Barker himself:
It is a mistake to suppose that the Shakespeare National Theatre would be
in any sense hostile to the long-run theaters, or would compete with them
to their detriment. There are, and always will be, numerous plays which
contain great ‘star parts,’ and are otherwise suited for huge and instant
popularity implied in the long run. But there are also plays, and these
often of the highest order, in which the importance of various parts is more
evenly balanced, and which, though appealing to a very considerable
public, are unlikely to secure the immediate and enormous vogue
necessary for a long run. Under the existing order of things, the outlet for
such plays is very limited. The Shakespeare National Theatre, by
relieving authors of the necessity of making a long run their one aim and
ideal, will undoubtedly remove one of the chief impediments to the
fertility and virility of English drama. (qtd. in Whitworth 85)
While the new document was intended for a general audience and made no mention of a
possible repertoire, it was clear that Barker had set his sights on replicating his work at
the Court on a larger scale at the National Theatre. As he and Archer set about revising
their original Blue Book in 1908, Barker was clearly emboldened by his success. In the
115 new Preface for the 1908 version, crafted as a letter from one author to the other, Barker
wrote:
From one thing this three years’ interval between writing and publication
has absolved us: the extreme self-denial with which we composed that list
of plays to be performed during the opening season. Certainly in those
far-off days you, as Ibsen’s sponsor, were under more than suspicion as a
dangerous theatrical revolutionary. I was known to those who knew me at
all as being associated with the shadiest interests. I believed that
Shakespeare should be played without scenery, and I was hand in glove
with a crew of impossibilists called the Stage Society. Perhaps we were
wise, then, to demand at first only a new and healthy system of existence
for our theatre, to prove that it could be brought into being under a
management which need have no distressing gospel to preach, which need
not even possess settled artistic convictions. I hope we did not overdo our
disinterestedness. I am sure neither of us ever wanted to see a spiritless
theatre, be its economic condition never so perfect. Anyhow, even this
short lapse of time has been enough on our side – which is, we think, the
side of the angels – for us no longer to need to assume such a position.
Helping you with this book today, I should unhesitatingly, both from
motives of good policy and personal taste, advocate the inclusion in our
repertory list every author whom we so carefully excluded four years ago
– Ibsen, Hauptmann, d’Annunzio, Shaw, and the rest. I hope I could even
find other names to add. (Archer and Barker X-XII)
116 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
It is in the very definition of what a national theatre will be as envisioned by the
committee that one sees Barker’s firsthand influence. The theatre is defined in its
working methods section as “[a] Repertory Theatre. The statutes define a Repertory
Theatre as one ‘able to present, and bound to present, at least two different plays of full
length at evening performances each week, and at least three different plays at evening
performances and matinées taken together’”(qtd. in Whitworth 87). At no point prior to
Barker’s involvement with the national theatre movement was there a push to define it as
a repertory theatre. While his goal at the Court was to run a true repertory theatre, space
and financial limitations prevented him from doing so. However it was still his goal that
the National Theatre, when it launched, would do so as a true repertory theatre.
About the only major difference between the Blue Book and the more streamlined
Illustrated Handbook is in the estimation of the total cost of the venture. While Archer
and Barker had anticipated the initial expenses at approximately £330,000 to be divided
between the site, the building, and the general fund; the Illustrated Handbook anticipated
the need for £500,000 in start-up costs, and the executive committee created four separate
funds for the allocation of potential resources: Fund A was for the site, with an
anticipated expense of £100,000. Fund B was for the building and equipment, with an
anticipated need of approximately £150,000. Fund C would establish an endowment for
the theatre, and the desired start-up amount was £250,000. Fund D would be a general
operating fund made up from any balance obtainable and could be used to provide funds
to the other three funds.
With the initial success of the Meyer contribution, the Shakespeare Memorial
National Theatre Committee set about the arduous task of attempting to raise the
117 necessary funds to purchase a site for the future building. In 1909 William Archer wrote
to Mrs. Lyttelton that in his estimation the “[f]inest site in Europe was on the South Bank,
near Waterloo Bridge, overlooking the river” (Elsom and Tomalin 47), and even though
the future National Theatre would be built within a few yards of Archer’s dream site, he
was immediately opposed by members of the committee, including Shaw, who felt the
South Bank was too remote from the fashionable center of London. Attacks began to be
felt from the profession at large as well. Actor-managers who were not involved in the
scheme criticized it for not supporting their endeavors, for not providing a realistic
estimate of the total costs, and for the British government even having a role in the affair.
A long letter authored by Sir Charles Wyndham that appeared in The Daily Telegraph
was co-signed by a significant group of prominent actor-managers, including Sir Squire
Bancroft (who originally endorsed the Blue Book in 1904), Edward Terry, Charles
Hawtrey, H.B. Irving, Seymour Hicks, and others. The committee ignored the attacks
and proceeded in their fund-raising efforts, though they struggled to make headway. At
the same time, Barker was moving on from the Court Theatre. As 1909 dawned, he was
still a very young man of thirty-one, and while he had made a success out of the Court
Theatre, the Savoy had ended disastrously. While his reputation had grown since the
1904 publication of the Blue Book, Barker recognized he was still only as good as his last
effort and the Savoy had ended in disaster. He would set out over the next several years
to attempt to bring the repertory model to life in London and, as he greatly desired the
Directorship of the Shakespeare National Theatre, he would need to prove his mettle as a
director of Shakespeare. From 1912 to 1914, he would do just that, demolishing a
118 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
century of convention and in the process establishing an international reputation for
himself.
If the Court Theatre seasons of 1904 to 1907 represented a career peak for
Granville Barker, the years 1908 to 1910 could best be summed up as a career nadir. The
failure of the Savoy Theatre move left both Barker and Vedrenne deeply in personal debt
to creditors.23 This historic team would soon suffer an acrimonious breakup under the
strain of the failure and despite the high esteem for which he was regarded; because of
the venture, Barker would literally find himself penniless. In March 1908 he set sail for
New York with William Archer to survey the possibilities of becoming Director of the
so-called “Millionaires Theatre,” with Archer serving as his literary manager and
simultaneously teaching at either Columbia or Harvard. Barker initially had high hopes
for the possibility of running a true repertory theatre, even if it had to be New York as
opposed to London. Unfortunately, those hopes were dashed the moment he saw the
unwieldy theatre.
While Barker the director was struggling to find his post-Savoy footing, Barker
the writer was having no better luck. His new play Waste was denied a license by the
Lord Chamberlain, and Barker would fight a protracted, albeit futile, battle to get the play
put on. Barker was able to scrape together some minor directing work. In May 1908 he
directed the matinée production of John Masefield’s Nan at the Pioneer Theatre and
essentially consulted on another play, The Chinese Lantern, which played matinées in
June. Finally, and with great reluctance, Barker agreed to tour two Shaw pieces, Man
23
According to C.B. Purdom when the Vedrenne/Barker management finally suspended operations they were left with £484 in their account. Shaw had personally loaned them £5,250, however, to keep it running, so he took their remaining cash and whatever they could raise from their few assets and he wrote the rest of the debt off. Other creditors were not as generous. 119 and Superman and Arms and the Man, in an effort to pay off some of his debts. In his
best states, Barker could charitably be described as moody, but he completely withdrew
during this dark professional period. As if to make matters worse, while on tour in
Manchester he drank some infected milk and contracted typhoid fever. The sickness
debilitated him, and he spent more than eight weeks in bed in Dublin where he very
nearly died.
Once Barker began recuperating from his rather serious illness, it still took him
many months to fully get his strength back. He would only direct one play between June
1908 and February 1910, but that one project linked him with a potential, if unlikely,
angel. The play was John Galsworthy’s Strife, which opened at the Duke of York’s
theatre in March 1909 and was produced by the American Charles Frohman. Frohman
was a commercial producer through and through. He had acquired his first Broadway
house in 1892, and in 1896 had gone on to be one of the founders of the Theatrical
Syndicate. The Syndicate had grown to exert a monopoly in the American theatre and
Frohman looked to expand his operations in London. He had acquired the lease at the
Duke of York in 1897 and for more than a decade had devoted the theatre to the typical
hit-or-miss long-run scheme found in the commercial theatres of Broadway and the West
End. One of his most successful playwrights had been J.M. Barrie, and it was Barrie who
convinced Frohman in 1909 that a commercial repertory theatre was now possible in
London. Barrie also convinced Frohman that the man needed to run the new repertory
was Harley Granville Barker.
Granville Barker leapt at the opportunity to run the Duke of York repertory. He
even turned down a similar proposal from Lord Howard de Walden to establish a
120 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
repertory at the Haymarket Theatre. Lord Howard was so enamored with Barker that
when Barker turned down his proposal, he refused to consider an alternative director.
History may have been different had Barker accepted Lord Howard’s offer versus
Frohman’s, for the Duke of York repertory scheme was fraught with issues from the
outset. The two major issues which faced Barker at the Duke of York’s centered on the
proposed repertoire and the overall chain of command for the venture. In response to the
old adage “He who pays the piper picks the tunes;” Frohman was very much involved in
selecting the repertoire. He gave Barker plenty of leeway with the old Court dramatists,
but he insisted on including playwrights he had successfully produced in the past. To
compound matters, he also appointed Dion Boucicault as a kind of co-director, and so
effectively cut the legs out from under Barker’s leadership.
The proposed repertoire for the first season at the Duke of York’s was ambitious
and fatally flawed. The chosen plays included Pompey the Great (Masefield), The Eldest
Son (Galsworthy), The Voysey Inheritance (Barker), Murray’s translation of Iphigenia in
Tauris, three plays each by Barrie and Arthur Wing Pinero, as well as Shaw’s Major
Barbara, Man and Superman, and The Doctor’s Dilemma. There would also be new
plays by Barker (The Madras House), Galsworthy (Justice), and Shaw (Misalliance).
The Duke of York scheme was billed as “The Repertory Theatre” and promoted as the
first true repertory theatre in modern London theatre history. It was launched on
February 21, 1910 with Barker’s production of Justice followed two days later by the
premiere of Misalliance and then The Madras House. Critics were lukewarm to Justice
and savaged Misalliance and The Madras House. The second week of the repertory was
given over to a triple bill directed by Boucicault that failed to find an audience as well,
121 and almost immediately Frohman panicked and pulled all the productions, replacing them
with a revival of Trelawny of the ‘Wells’. New plays were no longer trusted, and
Frohman would only sanction revivals. On May 6, 1910 King Edward VII died of a heart
attack, and when the theatres closed out of respect for the late monarch, Frohman had the
excuse he needed to permanently terminate the scheme. The Repertory Theatre at the
Duke of York’s sputtered to a close after presenting ten plays in 17 weeks for a total of
128 performances.
While the leadership issue of The Repertory Theatre was problematic, one of the
points of blame must be aimed squarely at Barker. The repertoire of the Duke of York’s
was ambitious but he made the mistake that can ultimately befall any artistic director,
particularly a new one. While there never was and never will be a surefire formula for
programming a season, it is imperative that an artistic director not get too far ahead of or
behind his audience. Even in 1910, a perceptive critic such as P.P. Howe recognized the
new challenges of producing a rotating repertory of plays:
A repertory theatre may be likened to a juggler; certainly it may, within
reason, be judged the same way, by the number of things it can keep
going. No definite rules can be laid down…as to the number of plays to
be performed within the week, and the maximum number of performances
of any one play, but it may generally be assumed that the more strenuous
and deliberate the adherence to the repertory idea the greater number of
plays per week. (157)
A balance needs to be struck, one that provides a theatergoer with the widest possible
range of choices. As Dennis Kennedy asserts, “Misalliance and The Madras House are
122 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
brilliant companions now recognized as masterworks of the Edwardian era. In 1910,
however, the general audience was not ready for lengthy discussion plays…” (102).
While there is no surviving correspondence to suggest Barker’s thought process with the
selection of plays, he may have succumbed to impatience for not wanting to start over
and with having to share responsibility with Boucicault while answering to Frohman.
Any theatre needs time to build an audience, and Barker (and Frohman) seemed to be
banking on the names of Shaw, Barrie, Galsworthy, Barker himself, and others to provide
the sufficient box-office draw to attract a large enough audience to launch The Repertory
Theatre. Unfortunately that was not the case.
Another major issue exposed by the failure of The Repertory Theatre was the lack
of a suitable London theatre to run a true repertory. Like the Court Theatre, the Duke of
York lacked the suitable storage space for a repertory program that featured six separate
plays performing every week with a seventh in rehearsal. In fact, no London theatre at
the time could handle that demand, and if a national theatre were to be built, and if that
national theatre were to be a repertory theatre as the Shakespeare Memorial National
Theatre Committee was pushing for, then there would be no choice but to build a new
theatre in London to house the ambitions of the committee. Ultimately The Repertory
Theatre scheme failed for a host of reasons: theatre, repertoire, the mixed aesthetic
sensibilities of Barker and Boucicault, panic by Frohman, and a lack of patience to allow
the audiences to get used to a repertory schedule, but it did prove another point. If Barker
proved with the Court Theatre that there was a small albeit devoted audience to the New
Drama, at the Duke of York he proved that a successful large-scale repertory theatre
could not work commercially in London. If the proposed national theatre was truly going
123 to be a repertory theatre, it would require either a substantial subsidy or would have to
scale back its ambitions to the level of the Court Theatre. On April 30, 1910, Shaw wrote
to Barker from France a kind of summation of the successes and failures of the Court and
the Duke of York as they related to the national theatre campaign:
As to Permeation versus Secession, we have no choice in the matter. We
did not undertake to compete: we undertook to propagate a higher drama.
Producing a lot of plays merely to ascertain which draws the most money,
and running that and dropping the rest is not Propagandist Repertory: it is
competitive commerce pure and simple, and can end only in a theatre for
second hand plays, exploiting revivals of old successes. The announced
program cannot now be carried out, because it includes several revivals of
my plays, which I shall not permit, as, if they proved pecuniarily
successful Frohman would simply run them to death, and if they did as
Misalliance did, he would drop them as failures. Therefore, no more
Shaw at the R.P.
Shaw’s withdrawal of his plays from The Repertory Theatre highlights the very
contradiction of inherent in the scheme. On the one-hand, Barker and Shaw consider
themselves artists and purveyors of the “uncommercial” drama. On the other hand,
Charles Frohman is a business-man whose aim is to maximize his profits while
minimizing his expenses. Shaw counseled Barker to follow his lead:
It is up to you to say whether there is to be any more Barker; for they will
presently want Voysey; and if you let them have it, a month or so will see
the end of it for the next ten years one way or the other, just as it will see
124 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
the end of Trelawney. Charles (Frohman) has not played the game for a
single moment. I don’t blame him, I don’t see how any manager who has
the other game open to him as an alternative can play our game, but that
does not alter the facts: the R.T. (Repertory Theatre) is not an R.T. in our
sense; and all we have succeeded in doing is to prove the impossibility of
a high class theatre under a commercial management.
Shaw brings the argument back to the establishment of a national theatre and memories
of the Royal Court successes. If the kind of work Shaw and Barker are interested in is to
be successful, it can only do so on a small scale like the Court unless public subsidy is
involved. There is no other way for a national theatre to survive with out subsidy.
We have also demonstrated beforehand what the National Theatre will be
if it ever gets founded; and the moral is that we must revive Vedrenne and
Barker in a theatre where £600 a week gate money will cover expenses. It
is no use pretending that we can draw more or that we ever did draw more.
We should have gone into the Court Theatre figures scientifically, and
extracted the averages: we have never yet looked them in the face. The
expenses at the D. of Y’s [Duke of York’s] are gamblers’ expenses and
F’s [Frohman] financial habits gamblers’ habits. Neither will do for us.
Secession is finally inevitable; and you had better not sacrifice another
play – especially Voysey – to keep the D. of Y’s going. I shall make no
secret of the fact that I am out of it, and that the promised revivals are off.
G.B.S. (qtd. in Purdom 164-165)
125 P.P. Howe ultimately summed up a major reason for the failure of The Repertory
Theatre:
It is impossible to doubt that Mr. Boucicault and Mr. Barker are both
capable of directing a repertory theatre. At the Duke of York’s it was Mr.
Barker who called the first four tunes; then considerations of finance
triumphed for a space over those of glory, and Mr. Boucicault was
installed to pay the piper; while at the finish Mr. Boucicault and Mr.
Barker were directing the piping together, and the instruments would
appear to have become mixed. (161)
With the failure of the Duke of York scheme, Barker made one final attempt at running a
repertory theatre. This time his partner would not be a wily manager like J.E. Vedrenne
or an ambitious commercial producer like Charles Frohman. In fact his partner would be
his leading lady and wife Lillah McCarthy, and the McCarthy/Barker management of the
Little Theatre would represent Barker’s final attempt at running a theatre on his own.
1911 dawned on a dispirited and depressed Granville Barker. The failure of the
Duke of York repertory scheme left him at a low point in his career – a point that was
exacerbated by his late 1910 visit to Berlin and Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theatre.
Barker made his visit for personal and professional reasons: professionally to study how
the Deutsches Theatre made use of its plentiful state subsidy and personally to spend time
watching the directing methods of Reinhardt. He was invigorated by his stay there, and
Reinhardt would exert one of the most profound influences on Barker as a director.
Barker cabled to Gilbert Murray shortly after arriving, “Theatre here so alive and
interesting it makes me ashamed” (qtd. in Salmon 265), and for a time he seriously
126 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
considered moving to Berlin. According to C.B. Purdom, “He was even talking about
leaving England and becoming a naturalized citizen of a country where the theatre was
treated seriously, for his visits to Germany had filled him with admiration for the attitude
to the theatre in that country, so different from the casualness of the English theatre
audience, with its utter commercialism and theatrically uneducated audience” (121). As
the clouds of war gathered on the horizon, he returned home in an effort to convince
McCarthy to spend some time in Berlin.
In an effort to revive his fortunes and to provide herself with a quality role, the
always resourceful Lillah McCarthy coaxed Barker into directing a series of matinées she
produced at the Court billed as “Miss Lillah McCarthy’s Matinées.” They began with a
John Masefield adaptation of Wiers Jenssen’s Anna Pedersdotter called The Witch. This
run was successful enough for them to follow up with Masefield’s Nan on a double bill
with a new Barker play called Rococo. Although they were successful at the Court, the
response did not match up to the legendary Vedrenne/Barker management, and Barker
began to grow disillusioned and started to gaze once again in the direction of Germany.
At this point, McCarthy went a step further. She secured a £1,000 contribution from
Lord Howard de Walden and coupled that with matching £500 donations from Lily
Antrobus and Bernard Shaw. Without her husband’s knowledge she signed a lease for
the Little Theatre in Adelphi and invited him to serve as its director (Kennedy 117).
The Little Theatre was essentially a black box theatre before its time. It seated
approximately 250 and lacked galleries, tiers, and an orchestra pit. The McCarthy/Barker
management launched on March 11, 1911 with an adaptation of Schnitzler’s Anatol,
directed by Barker and featuring him in the leading role. It was to be Barker’s final
127 performance as an actor, and for the rest of his career he would work solely as a director
or writer. Anatol was followed by Ibsen’s The Master Builder and a new play by Shaw
written specifically for the Little Theatre, Fanny’s First Play: An Easy Play for a Little
Theatre. Fanny’s First Play was an instant success and much to Barker’s chagrin would
play for 623 performances, with Shaw calling it “the Charley’s Aunt of the new drama”
(Purdom 129). It was such a success that the rent of the Little Theatre was raised to what
McCarthy and Barker considered an exorbitant amount.
With Lord Howard’s assistance, the management moved to the 564-seat
Kingsway Theatre, and Barker directed Iphigenia in Tauris, which he had intended to do
at the Duke of York’s but had been thwarted by Frohman’s cold feet. His Iphigenia in
Tauris was directly influenced by Reinhardt’s massive Oedipus Rex – with McCarthy in
the role of Jocasta and featuring Gilbert Murray’s translation that had opened at Covent
Garden on January 12, 1912. McCarthy appeared as Iphigenia in Barker’s production,
and although it was not commercially successful, it was vastly popular with the critics
who acknowledged the debt to Reinhardt while simultaneously crediting Barker for
making Euripides work on his own terms. Emboldened by his successes, Barker seemed
to be coming out of the professional cloud that had hung over him since the end of the
Vedrenne/Barker management of the Court Theatre in 1907. If; however, Barker was
going to be seriously considered as a potential director for any national theatre, there was
one final professional mountain he needed to climb.
By 1912, Granville Barker’s reputation as a director and theatre manager rested
almost entirely with the New Drama. Other actor/managers –Beerbohm Tree being a
prime example – had made their reputations by putting their personal stamp on
128 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
interpretations of the great roles of Shakespeare. If Barker had any hope of one day
serving as the director of a “Shakespeare” Memorial National Theatre, he would need to
prove himself as a director of more than just new plays. He would need to succeed with
the plays of Shakespeare as well. From his earliest days as an actor, Barker despised the
overly ornate, star-actor-driven productions of the likes of Beerbohm Tree and Henry
Irving. Irving felt the opening speech of the Chorus in Henry V was Shakespeare’s
apology for a lack of sophisticated stagecraft, and that if he were a Victorian playwright,
he would certainly take advantage of the prevailing technology. Tree’s Romeo and Juliet
turned “two hours traffic on our stage” into a three-hour-plus spectacle-driven
extravaganza. Barker rebelled against what he perceived to be these excesses and
attempted to do for Shakespeare what he had done for Euripides during his directorship
of the Royal Court Theatre.
Eric Salmon’s book Granville Barker: A Secret Life develops this idea in his
discussion of Barker and Shakespeare:
Barker approached Shakespeare in rather the same spirit in which he
approached Euripides nearly ten years before: he wanted to rescue him
from his own reputation and restore him to the theatre as a writer of living
plays: Barker’s aim, in both cases, was to take the playwright off his
pedestal and put him on the stage. In both cases this would mean, Barker
well realized, the inventing and gradual developing of new techniques of
both acting and of stage presentations. There was, though, one important
difference. In the case of Euripides, Barker had the field to himself: in the
case of Shakespeare, he had to live down an already existing tradition
129 which, though we now recognize it as a thoroughly bad tradition, was in
Barker’s day the accepted and virtually unquestioned norm. (Salmon 205)
His early Court Theatre production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona in 1904
notwithstanding, Barker’s reinvention of Shakespeare rests largely on three productions:
The Winter’s Tale, Twelfth Night, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, all produced at the
Savoy Theatre between November 1912 and February 1914. It is important to note that
Barker was not alone in his disdain for current contemporary practices of staging
Shakespeare. Shaw had lampooned Henry Irving as early as 1895; William Poel’s ideas
of staging Shakespeare dated to the 1890s and were a tremendous influence on Barker’s
subsequent work; and Gordon Craig had been advocating non-realistic scenery for
several years. As Salmon states, however; “…Poel was an amateur, Shaw was a critic
and Craig was a drop-out; Barker was the only truly professional theatre man among
them and he wanted to challenge Tree and the rest on their own professional territory”
(207). Barker approached his work on Shakespeare as he would any other playwright; he
did not start with a manifesto or theories of how the work should be staged. Barker’s
way of working was to make discoveries in rehearsal and then develop theories from
those discoveries. His work on Shakespeare can best be understood by considering the
four main ideals of his practice broadly defined as the following:
First, that the text of the play should be, with few specific and minor exceptions,
uncut; second, that the verse should be spoken crisply, incisively and rapidly;
third, that the stage setting should be non-localized and non-representational;
fourth, that the stage should be handsome and decorative to look at, but not
obtrusive; and that physical relationships of its acting areas should reproduce the
130 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
essential relationships of the stage for which the particular play was written,
whether the Globe or the Blackfriars or one or other of the great private halls of
Elizabethan or Jacobean times (Salmon 208).
It is important to note when considering the last element, Barker was not an antiquarian
searching for an authentic notion of staging Shakespeare. Responding to a negative
review of The Winter’s Tale, he wrote, “We shall not save our souls by being
Elizabethan…To be Elizabethan one must be strictly, logically, or quite ineffectively so.
And even then, it is asking much of an audience to come to the theatre so historicallysensed as that” (Salmon 214). What Barker fundamentally understood was that the
structures of Shakespeare’s plays are inextricably linked to the playhouses they were
created for; he recognized that a director could shape a swift-moving physical production,
clearly communicating emotional and intellectual affects while simultaneously being
unencumbered by long drawn-out scenic changes which added hours to productions.
This concept literally changed the face of Shakespeare in the twentieth century. What is
so astonishing is how quickly he was able to demolish more than a century of tradition.
In the space of sixteen months, from his production of The Winter’s Tale, which
was met with mixed to positive reviews, to the opening of Midsummer, by which point
critics and audiences were rapturous. A.B. Walkley’s review in The Times is fairly
representative of the prevailing mood: “If only he can keep it up! If only he can run
through all Shakespeare plays in the spirit of daring artistic adventure with which he
turned the fairy-land of A Midsummer Night’s Dream into gold” (qtd. in Salmon 215).
According to Richard Eyre and Nicholas Wright, what Barker had argued and achieved in
his productions was that “…for the theatre to be expressive it must be, above all, simple
131 and unaffected: a distillation of language, of gesture, of action, of design, where meaning
is the essence. The meaning must be felt as much as understood. ‘They don’t have to
understand with their ears,’ Barker wrote, ‘just with their guts’” (qtd. in Eyre and Wright
29). Tree and Irving and bombast and scenic embellishment were swept away with the
same suddenness the Angry Young Men would sweep away Rattigan, Coward, and
Priestley in the 1950s. Audiences and critics were breathless for Barker’s next
productions, and his success provided him with international acclaim, making it a
foregone conclusion that he was the prime theatrical figure of his age.
The initial enthusiasm for the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre provided
by Carl Meyer’s £70,000 contribution in 1909 had turned lukewarm by 1913. The
fundraising campaign had only managed to secure an extra £30,000 over the three-plus
years, and despite the fact that the opening of the National Theatre was scheduled for
April 23, 1916 – the Shakespeare Tercentenary – it was becoming more and more
apparent that the SMNTC was not going to be able to raise the necessary £500,000 in
time for the opening. The committee began to fracture along three distinct lines: one
group favored opening the theatre in existing spaces while simultaneously continuing to
raise funds for a new building24; a second group favored identifying and purchasing a site
for the National Theatre, which would provide them with an asset that could always be
re-sold if need be and would prevent the money already raised from being squandered in
small increments on productions; a third, almost dissident, faction of the committee, led
by the journalist and editor Sidney Low, argued that, since the movement had failed to
raise the necessary funds, it should obviously be written off as a failure. As such, they
24
This would be the path that would lead to the NT launching at the Old Vic in 1963 prior to its move to the South Bank. The “temporary” home of the NT would last for nearly thirteen years. 132 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
should revive the Portland Place scheme and just build a monument to Shakespeare and
be done with it.
It was with some sense of desperation that the SMNTC finally turned to the
government in an effort to seek assistance. For the first time, the question of whether a
national theatre should be built would be taken up in Parliament. The committee
convinced H.J. MacKinder to submit a Private Member’s Bill25 on the subject, and the
House of Commons took up the debate on April 23, 1913. MacKinder’s resolution read
in part: “That in the opinion of this House there shall be established a National Theatre,
to be vested by trustees and assisted by the State, for the performance of the plays of
Shakespeare and other dramas of recognized merit” (qtd. in Whitworth 100). What is
most interesting about this 1913 debate is that, while the SMNTC had come to the
foregone conclusion that subsidy was a necessity for the creation and maintenance of a
national theatre, that conclusion had certainly not yet reached the government. “The idea
that government existed to ‘change society’ would have stubbed its toe on the charge of
totalitarianism;” writes Elsom and Tomalin, “It was not, therefore, a sufficiently
persuasive argument for the Commons simply to state that the arts were good for people
and that the government should thus provide them” (47). At most, both the supporters
and opponents of the National Theatre Resolution agreed that the role of government was
to “crown” the project, not to initiate it. If there was not sufficient public support for a
national theatre, there would be no corresponding government support. This was the
25
A Private Member’s Bill is a proposed law introduced by a member of Parliament who is not acting on behalf of the executive government. In this instance, the National Theatre Act was not introduced by the Prime Minister or a Minister of Culture, but rather by MacKinder acting on his own behalf. 133 battlefield over which the debate in Parliament raged. Was there sufficient public interest
and support to favor the funding of a national theatre?
MacKinder’s argument ranged from national pride – he produced the latest
Shakespeare Jarbuch which recorded that in the year 1912, 178 separate theatre
companies gave 1,156 performances of 21 of Shakespeare’s plays in Germany alone – to
the august names involved with the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre Committee
and the work they had done up to this point. He also made, as Elsom and Tomalin point
out, a relatively new argument that was the byproduct of the industrial age: if the middleclasses were to have more leisure time and what we would consider disposable income,
wouldn’t it be better for them to spend it at the National Theatre, where they may,
through the plays of Shakespeare and others, be instructed in the right models of
behavior? “What we want,” argued MacKinder, “is education through our
Shakespeare…not mere amusement. Our idea is that a theatre of this kind should be
popular and educational, and that you should allow schools opportunities for attending en
masse and to form the whole audience on occasions” (qtd in Elsom and Tomalin 49).
National pride, education, and the propagation of a great theatrical tradition were the
main selling points of MacKinder and those who rose in support of his resolution. The
opposition was led by a Mr. Lynch, an Irish Nationalist MP from County Clare who
based his objections primarily on the fact that, while there were National Theatres
throughout Europe, in his opinion only in France had such an institution been successful:
The same project has been tried out in other countries – France, Italy,
Germany, Spain, and elsewhere – and I believe that it is only in France
that is has been an undoubted success, for many reasons which do not
134 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
obtain in this country. You can hold no greater warning than the Berlin
system…The Schauspielhaus is one of the innumerable ways of glorifying
that stupendous Prussian system. Who are the Berlin dramatists? Where
is their great national drama? Where is their inspiring work? Why, their
best plays are all adaptations from French writers, and when they do adapt
them, they invariably choose second-rate ones…If such a national theatre
had been in existence in Shakespeare’s time, I doubt if he would have had
a chance to be represented. (qtd. in Elsom and Tomalin 50)
Nationalism was a further concern for Mr. Lynch, as the Irish Nationalist feared that an
“English” National Theatre would use its house poet to give over to glorifying all things
England at the expense of the rest of the Empire:
I doubt whether Shakespeare is a great model for the literature of the time
to come. All through Shakespeare there is in the construction of his plays
the fairy-tale model. Shakespeare was not a man greatly alert to the more
modern influences even of his own time, and so far from being the great
eponym and governor of English literature for times to come, he was
rather the closure and apotheosis of the feudal system, which he did so
much to glorify. Therefore I think that Shakespeare is a bad model for a
great National Theatre…(qtd. in Whitworth 106-107)
Ultimately the question was called and Parliament voted on the National Theatre
Resolution. The motion passed rather decisively but was ultimately undone by
parliamentary procedure. “The House of Commons was in favour of the motion, but, as
it happened, not enough in favour. The Speaker ruled that the question was not decided
135 in the affirmative because it was not supported by the majority proscribed in Standing
Order 27, which governed Private Members’ Bills and required a two-thirds majority”
(Elsom and Tomalin 51).
Despite the temporary setback, the SMNTC was heartened enough by the vote
that in the fall of 1913 they moved forward with the purchase of the first site for the
National Theatre. The committee ignored Archer’s South Bank proposal and instead
bought a site in Bloomsbury, located close to the relatively new Academy of Dramatic
Art and well removed from the West End. The idea was to eventually link the National
Theatre with the Academy as a training school for actors. It was the intent of the
Committee to make another proposal to Parliament as soon as was practical. There was
an overriding sense of optimism about the near future in all things related to society.
Women would be emancipated; the Irish problem would be solved.
Britain was evolving peacefully into a different sort of country:
democratic, liberal, classless and civilized. There would never be another
war: we had evolved beyond that state. The new employment exchanges
would control the scourge of unemployment, as they seemed to be doing.
The new industrial wealth would spread around the populace. The
National would be built. It was all a matter of time, stability and growth.
(qtd. in Elsom and Tomalin 52)
Barely one year later, on June 28, 1914 in the city of Sarajevo, the world would explode,
and nearly five years of unimaginable bloodshed would turn that optimism upside down.
By the time the guns went silent and Armistice Day finally arrived on November 11,
1918, the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre Committee had been dissolved and
136 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
Granville Barker had all but walked away from the professional theatre. A national
theatre seemed farther away than ever.
137 CHAPTER FIVE
BARKER’S SECOND ACT
As public debate to fund the development of a national theatre continued,
Barker’s work – following his decision to leave the theatre – consisted of his
chairmanship of the British Drama League as well as his contributions to theatre
scholarship. In effect, Barker’s work in the 1920s was similar to that of a modern
professional athlete. After a long and productive – and occasionally frustrating – career
he was able to spend the second half of it working almost like a commentator. He still
favored the establishment of a national theatre, but he recognized that his time to be the
founding director of it had passed; now he cheered from the sidelines and advised a new
generation of dreamers and schemers. He would advocate for the creation of a national
theatre right up until his death in 1946 but it would be another seventeen years before his
dream would become a reality.
When the guns fell silent on Armistice Day in November 1918, the smoke cleared
to reveal a vastly different Europe. The war had caused more than 15 million casualties
and destroyed no less than four different empires. While the British Empire still stood, it
had been incredibly weakened by the overwhelming loss of life and matériel. All of the
prewar optimism had been crushed and would be exacerbated by a world-wide economic
depression combined with the encroaching dread of a communist revolution that shifted
British priorities away from anything that would cause the establishment of an English
national theatre.
Like most people in England, Granville Barker’s fortunes had changed greatly
during the war as well. He spent most of 1915 and 1916 in New York City running a
138 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
repertory season at Wallack’s Theatre, where he produced a season featuring his
productions of Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion, The Doctor’s Dilemma, a remount of his
now famous production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Curtis Page’s translation of
Anatole France’s The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife – featuring an early scenic design
by pioneer American designer Robert Edmund Jones. Despite the fact that his wife
Lillah McCarthy was the leading lady in his company, the most fateful occurrence in
New York was his meeting of American heiress Helen Huntington. Barker, then thirtyseven, fell madly in love with Huntington, who was ten years his senior. At the end of the
Wallack’s season, McCarthy returned to London, while Barker stayed behind and
shuttled back and forth between New York and Williamstown, MA. As his romance with
Huntington deepened, he became acutely aware of the need to divorce McCarthy. Barker
eventually wrote to McCarthy from New York asking for a divorce and revealing – at
least in his mind – that their marriage had always been more of a business partnership
than one built on a foundation of love.
I did you a very great wrong in asking you to marry me at all. Though I
explained at the time how mixed my feelings were and you said you
understood nevertheless I should not have let you accept the risk that
someday there might happen what has happened now. Though I was
willing to accept such a risk as far as you were concerned that does not
much affect the matter. For I never loved you as I know – and I knew –
that I ought to love a woman to want to be married to her. (qtd. in Salmon
237)
139 While it would take almost two years for Barker – with a great deal of help from Shaw—
to convince McCarthy to divorce him, and for the ex-couple to navigate the medieval
British divorce laws, he would eventually marry Huntington on July 31, 1918.
This brief digression into Barker’s personal life is not meant to be in any way
salacious. 1916 represented a turning point in Barker’s life in that he clearly intended to
walk away from his active work in professional theatre. It had been twenty-five years
since the then fourteen-year-old Barker first trod the stage, and as a thirty-nine-year old,
he had reached something of a crossroads. While it would soon become legend that
Huntington essentially “bought” Barker away from the theatre, in point of fact, as they
were each negotiating their various divorces, it was readily apparent that Huntington
would be in good financial shape but not at all what we would consider “wealthy.” Both
Huntington and Barker were surprised, however, at the generosity of her ex-husband: she
was left with a fortune that included an annual $10,000 cost of living allowance and
access to a trust fund with well over $300,000 in it. Suddenly Barker was wealthy, and if
he was contemplating leaving the theatre, he certainly had the means to do so. During his
1916 self-imposed exile in Williamstown, he wrote the long one-act play A Farewell to
the Theatre. Without wanting to read too much into this curious little play, it clearly
represented its author at a crossroads. This autumnal, almost Chekhovian two-hander
presents an actress walking away from her life in theatre and simultaneously feeling both
melancholic as she looks back over her career and life and hopeful as she is presented
with a glimpse at the future.26
26
Barker’s Williamstown experience has been dramatized in Richard Nelson’s very interesting – and Chekhovian – play Farewell to the Theatre, which played in 2012 at the Hampstead Theatre in London. 140 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
While the focus of this present work deals with Barker’s influence on the
subsequent development of the National Theatre, I believe it is important to insert a brief
interlude that attempts to explain the diminution of his reputation in the twentieth
century. Barker was thirty-nine when he made the decision to give up an active life in the
theatre in favor for a fulltime career as a writer. One of his curious decisions – and one
not fully explained – was his choice to cut off contact completely with Shaw. It had long
been rumored that Helen Huntington was not at all fond of Shaw and found him to be
something of an egomaniacal braggart. Hesketh Pearson reported Shaw remarking on
Huntington’s influence on Barker:
He was completely dominated by her, ceasing to be the independent
human being we had all known. She made him throw over Socialism as
well as Shaw; she made him do translations of Spanish plays, or put his
name to her translations; she cut him off from all commerce with the
theatre; she tried to turn him into a country gentleman, but as he could
neither hunt, shoot nor fish, it was a hopeless proposition…(qtd. in
Salmon 260)
While Shaw’s remarks could be written off to Shaw at his worst and pettiest, he was not
alone in his sentiments. Lewis Casson similarly articulated a sense of abandonment felt
by members of the Court Theatre coterie and, although he is somewhat softer than Shaw
in his condemnation of Barker, he still wrote with a sense of deep lamentation:
His death was a heavy loss to Shakespeare criticism and to the drama; but
to us of the theatre, and especially to those of us who worked with him and
for him and who learnt from him what the theatre meant and drew
141 inspiration from his dazzling imagination and intelligence, the blow fell
thirty years earlier when he gave up the struggle, threw off the dust of
battle, and became a mere professor. To us it was almost a desertion, and
we found it hard to forgive him. Always we would have left all and
followed him if he returned from his self-banishment; but it was not to be.
Perhaps it was not his fault. The best theatre, always in advance of the
public, seldom plays. There must be a patron, a subsidy, or some
compromise with public taste. He came at a time when the wealthy patron
of taste was dying out, and before the State had recognized the value and
necessity of subsidy; and he would not compromise. (qtd. in Purdom viii)
Lewis Casson’s quip about him becoming a “mere professor” while noting that the
theatre Barker favored didn’t really pay, are both important points. Despite success and
international acclaim, Barker was often forced to scramble for money and oftentimes
found himself nearly penniless. While there may be some truths in the sentiments of
Shaw and Casson – and they have unfortunately carried the day with many armchair
theatre historians – perhaps they oversimplify what was really going on with Barker at
the time of his decision to walk away from the theatre. I would argue that first and
foremost Barker always considered himself a writer who happened to act and then direct.
His first contact with William Archer, the desire to associate himself with the New
Drama, came under the guise of a playwright. As we have seen earlier, he even wrote to
Archer seeking career advice working as a critic. He was a very good actor, he was a
great director, but writing was where his heart was, and it was hard work for him. During
his days running the Court Theatre, he would have to occasionally disappear to
142 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
concentrate on his writing. It was an agonizingly slow process for him and one gets the
sense that he occasionally felt the actual business of putting on plays interfered with his
ability to focus on his writing. In a 1923 letter to St. John Ervine he came closer to
explaining himself than he ever would:
As to the producing of plays, I made up my mind sometime before 1910
that was futile to plough the sand i.e., in this connection, to make a
production and then disperse it, the play to semi-oblivion, the actors to
demoralisation. On the personal count I had made up my mind even
earlier to give up acting when I was 30 and producing [directing] when I
was 40. I made – or contributed to – one attempt after another to create a
theatre which should be an institution of some permanence. In 1914 this
seemed on the verge of accomplishment (I calculated that by 1919 it might
have developed a life of its own, so that I could go free).
Then came the war.
The war was a paradigm shift for Barker. From about 1903 onward his work was all
geared toward the eventual establishment of a national theatre. The war so drastically
altered the landscape of possibilities that it now seemed more unlikely than ever that a
national theatre would be forthcoming. Barker continued:
Personal and psychological considerations apart, neither my health nor my
aptitude is what it was: and there has been a sharp break of tradition; the
new generation is excusably, perhaps, intolerant of the experience of the
old – the present establishment of a theatre-institution of scope and
143 importance is not economically feasible; though it will come, doubtless,
when there is enough conviction of its need, perhaps in 5 years, 10, or 20.
Barker’s decision was to walk away from active work in the professional theatre.
Instead, if Barker could not will a national theatre into existence, he could at least write
about what should go on the stage of a national theatre if and when it ever came about.
This led to Barker’s Prefaces to Shakespeare, which, in effect, would stand as Barker’s
greatest work of criticism:
So in place of ploughing the sands I cast my bread upon the waters; a book
on the aesthetics and politics of theatre, subjects which most practitioners
of drama have by temperament or circumstances neither patience nor time
to consider; a series of studies of Shakespeare staging which I hope may
be of use to some future institution; and – yes – even such plays as The
Secret Life, which for all their shortcomings may serve, if only by
example, to set actors new problems and to widen the theatre’s appeal. It
needs widening.
To Barker, trading the theatre for the drama was an easy decision to make. For more than
twenty years he attempted to create his ideal theatre. Unfortunately for him, it had not
come about. Instead he would focus on creating his ideal drama. There was no need for
an apology and Barker wasn’t about to offer one:
This, then, is my apologia; but not my apology. (qtd. in Salmon 499-500)
There is more to Barker’s apologia, however, than he mentioned in this letter. Despite
his lack of formal education, Barker was preternaturally intelligent and reveled in
144 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
scholarship. In a 1953 BBC radio interview, another of Barker’s protégés, W. Bridges
Adams, attempted to dismiss the idea that Barker deserted the theatre:
If, towards the end of his life, you looked up Harley Granville-Barker in
Who’s Who, it would tell you that he was a playwright, a Doctor of Law, a
Doctor of Letters (twice) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Not one word more about the more than twenty years of struggle, and
endurance, and triumph on the stage – almost as if it was a youthful
indiscretion he preferred to forget. When we come across this sort of selfobliteration somewhere east of Suez, and not in a flat in the Etoile, we
may be forgiven for imagining we are on the track of a Joseph Conrad
hero who is trying to trample his past. That was not so. Barker always
loved the theatre. But in my belief – and I knew him for many years – he
became what he had always intended to be. (qtd. in Salmon 261)
The ephemeral nature of the theatre worked both for and against Barker. Though it
enabled him to build an international reputation, it did not provide him with the wealth
that his longtime partner Shaw enjoyed. Writing was what he was going to leave behind
as his legacy, and by 1918 he had the means to weed out any distractions that would
prevent him from focusing his full attention on his craft. His reputation suffered as it was
attacked by that oldest of theatre pastimes – inveterate gossip – which, as it passed to the
next generation, became received truth. The received wisdom is that he abandoned the
theatre because his wealthy mistress bought him off, isolated him from his friends and
attempted to turn him into a country squire. The passion of Harley Granville Barker
145 burned way too brightly and independently for this to be the truth. Of course the truth is
less interesting: he became a writer.
Granville Barker’s work between the wars was nothing short of prolific.
According to his biographer Eric Salmon; Barker wrote two full-length plays and seven
books of criticism, he directed or co-directed eight productions without receiving credit,
he translated thirteen plays from Spanish and three from French, he wrote more than a
dozen major articles on theatre history or criticism, and he remained an active participant
in the reform of the theatre in general and specifically for the development of the national
theatre. For my purposes, his contribution to the national theatre debate was with three
major activities: two books – The Exemplary Theatre (1923) and A National Theatre
(1930) – and his decision to serve as the first Chairman of the British Drama League in
1919. Barker would serve as Chair of the B.D.L. until 1932; it was under the auspices of
the League that he would revise and republish the National Theatre manifesto he had coauthored with Archer, now dead.
In July 1919, Sir Israel Gollancz called together the remnants of the pre-war
Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre Committee for the purposes of selling their
Bloomsbury property and releasing some of their funds to support a theatre company that
would play Shakespeare and other recognized classics and also tour their productions
around the country. At this point, two companies entered the fray, each of which would
eventually carry their own mantle of “national theatre,” either in theory or in practice.
They were Lilian Baylis’s Old Vic and the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre located in
Stratford, at the time under the leadership of Barker protégé W. Bridges Adams. The
S.M.N.T. committee eventually chose Stratford as the company it would support, denying
146 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
Baylis access to the much-coveted coffers of the committee. Legal wrangling, however,
eventually made it impossible for the committee to support any company, and after three
seasons they were forced to suspend their support of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre.
Throughout the 1920s, the Old Vic was in an ascendency under Baylis’s
leadership. Established in 1818 as the Royal Coburg Theatre, it was taken over in 1880
by Baylis’s aunt, Emma Cons. At the time it was known formally as the Royal Victoria
Hall. Baylis succeeded her aunt in the leadership position of the Old Vic in 1898. Since
1914 the Old Vic had presented a series of Shakespeare productions and remained open
throughout the war, continuing to produce work as the S.M.N.T. committee was
disbanded. Always a passionate advocate for the ability of the arts to raise the quality of
life in South London, Baylis used the Old Vic as a kind of bully pulpit for the arts. There
were members of the S.M.N.T. committee who felt that they had failed in their charge to
launch a national theatre and that they should divest the committee of their cash reserve
by endowing the Old Vic as the National Theatre. Baylis made no secret of what she
considered the Old Vic. She would famously begin her curtain speeches by declaring,
“All this talk about a National Theatre. We are a National Theatre!” (qtd. in Elsom and
Tomalin 65).
As the S.M.N.T. committee continued to fragment along different lines, a new
proposal came to the forefront. The idea would be the first of several amalgamation
plans that would involve the Old Vic and Stratford, and in this instance, the proposal
called for a national theatre to be divided into three companies: one based in Stratford,
one at the Old Vic, and one touring the nation.27 For a variety of reasons this scheme fell
27
There would be at least two other amalgamation schemes floated about. In the early 1960s Laurence Olivier would propose a merger with Peter Hall between the Old Vic and the newly chartered Royal 147 apart as well, and a general apathy about any future national theatre set in among many
members of the theatre profession. Attention began to turn to what appeared to be the
robust health of newly formed regional repertory theatres.
Beginning in 1908 with Annie Horniman’s founding of the Gaiety Theatre in
Manchester – with a company featuring Royal Court alumni including Lewis Casson and
Sybil Thorndike – and including new theatres in Birmingham, Liverpool, and touring
companies based in London, the New Drama seemed to find a more successful perch in
the regions than it did in a London now dominated by escapist West End musicals like
Chu Chin Chow.28 All of this growth in theatre demanded some sort of organizing as a
means for giving voice to the expanding profession. The man to organize it was a young
publisher named Geoffrey Whitworth.
In 1918 Whitworth was invited to Crayford to present a lecture entitled “A Bird’s
– Eye View of the History of the Stage” to a group of munitions workers. Following his
lecture he was invited to stay for a play reading of a new one-act by Stanley Houghton.
The reading was being put on by the Crayford Reading Circle, and Whitworth was
immensely impressed by what he saw.
Now this visit to Crayford was also my point of divergence to that new
orientation of mind – conversion if you like to call it – which was to result,
Shakespeare Company with Olivier the Director and Hall his number 2. Hall refused the offer. Years later when Hall took over the National, he proposed a similar scheme with Trevor Nunn whereby the RSC would move into the NT building on the South Bank and be responsible for programming Shakespeare in the Olivier Theatre, and the NT would program new experimental work in the Cottesloe, and two companies would split the Lyttelton. This scheme fell apart as well. 28
Chu Chin Chow would open in 1916 and play for a then record 2,238 performances. Based on the story of Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves, Chu Chin Chow is now seen as an example of the war-­‐time theatre’s penchant for escapism and light entertainment. It was decidedly a far cry from the type of work Barker was attracted to throughout his career. 148 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
a year later, in the foundation of the British Drama League. What had
been done at Crayford could clearly be done elsewhere, and ignorant as I
was of how far similar movements were already in action both abroad and
at home, I felt impertinently moved to do all I could to spread the good
news. There was no knowing how the idea might “catch on.” And I felt,
too, that there might be the germ of something, which, if not exactly the
National Theatre of my youthful allegiance, was not wholly unrelated
thereto. For what so distinguished the playreading at Crayford was the fact
that it had been undertaken in the spirit of community enterprise. It was
that which had endowed the performance with its peculiar dignity, and
was it not precisely this dignity that would characterise the work of a
National Theatre? In a flash I saw that a National Theatre, for all its costly
elaboration, for all its perfection of professional technique, was no more
and no less than a Community Theatre writ large. And for this a
democratic background was the first essential, and the creation of a public
consciously concerned with the practice of theatre art both for its own sake
and as a major factor in the enjoyment of life. (Whitworth 149)
This was the impetus that led to Whitworth creating the British Drama League as a
service organization for the theatre – much like present day Theatre Communications
Group in the United States – and he was able to persuade Barker to serve as the Chairman
of the League. From the beginning Barker remained very active in the organization and,
as was true of his work with the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre Committee, his
practical experience in the theatre helped provide the framework by which the B.D.L.
149 would operate. Shortly after he returned from the United States, Barker wrote a detailed
letter to Whitworth spelling out his ideas for the League:
My dear Whitworth,
Here is a very rough memorandum of my present views on the Drama
League, which I hope may be of some use to you.
Looking ahead for pitfalls I believe the chief danger is our centralisation.
If there is to be any new and healthy growth of drama in this country, it
will not be in the West End of London.
An Executive, active in London interests, will tend to depress and not
encourage that growth. Not only so, but seven or eight brilliant people,
with the weight of the movement on their shoulders, made to feel that
initiative must come from them, will – all probably being persons of
strongly developed and conflicting opinions – tend to neutralize each
other. They will not submit to being “run” by a secretary, even if a
secretary could be found to run them. That way, the League may become
a mere manifesto-issuing body. To prevent this – and other evils of the
same origin – I suggest some such plans as following: -It is important to note that by this point, Granville Barker was beginning to react against
the London-based nature of the theatre. He believed if a national theatre was going to
happen, it would perhaps be more practical to establish it in a regional center like
Manchester or Liverpool and have it gain traction there before moving to London. To
this day, British theatre remains resolutely dominated by the overwhelming influence of
150 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
London. As early as 1919, Barker was trying to counter that, and his ideas for the various
subcommittees relates to this point.
1) Foreign Drama (chairman, say, Edith Craig): to be a link with any
theatres or similar organizations abroad who want to get in touch with the
English movements. I believe there is quite a field for this. Also some of
the foreign theatres, especially those in the “new” nations, will be very
keen on sending their companies to England and perhaps on doing English
plays.
2) Training in Acting and the Professional Status of the actor (chairman,
say, Fisher White): link with the Acting Academy.29 More importantly, to
keep in touch with all dramatic schools and methods of training here and
abroad.
3) On “Decoration” as Norman Wilkinson30 and I used to call it: Look
after this “Workshop” and all it may involve.
4) On Repertory Theatres proper (chairman: John Drinkwater).
5) On Village Theatres, “Community” movements, Pageants, etc., link
with the Folk Dance people, etc. Personally I think this is the most
important field for the near future.
6) On dramatic teaching in Schools and Universities: there is much to be
done, especially in America. I am sure it might be possible to establish a
29
Soon to be rechristened Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) 30
Barker’s longtime designer 151 Readership in Modern Drama at every university – and the whole question
with regard to the schools wants ventilating.
7) On the subject I haven’t mentioned; whatever that may be.
These six main points helped to widen the focus of the British Drama League, making it
truly British and encompassing many different levels of theatre, styles of work,
disciplines within the field, and also including a focus on education. It would not be
exclusively London-based nor would it be exclusively devoted to professional theatre or
even to just star-actors.
These committees to number 5 members each. No executive powers, of
course, except by special delegation from the main Executive. I incline to
think that two members of the Executive should be on each subcommittee, three appointed from the outside. The General Secretary or
(and?) Honorary Secretary to run them, of course: this is vital.
My experience in working on these sorts of movements has been that
whenever a matter wanting careful attention came up, a sub-committee
was always appointed. That was to the good; but it was nominated
haphazardly and never had a chance to become an effective body.
Some of these committees would function very little; some would from
time to time be hard at work. But I believe a permanent sub-committee
plan improves attendance at the main executive, which gets its stuff cut
and dried for deciding upon.
If the “outside” members of a sub-committee are appointed by the Council
– as I incline to think they should be – they should have the right by a
152 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
unanimous request (unanimous of any one sub-committee) to have a
Council meeting called to consider any report which they hold the
Executive has dealt wrongly with. They’d need some protection of this
sort to prevent them feeling they were mere ciphers.
We meet on Thursday.
Yours,
H. Granville Barker. (qtd. in Salmon 555-557)
The final section of his letter proves that Barker had learned his parliamentary procedures
well after years of committee meetings with the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre
Committee. He was determined to make sure the ideas of the British Drama League were
clearly articulated and that the matter of its governance would be stated in advance as
well. Once Barker’s ideas were clearly spelled out and agreed to by Whitworth, Barker
became Chairman of the Council of the British Drama League. Joining him were Lord
Howard de Walden as President and the initial board included, Sir Michael Sadler; J.R.
Clynes M.P.; Lady Denman; Lena Ashwell; the Rev. H.R.L. Sheppard; J. Fisher White,
representing the nascent actors’ union, the Actors’ Association; Ben Greet; Laurence
Binyon; and John Drinkwater, with Whitworth serving as Honorary Secretary
(Whitworth 150). It was against this backdrop that Barker would spend the 1920s
making one final push on behalf of a national theatre. He seemed to recognize that the
national theatre argument was part of a larger conversation that needed to happen. The
British theatre in his estimation was not going to be reformed from the West End. If
reform was going to happen, it would need to be a societal level and not just within the
profession of the theatre.
153 This argument forms the basis for his most ambitious scholarly work – one that
has been curiously overlooked in the ninety-plus years since its original publication. The
Exemplary Theatre is as close to a manifesto as a practical man of the theatre like Barker
would allow himself to write. While nearly half the book deals with his arguments in
favor of establishing a national theatre, it also serves as a “quintessence of Barker”
(Salmon 111) on all his thoughts on producing and directing. Even of greater interest is
Barker’s focus on the inherent value of the theatre as a means of education. Dennis
Kennedy succinctly summarizes Barker’s ideas behind The Exemplary Theatre’s focus on
theatre and education: “Barker’s urge was to provide an ‘educational basis’ for a
paradigmatic theatre which would justify its existence, or rather make its existence
essential, in any society concerned with its own emotional and psychic health. The
theatre should be a great teaching force for the nation, as well as a depository of its
dramatic culture and a seminary for its future practitioners” (Kennedy 200).
Another interesting new development featured in The Exemplary Theatre is
Barker’s call for a multi-stage national theatre. In the Blue Book, he and Archer limited
themselves to a single large proscenium theatre. In The Exemplary Theatre he called for
both a proscenium stage and a platform stage suitable for the staging of both Shakespeare
and Greek plays. After all, Greek plays were written for open air thrust theatres and “…if
Greek tragedies are to be kept alive in the English climate they must submit to the
conditions of a new playhouse” (Barker 206). A multi-stage theatre, with a strong focus
on education – both for future practitioners and future audiences – featuring a range of
plays from Greek tragedies to Shakespeare to new plays was the dominant theme featured
in The Exemplary Theatre.
154 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
By the time it was published in 1923, Barker had been out of professional theatre
for nearly seven years, and many of his former colleagues dismissed the work as being
produced by someone out of touch with current practices. Barker himself in later years
came to almost dismiss The Exemplary Theatre. Dennis Kennedy reports that in 1937 he
told Frank Sidgwick that “…it is a pretty poor book – though there is sense in it”
(Kennedy 201). Barker, however, was notorious for bad mouthing his own work, and I
believe The Exemplary Theatre is ripe for reevaluation. Much more practical than both
Gordon Craig’s On the Art of the Theatre and Peter Brook’s The Empty Space, it
nevertheless serves as a manifesto for a society embracing its theatre and for a theatre
company being responsive to the society that produces it. Thanks to his position as
Chairman of the British Drama League, his ideas on the multi-stage theatre were
endorsed by the League and eventually became part of the Shakespeare Memorial
National Theatre Committee’s platform when Geoffrey Whitworth succeeded Sir Israel
Gollancz as Secretary of the committee.
There would be two major pushes in the 1920s to secure government support for a
national theatre. The first came in 1924 with the advent of the first Labour Government.
In his position as Chair of the British Drama League, Barker launched the first salvo in
the latest battle with a letter to the editor of The Times of London published sometime in
late February 1924:
Sir,
The Labour Party’s election manifesto spoke for the abolition of the
entertainment tax. What the Chancellor of the Exchequer may be able to
do this year, is, of course, another matter. The interests of the theatrical
155 industry, however, are completely represented in the House of Commons,
and we may be sure that no chance of urging them will be missed.
But will not some member of this Parliament constitute himself the
champion of the theatre as an art and aid to education? He could call Mr.
Snowden’s [Phillip Snowden, Chancellor of the Exchequer for the
incoming government] attention to the fact that ten percent of the proceeds
of the tax in 1922 would just have sufficed – by present calculations – to
build and endow the Shakespeare National Theatre. (Nor is the million
pounds wanted cash down; a hundred thousand a year would probably do.)
He could suggest to Mr. Trevelyan [Sir Charles Trevelyan, President of
the Board of Education from 1924 – 1928] that the study of drama now
carried on in schools and teachers’ colleges throughout the country as a
means (among others) to the betterment of our English speech needs just
this as a keystone. Perhaps it is against the canons of good finance to
hypothecate a particular tax to a particular purpose. But if the last year of
this one is in sight, might not the irregularity be forgiven, and would not
the still vexed theatre managers at least pay with a better grace if they
knew that a little of the money was to go to the accrediting of their own
calling.
Barker continued his letter by using the occasion of the British Empire Exhibition –
scheduled to be opened by King George V on April 23, 1924 (St. George’s Day and
conveniently Shakespeare’s traditional birth date) – as the right opportunity to endow a
Shakespeare National Theatre:
156 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
And as for the drama; we have a British Empire Exhibition this year, but
when a worthy theatre was projected there the project was turned down as
too costly. (It will be interesting to discover hereafter for what better
regarded enterprises money has been quite easily found.31) London will be
as full as ever this summer, no doubt, of excellent entertainment. But the
cry will certainly be raised: Where, upon such an occasion, is our
Shakespeare and the rest of our classic drama? We must send our visitors,
I suppose, to the Old Vic. But the wisest friends of this gallant little
institution will not, I think, claim that it does much more than bear witness
to our melancholy lack of a theatre, properly, adequately endowed and
able to set a standard to the English-speaking world in the presentation and
cultivation of the by no means negligible part of that world’s common
inheritance, the English Drama. And to suppose that private enterprise
can ever supply the lack is absurd; it merely shows a quite inadequate
conception of what a National Theatre should be.
This, one may be told, is not time to demand even the smallest public
expenditure. One can only answer that the true believer in a cause must
plead it in season and out; and if it is a good cause even the unlikeliest
moment may turn in its favour. Matthew Arnold started to plead 45 years
ago; it has had and has many able advocates, and the prejudice against it,
31
The British Empire Exhibition would end up costing nearly £12 million and attract more than 27 million visitors. One of the major expenses that one might consider “better regarded enterprises” included the building of Empire Stadium – rechristened as Wembley Stadium – which would serve as the home of Football in England until 2002 when it was demolished and replaced with a new stadium. 157 which is largely composed of inertia and indifference, will certainly go
down sooner or later. May it be sooner!
Faithfully yours,
Harley Granville-Barker. (qtd.in Whitworth 125-126)
Geoffrey Whitworth echoed Barker’s call in a letter to The Times that was printed on
March 3, 1924:
Sir,
Mr. Granville-Barker’s letter in The Times of to-day (sic) will once more
focus public attention on a matter of concern to a larger number of people
than is generally recognized. Since it has become clear that private
enterprise is itself incapable of bringing the National Theatre scheme to
fruition, the idea of an effort to invoke the support of the Government
should win wide acceptance. But much ground remains to be cleared
before the Government could be fairly asked to offer a subsidy in any
form. What, for instance, do we precisely mean by the words ‘National
Theatre?’ And even granting the million pounds or so, on what basis
should such a theatre be run, and with what chances of success?
It would seem desirable that a committee of inquiry should be instituted
similar in scope to that which, under the chairmanship of Sir Henry
Newbolt, has recently issued so valuable and effective a report on the
teaching of English. If no Government Department felt competent to set
up such a committee, the Prime Minister might well be approached with
158 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
the suggestion that he himself should initiate the inquiry. This could be
done by the stroke of a pen and at little or no expense to the country.
Yours faithfully,
Geoffrey Whitworth
Hon. Sec., British Drama League. (qtd.in
Whitworth 127-128)
Unfortunately the nascent Labour government only lasted from February to November,
1924 and was too short lived to even appoint a committee, much less initiate a grand
scheme like legislating the creation of a national theatre.
In 1929, however, Labour once more became the ruling party in the Government
and the British Drama League, in tandem with the Shakespeare Memorial National
Theatre committee would make another attempt at securing government funding for a
national theatre, and Barker would make his final contribution to the cause.
By 1929 there was a concerted effort by the S.M.N.T. committee to make another
approach to the government for financial support for the establishment of a national
theatre. In tandem with the British Drama League, they convinced Robert Young, a
backbench M.P.32, to propose a question to then Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald.
Elsom and Tomalin pick up the story when Young agreed to pose a question to the Prime
Minister. Young duly asked the following of MacDonald, “Would he, in order to
promote the artistic sincerity and dignity of Great Britain and to encourage the best
elements in the British Theatre, consider the establishment of a national theatre on lines
somewhat similar to those followed in many European countries?” MacDonald said he
32
According to Wikipedia, a backbench MP is a legislator who does not hold government office and is not a front bench spokesperson in the Opposition. A backbencher may be new to Parliament, a senior figure dropped from government, or someone who for whatever reason is not chosen to sit either in the ministry or the opposition shadow ministry. 159 was sympathetic to the idea of a national theatre but that there were obstacles that must
first be overcome before the government would be prepared to act. For nearly fifty years
at this point, one of the contributing factors that time and again prevented the
establishment of a national theatre stemmed from the incessant squabbling within the
theatre field itself. The recent collapse of the Old Vic/S.M.N.T.C. amalgamation scheme
was one example of the field’s inability to organize itself. A second example was as old
as the argument for a national theatre itself. Commercial West End managers were
concerned that an endowed national theatre, supported by state subsidy, would drive them
out of business by being able to attract all the “stars” and paying top dollar (pound) for
talent while simultaneously keeping ticket prices artificially lower than the market called
for. They tended to view a national theatre not as a platform for showcasing the best in
classical and contemporary British theatre but as a competitor unfairly propped up by the
state. MacDonald placed the impetus squarely on the theatre profession to come together
behind one scheme before he would be prepared to act. “There are…serious difficulties
arising partly from the number of similar schemes which are being put forward,” he
replied in Parliament, “In present circumstances, therefore, I would only be holding out
false hopes if I were to answer otherwise than that I regret that I cannot give a promise of
Government subsidy” (qtd. in Elsom and Tomalin 67). James Hudson, another M.P.,
immediately followed on MacDonald’s answer, “If those pressing for various schemes
would come to an agreement, would the Prime Minister be prepared to reconsider the
answer that he has made?” To which MacDonald replied, “I think that my answer is
partly an invitation for them to do so” (67). MacDonald was essentially throwing down a
160 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
gauntlet to the various theatre factions both in London and across the country to coalesce
behind a single plan regarding a national theatre.
The B.D.L. and the S.M.N.T.C. took up MacDonald’s challenge. At the British
Drama League’s 10th Annual Conference, held at Northhampton in October 1929, Lord
Lytton – the 2nd Earl of Lytton and Bulwer-Lytton’s grandson – called once more for the
establishment of a National Repertory Theatre, and Robert Young, the M.P. who posed
the question in Parliament to MacDonald, proposed that all 1,600 drama societies
affiliated with the League endorse the plan for a national theatre as well. Within a month
of the annual conference, a delegation consisting of two members of the B.D.L., two
from the S.M.N.T. committee, and two from a parliamentary committee of M.P.s in favor
of the scheme, presented a detailed report to Parliament once again based almost entirely
on the work of Granville Barker.
Barker’s reworked proposal, A National Theatre, would be published in 1930 and
was not substantially different from the original Blue Book with the notable exception of
the two-stage scheme. As he explained in the new version, a two-stage set up would
provide the ultimate in flexibility and allow for both classics and new work:
The need for the two auditoria – or ‘houses’ as it will be more convenient
to call them – is fundamental, artistically and economically too. In point
of size, one house would have to be a compromise. It could not be exactly
suited both to the Agamemnon and the comedies of Mr. Milne and of
Hubert Henry Davies. Nor could it be big enough for the due exploiting
of a popular success, yet not too big for the audiences which a more select
play might draw. But this theatre must do all sorts of plays and at the
161 same time keep up a high average of receipts. When it can legitimately
draw crowds it must, and plays which might barely half fill a large house
could not be let constantly exclude plays which would quite fill it.
Moreover – as we shall see when we consider the size of the company that
will be needed for the due filling of lengthy casts – with one stage only
available, for half the time more than half of them might be standing idle
while plays with small casts are acted. One house, in fact, would
artistically give no play its best chance and economically would mean
waste both ways, in the paying of actors for doing nothing and in the
waste of empty seats which might be filled. (Barker 45)
This is basically the argument used to justify not two but three houses in the National
Theatre complex on the South Bank. Peter Hall fought hard to keep the small Cottesloe
Theatre as part of the building plans to work in tandem with the larger Lyttelton and
Olivier theatres. The Olivier’s larger thrust platform stage, combined with the Lyttelton’s
proscenium stage, allows for maximum flexibility when combined with the Cottesloe’s
black box set up. All three theatres currently combine to seat approximately 2,500 people
per evening: 1,150 in the Olivier, 950 in the Lyttelton, and – depending on configuration
– up to 400 in the Cottesloe.
Unfortunately before the MacDonald government could act on Barker’s proposal,
it was replaced by the Tory government of Stanley Baldwin, and once again the national
theatre scheme was shelved due to politics. Although the British Drama League formally
united with the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre Committee under the leadership
162 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
of Geoffrey Whitworth, Barker resigned his Chairmanship of the B.D.L. in 1932 and was
no longer active in the national theatre debate.
Throughout the 1930s the dogged pursuit of a national theatre would continue. A
new generation of leadership would come to the forefront led by actors such as Laurence
Olivier and John Gielgud. Barker would remain an active follower while living in a sort
of self-imposed exile in Paris. Throughout the 1930s he carried on a lengthy
correspondence with Gielgud as the young actor attempted to juggle his own career with
his desire to establish a repertory theatre. On June 27, 1937 Barker wrote to Gielgud
from Paris:
My dear John Gielgud
…I am only afraid that my counsel – such as it would be – might increase
and not lessen your distraction. For distracted – if I guess right – you must
be: between two aims; the one, which is really forced on you, a personal
career; the other, the establishing of a theatre, without which your career
will not be, I think you rightly feel, all that you wish it to be. It was
Irving’s dilemma; he clung on to one horn of it for a number of glorious
years; then he was impaled on the other and it killed him. It was Tree’s;
and he would have died bankrupt but for Chu Chin Chow. George
Alexander, thrifty Scotsman, replied to me when I congratulated him on
the 25th anniversary of his management: well, I’ve not done much for the
drama (though in a carefully limited fashion he had) but I’ve paid salaries
every Friday night without fail, and that’s to my credit. And it was. I
won’t say that there too was my dilemma; because I never had such a
163 career in prospect, I should suppose. But I pinned my faith to the theatre
solution; and finding it – with a war and a “peace” on – no go, I got out.
This letter can be seen almost as a ceremonial passing-of-the-torch. As stated above,
Barker did not entirely abandon the theatre, and even Gielgud would be able to coax him
back one final time several years later. Barker continued:
It must be your dilemma, I think; for you have rather the Irving than the
Alexander conception of your job (by the way I never saw your Hamlet; I
wish I had). The question is: have times changed? can (sic) you yet hope
to establish a theatre? if (sic) not the blessed “National” Theatre (but
names mean nothing) such a one as Stanislavsky’s or even Rheinhardt’s
(sic) 30 years back? For that you’ll gladly sacrifice as much of your
personal career as need be – this I see; but naturally you don’t want to
make the sacrifice in vain.
One of the inherent strengths and admirable qualities I find in Granville Barker – and
many other theatre artists I admire – was his flat refusal to compromise is ideas of what
theatre can and should accomplish. Would Gielgud do the same, he almost wondered out
loud?
Is a compromise practicable? I don’t know. Everyone English will be for
compromise, just because they are English. And even the work has to be
done in England. Perhaps one must accept there the fruits of the national
virtue and failing combined. It makes for good politics but bad art. And
so it is, you see, that the question (for me) opens up; no longer for me a
practical question, therefore I can still say theatre or nothing [Barker’s
164 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
emphasis] and not suffer. For you a devilishly practical one; so, who am I
to counsel you? Only I’d say: do not expect to pluck more than a few
grapes from thistles, and don’t expect them always to be of the best
quality!
Yours,
Harley Granville-Barker. (qtd. in Salmon 409-410)
Barker well understood the challenges facing Gielgud; indeed, thirty years earlier he had
faced many of the same challenges. How does one balance the needs of their own career
with the desire to run a theatre? It is a question that many theatre artists deal with even
today. Barker would continue to counsel Gielgud throughout the remainder of his life
and even famously direct – though uncredited – Gielgud’s 1940 King Lear at the Old Vic.
Gielgud revered Barker and was delighted to coax him out of retirement one final time
for King Lear. Samuel L. Leiter, in his book From Belasco to Brook: Representative
Directors of the English Speaking Stage, features Gielgud description of Barker’s
directing style in detail. Gielgud remembers that ‘[h]is praise was often rather implied
than stated. ‘You did some fine things today in that scene’ he would say to me, ‘I hope
you remember what they were!’ and then proceed to read me a long list of my mistakes”
(Leiter 43). Gielgud further explained Barker’s process:
In dealing with the actors he was quite impersonal, calling everyone by the
name of the part they were playing. He neither coaxed nor flattered, but at
the same time, though he was intensely autocratic and severe, he was
never personal or rude. The actors had immediate respect for his
authority. They did not become paralysed (sic) or apathetic, as can so
165 often happen when a strong director is not excessively sensitive. They
were constantly dismayed, however, by the high standards he continually
demanded of them, and by the intense hard work to which he subjected
them without showing any appearance of fatigue himself. For, the
moment they appeared to begin to satisfy him in one direction, Barker was
urging them on to experiment in another. (qtd. in Leiter 44)
Gielgud further discussed his work with Barker in Richard Eyre’s book Talking Theatre.
Eyre devotes a section of the interview to discuss Barker’s work on the now legendary
1940 Gielgud production of King Lear:
RE: I think the unsung genius of twentieth-century British theatre is –
JG: Barker.
RE: -- Granville Barker, yes. You knew him very well.
JG: Well, I knew him – I have a whole bunch of wonderful letters he
wrote me having seen various productions I did. The two times I worked
for him he came for a few days only and then retreated into his Paris
grandeur where he gave lectures and things. And his second wife who
loathed the theatre: she would drag him away the moment he got very
interested. The few hours he was on the stage with me I was so impressed
by him, but I never got to know him intimately at all. When I did Lear at
the Old Vic at the beginning of the war, the Second War, he never took me
out to lunch; but he came once to my house, on the night that peace was
declared, and was already not well and tired and dejected somehow. But
166 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
he made an extraordinary impression on me. He seemed to know exactly
what he wanted and how much to give and how much not to give.
RE: What was he like?
JG: He was like a surgeon.
RE: Very reticent?
JG: Very, and very, very terrified of getting involved again in anything to
do with the theatre. But a number of actors who had been with him earlier
– when he had a company and had three Shakespearean productions at the
Savoy – said he was a sort of young genius and wore sandals and ate
nuts…
RE: Is it apocryphal, the story that he told you after a run-through of
Lear, that you were an ash and what was required was an oak?
JG: He did. He did. He wrote me these wonderful letters about what I
should do if I went into management during the war and whether I should
join up or whether I shouldn’t and all that. He was marvelously helpful.
But this lady was always in the background egging him on, and she didn’t
want any talk about the theatre at all. When I tried to arrange a memorial
service in London she forbade it, wouldn’t allow any notice to be taken…
RE: Granville Barker is alleged to have written on an actor’s dressingroom mirror: ‘Be swift, be swift, be not poetical.’ Do you think that’s
good advice?
JG: Yes, I’m sure it is. I suffered so dreadfully for many years from
being told I had a beautiful voice, so I imagined that I had and rather made
167 use of it as much as I could. It wasn’t until after I worked with Olivier,
who was very scathing about my voice – very resentful that the public and
the critics didn’t like him better when he played Romeo – he thought I
sang all my parts, and I am sure he was quite right. (qtd. in Eyre 4-6)
King Lear – perhaps fittingly – would be the final production Barker would work on.
The outbreak of another World War saw Barker and Helen leaving Paris just ahead of the
Nazis and spending much of the war in the States. His final book, published in 1945 by
Princeton University Press, was called The Use of the Drama and was based on a series
of lectures he gave at Princeton and Harvard. In it he still makes the case for a national
theatre and for the importance of drama and theatre in education. He also rails against
the long run and over commercialism of the West End. He fought the fight for a national
theatre for more than forty years, and part of his tragedy is that, unlike even Moses, he
was never allowed a glimpse of the Promised Land. It would be nearly three full years
following his death before Parliament would ratify the National Theatre Bill and
seventeen years before the National Theatre would officially come into being at its
temporary home at the Old Vic under the leadership of Laurence Olivier. Although
Barker may have lost the battle during his lifetime, his work – both on the stage and on
the page – would have an indirect impact on the ultimate winning of the national theatre
war
168 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
CHAPTER SIX
BARKER’S LEGACY
The National Theatre would finally be created, but only after Barker was no
longer able to enjoy it. His influence, nonetheless, would be great. Barker and Helen
returned to Paris following the war and found, to their great relief, that their flat had been
well looked after during the occupation and all of their effects had survived. Barker was,
however, a very sick man by this time, and though he tried to keep working, he
succumbed to illness and died on August 31, 1946. He was 68 years old. The following
day Desmond MacCarthy paid tribute to him on a BBC radio broadcast:
Harley Granville-Barker will figure in every history of the stage which
deals with the twentieth century. He has also won a permanent and special
place among Shakespeare scholars. He was pre-eminently what the
French call un homme de Theatre…As an actor, he excelled in the
expression of lyrical emotion…the poet in him was uppermost. As a
playwright it was the psychologist who endeavoured to see human
emotions in relation to a moral and social order who was in control…as a
man he was both critical and kind, and fastidious without being
censorious, and that he was as enthusiastic as a man can be who has no
illusions. Both his manner and appearance were inevitably charming, and
his arresting voice – it was at once gay and melancholy – expressed a great
friendliness with detachment. His gifts and knowledge were ever at the
services of disinterested artists and scholars. (qtd. in Purdom 276)
169 C.B.Purdom, who I think mistakenly viewed Barker’s life as that of a tragedy, summed
up Barker’s impact in view of his profound desire to reform the theatre of his youth:
Barker pointed to what was required to put the theatre into its rightful
place – social responsibility for the institution and dedication in those who
serve it. He wanted the theatre related to the common good and
incorporated as an institution into the social order. The idea can be
perceived in him in his earliest days and persisted throughout his life. He
thought more of the drama as a means of the enlightenment of man as a
social being than of its value as entertainment (though he did not ignore
that element), still less did he think of it as a means of advancing his own
name or position. That caused him to write as one attempting something
that was worth doing and gives his plays seriousness. He was, that is to
say, a disinterested artist who never by mere cleverness in the use of the
technical means in which he accomplished employed that accomplishment
contrary to his integrity as a man and an artist. In the contemplation of his
life our affections are engaged, and upon the complex story there remains
a glow that may not be subject to the dissipation of time in the wilderness
of existence. He was a Moses who sensed the future, but did not enter it.
Looking with his eyes, the Promised Land is seen, but it will be better to
learn from his failure the essential conditions of the courage required to
possess it. (Purdom 286-287)
Despite all of his accomplishments as an actor, director, scholar, and playwright, for
Barker the Promised Land was always the establishment of a national theatre. From as
170 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
early as 1903 all of his work was undertaken with that single goal in mind. Throughout
his career he was convinced of the inevitability of a national theatre eventually being
created. Though he went to his grave in 1946 without witnessing the establishment of a
national theatre, the battle raged on, and his work towards that inevitable establishment
continued to lead the way. Had Barker only co-authored the Blue Book, his
accomplishment would have been legendary. Combine his scholarly work with his
legendary direction of the Royal Court Theatre and his groundbreaking work on the
staging of Shakespeare’s plays, and the picture becomes complete. One can make the
argument that the three most essential theatres in England are the National Theatre, the
Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal Court Theatre. It is no small claim to make
that Barker directly influenced the fates of all three of these theatres. His work on the
establishment of the National Theatre is unquestionable. In seeking to establish the
English Stage Company at the Royal Court, George Devine wrote in 1953:
The policy of the Royal Court will be to encourage the living drama by
providing a theatre where contemporary playwrights may express
themselves more frequently than is possible under commercial
conditions…Of all the theatres in central London, the Royal Court is by
far the best suited to such a purpose. The work of Harley Granville
Barker, his revolutionary productions of the classics and his presentation
of a new school of dramatists give the Royal Court a fine and appropriate
tradition. (qtd. in Roberts 8-9)
Devine embraced the tradition of Barker at the Court and planted the flag of the English
Stage Company – arguably the most important theatre in the world dedicated to the
171 development of new plays – firmly at the Royal Court. The real testament to Barker’s
legacy, however, would occur in Parliament as finally, more than a century after
Ephingham Wilson first made his call for a national theatre and nearly fifty years after
Barker first joined the fight for its establishment, a bill was presented in Parliament that
was sure to succeed.
On January 21, 1949 the National Theatre Bill was brought before the House of
Commons for its crucial second reading. According the Geoffrey Whitworth, the
operative clause in the bill read as follows:
That, for the purposes of any Act of the present Session to authorize the
Treasury to contribute towards the cost of a National Theatre, it is
expedient to authorize the payment out of moneys provided by Parliament,
upon such terms and subject to such conditions as the Treasury may think
fit, of such contributions not exceeding one million pounds to the funds of
the Shakespeare Memorial Trust, in respect of the cost of erecting and
equipping a national theatre in accordance with a scheme to be submitted
to the Treasury for the purposes of the same Act. (qtd. in Whitworth 242)
The scheme submitted once again belonged largely to the now dead Harley Granville
Barker. The Financial Secretary to the Treasury, Mr. Glenvil Hall moved for the second
reading of the Bill, beginning by stating, “This is a small Bill with a very great purpose
and I am glad that it has fallen to my lot to introduce it” (qtd. in Whitworth 243). During
his explanation of the Bill, Mr. Hall gave proper credit to the architects of the national
theatre scheme, “The first plans for a national theatre to be built by public subscription
were laid by Harley Granville Barker, whom some of the older Members of this House
172 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
will remember for the work he did at the Court Theatre, and William Archer, in 1903”
(qtd. in Whitworth 244).
The National Theatre Bill was approved by the House of Commons and ratified
by the House of Lords in February, and at last, 101 years after Effingham Wilson first
published his call for a national theatre, there was finally a sense of inevitability about the
coming of a national theatre. Of course, wrangling of all kinds – political and artistic –
would prevent the launching of the theatre until 1963, and even then it would be another
thirteen years until the South Bank complex would fully open and allow the National
Theatre to take its place among the preeminent theatres in the world. Laurence Olivier
would run the National from 1963 to 1973 under a kind of old style actor-manager model,
and though he made no mention of Granville Barker, his literary manager Kenneth Tynan
was acutely aware of Barker’s influence; Tynan’s desire to build up a repertoire of
approximately fifty productions was a direct result of his reading of Barker. Under the
successive leaderships of Peter Hall and Richard Eyre, Barker’s prominence became
more pronounced.
In 1973 Hall wrote a memo for the National Theatre entitled
National Theatre on the South Bank: Questions and Answers that acknowledged Barker’s
influence on the building and the policies being put in place to run the company.33 Eyre
made no secret of his respect for Barker from his earliest days running the National
Theatre, and one of his earliest productions as artistic director was a revival of The
33
I found the memo as part of my research at the V&A and as near as I can tell it was meant as an internal document to get the staff and Board speaking with one voice at a time when the National was facing withering attacks on the costs of getting the building up and running as well as the perceived shabby treatment of Olivier who had been essentially – and rightfully – pushed out of his leadership position by the Board. 173 Voysey Inheritance in 1989. In 1977 Hall produced The Madras House to celebrate the
centenary of Barker’s birth.
Harley Granville Barker’s legacy to modern British theatre is enormous. In
2006, David Farr, then artistic director of the Lyric Hammersmith, wrote an extraordinary
article for The Guardian about Barker. Entitled “Our Very Own Ibsen,” Farr argued for
the continued influence of Barker and simultaneously for the need to go beyond it. “He
was, in his day,” wrote Farr, “one of the most experimental and progressive theatre
practitioners around. He rejected the accepted fashions of the time and forged a New
Theatre that would dominate British theatre for 100 years” (Farr 1). Farr argued that it
was this very progressivism that requires us to acknowledge Barker’s influence but to
also transcend it:
Today, Granville Barker's ideas have been assimilated into the mainstream - and
now we must go beyond him in our new work. The kind of theatre he advocated essentially the tentative beginnings of social realism - has been embraced for over
40 years. We need to move on again, and realise that if theatre is evolving beyond
this, it is for a very good reason. It frustrates me when reactionaries wonder where
all the political and society plays have gone. Have they never watched television?
Do they not think that, had he been alive today, Granville Barker wouldn't have
been straight off to the BBC to make his version of Troy Kennedy Martin's Edge
of Darkness, Abi Morgan's Sex Traffic or Peter Flannery's Our Friends in the
North? Meanwhile, theatre has returned to what the Greeks began and
Shakespeare did most brilliantly: making stories in an empty space. (1)
174 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
Ultimately Granville Barker’s legacy is in part Denys Lasdun’s concrete bunker on the
South Bank. The triumph of Barker’s life’s work is that it eventually got built and now
dominates theatre in the English speaking world. It is almost unimaginable to think of
London without the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain.34 The tragedy of Barker’s
career is that his influence is largely second hand. Unlike Olivier, Hall, Eyre, Trevor
Nunn, and Nicholas Hytner, he never had a chance to actually put his personal imprint on
a theatre he so profoundly influenced from the first third of the twentieth century. That
second-hand influence, however, is felt through the flourishing in British drama that
began in 1956 at the Royal Court and continues to this day. Barker and Archer’s major
argument when they set down the need for a national theatre concerned the dearth of
native drama and lack of opportunities for native playwrights. Barker proved during his
years at the Royal Court that there was an audience for a new drama and writers such as
Shaw, Galsworthy, Hankin, Robins, and Barker himself would give way to John
Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Edward Bond and Shelagh Delaney. The establishment of the
National Theatre would usher in a golden age of writing as playwrights as diverse as
Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, David Hare, Howard Brenton, Peter Shaffer, Richard Bean,
Alan Bennett, and Helen Edmundson and many others would have significant work
premiered by the company. Those new plays would sit side-by-side with adventurous reimagining of classics by notable directors such as John Dexter, William Gaskill, James
34
The official title of the theatre, despite Richard Eyre’s well reasoned argument against being both “Royal” and “National:” One cannot be simultaneously a subject and a citizen. 175 McDonald, Clifford Williams, Michael Elliot35, Deborah Warner, Stephen Daldry, John
Caird, Katie Mitchell, and many others.
Had Granville Barker had more opportunities to run theatres, his reputation would
be deservedly placed alongside such European giants as Stanislavski, Reinhardt, Antoine,
and Copeau. When one walks around the National Theatre today there is no visible
monument to his ultimate legacy. Dennis Kennedy concludes his book on Barker by
writing:
(Christopher) Wren’s memorial in St. Paul’s reads si monumentum
requires, circumspice.36 The real National Theatre on the South Bank
owes Barker a great debt, and such a plaque would not be out of place in
the lobby, dedicated to its dreamer-architect. But playwrights and
directors, especially dreamers, do not require concrete monuments. The
National’s production of The Madras House in 1977, the centenary of
Barker’s birth, was a more appropriate memorial. So also were
productions of Waste in 1985, and of Ann Leete a decade earlier, by the
Royal Shakespeare Company, Britain’s second national theatre. Other
such payments would be an adequate epitaph. (206)
Barker’s legacy extends beyond the occasional revivals of his plays. It can also be found
in the educational initiatives of the National Theatre such as their ongoing platform
series, backstage tours, and in what David Hare calls “…the most varied and complete
35
A generation later, Elliot’s daughter Marianne, would be an associate director of the National Theatre and a favorite for the Artistic Director position succeeding Nicholas Hytner. As of this writing, she has ruled herself out as a candidate. 36
“If you seek his monument, look around you.” 176 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
performing arts bookshop in the English-speaking world:”37 the National Theatre
Bookshop. Although the idea of a permanent resident company has eluded the National
Theatre, the three theatres running in a modified rep remain part of Barker’s legacy. An
idea that began in 1848 might have happened even if Barker had not come along when he
did. His ultimate contribution to the National Theatre, however, was profound both in his
work at the Royal Court Theatre and in his groundbreaking Blue Book. The Blue Book
articulated how a national theatre could work, and his productions at the Royal Court
revealed how the New Drama could successfully play on the stages of London. These
two facets, combined with his work as a director of Shakespeare, his playwriting, and his
theoretical work all combine to make Harley Granville Barker, in Richard Eyre’s
profound words, “[t]he father of modern British theatre” (1).
37
www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/your-­‐visit/bookshop. 177 BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Archer, William. The Old Drama and the New: An Essay in Re-Valuation. Boston:
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Archer William and Barker, Harley Granville. Schemes and Estimates for a National
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Barker, Harley Granville. The Exemplary Theatre, London: Chatto and Windus, 1922.
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Billington, Michael. State of the Nation: British Theatre Since 1945. London: Faber and
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Brockett, Oscar G. and Hildy, Franklin J. History of the Theatre, Foundation Edition.
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Chambers, Colin. Inside the Royal Shakespeare Company. London: Routledge, 2004.
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Cook, Judith. The National Theatre. London: Harrap, 1976.
Elsom, John and Tomalin, Nicholas. The History of the National Theatre. London:
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Eyre, Richard. “My Hero: Harley Granville-Barker.” The Guardian. The Guardian, 12
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Fay, Stephen. Power Play: The Life and Times of Peter Hall. London: Hodder &
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Guest, Kristen. “Class, Culture and Colonialism: the Struggle for an English National
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182 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
APPENDIX ONE
Interview with Sir Richard Eyre
Jerwood Space, London, England
March 14, 2013
Richard St. Peter (RS): First of all I want to thank you for meeting with me. I know how
busy you are. My interest in Granville Barker sort of came through you and I have a
whole load of questions but mostly what do you think was his influence on the
development of the National Theatre and had he not happened, was there an inevitability
that a National Theatre would have eventually happened? How does he fit in to that do
you think?
Richard Eyre (RE): I think he was the catalyst and his pamphlet with William Archer…I
think that kind of codified and was a piece of polemic around which arguments could
coalesce. I think you could make a very, very reasonable argument that without that the
flywheel wouldn’t have got in motion so there would have been not sufficient momentum
to start it.
RS: Do you think the Blue Book, combined with the success of the Court Theatre
seasons…It seems like prior to Barker most everyone championing a National Theatre
was either a critic or academic and Barker was really the first pro who said, “This is what
it could look like” and not only that, he created a theatre and said, “Here’s a model of
what it could be…”
RE: Not only was he a pro, but he was a star. He was a very good-looking young actor,
he was obviously extremely capable in that Shaw wrote leading parts with him in mind.
He was also a terrific director and mind I think he, I mean you can speculate endlessly
why he retired, but stars whose lights shine very, very brightly in their twenties. You
know, I think you could make an argument that he felt he’d done it all and when he met
this very persuasive and very rich woman, he may have thought, “Fuck it, I don’t need
this.”
RS: Do you think in 1916, 1917, he may have been suffering from what we would
consider career burnout? He’d been on the stage since he was 14, he had done
everything, and other than a National Theatre what else was there for him to do?
RE: I think that’s true, I think that’s true. I’ve noticed this with writers, especially
writers who direct, at some point they get weary with the whole sort of barter of
directing. Directing is all about, “Why don’t you try this? Why don’t you try that?” And
it becomes second nature to a director. But if you stand outside a rehearsal…I mean I
remember my daughter when she was quite young watching me rehearse saying, “Dad. I
don’t know how you can stand that. Why do they keep asking you questions all the
time?” And I think that is a sort of weariness that you don’t want the whole barter, you
don’t want to set everything up, you don’t want to get everything moving. I think that
being a writer, that his Prefaces (to Shakespeare) are a vicarious directing. “I’ll write
183 about how I would direct the play” but you know without really the business of actually
staging it. I would say it’s a lot to do with that.
RS: I was just at a conference in Louisville, KY doing a workshop on
playwright/director collaboration and I actually cited your example of David Hare not
wanting to direct his plays anymore for that very reason. In his mind, he was so far ahead
and he didn’t have the patience for the actors to catch up.
RE: I think that is absolutely true, absolutely true. And there was something…did you
see that Richard Nelson play (Farewell to the Theatre)?
RS: I did. Yes.
RE: It’s an interesting thesis, isn’t it? So I think there are a lot of contributing factors. I
do remember talking to (John) Gielgud about it and he said there were a lot of attempts to
coax Barker back but he wouldn’t have it. He just wouldn’t have it, he had left the
theatre and didn’t want to get sucked back in.
RS: When did you first become aware of Barker? When did he become such an
influence on you?
RE: I think I became aware of his Prefaces when I was directing my first Shakespeare
play which would have been, I don’t know, when I was a pretty young director. And then
I got very interested in his plays and did The Voysey Inheritance and then I got interested
in him I think before I started rehearsing The Voysey Inheritance and I also read all his
other plays. So I guess around the time I started to run the National Theatre. I started for
a variety of reasons to get interested in him and his history and then through The Voysey
Inheritance.
RS: Your description of him in Changing Stages is the paragraph that launches my
dissertation.
RE: Oh really? Oh great!
RS: You are all over my dissertation! I am citing you wherever I can! It might want to
be co-authored by Rick St. Peter and Richard Eyre!
RE: I wrote the entry on him for the Dictionary of National Biography. So a lot of the
stuff I say is in that entry. So you can cite The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
as a sort of completely authoritative work. So if that’s any use. So I was just fascinated
by this guy and it is a play (The Voysey Inheritances) that very few writers have learned
from Chekhov this technique of keeping a whole orchestra of characters going, you
know, spinning those plates, keeping them going, writing symphonically. And most
plays that are lazily described as Chekhovian simply aren’t. They might have a sort of
elegiac mood, some sort of autumnal feel but they’re not...if you look at the way he
184 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
handles characters in The Cherry Orchard or Three Sisters, what are there, 12, 14
characters?
RS: Yes. And they are all fully formed.
RE: Fully formed, yes. And their destinies are followed; so it is kind of exquisitely
clever.
RS: And you find that in The Voysey Inheritance as well?
RE: Yes! Absolutely. Barker’s got that. He’s almost showing off. It is so deft. And
also it seems to me that it’s an actor who knows what it’s like to play a small part that has
no life that doesn’t extend through the play and is just there as a kind of prop for the
writer. He’s very, very conscious, like a composer. You often get a composer who has
played a string instrument and know what it feels like to sit second desk of the
violins…so I think that is a key factor of his writing.
RS: I know this is speculation but if you don’t mind speculating with me, what do you
think he would think of the South Bank and the three theatres and what you all have
accomplished there?
RE: I think he’d be appalled at how ad-hoc it was. His vision was of a permanent
company of about 50 actors…
RS: 42 men and 24 women…
RE: Well there you are…a big company of actors and a repertoire of plays so it was a
view of a European-style ensemble company. And it’s never proved possible with British
actors who I think are endemically unsuited to long-term contracts.
RS: I’ve read that you’ve said that in the past and I am kind of curious about that. Is it
because the actors are always looking for the next big thing?
RE: It just is that it’s the way that certainly my generation has grown up. TV in this
country, drama on TV has always been very respected and respectable. You don’t have
to make a decision between East Coast/West Coast. You can have a perfectly good living
being in the company of the RSC (Royal Shakespeare Company) or the National Theatre
company and being in a really significant drama series. So that’s allowed actors to have
a kind of pragmatism.
RS: It seems like the true company idea is when we do Hamlet, Hamlet is Hamlet but
when we do something else, he’s the butler. Are you ever going to waste Ian McKellen
as the butler?
RE: Well Ian would say, “No, no, that’s what I crave!” But of course it’s not. When he
was in the Actors Company that happened in a couple of shows and he gave scene-
185 stealing performances as the butler. Stars are stars because there is a kind of energy and
there’s a kind of, some would say a negative energy, because they suck the life out of
everyone around them. They burn at a higher temperature. They’re hotter. If you put a
heat-seeking camera on the stage it would point to them. That’s why they’re stars. They
have a formidable skill and I think there is a certain sort of willful naiveté when people
talk about companies. You can have a company of kind of modestly talented people. I
had a company when I was running a repertory theatre in the 70s but I couldn’t hold them
for more than a season. Actors like Jonathan Pryce. Don’t tell me Jonathan Pryce is
going to stick around because he believes in a company. He is a virtuoso actor; he wants
to be allowed to exercise his virtuosity.
RS: Let me ask you about regional rep. It seems like after those Court seasons, many of
Barker protégés found themselves creating what we in the United States would consider
resident professional theatre companies. Do you credit Barker with that influence?
RE: Oh sure. I think I say that in Changing Stages. Absolutely. I think that was a model
to be followed. When I took over Nottingham in 1973, it was still possible. We had a
company, we had a repertoire, we played in repertoire. And during the five years I was
there, we just couldn’t afford it. By the third year, it couldn’t be sustained. And it
coincided with a period when actors were much more impatient, they didn’t want to serve
an apprenticeship as it were in regional companies. They didn’t want to stick around for
a year. Also the casting directors proliferated, everyone became more avaricious,
opportunist. Nowadays if there is an exciting young actor, they’ll be spotted at dramacollege and they will be pulled out of school. It is all accelerated and at the same time the
money has been depleted and so the opportunities are much fewer. So it is has been a
vicious circle.
RS: One of the things Barker was most interested in when constructing his National
Theatre model was a training school. Actors would grow up on the stages of the school
and then take their place in the National Theatre company. Was that ever a practical
possibility?
RE: We actually talked about it occasionally, the idea of a school being associated with
the National Theatre. None of the principal colleges had the slightest interest. Rose
Bruford College38 is quite exceptional in having a sort of outward looking view. Most of
the drama colleges are very, very inward looking. You talk to a lot of the students and
they don’t go to the theatre or to the movies, they are so up their own asses. So I couldn’t
find the interest nor was I ever, in the 10 years I was at the National Theatre, ever
approached by any drama school who said, “Would you consider an association with our
program?”
RS: I think that’s the future in America. As the regional theatre movement has been
decimated by the economy and lack of proper funding; you are starting to see huge
theatres like the Goodman in Chicago or your Lincoln Centers and Roundabouts in New
38
Eyre is the honorary President of Rose Bruford College where I have been a visiting lecturer since 2006. 186 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
York and a proliferation of small, startup companies but the middle class theatres have
really been hammered, I suspect the way regional rep has here. It seems like more and
more theatres are looking to partner with academic institutions and more and more
universities are doing that as well.
RE: Well it makes sense…
RS: When you were the Director of the National and you were doing your lectures at
Oxford was that part of your outreach?
RE: I was offered the Cameron MacKintosh Professor position for a year so I kind of
said yes. And then I thought, “Well it kind of concentrates the mind.” So I enjoyed
working with the students but I really had time to concentrate my mind.
RS: As a director do you enjoy teaching?
RE: Yeah, I sort of enjoy it when I do it. I don’t enjoy thinking about it in advance. I
sort of drag my heels and I say, “Oh I said I would do this” and then I turn up and
invariably it’s great because there are these eager faces and I find that fulfilling.
RS: When the National started in 1963 at the Old Vic was there any sense that they were
carrying Granville Barker’s torch?
RE: Not at all, not at all….I think if you would have said to Olivier, “Have you been
influenced by Granville Barker, he would say ‘Who?’” Whereas Gielgud revered him, I
think Granville Barker would have smacked to Olivier as an intellectual and he had
absolutely no tolerance for that at all.
RS: What about Peter Hall?
RE: Peter would absolutely have acknowledged Barker.
RS: This may be a gross generalization on my part but it seems like the National Theatre
under Olivier’s leadership seemed almost like the Henry Irving, Beerbohm Tree ActorManager model and it seemed like it really evolved into a company under Hall and
certainly under you.
RE: It was, it absolutely was. I remember when I was working with Paul Scofield,
sitting in the canteen, Paul talking about how ungenerous Larry (Olivier) had been.
RS: It was kind of his kingdom?
RE: Yes, and he gave his peers a chance – like putting Gielgud in Seneca’s Oedipus -directed by Peter Brook, and it was sort of like almost every play he got one of his
contemporaries to do was sort of deliberately chosen to fuck up their careers. It’s
astonishing but pretty well true, I think. He was not a generous man.
187 RS: I’ve always wondered, I have Hall’s Diaries, I have your Diaries…when you were in
the regional rep and you signed the letter decrying the disproportionate amount of
funding the National was taking up. When you started working at the National, was there
any friction between you and Hall?
RE: We had a furious row about that. He was absolutely incandescent with anger about
that. It was a bitter row but it didn’t persist. The point we were making was not an attack
on Peter and the National, it was an attack on the funding bodies and the fact that it was
completely disproportionate.
RS: It seems like it has been a mess for a long time.
RE: It’s just expanded in an imperial fashion whereas the National Theatre was defined
by its building. The RSC has no reason to keep producing all these theatres and trying to
do more and more of everything. That wasn’t their remit. So what was happening is they
were expanding, sucking up funds. The National Theatre had been built and committed
to, they needed x million to run it and what was left over dribbled down to the regions.
So nobody had taken the view, which they should have done, of “If this space is built,
there is going to have to be an exponential increase so as not to create an exponential gap
between the regions and the center.” And unfortunately that has never been rebalanced.
So it is more and more that the power has been sucked to the center.
RS: I love the South Bank, I love reading your battles with Denys Lasdun, I love the
South Bank once I am inside it, on the outside it looks rather Soviet. What do you think
about theatres like the National Theatre of Scotland being a theatre without walls? Do
you think in the 21st century that might be a more workable model as opposed to a
gigantic building the center of a capital city?
RE: It’s a good model in Scotland. I don’t regret for a moment having the National
Theatre and its three auditoriums. I think it is a wonderful conceit and in practice I think
it is the most extraordinary theatre center in the world.
RS: I absolutely agree.
RE: I wish the Olivier theatre had been better designed, I wish the Lyttelton theatre had
been better designed but when you have a hit in any theatre you start to feel more fondly
about it. But I think it is a magnificent vision and I think it has been humanized over the
years. I think it is like stones in cathedrals. They get worn and acquire a mystique.
People love going to that place.
RS: I spent yesterday afternoon sitting in the Lyttleton lobby and it seemed like it was a
building fully alive to the community it was serving. There was a guy sitting next to me
learning Italian, there were people doing their homework, there was live music playing.
For me it was like being a Catholic at St. Peter’s. What do you think of the
redevelopment?
188 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
RE: I think it will be good.
RS: When you were there, was there really not that much activity heading towards where
the Globe is now?
RE: No, that has been totally redeveloped.
RS: That is extraordinary.
RE: One of the things I did was to remove the roadway that was in front of the theatre
that separated the theatre from the river. There used to be traffic around the building and
it was awful. That is one of the battles I had with Lasdun. He would not concede that
was a mistake.
RS: I know towards the end of your Diaries where you say, “Maybe I could run it for
another 20 years.” In our world, after you run the National Theatre, is that like being
President of the United States? What do you do for a next act?
RE: Not really because one of the things that is brilliant about theatres is that a director
of plays can also be an artistic director and in my view it’s pretty well essential that they
are. So the analogy doesn’t really hold up because you can’t go and be President…I
don’t know that there is an analogy. The worry is, can you have a freelance career? If
you are running the NT you are employing yourself as a director and you are able to
organize your artistic life.
RS: That’s what I miss.
RE: This year I find myself doing a lot of shows but you can’t really pick and choose.
RS: How does something like The Pajama Game or Ghosts happen?39 Are you
approached by theatres or do you approach them?
RE: Both of those projects I initiated. Pajama Game was the first musical I heard, my
sister had the album when she was 15 and I was 13 when it first was on Broadway. I
went to Jonathan Church40 and said, “I always wanted to do this.” This was about five
years ago. With Ghosts, I did a version of Hedda Gabbler a few years ago which was
very successful. I’ve always been interested in Ghosts, I was going to do a movie that
fell through and I found myself with time on my hands so I did the adaptation a few years
ago and finally it sort of got the theatre.
39
When we met, Eyre was rehearsing Pajama Game at the Jerwood Space for an opening at the Chichester Festival. Later in 2013 he will be directing his own adaptation of Ibsen’s Ghosts for the Almeida Theatre. 40
Artistic Director of the Chichester Festival 189 RS: Do you enjoy going back and forth between film and theatre?
RE: Love it.
RS: I recently saw Ploughman’s Lunch for the first time. I loved it and would love to
see Tumbledown41 but I have never been able to find it in the States.
RE: You can get it via Amazon UK and I think the last thing I did was Henry IV which is
going to be on PBS in the fall.
RS: Yes, I am looking forward to that. I hope you didn’t mind the “Why do we do it,
Paul?” story that I emailed to you. It really has become our motto!
RE: No, no. I loved that.
RS: Are you doing any more writing?
RE: No, I don’t have anything to write about just at the moment.
RS: What’s really funny about sitting here with you is that my initial idea for my
dissertation was to write about your collaboration with David Hare and I thought it would
never work as I would need to interview each of you and I figured that would be
impossible to do.
RE: I am seeing him later on today…
RS: Please give him my regards from America!
RE: I will!
RS: This has been a tremendous honor. I really appreciate you taking your time out to
meet with me. Not all of this will find its way into my dissertation but I will send you a
copy of it and you can give it a glance and say, “Yes or no” I would be grateful.
RE: Of course, you can also email me if you have more questions.
41
Ploughman’s Lunch (1983) and Tumbledown (1988) are two early films directed by Eyre. 190 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
APPENDIX TWO
Productions of Harley Granville Barker, compiled by Dennis Kennedy
(* indicates productions he appeared in as an actor)
Date
Author
Play
Theatre and Management
Fina MacLeod
Maeterlinck
Maeterlinck
The House of Usna
Interior
The Death of Tintagiles
Globe (Stage Society)
Zangwill
Shaw
The Revolted Daughter
The Man of Destiny*
Comedy (J.T. Grein)
Comedy (J.T. Grein)
Barker
The Marrying of Ann Leete
Royalty (Stage Society)
S.M. Fox
Ian Robertson
Shaw
The Waters of Bitterness
The Golden Rose*
The Admirable Bashville
Imperial (Stage Society)
Brieux
Shakespeare
Shaw
Euripides/Murray
W.B. Yeats
George Paston
The Philanthropists
Two Gentlemen of Verona*
Candida*
Hippolytus*
Where There is Nothing
The Pharisee's Wife
1899-1900
April 29th
1900-1901
March 22nd
March 29th
1901-1902
January 26th
1902-1903
June 7th
1903-1904
January 31st
April 8th
April 26th
May 26th
June 26th
July 12th
King's Hall (Stage Society)
Royal Court (JH Leigh)
Royal Court (JH Leigh)
Lyric (New Century)
Royal Court (Stage Society)
Duke of York
1904-1905
October 18th
November 1st
November
15th
November
29th
Euripides/Murray
Hippolytus*
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
Shaw
John Bull's Other Island*
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
Note: Revived Feb 7th for matiness and May 4th for evening performances
Maeterlinck
Aglavaine and Selysette
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
Shaw
Candida*
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
191 Note: Revived May 22nd for evening performances
December
23rd
February 28th
March 21st
April 11th
May 2nd
Housman/Barker
W.B. Yeats
Schnitzler
Shaw
Hauptmann
Euripides/Murray
Shaw
May 23rd
Shaw
Prunella*
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
The Pot of Broth
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
In The Hospital
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
How He Lied to Her Husband
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
The Thieves Comedy
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
The Trojan Women
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
You Never Can Tell*
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
Note: Revived June 12th for evening performances
Man and Superman*
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
1905-1906
September
11th
September
26th
October 12th
October 23rd
November 7th
November
28th
January 16th
February 6th
February 27th
March 20th
March 26th
April 24th
July 9th
Shaw
Hankin
Ibsen
Shaw
Barker
John Bull's Other Island*
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
The Return of the Prodigal
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
The Wild Duck*
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
Man and Superman*
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
The Voysey Inheritance
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
Note: Revived February 12th for evening performances
Shaw
Major Barbara*
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
Note: Revived January 1st and February 13th without Barker in the production
Euripides/Murray
Electra
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
Harcourt
A Question of Age
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
Fenn
The Convict on the Hearth
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
Hewlett
Pan and the Young Shepard
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
Hewlett
The Youngest of the Angels
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
Shaw
Captain Brassbound's Conversion
Note: Revived April 16th for evening performances
Euripides/Murray
Hippolytus*
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
Housman
Prunella
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
Shaw
You Never Can Tell
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
1906-1907
September
17th
September
25th
October 23rd
Shaw
John Bull's Other Island
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
Galsworthy
Hankin
The Silver Box
The Charity that Began at Home
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
192 Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
October 29th
November
20th
January 8th
February 5th
February 11th
March 5th
April 9th
April 29th
May 7th
June 4th
Shaw
Man and Superman*
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
Note: Revived May 27th for evening performances without Barker in the cast
Shaw
Harcourt
Masefield
Shaw
Shaw
Ibsen
Robbins
Hankin
Housman/Barker
Shaw
Shaw
The Doctor's Dilemma*
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
Note: Revived December 31st for evening performances
The Reformer
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
The Campden Wanderer
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
The Philanderer
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
You Never Can Tell*
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
Hedda Gabler
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
Votes for Women
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
Revived May 11th for evening performances
The Return of the Prodigal
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
Prunella
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
Don Juan in Hell
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
The Man of Destiny
Royal Court (Vedrenne/Barker)
1907-1908
September
16th
September
24th
October 14th
October 22nd
November
24th
November
25th
December
30th
May 12th
Shaw
You Never Can Tell
Savoy (Vedrenne/Barker)
Galsworthy
Shaw
Joy
Savoy (Vedrenne/Barker)
The Devil's Disciple*
Savoy (Vedrenne/Barker)
Note: Transferred to the Queen's with Barker still in the show
Euripides/Murray
Medea
Savoy (Vedrenne/Barker)
Barker
Shaw
Shaw
Fenn
Shaw
May 24th
Masefield
Paston
June 16th
Housman
Waste*
Imperial (Stage Society)
Caesar and Cleopatra*
Savoy (Vedrenne/Barker)
Note: Produced by Barker, Directed by John Forbes-Robertson
Arms and the Man*
Savoy (Vedrenne/Barker)
The Convict on the Hearth
Getting Married
Haymarket (Vedrenne/Barker)
Note: Produced by Barker, Directed by Shaw
The Tragedy of Nan
Royalty (Pioneers)
Feed the Brute
Note: Transferred to the Haymarket by Vedrenne/Barker
The Chinese Lantern
Haymarket (Vedrenne/Barker)
1908-1909
March 9th
Galsworthy
Strife
193 Duke of York (Frohman)
1909-1910
February 21st
February 23rd
March 1st
March 9th
April 13th
May 3rd
Galsworthy
Shaw
Justice
Duke of York's (Frohman)
Misalliance
Duke of York's (Frohman)
Note: Directed by Shaw
Meredith
The Sentimentalists
Duke of York's (Frohman)
Barrie
Old Friends
Duke of York's (Frohman)
Barrie
The Twelve Pound Look
Duke of York's (Frohman)
Note: The Twelve Pound Look was directed by Boucicault
Barker
The Madras House
Duke of York's (Frohman)
Housman/Barker
Prunella
Duke of York's (Frohman)
Barrie
The Twelve Pound Look
Duke of York's (Frohman)
Hope/Lennox
Helena's Path
Duke of York's (Frohman)
Barrie
The Twelve Pound Look
Duke of York's (Frohman)
1910-1911
October 10th
January 31st
February 6th
February 21st
March 11th
March 28th
April 19th
May 16th
Jensen/Masefield
The Witch
Royalty, Glasgow (Glasgow Rep
Jensen/Masefield
The Witch
Royal Court (Lillah McCarthy)
Schnitzler/Barker
Anatol*
Palace
Masefield
The Tragedy of Nan
Royal Court (Lillah McCarthy)
Barker
Rococo
Royal Court (Lillah McCarthy)
Schnitzler/Barker
Anatol*
Little (McCarthy/Barker)
Ibsen
The Master Builder
Little (McCarthy/Barker)
Shaw
Fanny's First Play
Little (McCarthy/Barker)
Note: Directed by Shaw, transferred to the Kingsway September 12th
Masefield
The Tragedy of Nan
Little (McCarthy/Barker)
1911-1912
September
23rd
October 3rd
February 22nd
March 19th
Peacock/FraserSimon
Bonita
Queens
Barrie
The Twelve Pound Look
Little (McCarthy/Barker)
Barker
Rococo
Little (McCarthy/Barker)
Meredith
The Sentimentalists
Little (McCarthy/Barker)
Philpotts
The Secret Woman
Kingsway (McCarthy/Barker)
Euripides/Murray
Iphigenia in Taurus
Kingsway (McCarthy/Barker)
Note: Played at His Majesty's June 4, 1912 and Bradfield College June 11, 1912 with Barker in
cast
1912-1913
September 7th
September
21st
Barker
The Voysey Inheritance
Shakespeare
The Winter's Tale
194 Kingsway (McCarthy/Barker)
Savoy (McCarthy/Barker)
Texas Tech University, Richard St. Peter, December 2013
November
15th
November
23rd
December
26th
March 25th
Shakespeare
The Twelfth Night
Galsworthy
The Eldest Son
Shaw
Bennett
Savoy (McCarthy/Barker)
Kingsway (McCarthy/Barker)
John Bull's Other Island
Kingsway (McCarthy/Barker)
Note: Directed by Shaw
The Great Adventure
Kingsway (McCarthy/Barker)
1913-1914
September 1st
October 29th
December 1st
December 2nd
December 6th
December
17th
February 6th
Shaw
Calthrop/Barker
Jensen/Masefield
Ibsen
Molière
Masefield
Shaw
Androcles and the Lion
The Harlequinade
The Witch
The Wild Duck
Le Marriage Forcé
The Tragedy of Nan
The Doctor's Dilemma
St. James (McCarthy/Barker)
St. James (McCarthy/Barker)
St. James (McCarthy/Barker)
St. James (McCarthy/Barker)
St. James (McCarthy/Barker)
St. James (McCarthy/Barker)
St. James (McCarthy/Barker)
Galsworthy
The Silver Box
St. James (McCarthy/Barker)
Maeterlinck
The Death of Tintagiles
St. James (McCarthy/Barker)
Note: All of the December productions ran in rep at the Savoy in January 1914
Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Savoy (McCarthy/Barker)
1914-1915
November 5th
November
25th
January 27th
February 16th
February 25th
May 15th
May 19th
Masefield
Phillip the King
Hardy/Barker
Shaw
The Dynasts
Kingsway (McCarthy/Barker)
Androcles and the Lion
Wallack's, New York
The Man Who Married a Dumb
France
Wife
Wallack's, New York
Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Wallack's, New York
Shaw
The Doctor's Dilemma
Wallack's, New York
Euripides/Murray
Iphigenia in Taurus
Yale Bowl (McCarthy/Barker)
Note: Toured to Harvard Stadium, Piping Rock Country Club/Long Island, CCNY in
New York,
University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton all between May 18 and June 11, 1915
Harvard Stadium
Euripides/Murray
The Trojan Women
(McCarthy/Barker)
Note: Toured to CCNY, University of Pennsylvania and Princeton between May 29
and June 12, 1915
1920-1921
Covent Garden (Arts Fund)
195 September
16th
January 8th
Martinez
Sierra/Barker
Maeterlinck
The Romantic Young Lady
The Betrothal
Guitry/Barker
Deburau
Royalty
Gaiety
1921-1922
November 2nd
Ambassador's
1925-1926
November
30th
Barker
The Madras House
Ambassador's
Note: Revised version of the play
1927-1928
October 26
th
Martinez
Sierra/Barker
The Kingdom of God
Strand
1933-1934
May 3rd
Barker
The Voysey Inheritance
Sadler's Wells
Note: Revised version of the play co-directed with Harcourt Williams
Barker
Waste
Westminster
Note: Revised version of the play co-directed with Michael MacOwan
1936-1937
December 1st
1939-1940
April 15th
Shakespeare
King Lear
Old Vic
Note: Co-directed with Lewis Casson
196