Professional Theatre in the Provinces

Abstract

During the course of the War, the provincial theatres contributed relatively little to the history of the war play. The four flagships of the repertory-theatre movement before the War (setting aside for the moment the exceptional role of the Dublin Abbey Theatre) were the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester, the Scottish Repertory Theatre in Glasgow, the Liverpool Repertory Theatre and the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. All four of them suffered — albeit in different ways — from the War. The Glasgow enterprise folded with the beginning of hostilities — not, it should be added, exclusively because of the War (after some initial difficulties, it had been remarkably successful, and ‘The Glasgow shareholders’, as one critic put it, ‘having recovered their losses, decided to take no further risks’255); yet the radical changes that wartime conditions imposed had undoubtedly a share in the collapse. Miss Horniman’s company at the Gaiety, Manchester (where Monkhouse’s The Choice had been premiered in 1910) struggled on until 1917 when it was dissolved. Again, the seeds of disintegration had been sown before the War when the sensational success of Stanley Houghton’s Hindle Wakes in 1912 and its transfer to London had taken some of the company’s best actors to the West End, never to return. However, the War contributed substantially to the demise of this remarkable venture.