The Stage

Rep into the unknown - repertory theatre

Published Monday 31 January 2005 at 14:00 by Charles Vance

Charles Vance examines the origins and evolution of repertory and celebrates a form of theatre that has been delighting audiences for more than 100 years

The Stage was born twenty years before the advent of repertory theatre. It would be impossible here to evaluate the evolution of a type of theatre that, by its very name, means different things to different people. For clarity I deal only with repertory as a standing company serving a specific community. This can be commercial, subsidised or amateur.

From 1904, Granville Barker successfully produced plays in repertoire at Royal Court focusing on Shakespeare and Shaw. By 1911 he had joined forces with Charles Frohman to create a repertory company at the Duke of York’s Theatre that lost money and soon closed.

It was in the provinces that the genre found two financial angels who would lay the foundations of what we now know as repertory. The first, the legendary AEF Horniman (of tea fame) who disliked the theatre as an art form but believed that it should educate and uplift the community in which it existed. In 1903 she had supported WB Yeats’ plan for an Irish Repertory Theatre and converted the Mechanics Institute Hall in Dublin into the Abbey Theatre. In 1907 she bought the Gaiety Theatre in Manchester and a year later it opened as what must be accepted as the first rep theatre in England.

The second of these wealthy angels was Sir Barry Jackson who in 1913 created the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, based on his amateur company the Pilgrim Players that he had run in the pre-war years. By 1932 he had five repertory theatres, all based on the Birmingham model, in Malvern, Manchester, London’s West End and even Canada. By 1910 the legendary Basil Dean, a protege of Horniman, left her to found the Liverpool Playhouse.

Repertory in the provinces was growing apace and by the outbreak of the Second World War it was estimated that there were more than 400 rep theatres of varying standards in the UK. Space only permits the naming of a token few to identify the widespread growth - from the Glasgow Citizens to the Belfast Group Theatre and the Everyman Cheltenham to the Grand Theatre Swansea, rep was a major cornerstone of our theatre heritage.

After the 1939-45 war, dramatic changes were on the cards for post-war theatre. The Luftwaffe had taken its toll on a great part of our theatrical stock and the structure of provincial rep was to change almost beyond recognition. There emerged giants like the Salberg dynasty, Derek - of Alexandra Theatre Birmingham fame with Hereford as an outpost - and Reggie, who founded the Salisbury Playhouse as well as running a weekly rep company at the Penge Empire in south-west London.

With so many of the great Empires and Hippodromes ravaged by war and in a poor state of repair, a new world of commercial rep started to escalate under the prolific management of legends like Harry Hanson, Frank Fortescue, Margery Denville (of Jersey fame) and J Baxter Somerville, who owned the Lyric Hammersmith, the Brighton Royal and Margate Royal plus two seaside reps at Cromer and Hunstanton. There were dozens of these companies, operating up to seven or eight venues with permanent reps plus innumerable seaside repertory seasons in the halcyon days of packed resorts in the pre-Costa del Sol package holiday explosion.

Coincidentally, there was an upsurge of funding activity as the wartime Council for the Encouragement of Music and Arts, under the guidance of eminence grise Lord Goodman and first arts minister Jenny Lee, was transformed into the Arts Council of Great Britain.

Overnight, there was an identifiable change in the format of provincial repertory theatre and two disparate entities emerged. On one hand, for a new culture conscious society, the arts council had the Housing of the Arts Fund and, on the other, the introduction of subsidy for a great number of regional theatres saw the advent of a new umbrella and governing body, the Council of Repertory Theatre (CORT).

This identified a dichotomy in the structural meaning of the word rep in that there were two distinct entities - subsidised and commercial repertory.

By the seventies, the statistics were fascinating. There were a total of 90 repertory companies of which 48 were CORT members or state subsidised and 42 as commercial repertory managers. Further theatres were to be added to the CORT list that were slowly being diversified from repertory to regional production and receiving theatres. CORT itself was merged with the TMA as the governing body of regional theatre. With the development of relationships for the exploitation of productions mounted by subsidised theatres with major commercial managers, the next 25 years saw a diminution of the number of subsidised repertory theatres with standing companies. Increasingly, through-casting of a standing company ceased to be the norm as the opportunities for revenue development for regional theatre eased the funding burden and casts were engaged for each production. There are some very notable exceptions - Bob Carlton’s Queens Hornchurch and Dee Evans’ Colchester Mercury are examples.

With the continuing escalation of marriages between commercial producers and subsidised regional theatres, repertory - in the true meaning of the word - by the turn of this century fell into the remit of a number of established commercial repertory producers accustomed to trimming their financial sails to fit within the parameters of box office potential.

By the Millennium, my company was presenting repertory at seven venues and other long-standing companies like Newpalm were also providing the drama content of theatre’s programming, both of us during what had hitherto been the summer doldrums. And both of these companies have a repertory theatre base just as Colin McIntyre has at Chesterfield. But it must be recorded that in a comparatively short time, Ian Dickens has become the most prolific rep producer in the country, providing more production weeks for theatres and work for actors than any of us.

The irony is that today many high profile subsidised companies are contracting commercial companies to provide limited seasons of popular fare with high production values in an effort to balance the books of budgets stringently curtailed by central government edict.