George Rowell – författare

This is the first book to chronicle fully the history of London's Old Vic Theatre. After Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, the Old Vic is London's oldest theatre, with a continuous history since 1818. Drawing on important archives, both here (notably the Royal Victoria Hall's) and in the United States, George Rowell sheds new light on the management, audience, productions, and players. In particular he offers fresh information on its early years, when such famous figures as Edmund Kean and William Charles Macready appeared there, and Paganini gave his farewell concert. Throughout its history the Old Vic has served a number of purposes and provided many brands of entertainment, including spectacle, pantomime, 'blood-and-thunder melodrama', and variety. Subsequently it was used as a 'temperance hall' and working-men's college. The Theatre was the first permanent home of opera in English as well as British ballet, and, above all, the birthplace of the world-famous Old Vic Company.

This edition includes four plays and one libretto, covering more than twenty years of the dramatist's career: The Palace of Truth (1870), Sweethearts (1874), Princess Toto (1876), Engaged (1877) and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (1891). The collection demonstrates that Gilbert was an original dramatist in his own right. The sophisticated irony of his plays challenged the conventions of the Victorian burlesque and sentimental comedy by demanding, and receiving, an intelligent response from the audience. George Rowell's useful and thorough introduction, which presents the theatrical background to Gilbert's development, also shows the dramatist's influence on Pinero, Wilde and Shaw. Gilbert's style combines a technique rarely realistic and stretching to fantasy with a tone apparently cynical and in fact deeply pessimistic. This odd pairing of fantasy and fatalism was recognized by his own and later generations as 'Gilbertian' and the term has been widely applied even outside the theatre.

This volume contains four plays by the leading late Victorian and Edwardian playwright Arthur Wing Pinero (1855-1934). It provides a representative sample of the work of a writer who far outshone his rivals (including both Wilde and Shaw) in his own day, and inspired such successors as Somerset Maugham and Terence Rattigan in the genre of the 'wellmade play', and Ben Travers in the writing of farce. The plays are The Schoolmistress (1866), one of the famous Court farces; The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893), the best known of all the plays about 'a woman with a past'; Trelawny of the 'Wells' (1898), a much-loved backstage romance; and The Thunderbolt (1908), a pioneering social drama. Two of the plays (The Schoolmistress and The Thunderbolt), are not available in print elsewhere. This scholarly edition includes an introduction, a biographical account, a full list of Pinero's plays in performance and publication, and several important appendixes, including an alternative ending to The Schoolmistress and significant variants in the text of The Second Mrs Tanqueray.

This is an account of the origins, development and current state of the repertory theatre movement in Britain. The movement had its roots in ideas, experiments and traditions stretching back into the nineteenth century, and first found its voice in 1907 with Miss Horniman's company in Manchester. Since then it has played a vital - often a dominant - role in British twentieth-century theatre. As a method of theatre organisation, repertory refers to those theatres based primarily in the regions, housing a resident acting company and seeking to maintain each season a programme of plays catering for the tastes of the whole community. But the theory has never been dogmatic and the movement has evolved from a gamut of complex factors, not least the visions of particular personalities. Major landmarks in the history include the effects of the two World Wars, the advent of substantial state funding for the Arts, the growth of cinema and television and the renewal of theatre's link with the community in the form of such initiatives as Theatre- in-Education. The history concludes with a detailed study of six representative regional theatres: The Nottingham Playhouse; The Citizens' Theatre, Glasgow; The Salisbury Playhouse; The Victoria Theatre, Stoke; The Everyman, Liverpool; and The Royal Exchange, Manchester. Appendixes include a Chronology, sample repertory programmes from the period, audience attendance figures and some comparative statistics about funding. Interspersed through the text are photographs of selected theatre exteriors, auditoria, stages and productions.

Originally published in 1971. The Victorian Age was one of popular theatre and increasingly popular journalism. One manifestation of this journalism was the emergence of the dramatic critic from the anonymity and brevity which had previously characterized periodical treatment of the theatre. If Victorian theatre is regarded as existing essentially thirty years before Victoria acceded and continuing until the outbreak of war in 1914, the names of Lamb, Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt at one end, and of Beerbohm and MacCarthy at the other, can be added to a list that includes Lewes, James, Archer, Walkley, Shaw and Montague. All these writers, and others less famous, are represented in this selection.By selecting the articles on the basis of the play in performance, rather than the play as literature, and by arranging them according to various aspects of the theatrical process, this book builds up a skilful and lively picture of the contemporary theatre at work, in the words of its leading commentators. The anthology successfully conveys the qualities of abundance and vitality to characteristic of Victorian theatre.

Originally published in 1971. The Victorian Age was one of popular theatre and increasingly popular journalism. One manifestation of this journalism was the emergence of the dramatic critic from the anonymity and brevity which had previously characterized periodical treatment of the theatre. If Victorian theatre is regarded as existing essentially thirty years before Victoria acceded and continuing until the outbreak of war in 1914, the names of Lamb, Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt at one end, and of Beerbohm and MacCarthy at the other, can be added to a list that includes Lewes, James, Archer, Walkley, Shaw and Montague. All these writers, and others less famous, are represented in this selection.By selecting the articles on the basis of the play in performance, rather than the play as literature, and by arranging them according to various aspects of the theatrical process, this book builds up a skilful and lively picture of the contemporary theatre at work, in the words of its leading commentators. The anthology successfully conveys the qualities of abundance and vitality to characteristic of Victorian theatre.