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A Thousand Years of British Theatre History (Part 6b)The Twentieth CenturyThe Musical The Briish musical really came into its own in the twentieth century. In the first third of the century it was the romantic musical comedies of Ivor Novello and the revues of Noel Coward; then came the dominance of the Hollywood musical transferred to the stage. Briefly Sandy Wilson's The Boy Friend and Julian Slade's Salad Days (1953 and 1954) gave Britain a successful home-grown musical scene, but that died away again under the relentless onslaught of American cinematic musicals, although Lionel Bart's Oliver! briefly wrested the crown back to the UK in 1960. Then in 1968 a new British musical style first saw the light of day with Lloyd Webber and Rice's Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. The show made some impact but it was not until Superstar in 1970 that the new wave of British musicals began to make an impact internationally. This was followed by Evita (much less successful) in 1976, and the ubiquitous Cats in 1981, which has never been out of production since. Musicals had not really been part of the mainstream of British theatre, however, until Trevor Nunn directed Cats, giving the form a new legitimacy in the UK. This led to the explosion of new British musicals, often dismissed in the US as not being really proper musicals at all. It's a controversy which continues to this day, but, regardless of what the critics on both sides of the Atlantic might say, the appearance of such shows as Les Miserables, Miss Saigon, and other Lloyd Webber musicals such as Starlight Express, Sunset Boulevard and, most recently, Whistle Down the Wind, has established the West End as the place for musicals, even re-exporting shows back to the US (such as the revival of Kander and Ebb's Chicago, still running on Broadway after transferring there from London). Regional Theatre Since at least the time of Shakespeare, London has always been the centre of British theatre, and for centuries the regions more or less got the crumbs from the capital's table. If plague raged in London, the Elizabethan companies went into the country to perform. This began to change a little at the end of the nineteenth century but it was not until the 1960s that the real development of regional theatre began in earnest. A significant date here is 1946, the year in which the Arts Council (now the Arts Council of England) was founded. Its twin aims of fostering and funding the arts encouraged the growth of repertory theatre in the regions. Rep wasn't a new thing, for small rep companies could be found all over the country even as early as the 1920s, but what was new was the spirit of experimentation which which was the hallmark of the new breed of subsidised reps. This new breed of rep was accompanied in many cases by a movement away from the by now traditional proscenium arch stage to a more open staging. One of the earlier examples of this approach was in London, at the Mermaid, built in 1959. At about the same time we had the development of the thrust stage (Chichester Festival Theatre, 1962) and theatre-in-the-round (Victoria, Stoke-on-Trent, 1962). At the same time, local councils began to take an active interest in actually running theatres and by 1962, of the 55 reps in Britain, a third were accommodated in Civic Theatres, theatres owned by local authorities. Some were newly built, such as the Nottingham Playhouse, and some were considerably older and were rescued from closure or even demolition by the local authority. One of the earliest of this kind of civic theatre is the Sunderland Empire, originally built by Richard Thornton and later part of the Stoll Moss chain. Not all civic theatres, however, were reps. Some - the Sunderland Empire, the Bradford Alhambra, the Theatre Royal in Newcastle-upon-Tyne - were essentially variety theatres, which became receiving houses for a wide range of shows: opera, ballet, theatre, pantomime and pop concerts. Some of these experimented with rep seasons, but their success was only limited, often because of their sheer size: a performance of Swan Lake may fill a 2000-seater, but a rep company is unlikely to do so! There was what was almost an explosion of theatre building from after WWII until the seventies but, as we shall see later, this was brought to an abrupt halt in the eighties. The National Companies The Shakespeare Memorial Theatre opened in Stratford-on-Avon in 1879 and was burnt to the ground in 1926, a year after it had received the royal charter. The present building was opened in 1932. Both theatres were the home of an annual Shakespeare festival which by the mid-forties was accounted somewhat dull and worthy rather than exciting. In 1946 Barry Jackson was appointed director and he introduced new, young talent such as the actor Paul Scofield and the director Peter Brook. By 1958 the chairman of the board, Fordham Flowers, whose great uncle had actually raised the money for and launched the theatre, was discussing the idea of a full-time rep company at the theatre with the 28-year old Peter Hall. Two years later Hall was appointed director and in 1961 the Royal Shakespeare Company was founded. The National Theatre has an even longer history, for the idea was first proposed by Garrick in the eighteenth century but did not really receive widespread support until around 1850, when Bulwer Lytton and Henry Irving spoke out in its favour. In 1907 a detailed scheme was published by the critic William Archer and the director Granville Barker. A Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre committee was set up and set about raising money. It actually raised £100,000 in five years and a Private Member's Bill in 1913 to supplement that sum was passed but not with a sufficient majority to make it effective. However a site in Bloomsbury was bought. Then, of course, the First World War broke out and all thoughts of a National Theatre were put to one side. Between the wars the site in Bloomsbury was sold and another bought in Kensington. However by this time there was a rival scheme to set up the Old Vic as the UK's national theatre. However there was no actual movement until 1948 when £1m was given from public funds and in 1951 there was a ceremonial laying of a foundation stone on the south bank of the Thames. It was not until 1963 that the National Theatre Company was founded under Laurence Olivier and put on its first performance (Hamlet) at the Old Vic. As a result of the success of the season, the architect Denys Lasdon was commissioned to design the building which is the National Theatre we know today. There were delays and costs spiralled to the extent that the whole complex could not be opened at the same time: it was, in fact, opened in stages in 1976-7. Olivier had resigned in 1973 and Peter Hall took over. Its opening was not received with unalloyed pleasure. Oher subsidised companies objected to the huge amounts of public money invested, as did commercial theatres, and the new company was not following the lines which had long been thought of as the proper way for a national theatre to run - productions of a classic repertoire. In fact, there was a considerable degree of co-operation with commercial companies, which occasionally gave rise to much disquiet. For example, the vast majority of the profits from the world premiere of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus (1979) actually went to the Shubert Organisation in the US which owned the rights to the play. Now move to third part.
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