Theatre Studios

A Political History of Ensemble Theatre-Making

Tom Cornford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781317288664
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Theatre Studios explores the history of the studio model in England, first established by Konstantin Stanislavsky, Jacques Copeau and others in the early twentieth century, and later developed in the UK primarily by Michel Saint-Denis, George Devine, Michael Chekhov and Joan Littlewood, whose studios are the focus of this study.

Cornford offers in-depth accounts of the radical, collective work of these leading theatre companies of the mid-twentieth century, considering the models of ensemble theatre-making that they developed and their remnants in the newly publicly-funded UK theatre establishment of the 1960s. In the process, this book develops an approach to understanding the politics of artistic practices rooted in the work of John Dewey, Antonio Gramsci and the standpoint feminists. It concludes by considering the legacy of the studio movement for twenty-first-century theatre, partly by tracking its echoes in the work of Secret Theatre at the Lyric, Hammersmith (2013–2015).

Students and makers of theatre alike will find in this book a provocative and illuminating analysis of the politics of performance-making and a history of the theatre as a site for developing counterhegemonic, radically democratic, anti-individualist forms of cultural production.

Section 1

The London Theatre Studio (1936–1939) and the Old Vic Theatre Centre (1947–1952)

1

Remnants of the London Theatre Studio and the Old Vic Theatre Centre

The two studios explored in this section, the London Theatre Studio (1936–9, hereafter LTS) and the Old Vic Theatre Centre (1947–52, hereafter OVC), were both run jointly by Michel Saint-Denis and George Devine. Devine was Saint-Denis’ assistant director at the LTS, principally responsible for administration, but the two men collaborated with increasing equality across the two enterprises, with Devine taking joint responsibility for the planning of the OVC in the run-up to its opening in 1947, and becoming its co-director, alongside Saint-Denis and the actor and director Glen Byam Shaw. The ‘three boys’, as they became known, ran the OVC until entrenched disagreements with both the Old Vic Theatre Company management and the Old Vic’s governors led to the announcement, in 1951, of the resignation of Byam Shaw, Devine, and Saint-Denis, and of the OVC’s immediate closure, with the Old Vic Theatre School remaining open until the end of 1952 so that its current students could complete their courses.

The last act of the OVC, then, was the Old Vic Theatre School’s 1952 ‘School Show’, after which Saint-Denis seems to have given a speech from the theatre’s stage. Scribbled notes in his archive suggest that he took this opportunity both to note the centre’s achievements and to insist that its work was far from over: ‘We can feel happy and grateful’, he wrote, ‘6 years = 300 people [the number of students trained]’, and he thanked ‘students, staff, friends’ and ‘George and Glen’ for ‘heroic work in adverse circumst[ances]’, observing that ‘I asked them for [the] best show ever’ and that they provided it. He also thanked ‘public and friends’ for ‘a fortnight packed’ and said that although ‘people are sad’, ‘they should not be’. He made reference to attempts to ‘save the school’, but observed that ‘if it disappears = Young people to fight for their convictions = to pursue the work’, which, he reassured his supporters, ‘will not disappear’.¹

Privately, however, Saint-Denis was less optimistic about the future of ‘the work’ of the LTS and OVC. On August 4, 1952, he wrote to George Devine from Paris (having left England in July). He was ‘exhausted’ and ‘bewildered by my own feelings’, and his letter was defiant, but less confidently so:

I swear it is not the end. I know it cannot be: something infinitely strong binds us. Perhaps we needed this provisional end, this break to realise it: the way in which it has taken place is so strange […], that it contains the certainty of a future, otherwise it would be the unnatural destruction of life.²

Saint-Denis and Devine had many influential friends, including their long-time collaborator, Michael Redgrave, who gave the Rockefeller Foundation Lectures in the Department of Drama at Bristol University in 1952–3. In the second of his four lectures, Redgrave praised Saint-Denis’ achievements and echoed his belief in ‘the certainty of a future’ for his work, arguing that he had trained and developed ‘in many actors and actresses, designers, producers, authors, here amongst us, now, the seed, the flower and fruit of some of the best theatre of today and tomorrow’.³ This analysis of the aftermath of the LTS and OVC will show that Redgrave was right: we can see remnants of the work of these studios littering both what was identified at the time as the ‘best theatre’ of the 1950s, and the new theatre establishment that emerged in the 1960s. I have borrowed Redgrave’s horticultural analogy to examine, first, the seeds of that new establishment (which can be seen as early as 1953); second, its flowering in the tradition of English acting that this new establishment both supported and depended upon, and, third, the fruit that it bore in the form of short-lived studios established at the Royal Court and the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC).

1953: the seeds of a new theatre establishment

Following his 1952 prediction of Saint-Denis’ influence providing ‘the seed, the flower and fruit’ of the future English theatre, in 1953 Michael Redgrave went to Stratford. There, Glen Byam Shaw had joined Antony Quayle as director of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre and was developing, alongside George Devine, larger-scale productions of the Shakespeare plays they had directed at the OVC with the Young Vic company.⁴ In 1953 Byam Shaw directed what would be seen as a landmark production of Antony and Cleopatra with Redgrave as Antony, Peggy Ashcroft as Cleopatra, Marius Goring as Caesar, and designed by Motley, all of whom had been active in the LTS and OVC. Redgrave also played Shylock to Ashcroft’s Portia, with LTS graduate Yvonne Mitchell as his daughter Jessica, and was directed as Lear by Devine, with Mitchell as Cordelia. Mitchell was also Katherine in Devine’s production of The Taming of the Shrew and Lady Anne to Goring’s Richard III. The continuity between the OVC and Stratford was also visible off-stage, not only in the employment of Motley as designers, but in the appointment of Peter Streuli, from the Old Vic Theatre School’s staff, as stage director, a role which included a wide range of responsibilities including stage management, lighting, and rehearsing understudies.⁵ From this foundation of LTS and OVC networks, Byam Shaw’s 1953 season broke Stratford’s box office records, playing to more than 360,000 people.

That box office success would certainly have pleased the outgoing chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1953, Ernest Pooley. Two years earlier, at the height of the public outcry over what was seen as the forced resignation of the Old Vic Centre directors, Pooley had written to Lord Esher, chair of the Old Vic governors, expressing the view that ‘The Old Vic business is very tiresome—the only sensible comment I have seen is in the Economist’.⁶ The article to which he referred claimed that

it will be a great pity if so much talent is irrevocably lost to the Old Vic; but if financial [pressures] should make necessary some curtailment of its activities, it must not be the main theatre company which suffers. The Old Vic is the nearest approach to a British national theatre, and the public looks to it for first-rate performances of the English classics. And it is the public which pays the piper.⁷

In 1953 Ernest Pooley might well have still assumed that the Old Vic was still ‘the nearest approach to a British national theatre’, and the foremost venue for ‘first-rate performances of the English classics’, but several events that year might have given a more astute observer pause for thought. First, there was the success of Quayle and Byam Shaw’s Stratford season. Second, in that year Guthrie handed leadership of the Old Vic over to Michael Benthall, who pursued a policy of producing Shakespeare’s entire body of work, frequently under the balletic direction of Robert Helpmann and with designs by Leslie Hurry, that harked back to nineteenth-century pictorialism. This policy was in marked contrast to Stratford under Quayle and Byam Shaw, where a series of dynamic Shakespearean productions were created that would come to define their era rather than recalling an earlier one (among these, Byam Shaw’s 1955 Macbeth, starring Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, is discussed below). Furthermore, when Byam Shaw took over sole direction of the Memorial Theatre in 1956, he offered Peter Hall his first production there, leading, in 1959, to Hall’s ascent to the position of director, and subsequently to the creation of the RSC, confirming that within a decade the ‘nearest approach to a British national theatre’ had shifted from the Old Vic to Stratford and the Aldwych.

Nineteen fifty-three was also the year in which Devine began work on what would become the English Stage Company at the Royal Court. This enterprise was catalysed by the director Tony Richardson, who wanted to run a theatre that would be a home for contemporary, international plays: ‘Devine knew all about the organisation side, and I knew the plays’, he reportedly said.⁸ True to form, and to the policy of both the LTS and OVC, Devine ‘prepared a nine-page memorandum’.⁹ While he produced this plan, Devine was also attempting, as Taryn Storey has shown, to establish the Royal Court as the London hub of a ‘grid’ of theatres, envisaged by the Arts Council’s secretary general, William Emrys Williams, as a ‘national infrastructure’ whereby ‘middle-weight’ provincial theatres would be linked to larger ‘number one’ theatres, sharing productions and developing other forms of ‘practical co-operation’.¹⁰ Evidently, this approach was intended to align Devine’s plans with Arts Council strategy, and possibly to distract somewhat from the fact that his proposal for a ‘studio theatre’, which Williams greeted with ‘warm interest’,¹¹ closely resembled the recently closed OVC. Alongside the Royal Court’s proposed ‘ten productions a season by a small permanent company’ to be performed on ‘a permanent setting’, Devine planned ‘an audience-building organization, and training courses for writers and actors’.¹²

The complicated series of deals and compromises that finally gave rise to the founding of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court have received detailed attention elsewhere,¹³ so I will not rehearse them here, except to note that Devine relinquished the ‘studio’ elements of his plan with reluctance. In 1957 he wrote to Saint-Denis with mixed feelings about the Court’s evident success:

I have made a plan for myself which I intend to keep to. I shall work on here [the Royal Court] for another two years—roughly till April ’59 and then take a long break, at least six months, when I shall have a long holiday, go abroad, produce abroad, etc. and try to renew myself. When I com...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: ensemble theatre-making and the theatre studio tradition
• SECTION 1: The London Theatre Studio (1936–1939) and the Old Vic Theatre Centre (1947–1952)
• SECTION 2: The Chekhov Theatre Studio (1936–1942)
• SECTION 3: Theatre Workshop (1945–1963)
• Bibliography
• Index