11 - New theatres for a new drama

Summary

In 1904, the Court Theatre was a shabby, late-Victorian playhouse seating barely more than 600 patrons, a few underground stops away from the fashionable “theatreland” of the West End. That spring, H. Granville Barker, twenty-seven, an actor, director, and playwright, hired to direct and to play a supporting role in a production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, booked the theatre for a series of matinees of Candida, by George Bernard Shaw. By the following fall, Barker, in partnership with J. E. Vedrenne, the business manager for the theatre's previous principal lessee, embarked on his own management of the theatre. Every second week a new staging would be given three matinee performances; if public attention or artistic merit warranted, the production would be moved into the evening bill for a limited run.