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‘Nobody Was Ready for That’: The Gross Impertinence of Terence Gray and the Degradation of Drama

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Steve Nicholson
Steve Nicholson
Affiliation:
Steve Nicholson is Senior Lecturer in English and Drama in the School of Music and Humanities, University of Huddersfield.
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Extract

In 1932 Terence Gray, the innovative director of Cambridge's Festival Theatre, was invited by the monthly journal of the British Drama League to contribute to a series exploring the possible modernization of British theatre. Gray's article was caustic and typically heretical. ‘Let the gangrenous old thing die’, he urged, denying the possibility of revitalizing something so riddled with sickness and already ‘sitting on its long-overdue coffin… waiting for the undertaker’. Within a year, Gray had abandoned not only the Festival theatre, which he had created in 1926, but all theatre.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , Summer 1996 , pp. 121 - 131
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1996

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References

Notes

1. Gray, Terence, ‘On Modernising the Theatre’, Drama, 11 1932.Google Scholar

2. Cave, Richard, Theatre in Focus: Terence Gray and the Cambridge Festival Theatre, Chadwyck-Healey, Cambridge, 1980.Google Scholar

3. Op. cit. n. 1.

4. the festival theatre review, 1927, no. 15.

5. Op. cit. n. 1.

6. the festival theatre review, 1932, no. 107.

7. Theatre World, October 1925.

8. Gray, Terence, Dance-Drama: Experiments in the Art of the Theatre, Cambridge, 1926.Google Scholar

9. Gray, Terence, ‘The Art Theatre Movement’, in NUT, Cambridge Souvenir, 1928.Google Scholar

10. Ibid.

11. Gray, Terence, ‘Letter to the Editor’, Drama, 12 1928.Google Scholar

12. He purchased the National Sporting Club in Covent Garden and his plans for converting the Playhouse in Oxford were well advanced.

13. Gray, Terence, ‘This Age in the Theatre’, The Bookman, 10 1932.Google Scholar

14. Gray, Terence, ‘Verse-Speaking and Movement in the Modern Theatre’, Drama, 02 1928.Google Scholar

15. Theatre World, October, 1925.

16. the festival theatre review, 1931, no. 64.

17. Op. cit. n. 14.

18. the festival theatre review, 1927, no. 8.

19. the festival theatre review, 1927, no. 3.

20. the festival theatre review, 1928, no. 27.

21. Dinner for two in the theatre's restaurant was offered for the person whose percentage ratings for specified aspects of the production most nearly coincided with those of the critics of the local newspapers.

22. the festival theatre review, 1927, no. 19.

23. the festival theatre review, 1929, no. 55.

24. All quotations from the Lord Chamberlain's Correspondence files—London Docks by William Rupke.

25. All quotations from the Lord Chamberlain's Correspondence files—The Hairy Ape by Eugene O'Neill.

26. the festival theatre review, 1927, no. 11.

27. From the Chamberlain, Lord's Correspondence files— Adam the Creator by Karel Capek.Google Scholar

28. Op. cit. n. 9.

29. the festival theatre review, 1931, no. 5.

30. the festival theatre review, 1929, no. 5.

31. the festival theatre review, 1929, no. 3.

32. From the Chamberlain, Lord's Correspondence files— The Thought by Leonid Andreyev.Google Scholar

33. From a letter from the Lord Chamberlain to the Home Office concerning the proposed production of Roar China, though this particular play was eventually considered too dangerous to be performed even in Cambridge. See The Lord Chamberlain's Correspondence files—Roar China by Sergei Tretyakov. For further discussion of censorship of this play, see Nicholson, Steve, ‘Censoring Revolution: The Lord Chamberlain and the Soviet Union’, New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. VIII no. 32, 11 1992.Google Scholar

34. Ibid.

35. From the Chamberlain, Lord's Correspondence files— Man and His PhantomsGoogle Scholar by Henri-René Lenormand.

36. All quotations from the Chamberlain, Lord's Correspondence files—The Eater of DreamsGoogle Scholar by Henri-René Lenormand.

37. From the Chamberlain, Lord's Correspondence files— Tsar LénineGoogle Scholar by François Porché.

38. the festival theatre review, 1927, no. 11.

39. All quotations from the Lord Chamberlain's Correspondence files—Hoppla! by Ernst Toller.

40. Chamberlain, Lord's Correspondence files—Adam the Creator.Google Scholar

41. Ibid.

42. the festival theatre review, 1929, no. 55.

43. the festival theatre review, 1927, no. 21.

44. Ibid.

45. Chamberlain, Lord's Correspondence files—Tsar Lénine.Google Scholar

46. the festival theatre review, 1927, no. 18.

47. the festival theatre review, 1927, no. 21.

48. Ibid.

49. the festival theatre review, 1931, no. 80.

50. the festival theatre review, 1931, no. 66.

51. Op. cit., n. 14.

52. Gray, Terence, ‘Was that Life? Swat it!’, The Gownsman, 6 06 1931.Google Scholar

53. Ibid.

54. Cooke, Alistair, ‘The Cambridge Festival Theatre: Ten Seasons of Dramatic Experiment’, Theatre Arts Monthly, 11 1931.Google Scholar

55. Op. cit. n. 1.

56. ‘The Theatre of Tomorrow: An Interview with Mr. Terence Gray’, Drama, July 1931.

57. Op. cit. n. 1.

58. Ibid.

59. Op. cit. n. 15.

60. the festival theatre review, 1931, no. 66.

61. Op. cit. n. 9.

62. Ibid.