Vaughan Williams was much involved, as observer and practitioner, with the theatre of the ‘long’ Edwardian age: less with aspects of that theatre we might first think of now (its WestEnd actor-managers, its nascent New Drama) than with its more broadly popular elements.His interest in music hall and musical comedy is evident near the beginning of the London Symphony. He worked for two seasons at Stratford-upon-Avon as musical director of a non-metropolitan troupe, Frank Benson’s touring Shakespeare company. (Sir John in Love would grow from this.) The age’s taste for pageants saw him compiling scores for an episode in the Crystal Palace’s London Pageant and for a Pilgrim’s Progress spectacular: music that connects with Hugh the Drover and his later Bunyan operas. More esoterically, he wrote music for actual and proposed revivals of Ancient Greek comedy and tragedy, also for a resurrected masque (a form he came to love). And he collaborated, or planned to collaborate, with the two most important English theatrical pioneers of the age: Harley Granville Barker, providing music for symboliste drama at his request, and Edward Gordon Craig, readying himself to work with him on a projected (though abandoned) ballet for Serge Diaghilev.

From 1908 to 1914, each summer party included a large-scale outdoor play, and these productions are considered in Chapter 4. Performed by casts of between 80 and 150 employees, between 1911 and 1914 these plays were written and produced by local theatrical personality John Drinkwater (1882–1937). Alongside other parties, charity occasions, and wartime entertainments that took place in the grounds, these performances demanded huge investments of time and money. What is clear is that they also offered a return, and these two chapters explores how outdoor theatrical events worked for and at Bournville and the ways in which they told stories about Cadbury’s and the Cadbury’s factory to in-house and external audiences.