Aldwych Theatre
Chekhov might have enjoyed the irony: the London theatre that saw the first production in England of The Cherry Orchard (in 1911, six years after the 1,100-seater opened) became best ...
Anthony Quayle
(1913–89)English actor and director. An engaging, intelligent, and energetic man, Quayle played supporting roles at the Old Vic under Tyrone Guthrie, appearing with Olivier, Richardson, Gielgud, and ...
Anton Chekhov
(1860–1904), playwright.The great Russian writer of stories and plays did not achieve American recognition until nearly twenty years after his death. The earliest performances of his works in the ...
Birmingham Repertory Theatre
One of the earliest of the regional repertory theatres in the UK, the Birmingham Rep was founded and funded by Barry Jackson, and had its origins in an amateur group ...
Coliseum
London Playhouse built by Oswald Stoll to designs by Frank Matcham and opened in 1904, seating nearly 3,000. Stoll's seasons mixed high with popular culture: the Marx Brothers appeared there ...
Criterion Theatre
London, in Piccadilly Circus. Originally an adjunct to Spiers and Pond's Criterion restaurant, this theatre was built entirely underground. A three-tier auditorium seating 675, it opened in 1874 and ...
Frith Banbury
(1912–2008),English actor, manager, and director, who made his first appearance on the stage in 1933, and played a wide variety of parts, both in straight plays and revues, before ...
George Devine
(1910–65)English actor, director, and manager. After Oxford he acted professionally, and from 1936 to 1939 taught at the London Theatre Studio, founded by Michel Saint-Denis, with whom he continued ...
Harcourt Williams
(1880–1957)English actor and director. Williams joined Benson's company in 1898, in 1903 toured with Ellen Terry, and in 1906–7 toured America with H. B. Irving (Henry Irving's son). Returning ...
John Gielgud
(1904–2000), actor and director.A grandnephew of Ellen Terry, the slightly arch, musical‐voiced actor first appeared in New York in 1928 as the Grand Duke Alexander in The Patriot. However ...
Leslie James Banks
(b. Liverpool, 9 June 1890; d. London, 21 April 1952)Actor, producer and director. Banks appeared in only a few productions before the First World War, during which he suffered ...
Lyric Theatre
New York, on West 42nd Street. This opened in 1903 with Old Heidelberg, starring Richard Mansfield, who for some years returned regularly with his company, the theatre being used also ...
Malvern Festival
Summer drama festival held annually from 1929 to 1939, revived briefly in the 1940s and 1960s, and re-established as a more general annual arts festival in 1977. Barry Jackson founded ...
Margaret Rutherford
(1892–1972)English actress. Although principally remembered after 1936 as a performer on film of deceptively eccentric English ladies like Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, Rutherford had a long stage ...
Maurice Browne
(1881–1955)English actor, manager, writer, and champion of the Little Theatre movement in the USA. Along with Ellen Van Volkenberg, he was founder and director of the Chicago Little Theatre ...
Michael Redgrave
(1908–85)English actor. At the Old Vic he played Orlando to Edith Evans's Rosalind in As You Like It (1936) and Laertes to Olivier's Hamlet (1937). In contemporary plays his ...
music hall
The music hall in Britain came into existence as Queen Victoria was crowned, flowered with her reign, and entered the twentieth century ready to decline; its heyday was roughly from ...
N. C. Hunter
(b. Derbyshire, 18 Sept. 1908; d. Merioneth South, Wales, 19 April 1971)Playwright. In the early 1950s, Hunter's sad bourgeois comedies provided strong roles for Edith Evans, Sybil Thorndike, Wendy ...
Nigel Playfair
(b. London, 1 July 1874; d. London, 19 Aug. 1934)English actor, producer and manager. From 1918 he was the owner and manager of the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, where for ...
Old Vic Theatre
A theatre in the Waterloo Road, London, famous for its notable productions of Shakespeare's plays under the management of Lilian Baylis (1874–1937), who took it over in 1912.
