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Jackson, Sir Barry

Source:
The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare
Author(s):
Dennis KennedyDennis Kennedy

Jackson, Sir Barry (1879–1961), English manager, director, designer, and playwright, 

the founder of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1913. Using his own substantial inheritance, Jackson funded the first purpose-built regional theatre in Britain and Ireland, which he made into a laboratory for theatrical experiment and change. He produced a wide range of work in Birmingham, London, and at the Malvern Festival, which he founded in 1929, that invigorated British theatre between the wars. He had two important managerial connections to Shakespeare. First, he mounted three modern-dress productions in the 1920s which insisted that a Shakespeare for the post-war generation required the light of contemporary fashions, manners, and politics. Cymbeline (1923) remained in Birmingham but Hamlet ‘in plus-fours’ (1925, the year he was knighted) and Macbeth set in the Great War (1928) moved to London and international fame. (Though they are rightly associated with Jackson’s name, only Cymbeline was directed by him, the other two by his regular colleague H. K. Ayliff.) Second, from 1945 to 1948 Jackson was director of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre; his first move was to bring along the young Peter Brook and Paul Scofield as part of a revitalization of moribund Stratford traditions.

Dennis Kennedy