Jackson, Barry Reference library
Russell Jackson
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance
..., Barry ( 1879–1961 ) English director and manager . Trained as an architect, Jackson was heir to a fortune derived from one of the leading grocery firms in the Midlands. In 1907 he founded an amateur group in Birmingham, the Pilgrim Players, which went professional in 1913 as the Birmingham Repertory Theatre , one of the first examples of the regional repertory movement. Jackson funded a new playhouse that year, and despite a number of financial crises maintained the venture out of his own pocket for 22 years. (After 1935 the theatre was...
Jackson, Barry Reference library
The Companion to Theatre and Performance
..., Barry ( 1879–1961 ) English director and *manager . Trained as an architect, Jackson was heir to a fortune derived from one of the leading grocery firms in the Midlands. In 1907 he founded an amateur group in Birmingham, the Pilgrim Players, which went professional in 1913 as the *Birmingham Repertory Theatre , one of the first examples of the *regional repertory movement. Jackson funded a new *playhouse that year, and despite a number of *financial crises maintained the venture out of his own pocket for 22 years. (After 1935 the theatre...
Jackson, Barry (6 Sept. 1879) Reference library
The Continuum Companion to Twentieth Century Theatre
..., Barry [ Vincent ] (b. Birmingham , 6 Sept. 1879 ; d. Birmingham , 3 April 1961 ) Theatre manager , director , designer and playwright . Born into a wealthy shop-owning family, he founded the amateur Pilgrim Players in 1907 , out of which came the Birmingham Repertory Company, whose theatre – the first purpose-built repertory theatre – he financed in 1913 . He remained the guiding force behind this company for nearly 50 years. In the 1920s and 1930s he staged many important productions in London at the Royal Court , Kingsway and other...
Jackson, Sir Barry Quick reference
An A-Z Guide to Shakespeare (2 ed.)
..., Sir Barry ( 1879–1961 ) Founder in 1913 of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, where the many Shakespeare productions included influential modern-dress versions of Cymbeline ( 1923 ), Hamlet ( 1925–6 ), and Macbeth ( 1928 ). He directed the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon from 1945 to 1948...
Jackson, Sir Barry (1879–1961) Reference library
Dennis Kennedy
The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (2 ed.)
..., 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...
Jackson, Sir Barry Vincent Reference library
The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre (2 ed.)
..., Sir Barry Vincent ( 1879–1961 ), English director and wealthy amateur of the theatre. He was trained as an architect, but in 1907 founded an amateur company, the Pilgrim Players, which became professional when in 1913 he built and opened for it the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in his birthplace. Classics and new plays, tragedy and farce, pantomime and ballet, opera, and even marionettes were seen on its stage, and Jackson maintained it with his own money for 22 years as a creative force in the English theatre, often in the face of local hostility...
Barry Jackson
Timon of Athens Reference library
Michael Dobson, Will Sharpe, and Anthony Davies
The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (2 ed.)
...play into three acts for a Stratford revival in 1892 . Since then, however, it has only occasionally been produced, and has rarely been fully convincing: Nugent Monck ’s 1935 production is remembered chiefly for its incidental music by a 21-year-old Benjamin Britten , Barry Jackson ’s post-war modern-dress production of 1947 for the bomb crater that was the set for the second half. Ralph Richardson and Paul Scofield , however, each found an other-worldly quality in the title role, and in 1999 Michael Pennington played Timon sensitively in ...
Henry VI Part 1 Reference library
Randall Martin and Anthony Davies
The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (2 ed.)
...many serious and innovative productions. F. R. Benson mounted all three Henry VI plays at Stratford in 1906 . He played Talbot in Part 1 , while Tita Brand played Joan la Pucelle. The play’s opportunities for colourful pageantry were sumptuously exploited. Sir Barry Jackson and Douglas Seale ’s Birmingham Repertory Theatre production in 1953 launched the play’s modern stage life and followed equally revelatory stagings of The First Part of the Contention and Richard Duke of York . Seale contextualized the opening funeral of Henry V by...
The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster Reference library
Randall Martin, Will Sharpe, and Anthony Davies
The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (2 ed.)
...and again in 1906 and 1909 . On the second occasion all three Henry VI plays were performed as a historical cycle (another idea borrowed from Germany). Benson satisfied Victorian tastes for sumptuous pageantry, but paced the action between scenes more continuously. Sir Barry Jackson and Douglas Seale ’s Birmingham Repertory Theatre production in 1951 launched the play’s modern stage life. Seale successfully alternated between still and lucid passages of formal verse, and explosions of factional violence. Barbara Jefford drew serious attention to...
Henry IV Part 1 Reference library
Michael Dobson and Anthony Davies
The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (2 ed.)
...In the 20th century the play gradually regained some measure of its earlier popularity, though unlike Richard III it has never attracted very much interest outside the nation whose history it dramatizes, Sir John seeming as inexplicably English a joke as Mr Punch. Barry Jackson staged a full text of 1 Henry IV in 1913 , and revived both it and 2 Henry IV for Shakespeare’s birthday in 1921 , anticipating subsequent directors who have sought to stage the Second Tetralogy as a grand, Wagnerian sequence. At the Old Vic in 1930 John Gielgud ...
Richard Duke of York Reference library
Randall Martin, Will Sharpe, and Anthony Davies
The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (2 ed.)
...Stratford-upon-Avon in 1906 , when all three Henry VI plays were first performed as a cycle (another idea borrowed from Germany). Benson’s exuberant Gloucester was matched by his wife Constance’s Margaret, played with ‘unflagging force and spirit’ despite heavy cuts. Sir Barry Jackson and Douglas Seale ’s Birmingham Repertory Theatre production in 1952 launched the play’s modern stage life. Seale successfully alternated attention between still and lucid passages of formal verse, and energetic clashing armies. Barbara Jeffrey’s fully humanized...
All’s Well That Ends Well Reference library
Michael Dobson, Will Sharpe, and Anthony Davies
The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (2 ed.)
...freed 20th-century directors to take unusual liberties with its text, and even purists sought to justify their revivals by highlighting topical parallels. William Poel ’s production in 1920 , taking a hint from Shaw, presented Helen as a proto-suffragette, while Barry Jackson ’s Birmingham Repertory Theatre production seven years later was in modern dress, with Laurence Olivier as a would-be sophisticated jazz-age Paroles. Robert Atkins produced the play three times ( 1921 , 1932 , 1940 ), to little avail, and it was only when Tyrone...
Cymbeline, King of Britain Reference library
Michael Dobson, Will Sharpe, and Anthony Davies
The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (2 ed.)
...and despite Peggy Ashcroft ’s two triumphs as Imogen (at the Old Vic in 1932 , and at Stratford, in a fairy tale-style production by Peter Hall , in 1957 ) few 20th-century productions were conspicuous successes: modern dress, then novel, did not help the play in Barry Jackson ’s Birmingham production of 1923 (derisively called ‘Shakespeare in plus-fours’), and B. Iden-Payne ’s critically acclaimed attempt to direct the play on sets derived from Jacobean masques (Stratford, 1937 ) did not dissuade George Bernard Shaw from producing his own...
Macbeth Reference library
Michael Dobson, Will Sharpe, Anthony Davies, and Will Sharpe
The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (2 ed.)
...Wolfit forceful but mannered ( 1937 , 1945–6 , 1953 ); Laurence Olivier was felt to be simplistic opposite Judith Anderson ’s operatic Lady at the Old Vic in 1937 , but was more impressive in Glen Byam Shaw ’s Stratford production in 1955 . Notable disasters include Barry Jackson ’s ‘tweedy’ modern-dress production ( 1928 ), Orson Welles ’s ‘voodoo’ design ( 1936 ), and Peter O’Toole’s notoriously gory, melodramatic performance ( 1976 ). Perhaps the period’s only legendary success was Trevor Nunn ’s studio production for the RSC in 1976 , with ...
Lil Son Jackson
An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island
William Bradley
William Bryant
