Birmingham Repertory Theatre

Birmingham Repertory Theatre, one of the most significant enterprises launched in the English theatre during the first half of the 20th century, began with private theatricals in the home of Barry Jackson. From these emerged in 1907 the Pilgrim Players, an amateur company which put on at local halls plays unlikely to be seen in the commercial theatre. Inspired by the opening of a repertory theatre in Manchester in 1908, and of the Liverpool Playhouse (originally the Liverpool Repertory Theatre) in 1911, Jackson, who was a wealthy man, built and equipped a theatre in Station Street to house a professional company, which opened in 1913 in Twelfth Night. During the next 10 years a wide variety of uncommercial plays was produced, including Drinkwater's Abraham Lincoln (1918) and the first British production of Shaw's Back to Methuselah (1923), one of many Shaw plays produced by Jackson. In 1924, disheartened by lack of civic support, Jackson closed the theatre, but the Birmingham Civic Society guaranteed a sufficient number of season-ticket holders to induce him to reopen it. Such plays as Phillpotts's The Farmer's Wife (1924), Drinkwater's Bird in Hand (1927), and Besier's The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1930) were transferred to London, and there were controversial modern-dress productions of Hamlet (1925) and Macbeth (1928). From 1929 to 1938 the company also provided the nucleus of that which appeared at the Malvern Festival. In 1935 Jackson transferred the Birmingham theatre to a Board of Trustees, but remained its director until his death in 1961. It became known as a fine training ground for young actors and actresses, including Laurence Olivier, Paul Scofield, Margaret Leighton, Albert Finney, and Derek Jacobi. In the late 1960s the Birmingham City Council donated the site for a new and larger theatre, seating 900, which opened in 1971 in the heart of the City Centre, financed by the Council, the Arts Council, and public subscription. The size of the auditorium, twice that of the old theatre, has intensified the normal conflict in a subsidized theatre between artistic and commercial considerations; but a mixture of ancient and modern drama is presented in both the main auditorium and the studio theatre, one of the most flexible in the country, seating 140. The theatres have staged the premières of such plays as Wesker's The Merchant (1978) and Annie Wobbler (1983) and Ustinov's Beethoven's Tenth (1983).