Jackson, Sir Barry Vincent

Jackson, 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 and indifference. Among the many plays he directed were several of his own, including The Christmas Party (1913), a children's play which was many times revived. He helped to establish the reputation of George Bernard Shaw with his production of Back to Methuselah (1923), and also presented his own versions of Ghéon's The Marvellous History of St Bernard (1925), Beaumarchais's The Marriage of Figaro, and Andreyev's He Who Gets Slapped (both 1926). Considering the theatre as a workshop for artistic experiment rather than a museum for the preservation of tradition, Jackson produced Cymbeline in 1923, Hamlet in 1925, and Macbeth in 1928 in modern dress and in 1929 founded the Malvern Festival, mainly as a shop window for Shaw's plays. In 1935 he transferred the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, whose company had proved an excellent training ground for many young players, to a Board of Trustees, but remained associated with it, among his later productions being versions of Wyss's The Swiss Family Robinson (1938), Dickens's The Cricket on the Hearth (1941), and Fielding's Jonathan Wild (1942). In 1945 he was appointed Director of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon, where he remained until 1948, helping the theatre over the difficult years which followed the Second World War and instituting several salutary reforms. Among the highlights of his management were Love's Labour's Lost directed by Peter Brook; Hamlet in Victorian dress, with Paul Scofield and Robert Helpmann alternating in the title-role; The Winter's Tale directed by Anthony Quayle, who was to succeed Jackson as Director of the theatre; and Othello with Godfrey Tearle in the name part.