Malvern Festival

Malvern Festival, founded in 1929 by Barry Jackson, who provided much of the money to initiate and support it, as well as actors from his Birmingham Repertory Theatre company, distinguished players being imported for special parts. Jackson's long association with Bernard Shaw led him to devote the first year's programme entirely to his plays, with the first English production of The Apple Cart (with Cedric Hardwicke and Edith Evans) and revivals of Back to Methuselah, Caesar and Cleopatra, and Heartbreak House. Shaw became the patron-in-chief of the festival, and more than 20 of his plays were presented there, Geneva and In Good King Charles's Golden Days having their first productions in 1938 and 1939 respectively. Too True to be Good (1932) and The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (1935) were also given their first English productions at Malvern. Apart from Shaw, the productions of the festival ranged over 400 years of English drama, from Hickscorner (c.1513) to contemporary plays by Bridie, Drinkwater, Priestley, and others, the first non-Shavian play to be seen being Besier's The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1930). After the 1937 season Jackson withdrew and the festival was run by the manager of the Malvern Theatre. After the Second World War the festival was revived only once, in 1949, when Shaw's Buoyant Billions had its first English production. In 1964 the theatre, seating 799, was taken over by a Trust, and since 1977 the festival has been revived as a Shaw and Elgar Festival each spring, the rest of the year being taken up by visits from touring companies and productions by a resident amateur company. The theatre is now part of the Winter Gardens complex operated by the local authority, but the festival is organized by an independent voluntary body. Shaw's Pygmalion was staged in 1989 to mark the 60th anniversary.