Stage Society

Stage Society, London, organization founded in 1899 to produce plays of artistic merit not likely to be performed in the commercial theatre. In order to make use of professional actors, performances were given in selected theatres on Sunday nights, when they were normally closed. This led to a police raid in 1899 on the Royalty Theatre, where the society was giving its first production, Shaw's You Never Can Tell. It was argued, successfully, that the theatre was being used as a private place and was therefore not subject to the ban on Sunday opening. Among the plays produced at similar Sunday performances was Shaw's Mrs Warren's Profession in 1902, which firmly established the society's right to perform plays which had been refused a licence by the Lord Chamberlain. Other unlicensed plays were Maeterlinck's Monna Vanna (also 1902), Leo Tolstoy's The Power of Darkness (1904), Granville-Barker's Waste (1907), Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author (1922), and James Joyce's Exiles (1926). These were all seen later in the commercial theatre, where the most successful of the society's productions, R. C. Sherriff's Journey's End (1928), was seen only a few weeks after its original production.

The Stage Society functioned for 40 years, during which it staged over 200 plays, many of them first performances of American and foreign plays in England. During the First World War it experimented with the revival of classic plays (in the absence of suitable modern material) and so aroused an interest in Jacobean and Restoration plays which was to lead to the establishment of the Phoenix Society and be a marked feature of the 1920s. In 1926 in face of rising costs and a declining membership, which had reached its peak just before the war, the society merged with Phyllis Whitworth's Three Hundred Club, whose productions since its foundation in 1923 had included A Comedy of Good and Evil (1924), by Richard Hughes, J. R. Ackerley's The Prisoners of War (1925), and J. E. Flecker's Don Juan (1926). Important productions after the merger, which lasted until 1931, were The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd (1926) and David (1927), both by D. H. Lawrence, and John Van Druten's Young Woodley (1928) and After All (1929). The society's last production was García Lorca's Bodas de sangre as Marriage of Blood (later known as Blood Wedding) in 1939 at the Savoy Theatre. The Second World War created conditions in which the society could not survive, and an attempt to revive it after the war was not successful.