Tyrone Guthrie

Tyrone Guthrie (1900-1971) was an English theater director, largely responsible for the founding of the Shakespeare Festival Theatre, Stratford, Ontario, and of the Guthrie Theatre, Minneapolis.

Born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, Tyrone Guthrie was the great-grandson of the Irish actor Tyrone Power. As a schoolboy Guthrie soon showed an interest in the theater, music, and writing. At Oxford University he studied history and was an active member of the Dramatic Society. In 1923 he joined the newly-founded Oxford Playhouse. However, the company's director, James B. Fagan, developed little confidence in Guthrie's acting abilities and did not re-hire him the following season.

Guthrie then accepted a job as a broadcaster for the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) in Belfast and soon began to produce plays over the air. His success as a radio director led him back to the theater and to a directing position with the Scottish National Players in Glasgow (1926). In 1928 the BBC produced two of Guthrie's radio plays, Squirrel's Cage and Matrimonial News, and employed him as a script editor in London.

Guthrie soon left the BBC to become artistic director of the Anmer Hall Company at the Festival Theatre, Cambridge. With this new company Guthrie's directing repertoire could shift away from the somewhat parochial national plays favored by the Scottish Players. He directed Euripides, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov, and Pirandello. It was here at the Festival Theatre that Guthrie also began to develop his gift for staging innovative, animated crowd scenes, eventually one of his directorial trademarks. In late 1929 another of Guthrie's radio plays, The Flowers Are Not For You To Pick, was successfully produced by the BBC. Despite Guthrie's primary involvement with the theater, his reputation as a radio writer and personality continued to grow. Accordingly, he was engaged to produce in Montreal a radio series of dramatized popular history, "The Romance of Canada" (1930-1931).

Upon returning to the Anmer Hall Company Guthrie directed James Bridie's The Anatomist (1931). The play opened the company's second home at Westminster Theatre and was Guthrie's first London production. He had his first West End directing success with Dangerous Corner, J. B. Priestley's first play (1932). That same year Guthrie published the first of his many books, Theatre Prospect, and his Westminster production of Love's Labours Lost brought him to the attention of Lilian Baylis. As administrator of the esteemed Old Vic, Baylis was in search of a new resident director for the company. She offered Guthrie the position for the 1933-1934 season.

Guthrie brought Charles Laughton to the Old Vic and directed him in several leading roles, most notably as Angelo in Measure for Measure (1933). However, Guthrie received mixed reviews for his year's work and subsequently concentrated on tallying up a number of West End and Broadway successes. Having proven himself in the commercial theater, Guthrie rejoined the Old Vic in 1936. As resident director, he staged a number of important, if not always entirely successful, productions: Wycherly's The Country Wife (1936), with Edith Evans and Ruth Gordon; A Midsummer Night's Dream (1937, 1938) with Mendelssohn's music; a modern dress Hamlet (1938) with Alec Guiness; and Ibsen's An Enemy of the People (1939). Two of his productions, Hamlet (1937) and Othello (1938), became famous for their Freudian interpretations, with Laurence Olivier playing major parts in both. During World War II Guthrie struggled to keep the Old Vic organization afloat in the provinces. One of his finest productions of this period was Ibsen's Peer Gynt (1944) with Ralph Richardson in the title role.

From 1945 to 1951 Guthrie worked as a freelance director. Among his many productions during these years were Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac (1946), again with Richardson in the lead role, and Oedipus Rex in Israel, New York, and Finland (1947, 1948). He also directed several operas and presented plays at the annual Edinburgh Festival. Guthrie returned to the Old Vic as interim artistic director for the 1951-1952 season, but his focus then moved to a new project in Canada.

The project was the Shakespeare Festival Theatre in Stratford, Ontario. It was founded in 1953 and originally housed in a huge tent. Guthrie's impulse to become involved with this venture was threefold: to help to develop a national theater tradition in Canada; to work with a resident ensemble, for Guthrie was a strong advocate of theater done by a community of artists; and to stage Shakespeare in a spatial configuration true to the Elizabethan spirit. After years of experience with Shakespeare's plays, Guthrie felt that an amphitheater setting with a large thrust stage better served the Bard's theatrical vision than the more common proscenium stage. Guthrie was the festival's artistic director for its first two summer seasons and directed plays for the company until 1957.

In 1958 Guthrie began plans to expand the ideas he had realized in Canada and to transfer them to America. His goal was to establish a fully professional classical repertory company free from commercial pressure. His efforts came to fruition with the 1963 opening of the Minneapolis Theatre, designed somewhat on the lines of the Stratford theater. For the opening season Guthrie directed his second modern dress Hamlet and Chekhov's The Three Sisters. His later productions in Minneapolis included Henry V and Jonson's Volponein 1964; Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard and Richard III, with Hume Cronyn in the title role, in 1965; The House of Atreus, an adaptation and monumental staging of Aeschylus's The Orestia, in 1967; and Chekhov's Uncle Vanya in 1969. In 1971 the theater was renamed in honor of Guthrie. He was knighted in 1961.

Further Reading

Besides Theatre Prospect (1932), Guthrie's own books on the theater include A Life in the Theatre (1959), his autobiography; A New Theatre (1964), which chronicles the development of the Minneapolis Guthrie Theatre; and In Various Directions (1965), a collection of essays. He also co-authored three volumes on the Shakespeare Festival Theatre, Stratford, Ontario: Known at Stratford, with Robertson Davies and Grant MacDonald (1953); Twice Have the Trumpets Sounded, with Davies and MacDonald (1954); and Thrice The Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd, with Davies (1955). An informative biography is James Forsyth, Tyrone Guthrie (1976). Interviews with numerous actors and designers about their work with Guthrie are collected in Alfred Rossi, Astonish Us in the Morning: Tyrone Guthrie Remembered (1977). □

Guthrie, Sir (William) Tyrone (1900–71), English actor and director, who through his mother Norah Power was the great-grandson of the Irish actor Tyrone Power. He made his first appearance on the stage under J. B. Fagan in Oxford in 1924, and directed plays at the Festival Theatre, Cambridge, 1929–30, his first London production being Bridie's The Anatomist (1931). Much of his finest work was in Shakespeare for the Old Vic. In 1933 he directed an interesting Measure for Measure with Charles Laughton as Angelo, repeating it in 1937 with Emlyn Williams. In 1937 he also directed Laurence Olivier in Hamlet, a production later seen at Elsinore; at Christmas 1937 and 1938 he was responsible for delightful productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream with Robert Helpmann as Oberon and Mendelssohn's music. Among his other productions were Hamlet (1938) in modern dress, starring Alec Guinness, and Ibsen's Peer Gynt (1944) with Ralph Richardson. He was Administrator of the Old Vic and Sadler's Wells theatres, 1939–45. For the Edinburgh Festivals of 1948 and 1949 he directed Lyndsay's Ane Pleasant Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis and Allan Ramsay's The Gentle Shepherd. From 1953 to 1956 he ran the Stratford (Ontario) Festival theatre, largely his own creation. In 1963 he became Artistic Director of the Minneapolis Theater, later the Guthrie Theater, contributing his own productions of Chekhov's Three Sisters and another modern-dress Hamlet to the first season. His productions there also included Henry V and Jonson's Volpone (1964), and Richard III and Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard (1965). Though no longer Director after 1966 he returned every year to direct until 1969. A creative artist who was not afraid to experiment, Guthrie was at his best in the handling of crowd scenes. He worked in many European countries, including Germany and Finland, and in Israel. In 1967 he returned to the Old Vic to direct the National Theatre company in Molière's Tartuffe.

Guthrie, Tyrone (1900–71), director and manager. The distinguished English director, long associated with the Old Vic, first came to America to direct Call It a Day (1936), later returning to stage a 1946 revival of He Who Gets Slapped. Thereafter, he moved back and forth between continents, offering New York his stagings of The Matchmaker (1955), Tamburlaine the Great (1956), Candide (1956), The Makropoulos Secret (1957), The Tenth Man (1959), Gideon (1961), and Dinner at Eight (1966). He was largely responsible for the creation of the Shakespearean Festival Theatre in Stratford, Ontario, in 1953 and the Guthrie Theatre and Guthrie Theatre Foundation in Minneapolis in 1963. Guthrie was at his best in bringing to life Elizabethan, especially Shakespearean, plays, but he displayed his fine sense of pacing, tension, and understanding in productions of many modern works. He also wrote a number of books, including Theatre Prospect (1932), A New Theatre (1964), and In Various Directions (1965). Autobiography: A Life in the Theatre, 1959.

Sir Tyrone Guthrie 1900–1971, English stage director, playwright, and writer. Guthrie directed the Scottish National Players (1926–28), the Festival Theatre, Cambridge (1929–30), and the Old Vic–Sadler's Wells Company. From 1953 to 1957, he was artistic director of the Shakespearean Festival in Stratford, Ontario, which he helped found. There he developed the thrust or open stage. Knighted in 1961, Guthrie was noted for his innovative and energetic approach to the classical theater. He was among the first to write plays for radio.

Bibliography: See his A Life in the Theatre (1959), In Various Directions (1965), and Tyrone Guthrie on Acting (1971); biography by J. Forsyth (1976); study by A. Rossi (1977).