Granville Barker A Secret Life

Granville Barker on Theatre brings together some of the most important critical theatrical writings of Harley Granville Barker, a major figure of 20th-century British theatre. Known as a pioneer of the National Theatre and Repertory Movement, and remembered mainly for his Prefaces to Shakespeare, from the 1900s to his death in the 1940s Granville Barker commented enthusiastically in newspaper items, introductions to plays, articles, essays, articles, and published lectures on a range of topics: the nature of theatre as an art form and as a social medium, the need for ensemble playing in a repertory system, the relationship between the three chief constituents of theatre – the actor, the playwright and the audience. Granville Barker on Theatre makes available again these writings in which Barker dissects the state of theatre as he saw it, with coruscating critiques of the commercial system, the long run and censorship, the vitality of theatre outside Britain, and what he saw as the welcome renaissance of theatre in non-professional groups liberated from the profit motive. These writings show a master practitioner concerned with, above all, promoting a new type of drama; vital not only for its own sake but for the sake of the health of society at large.

The first comprehensive study of Barker's critical and practical work on Shakespeare, setting it in the context of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Shakespearean production. Illustrated.

Harley Granville Barker was the most brilliant British director of the first quarter of the twentieth century. His best known plays, including Waste (banned by the Lord Chamberlain), were written as contributions to his Company's repertoire of provocative modern drama for a national theatre. In The Voysey Inheritance, a young man deals with the discovery that the inheritence due to him has been mismanaged by his own parents; Waste tells the story of a young man's whose life has been thrown away; The Secret Life is a portrait of spendthrift, indolent Edwardian aristocracy; Rococo is a one-act farce set in a vicarage and Vote by Ballot shows the teething troubles of mass democracy. This is a companion to Harley Granville Plays Two, which contains The Marrying of Ann Leete; The Madras House; His Majesty and Farewell to the Theatre.

Harley Granville Barker, the most influential theatre-maker of his time, finds himself adrift in America during the Great War. Estranged from the theatre, and with his spirit almost broken by an acrimonious divorce, he seeks refuge in the relative obscurity of a quiet, backwater, Williamstown, Massachusetts. He finds comfort in the congeniality of his fellow refugees and in the courtesy of strangers - and gradually begins to regain his faith in humanity and his belief in the central role of Theatre in the civilised community.

All four figures in this volume have been canonized as central to 'stage-centred' Shakespearean scholarship and stage practice. From William Poel's reproductions of early modern stages in the late nineteenth century to Sam Wanamaker's reconstruction of the Globe on London's South Bank, they all viewed Shakespeare's plays as being enmeshed in the social and historical dynamics of theatremaking and theatregoing. The volume considers how their attempts to recapture early modern performance conditions can be considered progressive.