In his analysis of the developing importance of professional expertise and the emergence of a recognised professional class in twentieth-century British society, Harold Perkin states that ‘the professional society is a logical continuation of industrial society’. The rapid growth in the number of actors seeking employment in the expanding theatre industry raised important questions about professional status: how it was to be achieved, developed, protected and, indeed, classified socially. While these were the concerns that most obviously preoccupied actors at the beginning of the century, the gathering momentum of nationalist movements outside England, which, if anything, was intensified by economic and industrial turbulence, had implications for attempts to enable a more demographically equitable distribution of professional opportunity.

Professional organisation

The trend towards the concentration of corporate resources in the late Victorian industrial economy, which, as we have seen, fed directly into theatre organisation, stimulated a parallel growth in trade unions and professional associations. For actors collective organisation was both an acknowledgement of increased confidence in their status in society and a strategy to ensure reasonable working conditions and protection against exploitation. But at a time of increasing industrial unrest and the forging of new political formations, any one organisation tasked with representing the whole profession had to accommodate different political persuasions and new ideas about the function of theatre in society.