This chapter provides a partner to Vivien Gardners examination of theatre-going in Chapter 4. It examines the social and economic context of wartime theatre production, considering the ways in which the conflict impacted on theatre and shaped what could and could not be performed. It covers the practicalities of theatre-making during the war considering the enlistment of actors, touring patterns, the repertory system, censorship, military tribunals, and air raids. It positions the war as a period of change, whether in terms of the growth of cinema, the increasing role of women, changing sexual mores, or changing audiences. It shows how managers responded to this change in order to keep their businesses afloat, for example with the introduction of twice-nightly performances. The chapter also emphasises the importance of understanding the value of ‘feel-good’ entertainment, and shows how the interweaving of ‘new drama’ and multi-mode, popular entertainment on the touring circuits was designed to satisfy audience demand. In highlighting the ways in which the constraints of war determined both the format and content of theatrical production this chapter provides an important framework through which to read subsequent chapters.

Stoppard arrived in England as an eight-year-old child and soon came to identify with his adopted country, although after his initial success as a playwright this identification was largely with the arts establishment and the metropolitan cultural elite.

In his introduction to the not-for-profit sector published in 2005, Helmut K. Anheier describes it as ‘a set of organizations and activities next [my emphasis] to the institutional complexes of government, state, or public sector on the one hand, and the forprofit or business sector on the other’. The not-for-profit ‘third sector’ is effectively positioned in the middle and in its mode of operation encounters the reality that there are no clearly defined sectorial boundaries and that distinctions are quite blurred. ‘Organisations’, Anheier suggests, ‘“migrate” from one sector to another.’ In the era of public subsidy most theatre practitioners would recognise the necessity for day-to-day ‘migration’ as they attempt to balance state and civic funding with income derived from other business strategies. Whatever the proponents of theatre as a weapon of social betterment might have argued, the arts never found a secure niche within the public sector. In any case, after 1979, when the Conservative Party led by Margaret Thatcher embarked on eighteen years of government, the public sector itself had to adjust to the growing insistence on the role of the market even in the basic provision of health care and education.

While it is broadly accepted, however, as the economist Michael J. Oliver has confirmed, that the way the political landscape changed during this period had ‘profound long-term effects on the economy and society of the UK’, the immediate tangible results in terms of public-sector funding were far less obviously ideologically determined than popular historical accounts of the period have claimed. As Oliver has pointed out, even within the Conservative Party, there were groups who remained ‘implacably opposed’ to the more extreme features of the dominant market-driven microeconomic policy. Countervailing principles remained in place to disrupt and subvert at every level. Individual political affiliation within a quango, such as the Arts Council of Great Britain, was not necessarily an automatic signifier of pragmatic decision-making. This in turn impacted on the extent to which state intervention and assistance could be reined back. As I have argued throughout this book, theatre as industrial practice is positioned within a very complex economic nexus. Even at its most idealised it cannot remain isolated from the way economic factors inhibit, for example, the circulation and costs of raw materials, and, indeed, other commodities including people. Legislative change, especially in fiscal policies and industrial relations, introduces structural change into the workplace – and in building-based theatre that can mean several different categories of professional and craft skill – and inevitably influences both directly and indirectly patterns of audience composition.

Demographic change manifests itself in the way the conditions of life in communities change over time. It is experienced both physically and psychologically in movement across particular kinds of community boundaries, be it the imagined communities of specific ethnicities or communities created by socio-economic or political categories and structures. In her discussion of social formations of identity and the power relations which control them, the geographer Cindi Katz has stated that ‘all societies are relational in that they are produced through uneven social relations that create and maintain particular identifications and formations of difference’. ‘Under contemporary conditions,’ she claims, ‘the most formidable sources of power remain capitalist production, patriarchy and racism.’ All three impacted on the way the British theatre community divided and subdivided into different spatial locations and categories of cultural practice throughout the century. Where uneven social relations were renegotiated success or failure often depended on the actions of the ‘knowledge elite’, who both exercise and broker power extending far beyond the actual physical boundaries of where they are located.

In the case of social formations of class which I want to address in the first part of this chapter, I would wish to argue that the social mobility, which produced the phenomenon of the ‘new’ actor, was primarily enabled by opening up access to local spaces of metropolitan power during the 1950s and 60s. It was limited and it was gendered. Women did not achieve the same degree of mobility during this period. Where greater fluidity of access was subsequently achieved was through the medium of television. The spatial effects of this new medium of mass communication could more readily cross social categories. Although spatially controlled within the domestic space, it nevertheless permitted the visual representation of hitherto marginalised ‘other’ communities on a previously unimaginable scale.

In order to delineate the principle features of theatre across the British Isles at the start of the twentieth century, it is important to be aware of the effects of stratification. Evidence of cultural practice in the case of buildings, for example, is literally embedded in different layers in the landscape. The form and structure of each building, its relationship spatially and conceptually to other built structures, is the product of human agency and a particular moment in time and, indeed, the convergence of other, past and often disruptive moments. That built landscape comes at the end of another more complex process where the elements of physical stratification in the natural environment become the source of social and economic formations.

This book explores theatre practice as a component in a whole matrix of social and economic activity, and thus this chapter focuses first on how theatre functioned in a wider industrial context in 1900 and the origins of that context. Because theatre is peculiarly dependent on performative interactions in space and the relationship of diverse groups of human agents in those spaces, it is also necessary to consider not only the materiality of spatial relations, but also the consequences of abstract notions of space. Thus the specificities of social space become part of the topography as well as larger abstract or imagined spatial frameworks. Nation and empire can be physically delineated and measured – flags are flown and borders agreed or imposed – and there are physical, especially, demographic, consequences. But the psychological impact of what Henri Lefebvre conceptualises as ‘abstract space’ or the ‘dominant form of space’, which I will call ‘the space of power’, is of particular interest to the theatre historian as she records the way creative and expressive cultural ‘need’ has been mediated or restrained within a political framework.

Theatre at the beginning of the twentieth century flourished within a market economy predicated on a belief in the moral virtues of free enterprise and individuation. Theatre, especially building-based theatre, requires capital investment and sufficient working revenue in order to survive. If the primary function of theatre practitioners is to create and market a product of sufficient quality and/or popular appeal to make it financially self-sufficient, then clearly the law of the survival of the fittest seems entirely rational. The historian of the comparatively obscure Alexandra Theatre, opened in Birmingham in 1901 and run as an independent family business until 1968, dubbed the commercial imperative which shaped employees’ lives the ‘if-it’ principle: ‘what didn’t come in to the box-office couldn’t go out in the players’ pockets’. The overwhelming majority of professional theatre ventures operated on that basis until well into the 1950s.

If, however, a theatre is envisaged as a concrete embodiment of the cultural prestige of a nation which is expressed in terms of intellectual and artistic excellence and innovation, or if it functions as an exemplary instrument of social betterment and change, then achieving and maintaining a secure resource base, certainly in the prevailing political and economic climate of the early twentieth century, required a seismic shift in the national mentalité. Harley Granville Barker, who published The Exemplary Theatre in 1922 when he had pretty much given up active theatre practice, described his ideal theatre in evangelical terms. It would be like a chapel:

This passionate language, from a man who had earned his living in theatre since the age of fourteen, published with the critic William Archer a realistic costing of all the practical components of a national theatre project, and formed business partnerships with leading entrepreneurs such as J. E. Vedrenne and Charles Frohman in order to establish his ideal theatre, was not untypical. For those who worked for a theatre that prioritised art over commerce and were convinced that an intelligent, challenging dialogue with audiences could effect social change, the campaign was akin to a crusade.

This attempt to construct a topography of theatre in 2000 takes as its starting point the thoughts on space expressed by the geographer Nigel Thrift:

Coming after the socio-political theatrical experiments that were associated with the 1970s, the term ‘collective’ has a very particular resonance for theatre scholars, and, indeed, one aspect of the spatial-temporal outcomes discernible in 2000 is the means by which old-style collectives had evolved into something more sustainable. However, to delineate the features of the landscape as whole in 2000 it is now necessary to think of collectivity and connectivity in much broader terms.

For 1950 I used the image of the intersection of over lapping circles to show the spatial relationships formed by commercial, metropolitan theatre, theatre strategically promoted through the emerging state funding body, and a diffuse and mainly commercial regional theatre sector. For 2000 the most appropriate image might be theatre as an organism formed from interlocking cells or clusters of activity, each corresponding to a different embodied constituency of interest whether composed of audiences or participants. I would argue that this is certainly the best way to think about regional theatre, although the way in which power was exercised spatially, both materially and in the abstract from the metropolis, showed that the geo-economic model of the core–periphery relationship was still highly relevant. But there was no doubt despite the complexity of economic relationships across sectors, that public funding for the arts had physically transformed the built landscape, and moreover, enabled other models of theatre ‘settlement’ which were strategically connected.

If the built landscape in 1900 was the product of nations-wide industrial prosperity and imperial confidence, in 1950 the scars inflicted by wartime bombing and the legacy of industrial decay from the 1930s were still all too visible. To be sure additional constructed layers to the environment bore witness to the industrial initiatives and housing developments of the interwar years, and there were some new theatres, but the spatial evidence provided by the topographical concentration of new build showed the geographical and demographic consequences of economic and social inequality. Lack of investment and maintenance in the worst-affected areas had resulted in the dereliction of physical infrastructure and the loss of population to more prosperous parts of the country. Patterns of internal migration formed and reformed as circumstances changed, but the drift towards the Midlands and the South-East of England in search of new industries continued.

In Wales, for example, between 1939 and 1941, it appeared that the 1930s’ haemorrhage of the population had reversed as at least 200,000 immigrants arrived seeking a safe haven from the war. In the 1951 census, however, it was shown that 649,275 people born in Wales were then living in England and of those 190,722 were resident in the South-East. The Irish were still coming to Britain at the rate of 60,000 a year after 1945. While the creation of the Irish Free State in 1921 had meant that as a geopolitical construct Great Britain had physically shrunk, Eire’s economic dependence on British markets made, as R. F. Foster pointed out, ‘nonsense of Irish “sovereignty”’.

Looking back over the one-hundred-year segment of the twentieth century, what conclusions can be reached about continuity and change in British theatre? I suspect that in 1900 relatively few could have confidently predicted the colossal changes in mass creative communication soon to be wrought by the electronic media. It is thus in the arena of technological innovation that the new continuity was forged. Throughout the book I have examined the impact this had on the making of live theatre: on the diversifying of opportunity for actors and the evidence that regional and national differences could be more readily recognised and disseminated. At the same time the economics of cinema and, then, as a more durable presence, television, not only meant that live theatre was no longer the dominant form of popular entertainment, but the major disparities in revenue-generation capacity linked to the concentration of centres of production in or near London also contributed to the contraction of the human and financial resources available for more ambitious theatre projects across the UK. By 2000 the digital revolution was well under way in transforming the means by which performance could be virtually manipulated and transmitted. Artists who remained committed to the live interaction of actor and audience in the same physically shared spaces were squaring up to the threat of another major technological change. And yet theatre-makers were proving adept, as always, in absorbing and working with change.

At my own university in Worcester, the resident C&T Theatre Company, which as the small theatre-in-education company Collar and Tie had faced liquidation within a bleak educational and local authority environment, had transformed itself by using new technology to enhance the participatory experience of young people in schools. Funded by Arts Council England and the West Midlands Regional Arts Board, which had designated it a Key Regional Organisation, C&T also received European funding through the European Social Fund Objective 5B targeted at work in isolated rural areas. In 2000 further boosted by a capital Lottery grant of £83,000, the company was travelling around Herefordshire and Worcestershire with two Touring Digital Media Units. Both a successful SME and a small-scale example of the exemplary theatre operating at the grass-roots of the community, C&T was clearly in the vanguard of change, but with artistic and pedagogic principles which would have been very familiar to the rural touring initiatives of the 1920s.

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.