Sensational with the Greeks and Daring with Shakespeare but Not So Sure about Shaw: Performance of George Bernard Shaw at Terence Gray's Festival Theatre, Cambridge, England, 1926-1935

{ 171 } \ Sensational with the Greeks and Daring with Shakespeare but Not So Sure about Shaw Performance of George Bernard Shaw at Terence Gray’s Festival Theatre, Cambridge, England, 1926–1935 —PAUL CORNWELL In the Art of the Theatre . . . the spoken word is but one element among others, of which the most important are Movement (dancing, expression by gesture, crowd-movement), Lighting (colour, expression by atmosphere, scenic and decorative projection), Painting (pictorial and decorative . . . ), Architecture (form, emotional expression . . . ), Sculpture (expression . . . through masks and lay figures), Sound (music . . . natural and artificial noise), and the as yet barely attempted use of the sense of Smell. TERENCE GRAY, “The Art Theatre Movement” (1928) To open with the Oresteia was a magnificent gesture—a kind of nailing of the colours to the mast. Artistically, there can be no two minds about its success, and the sustained applause which lasted for more than five minutes after the curtain had been drawn suggests that its success is not only artistic . . . The lighting and scenic effects were amazing. The use of the cyclorama . . . moved the audience to a spontaneous round of applause. . . . It is certain that no scenic effects approaching it have ever been seen in Cambridge before. J. E. SEWELL (1926) Probably the best of the experiments, not at all typical of the hundred plays produced by the most representative of Gray’s ideals, was the production earlier this year of Henry VIII. . . . The costume and facial make-up were of playing cards; characters like Norfolk, Abergavenny . . . were treated as unimportant puppets, { 172 } PAUL CORNWELL were represented by card-board models, and their lines spoken from the side of the stage; all the court entrances were danced. . . . The scene in the palace yard and the interruptions by messengers or rabble were played throughout in the auditorium. . . . The production was the most completely stylized of any I have seen. ALISTAIR COOKE, “Ten Seasons of Dramatic Experiment” (1931) Terence Gray’s dedication to the new “Art of the Theatre,” as promoted by Gordon Craig in the early part of the twentieth century, can be traced back to Gray’s own early books, all published by Heffer of Cambridge: Hatshepsut, A Pageant of Old Egypt, A History in Dramatic Form (1920); And in a Tomb Were Found, Plays and Portraits of Old Egypt (1923); Cuchulainn, An Epic Drama of the Gael (1925) (which included photographs of Gray’s models of theatre sets in his new modernist style); and Dance-Drama: Experiments in the Art of the Theatre (1926). There it is: pageants, history in dramatic form, plays of ancient Egypt, Irish epics, and modernist settings. In Dance-Drama Gray had three chapters with the heading “The Tyranny of Words” and further chapters on “Dancing”and“Environment”(including the use of luminous screens designed by Craig). This was sufficient to indicate the direction Gray wished to take when he opened his own theatre in Cambridge, not many weeks after DanceDrama was in the bookshops. Interestingly, Thomas MacGreevy, the reviewer of Dance-Drama in the Times Literary Supplement of April 8, 1926, noted the apparent influence of George Bernard Shaw on Terence Gray’s style of writing. In Dance-Drama, Gray wrote:“Now the revived art of the theatre, evolved theoretically by Englishmen such as Gordon Craig, and both evolved and put in to practice on the Continent by innumerable artists of the theatre, has developed rapidly, and appears to be approaching a renaissance, but in its development it has found that it is necessary fundamentally to alter the form of the stage.”1 Thus it was that workers were soon active restructuring the stage area of an old Regency theatre of 1814 that had been built on Newmarket Road on the outskirts of the town of Cambridge. When the theatre eventually opened, Gray felt the necessity to provide a motor bus to get his audience there from the colleges across the town, although today the site (now used as a Buddhist Center) is considered to be located in the city center. By demolishing the stage boxes, the old proscenium opening was extended so that the stage became as wide as the theatre, with steps leading down into the audience. Part of...