There is a certain kind of person needed to get any kind of theatrical event up and running, and keep it boiling until it succeeds; or if it dies bury it with some pomp and circumstance. I believe those people must appear to be self-centred, determined, of a high profile – no shrinking violets allowed – and almost completely impervious to criticism – at least on the surface – with an ability to retaliate to such criticism in lofty, spectacular silence.

Stratford-upon-Avon certainly has a few today who fit that bill – many, many more in the past – and there are probably just as many in Vancouver, New York, London, Paris, or anywhere else that considers theatre essential.

Charles Edward Flower was that kind of person, as were the actor/managers Edward Compton, and Barry Sullivan, who produced the very first show, Much Ado About Nothing, at the original Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1879. In the thirty odd years, from the 1880s to 1919, Frank Benson became so high profile, and lofty, and spectacular at Stratford that the theatre itself could easily have been re-named ‘The Benson’. Peter Hall did the same in the 1960s, but found it very hard not to verbally retaliate, making an army of enemies in the process.

When the first Shakespeare Memorial Theatre opened for business in Stratford on 23rd April 1879 it did so to a steady, soaking rain. Flags and bunting hung lifeless and drenched around the streets. Most of the locals were rather taken aback by, but nonetheless proud of, the new red brick palace of drama standing like Dracula’s Castle on the river’s edge. They talked about it endlessly in the newly extended department store of J.C. Smith & Sons , or when drinking in one of the many public houses in the town. What they also did was help raise the cash required – £20,000 – to build the theatre. Less than £1,000 came from outside of the town.

Since1746, when the very first production of a Shakespeare play, Othello, was performed in the Town Hall (all of Shakespeare’s plays had been banned in the town before then) theatre was an important part of Stratford citizens lives. There had been a small theatre-cum-dancehall, called The Royal Shakespeare Rooms, operating in what had been the back garden of Shakespeare’s house, since 1827 – funded and built by the Shakespeare Club – which, by the time of the building of the Tercentenary Theatre in 1864, was unsafe and no longer used. As a result all plays were performed – as most Stratford groups do now – in a variety of church halls, and the function rooms of hotels and pubs. But by 1879 the citizens of Stratford at last had a large, purpose built theatre to match any in the world, and one that could perhaps make them the envy of the theatrical world.

It was a worthy aim and certainly made them the envy of the London theatrical world, envy that resulted in a storm of pompous criticism from a good deal of the London press. One example comes from ‘The Theatre’, which wrote:

“The mistake of the Stratford Memorial Theatre has lain in striving to give national importance and significance to a purely local undertaking. It is well, no doubt, that a town of 10,000 inhabitants should have a theatre, though little can be said for its love of the drama when it has been content to remain so long without one. But it is not well that subscriptions should have been asked all over the country for a memorial of Shakespeare which means nothing except to the inhabitants of Stratford-upon-Avon and its neighbourhood. A new theatre erected by national subscription in the intellectual centre of the country [ London] and devoted to the higher development of the national drama might have signified much. Every Englishman of education is attracted more or less to London, and the tendency of the time is ever toward centralisation in art, in literature, and in commerce. A new theatre in a small country town signifies nothing at all except for those who would be attracted by the typical ‘inaugural festival’ arranged at Stratford for the 23rd April 1879.”

The unknown writer of the article continued in the same vein for several more paragraphs, then wrote:

“Can it be imagined that the poet who sought in London the sphere for his intellectual life stands in need of a ‘memorial’ which takes the shape of an addition to the list of petty provincial theatres? Should not his name have been associated rather with the advance of the art to which he was devoted than with the insignificant interests of the town which chanced to give him birth?”

I feel that within this piece of geographically self-centred, and self-important prose lies the very foundation, the very ethos, from which the British Labour Government of 1945 may have decided – and for the very best of reasons as they perceived them – to create the Arts Council in the first place, and by so doing, in their own rather pompous, self-centred, and centralised way ‘open up’ theatre – forgetting that the actions of Charles Edward Flower and others had already done that – to a much wider public.