Ashley Dukes Predicts A Poet's Theatre, ‘Theatre Arts Monthly'

Dramatist, critic, and theatre manager, Ashley Dukes (1885–1959) first acted as Drama Critic for A.R. Orage on the ‘New Age’ in 1909, and later collected his essays in ‘Modern Dramatists’ (1911). In addition to writing a number of original plays including ‘The Man with a Load of Mischief’ (1924), he successfully adapted for the English stage much of the European theatre he loved, in particular plays by Toller, Bruckner, Kleist, and Wedekind. He opened the Mercury Theatre in 1933 as a workshop for poets’ drama and for his wife’s Ballet Rambert, and later staged T.S. Eliot’s ‘Murder in the Cathedral’ (1935) as well as ‘The Ascent of F6’. He was co-editor of the international ‘Theatre Arts Monthly’.