ABSTRACT
Modernism in the British theatre began strangely. It went back to Shakespeare. Exasperated by the florid Victorian Romanticism of Henry Irving and Beerbohm Tree, a young ascetic purist, William Poel, began a mission to reform the presentation of Shakespeare. Poel’s productions were always experiments, as he tried to unite – or re-unite – literary scholarship and creative theatre. Poel’s most obvious successor was his near contemporary, Frank Benson, whose career began when as an undergraduate he staged Aeschylus’s Agamemnon in the original Greek in Balliol College, Oxford, under the eye of the formidable Benjamin Jowett, and then in St George’s Hall, London, in 1880. Between 1903 and 1910, Nugent Monck was Poel’s usual stage manager and choirmaster. In 1905 he founded the English Drama Society which staged a variety of plays, including mediaeval mysteries and plays by Ibsen and Yeats, which led to his employment at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin.
