ABSTRACT
Theatres have passed from the hands of one group of speculators to another, with rents ever mounting, and with conditions produced which have made the orderly production of plays difficult, and the construction of a great theatre tradition impossible. Playfair found the play in Barry Jackson's Repertory Theatre in Birmingham and so the piece makes a link between two forward minds in the theatre of the time. The main tendencies in the regular theatre in the first decade after the war of 1914-18 can be defined with some clarity. As has already been noted many of the London theatres were occupied by farce and spectacle of a definitely 'commercial' type, proclaiming aloud that they would make no demands on the intelligence of the audiences. The theatre was in a stronger position in 1945 when the war ended than it had been in 1939.
