“All the theatres then were either frankly commercial like the Adelphi, or commercial in disguise, and without exception were under the management of men chiefly in those days actor managers. Naturally the plays that were offered to them made the part the manager would play the chief figure in the scene.” Elizabeth Robins, 'Odd Bits' / “We had begun by talking about going into Management as we might have talked about going to the moon.” Elizabeth Robins, 'Whither and How' / These are the later reflections of Elizabeth Robins who, along with her fellow actress Marion Lea, went into joint management in order to put on the first English production of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler at the Vaudeville Theatre in London in April 1891. Her memories of working within the actor-manager system provide a useful starting point, highlighting as they do the key challenges and rewards for the actress who took on this additional role. Robins makes it clear that the dominant structures, within a theatre world that was resolutely commercial, were controlled by men, and she stresses their effects on the kind of theatre produced: writers had to offer plays with a star part for the actor-manager which meant in turn that 'men who wrote plays for women had long been seeing that they simply had little or no chance of being acted'. Robins's own experiences in attempting to persuade actor-managers to stage Hedda Gabler had made this only too clear to her. In her talk on 'Ibsen and the Actress' given to the Royal Society of Arts in 1928 and published later the same year, she describes the process of going to see the managers to try to persuade them that 'their indifference and their loathing was equally mistaken'.