In the programme I am described as a theatre architect. I am not an architect but a theatre design consultant – one of a small team in London which assist architects in Britain and in many other countries – for the design and equipping of theatres. All of our group are practical men of the theatre. I mention this because my training is not architectural but theatrical experience – for twelve years a director of a touring drama company with no theatres of its own but which visited over a hundred theatres in twenty countries. As a result my approach to the design of old and new theatres is empirical. I have also changed my title. It is now: Old and New: the rejection of the fan-shaped auditorium and the reinstatement of the courtyard form’.

The theory of literature expounded by Rene Wellek and Austin Warren in 1942 embraces, if somewhat gingerly, the drama. The authors acknowledge – in the apparent afterthought of an endnote – that ‘the whole tendency of dramaturgic doctrine is against any judgment of a play divorced from … its stagecraftness or theaterness’. But in the body of their work, they treat drama as one form of narrative fiction, at one point approaching and then retreating from any substantial consideration of the ‘distinction between play and story’.

One of the most consistently overlooked topics in Elizabethan theatre history is the internal organization of the acting companies. Modern scholarship has considerably enlarged our knowledge of the public and private playhouses, and of certain aspects of acting and staging, but we remain woefully ignorant of the way in which the actors went about the actual business of producing their plays. Our ignorance in these matters is the more surprising in that a substantial amount of primary evidence relating to production management and finance has long been known to exist in the so-called ‘diary’ and papers of Philip Henslowe and Edward Alleyn. Whereas the relatively less accessible material relating to the theatres has been subjected to increasingly sophisticated analysis by various commentators in this century, Henslowe's diary remains a curiously neglected document.

In October, 1774, the Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, passed a resolution designed to ‘discountenance and discourage every species of extravagance and dissipation’, including the ‘exhibition of shews, plays, and other expensive diversions and entertainments’. The Revolution would begin within six months, and Congress was clearly attempting to prepare Americans for a period of austerity. But if Congress intended to eliminate all theatrical activities for the duration of the hostilities, it could not have failed more completely. Indeed, the American Revolution saw more theatrical activity on American soil than had ever taken place there before. British military officers – who brought with them a strong theatre-going tradition – sponsored lavish performances of plays in New York, Philadelphia, and elsewhere between 1775 and 1783. In turn, the remarkable number of British theatrical productions stimulated certain American military officials to countenance performances given by American officers for audiences of soldiers and civilians. This may have been illegal, but it boosted morale and it was intended to demonstrate that Americans could compete with the British on any level, including the theatrical.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, but especially from the late seventies onwards, several internationally renowned actors or companies presented their Shakespeare productions in the main cities of Flanders. Undoubtedly, they provided an important impetus to the creation of a Shakespeare tradition in Flemish cultural life. In the present article I wish to draw attention to the successful performances which the greatest Italian interpreters of Shakespeare, Ernesto Rossi and Tommaso Salvini, gave in Flanders and which hitherto have been left unnoticed.

The eight plays written by Lord Byron between 1816 and 1822 constitute one of the major areas of his development as an important literary figure. Yet, paradoxically, these works have been relatively neglected by twentieth century criticism. Byron may be said to be one of the best documented poets biographically and critically. As a playwright, however, no comprehensive and objective study of him has been published. A great deal of the criticism of Byron's plays is to be found in magazine articles and short, often highly prejudiced, chapters in longer works devoted to theatre history. The result of this spasmodic and patchy criticism has been confusion and contradiction. One question which confronts any critic of the plays is whether Byron intended these works for stage representation or whether he saw them as ‘closet dramas’, intended for the solitary reader only. Byron's own attitude was ambiguous. Of his second published play, Marino Faliero, he wrote to Murray, his publisher, in apparently unequivocal terms:

I have never written but for the solitary reader, and require no experiments for applause beyond his silent approbation … I claim my right as an author to prevent what I have written from being turned into a stage play.

During the German occupation of France the theatre was a place where the Frenchman could, to some extent, rediscover his self-respect, a place where the man in the street could gather courage and the will to resist the invader in innumerable and often totally unexpected ways which often escaped the vigilance of the German censor. The records of the censor have disappeared, as the Germans destroyed the archives of the Propagandastaffel; nor are there any records in the French public archives of plays censored during the German occupation. What does exist, however, are the prompt copies used at the Comédie-Française during the war. A study of the censored passages reveals that it was often the very unlikely and seemingly trivial remarks that, for the reason that they aroused some sort of feeling of resistance in the audience, the occupiers felt had to be cut out. Marcel Thiébaut, commenting on audience reaction during the war, wrote:

… on retourna au théâtre … Ce fut d'abord pour y guetter les moindres allusions qui, d'un coup, auraient rendu toute la salle hostile ou complice. On épiait les sous-entendus.

When Basil Dean died in 1978 at the age of ninety, his death broke a link, though not the last, with one of the most important stage productions of the 1920s. The history of that performance and of the play itself is a complex one; it tells us a great deal about the problems of matching poetry to the modern theatre. For among Dean's major achievements was the production of Hassan.

Because the York Corpus Christi cycle drew so much of its dramatic power from the life of the medieval community, it presents formidable problems to modern producers. One obvious difficulty stems from the anachronistic dramatization of scriptural history. How can one convey to a twentieth-century audience the contemporaneity of a play in which Pilate holds a Parliament with his ‘bishops’ and Christ enters Jerusalem like a king passing in royal procession through the gates of a medieval walled city? The forty-seven separate pageants in which the York cycle treats the story of man from the Creation to the Last Judgment were mounted by the craft guilds of the city under the supervision of the municipal authorities. By what process are these pageants to be produced today without the social and economic structure of the towns that gave to cycle plays the character of a truly civic drama? Finally, what performing style is to be used by modern actors? Even if the modern productions were to employ a historically accurate style (supposing that one could be reconstructed from surviving evidence), this style would only very partially convey to a modern audience the devotional, didactic, and ceremonial purposes of the medieval cycle.

With the opening in the year 1908 of the Bat theatre (Letuchaya Mysh') in Moscow and the Crooked Mirror (Krivoe Zerkalo) in St Petersburg, intimate theatres of ‘small forms’ made their first commercial appearance in Russia. Inspired in part by the cabaret theatres and caféschantants of Paris, Berlin and other Western capitals, these new theatrical undertakings soon established themselves as an alternative to the regular dramatic and operatic theatres. Beginning as tiny chamber theatres intended primarily for the bourgeois intelligentsia, the Crooked Mirror, and to a lesser extent the Bat, developed into genuine aesthetic theatres of parodox and wit. The Crooked Mirror in particular sought to entertain by satirizing and parodying stale conventions and stultifying routine prevalent in society and in the arts. The repertoires of these theatres consisted entirely of miniature forms – a combination of one-act plays and separate variety numbers with music and dancing. One important innovation to which both theatres contributed was the introduction to the Russian stage of the figure of the ‘conférencier’ or compère who, like his French predecessors, had the task of linking the various items of an evening's programme by means of witty, topical dialogue, innuendo and spontaneous asides. Nikita Baliev, the founder of the Bat, made a speciality of this.

By far the most riveting play recently on view in an otherwise rather lacklustre British theatrical season has been the Royal Shakespeare Company's Macbeth. Trevor Nunn's production opened originally in Stratford at the RSC's tiny, experimental The Other Place in the summer of 1976, and transferred a year later to the company's equivalent London theatre: The Warehouse, a small, recently renovated auditorium in Co vent Garden. The Warehouse is aptly named: a high-ceilinged space, with three rows of seats on two levels surrounding the playing area on three sides, it has probably the worst sight lines of any theatre in London. But what it lacks in architectural excellence The Warehouse gains in intimacy (seating capacity: 190). With practically no physical distance separating actors and audience, and played straight through without risk of the kind of emotional distance provided by an intermission, the RSC production creates the most intense and powerful Macbeth I have ever seen.

The aims and ambitions of this article are initially fairly limited. I want to examine a series of events which occurred at the Comédie-Française in April and May of 1765, leading to a complete disruption of normal performances at the theatre, to the imprisonment of most of the company's leading actors, and to the temporary withdrawal from performance of what might otherwise have been eighteenth-century France's biggest ‘box-office hit’, Le Siège de Calais, a patriotic tragedy by Pierre-Laurent Buirette de Belloy. In themselves these events, sometimes known as l'affaire Dubois after the actor most directly involved in them, are little more than a bizarre and sporadically scurrilous footnote to the theatrical history of France in the eighteenth century. But the more one examines them, the more they illuminate certain rather murky areas of literary and social history, two areas in particular: firstly, the social relations of the acting profession at a time when it was, despite considerable pressure from numerous sources, still barred en bloc from the sacraments of the Catholic church; and secondly, the degree of autonomy which could be said to have existed for a company which was, legally, a kind of workers' co-operative but which, at any rate at that stage, operated within a rather ill-defined administrative limbo (it was simultaneously autonomous and totally subject to noble whim). The strike which brought about the cancellation of performances of Le siège de Calais in April 1765 is, then, a specific and in no way typical event, but one which draws together a number of historical strands – literary, theatrical, economic, moral and political – in a particularly interesting way. I want, in the course of this article, to deal with two questions – questions to which I do not really feel able to give definitive answers but which may, when examined, cast doubt upon one or two familiar preconceptions about the nature of the eighteenth-century theatre as a profession, and at the same time open up certain areas of enquiry with regard to the theatre as a material reality rather than a predominantly literary or artistic form. The questions are in themselves quite simple: why did the sociétaires of the Comédie-Française refuse, on Monday, 15th April 1765, to perform a play which, given its enormous success earlier in the year, it was very much in their economic interests to present? And why did the resulting situation become so irreducible that, far from the usual discreet pressures being brought to bear on the relevant authorities to resolve the dispute, it led to the imprisonment of three of the most popular ‘stars’ of the century, and to an effective lockout lasting for almost a month?