Happy Birthday Harley Granville Barker
This post was scheduled for 25 November, but that’s a strike day, so I’m wishing Harley Granville Barker a happy birthday two days early.
The English theatrical polymath Harley Granville Barker was born 135 years ago, on 25 November 1877, in London. This is based on the entry I wrote for him in the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Theatre Directors (edited by Maria M. Delgado and Simon Williams).
Harley Granville Barker with a cat photographed by E.O. Hoppé
Best known as an Edwardian playwright, an advocate for a British National Theatre and a critic, whose Prefaces to Shakespeare remain in print, Barker has a claim to be an English Stanislavsky or Copeau: a theatrical polymath whose ideas fundamentally reshaped theatre in the twentieth century. He began his professional career as an actor aged 15 and found success with William Poel’s Elizabethan Stage Society and Ben Greet’s Shakespeare repertory company. He was an early member of the Stage Society, which organised private performances of new and experimental and British and European plays, some of which were banned by the Lord Chamberlain.
Barker’s directorial career began in 1903 with The Two Gentlemen of Verona at the Court Theatre (now the Royal Court), of which he took over the lease the following year, alongside business manager J.E. Vedrenne. For the next three years, Barker experimented with new ways of organizing productions, enabling him to stage 37 plays by 17 authors, including the first English productions of plays by Bernard Shaw, Chekhov, Ibsen, and Maeterlink, as well as his own work, new translations of Greek tragedies, and Shakespeare. These productions were marked by unusually skilled acting and respect for their writers’ vision. His most influential directorial work, however, came later, at the Savoy Theatre, where he staged Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, Twelfth Night and Midsummer Night’s Dream between 1912 and 1914. Their scenery and costumes broke decisively from Victorian illusionism, and they were acted on an open stage in a way that was dynamic and revelatory.
At this time, Barker also travelled internationally, directing in New York and meeting with and watching productions by both Stanislavsky and Copeau. As a result, he became convinced that theatre was a collaborative art centred on the performer, who acquired skills through training. He deprecated the traditionalism and commercialism of ‘the modern professional stage’ that ‘has neither the time nor resource’ for ‘recruits deeply studied in the art of acting’ (The Exemplary Theatre, 39). Barker’s attempts to remedy this situation by establishing a permanent repertory theatre were, however, halted by WWI. During this time he divorced the actress Lillah McCarthy and married a wealthy American heiress, Helen Huntington.
There is a standard narrative that a combination of Barker’s despair at the philistinism of the theatre and his new wife’s distaste for the profession led him to abandon his theatrical career at its height, retiring to write in comfortable seclusion. The truth, however, is more complex. In fact he remained extremely active after the war, writing both critical works and new plays, continuing to direct, and supervising productions by other directors. He chaired the British Drama League, undertook extensive lecture tours, and campaigned for a National Theatre. After 1924, these activities declined, possibly because he was suffering from consumption. He remained, nonetheless, active behind the scenes, notably leading rehearsals for John Gielgud’s 1940 King Lear (Old Vic), and thus passing on to a new generation of actors the practical benefits of his experience and the ideal of theatrical artistry that he had long advocated. Once again, however, war intervened, and Barker fled occupied Paris for Spain and then the US, where he lectured at Harvard University, before returning to Paris, where he died in 1946.
