Happy Birthday Tyrone Guthrie
Anglo-Irish director Tyrone Guthrie was born 123 years ago today. This blog is based on the entry I wrote for him in the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Theatre Directors (edited by Maria M. Delgado and Simon Williams).
Tyrone Guthrie
The director Tyrone Guthrie (1900-1971) was born to an upper middle-class Anglo-Scots-Irish family and educated at Wellington College and St John’s College, Oxford. He began his career as an actor in the Oxford University Dramatic Society, before moving swiftly to become producer at the Old Vic under Lilian Baylis in 1933. Thereafter, his directing engagements list the highest profile Anglophone companies of the mid-twentieth century from the West End to the RSC and Edinburgh Festival to Broadway, as well as the North American theatres he was instrumental in creating: the Stratford Festival in Ontario and the Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis. Guthrie also worked with many of the greatest actors of this period. His productions typically framed virtuoso acting performances and combined the skilled, choreographic management of large crowds with a strongly rhythmic approach to staging and an eye for realistic detail and showmanship.
Early in his career, Guthrie set out what he saw as the urgency of facing the existential challenges posed to the theatre by other forms of entertainment: ‘those who wish for the continuance of a serious theatre will be obliged to face the necessity for organisation’, he wrote (Theatre Prospect, p. 24). He spent much of his career trying to create lasting theatre organisations with policies that would enable each to ‘create its own public’ (A New Theatre, p. 26), first as Administrator of the Old Vic from Baylis’s death in 1937 until 1944, where he developed a model for the management and repertory of a publicly funded theatre that remains influential in the UK to this day. After the war, he turned his attention to north America with where he established the Stratford Festival in Ontario in 1953 and the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in 1963. Although by no means similar in their contexts, all three of these organisations were shaped by Guthrie’s contradictory blend of innovation and conservatism. All centred on Shakespeare, but also used his plays as raw material for productions that were marked by the open architecture of the early modern stage, the bold plasticity of nineteenth century melodrama, and the realistic detail and epic dynamism of the cinema. This policy underpinned productions as different as Olivier’s athletic Hamlet (1936), the realistic, modern dress version starring Alec Guinness (1938) that followed two years later, the melodramatic quasi-Elizabethan Richard III starring Guinness that inaugurated the Stratford Festival in 1953, and the 1963 Hamlet, starring the 35 year-old George Grizzard, that opened the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.
In spite of Guthrie’s typically pragmatic approach to running theatres that were sustained to some degree by subsidy or patronage, his career was not marked by conspicuous success in the commercial theatre. His 1964 book, A New Theatre, describes Broadway as a disastrous environment for theatre, with limited space and high costs making staging productions punitively difficult and limiting access to the theatre to devotees and the very wealthy. Guthrie had learned this first-hand, when his 1956 staging of Candide collapsed on Broadway, but his resistance to commercial theatre was also strategic and principled. He could not see how a theatre without subsidy would secure the cultural status of live performance in the long term, the end to which his efforts were consistently directed. That aim underpinned not only those organisations he led, but his limited work in other contexts. These included opera – he directed notable productions of Carmen at Sadler’s Wells (1949) and the Metropolitan Opera, New York (1952) - and the post-war international theatre festival circuit – Guthrie’s 1948 staging of the 16th century morality play Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estates was the stand-out success of the second Edinburgh Festival. His commitment to the theatre as an art form that required active conservation led to a knighthood in 1961 and manifested itself in the problematically missionary spirit with which he brought theatre to north America. That commitment is sustained today in the work of numerous artistic directors of prominent theatres, whose roles were substantially shaped by Guthrie’s work, but also in his former house, now the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig, where artists are offered residencies to develop their practice.
