PROGRAMME DETAILS FOR THE 188TH SEASON 2011/2012

TUESDAY 10 JANUARY 2012
DR CLAIRE COCHRANE

Senior Lecturer in Drama and Performance at Worcester University

Dr Claire Cochrane both teaches and directs Shakespeare and other early modern drama. Her publications include Shakespeare and the Birmingham Repertory Theatre 1913-1929 (Society for Theatre Research, 1993) and Birmingham Rep: A City's Theatre 1962-2002 (Sir Barry Jackson Trust, 2003). Her new book Twentieth Century British Theatre Industry, Art and Empire will be published by Cambridge University Press in November.

Shakespeare in Modern Times: Birmingham Rep and the Shock of the New

The term 'repertory' as applied to a model of theatre that produces an eclectic selection of plays for its audiences has acquired a familiar, rather staid connotation in the hundred or so years since it was first introduced. At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, it represented all that was radical, high-minded and, above all, new about the work campaigning theatre artists such as Harley Granville Barker, George Bernard Shaw, William Poel and Edward Gordon Craig wanted to promote. As such it was heavily influenced by European innovation, defiantly modernist and certainly capable of delivering shocks to traditional assumptions about what made effective theatre. The 'new' drama and the 'new' stagecraft helped create a 'new' Shakespeare. The Birmingham Repertory Theatre, opened by its founder Barry Jackson in 1913, maintained what was arguably a more consistently radical approach to Shakespeare's plays than could be seen anywhere else in the UK over the next two decades delivering the 'shock of the new' to frequently resistant audiences. This talk will explore the origins of the aesthetic principles which informed Birmingham Rep's approach to Shakespeare up until 1929 and discuss the impact of the most significant productions.

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