CO-OPERATIVE PLAY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 34, 10 February 1937, Page 13

CO-OPERATIVE PLAY.

LONDON THEATRE SUCCESS. ~ i HEAVY LOSS TO PROFIT. LONDON. A production owned 'by its cast—given to tlu" players by the manager because it wars losing money—has set a record for the Whitehall Theatre here of 342 performances and is still going strong. Every member of the cast, including understudies, has received full salary throughout the run and a reserve fund amounting to the full pay roll for four weeks has been accumulated.

Four weeks after its opening last November, St. John Ervine's "Anthony and Anna" was losing money at the rate of £150 a week and was to be closed. Although members of the cast offered to work for half pay, J. P. Mitchellhill, the manager, said it could not be done. When they offered to work for nothing until the play made money, Mitchelhill declined, but said: "I'll give you the play." ' The actora' accepted. Contracts were cancelled and they drafted a. charter for co-operative ownership. . Mitchelhill agreed to manage the play without salary.. "It has worked out extraordinarily ■well," Harold Warrender, a member of the cast, said recently. "Almost from the start of the experiment business picked up. For most of the nine months the theatre has taken in anything from £700 to £1400 a week, though occasionally business has gone down. "We dividend the surplus after paying the author's royalties. It' was part of our charter that any member might leave if for two successive weeks the takings were not enough to pay half salary. "Actually the takings have been such that we have not only received the equivalent oi our full salaries from the beginning, but we have an additional Iritty' of four weeks' extra salary—a profit of nearly 10 per cent."