UNIVERSITY EXPERIMENT

Press, Volume C, Issue 29474, 28 March 1961, Page 11

UNIVERSITY EXPERIMENT

Producer As Professor

[Reprinted From "The Times”] Ever since the infiltration of Granville Barker’s prefaces to Shakespeare the notion has been gaining ground that experience of staging plays need not disbar a man from academic status. Indeed a growing minority of scholars inclines to distrust research based on the text alone and to favour the recognition of drama as a subject in the university curriculum. In the United States, more often than not, it is accept I, and in England Bristol’s lead has been foil; wed by Manchester University, which now announces the appointment of Mr Hugh Hunt to its newly created professorial chair. Like Barker he has published prefaces to Shakespeare, but more significant is his record as a director of classical revivals. Now 49, Mr Hunt has ,t various times been in charge of the Maddermarket, the Abey, the Old Vic, and the Elizabethan Theatre Trust in Sydney. This means that he is likely to take the administration duties of the chair in his stride and have enough surplus energy to solve the problem, persistent in the United States, of striking a balance between academic integrity and the tendency of all such departments to become de facto schools of acting. Mr Hunt, as it happens, is the urbane type of Englishman more likely to be taken for a don than for a master of ceremonies involving the control of performing artists, implacable technicians and expensive machinery. Certainly his manner as a lecturer is the reverse of exhibitionist. It reminds one of a line in understatement shared with his elder brother, the soldier and mountaineer, just as it requires an effort to believe that he b-.s been a piomjr of the classics in Australia, ready to present Shakespeare in the outback with actors in jeans, or that he has made a searching first-hand stv-’y of theatres in the U.S.S.R. At Manchester the sometimes conflicting claims of academic and vocational approaches to the drama are to be tackled by providing for both. There will eventually be two separate courses, one leading to an honours degree, jointly with English or a foreign language, the other course amounting, says Mr Hunt, fo a school of acting which will give a diploma. Other universities which plan to set up drama departments will watch this experiment with urgent interest and a special eye to the balance obtainable between two such courses within the samq) department