NATIONAL THEATRE

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 6, 7 July 1938, Page 11

NATIONAL THEATRE

BERNARD SHAW'S ADVOCACY

(From "The Post's" Representative.) LONDON. June 15. Mr. George Bernard Shaw is writing to the newspapers again. This time he has a cause. He appeals for support for the National Theatre, a site for which has been secured and bought. "We cannot really afford it," Mr. Shaw declares. "People ask me," he says, '"Do the English people want a National Theatre?' Of course, they do not. They never want anything. They have a British Museum, but they never wantedit. They have Westminster Abbey. They never wanted that either; but now that it stands there, a mysterious phenomenon that came to them they don't know how, and don't care, they quite approve of it, and feel the place would be incomplete without it. What we have to do is to produce the phenomenon of a National Theatre on the site at South Kensington. "The' way the National Gallery, the British Museum, and all these places begin is always by a small group of people who understand their national cultural importance. They make a beginning, and after a time the beginning | becomes an institution. Then the Government comes along, or rather the Government does not come along, but the created institution confronts the Government, and the Government, which never wanted it, says, 'Here is something which for some reason or other we have got to keep going.' We can go ahead for some distance, far enough to oblige the Government who will have to come and help to keep on foot an indispensable national institution when we have solidly founded it."