REAL REPERTORY.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 11731, 22 June 1916, Page 3

REAL REPERTORY.

THE SHAKESPEARE TERCENTENARY A THEATRE FOll THE PEOPLE. (From a Lady Correspondent.) LONDON, May 4. In the midst of excursions and alarms —rebellion in Ireland, Zeppelin raids, the recurrent political crisis, real or psoudo; the celebration of Shakespeare's Tercentenary goes calmly on its appointed courso. All agog are special seasons at theatres, special music at concerts, special and 1 Royal matinees, at which all the world and his wife on tho stage or in tho audience are present in force; in short, all tho variations possihlo aro being played on the theme William Shakespeare. Most of them aro familiar manifestations. The movement towards a national drama and its expression through Shakespeare has been growing apace for years. Tho Benson School at Stratford has been fostering it carefully, and on Tuesday Mr Frank Benson received tho meed of bis long work at the King's hands—a knighthood. Sir Frank Benson apart, this year's tercentenary is marked by the coming into its own of a mod'est, long-establish-ed enterprise at tho "Old Vic," which has done arduous spado work in, popularising dramatic (Shakespeare ita particular) and musical art. All tho cognoscenti of the West End are flocking now to its unfashionable haunt on the south side of the river. Everyone knows that for 3 r onr real enthusiast one must go to the cheap parts of tho theatre. What the gallery first nighter does not know about drama would equip a critic: if one would seek the opera goer who understands the score one looks among the godli. And so we find the torch of the Shakespearean art kept burning vaiiautly through a long unheralded tale of years in that cheap theatre, the Old Vic., Waterloo Bridge Road, on that " Surrey side " of the Thames which the Philistine West Ender scorns to consider as within his range of. vision—that Surreys,ide in which a Rose Alley led to tho Globe Theatre, for the oxpenses of building which E'urbage had to borrow money from, among others, Shakespeare himself. In this People's Opera, Play and Lecture House hundreds of performances of Shakespeare's plays and such classics as "The Rivals," "School for Scandal," and " Sho Stoops to Conquer/' and the more modern "liveryman,' were given at a time when West End houses would not touch Shakespeare with a long pole. This enterprise was founded in 1880, when the Old \ic, a music-hall of a not too wholesome reputation, was acquired by the late Miss Emma Cons, one of the group of reformers associated with Aliss Octavin Hill. The hall remains superficially as in its old Bohemian days 3 all aglitter with gold and glass. Its wealth of mirrors reflects a strangely different audience from that of. its. roystering day. The prices range now from twopence to two shillings and yet nowhere in London is the Shakespeare Tercentenary being observed with a more rdal enthusiasm than at the Old Vic. The enthusiasm is decorous, almost reverent; and, as is fitting in these days of war, it requires no stimulus of elaborate production or ponderously important lists of players to bring it to expression. But it is being shown and it is wholehearted. "The play's the thing" at- the "Old Vie." and in no theatre is carelessness of appreciation more sure of censure. To' walk to or from one's seat during the performance, or even to ehuflle the feet too noisily, is to invite rebuke. Here is an audience which understands the drama strangely well and which knows every note of an'opgra, as surely as the- patroiis of the gallery at Covent Garden. Tho Old Vic is in the midst of a fortnight's festival in which half a dozen plays will be given by the fine repertory company which Mr Ben Greet has gathered round him. He has shown that Shakespeare staged without elaborate scenery and the simplest fashion really pays its way among people supposed to have no. literary culture —or kultur! Ben Greet should, indeed, be bracketed with Benson. He was a pioneer of pastoral plays and has for nearly twenty years presented Shakespeare in the open air, both in and out of London and in America, and produced "Everyman" both here and across the Atlantic. To come from a trainiug with Ben Greet is in itself a diploma in the dramatic profession the world over. The list of Shakespeare's plays produced by the Ben Greet Repertory Company comprises:—" As You Like It," "Romeo and Juliet," "Merchant, of Venice," "Henry V.," "The Tempest," "Othello/' "Richard III.," "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "Julius Cresar," "Much Ado About Nothing," " Tho Taming of the Shrew," "'The Winter's Tale," "Comedy of Errors," "Merry Wives of Windsor," and what is as rare as tho dodo a production of "Hamlet" in its entirety! It is, of course, fitting that a Shakespearean festival should have its musical setting. How could it be otherwise when of his thirty-seven plays thirty-six contain stage directions as to music, when lyrical poetry which above all poetry appeals to the musician is so lavishly strewn in them—there aro more than j.inoty lyrics in his plays—when Sir Henry Wood on drawing up a scheme for Shakespeare concerts unearthed nearly 100 settings by composers of various epochs and then he had only touched the fringe of his subject. And tiie Old Vic has the true