A History of the Royal Court

Before going to the Royal Court, you might like to know...

Early History

For the greater part of the second half of the 20th century, the Royal Court theatre has probably been the most consistent influence on British - and international - theatre in the UK. The Royal Court is the home from which John Osborne, Harold Pinter, Arnold Wesker, David Storey and Christopher Hampton emerged, among many others; and a whole revolution in post-World War II British theatre happened there and continues to this day. It has been persistently one of the most significant, stubborn and seminal sources of controversy and innovation anywhere in the world of Western theatre.

The theatre itself was built in 1888. It was a benchmark Victorian playhouse in south-west London within walking distance of the back gates of Buckingham Palace. The building was the realisation of the dream of a theatre practitioner called Walter Emden. He came from a family of actors and knew a thing or two about the needs of a functioning theatre. In a state of serious disrepair by the end, the theatre nevertheless functioned as a usable building for more than 100 years before major innovations were achieved.

By the time George Devine (pronounced: De-Veen) took over the Royal Court in 1956, the beginning of its glory days, the building already had a lot of history. This mainly came from its having courageously turned itself into a private club so that it could put on plays that were banned by the Lord Chamberlain. From 1904-07, the theatre was run by Harley Granville Barker, himself a respected playwright. Most of the premieres of Shaw's plays occurred here as did the first English versions of Ibsen, Maeterlinck, and Strindberg. This was the home of the first and most important breakthrough of British theatre into the modern era. It established the Court as a place to watch. It was also the theatre that saw the first ever use of the repertory system in the United Kingdom.

After this period, the theatre began slowly to fall into disrepair. It became a cinema and sustained bomb damage during the Second World War. By the time George Devine was looking for a home for what he called the English Stage Company it was in terrible shape. Famously, George Devine came to view the building as a possible home for his dream company, and phoned his partner to say: "It's a dump - we'll take it." Backstage, it is told, the hallways and dressing rooms smelled of the waters of the Thames.

But there can be no doubt that this small Victorian playhouse that had survived somehow, had qualities that Devine loved; and though it was, as he said, "a dump"; it was a dump he could transform and put into the service of the working out of a philosophy of theatre that would revolutionize what audiences expected from this art form.

The English Stage Company

And that is how the Royal Court, in 1956, became the home not only to a stellar revival of Wycherley's The Country Wife with Joan Plowright in one of her first career-defining roles (joined by Alan Bates, George Devine, Laurence Harvey and Robert Stephens); but also the home to the first production of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, which can be said to have changed the course of theatrical history - in the UK at first, and then around the world. Devine had established his dream: a theatre, with its own company, that played the classics as if they were new; and the newest plays as if they were classics. It was to be a writer's theatre, a theatre dedicated to bringing to the audiences fresh and stimulating interpretations of the text, and the most exciting and important new writing it could find.

Look Back in Anger was staged a mere five weeks after the opening of the company in 1956.

Joan Plowright wrote, 25 years later, for a book about the English Stage Company, that for the first time, at the Court, "I felt totally at home in a theatre. I was in touch with people who cared, as I cared, about creating theatre which was to do with the 20th century. I found my own voice as an actress, and an exhilarating sense of purpose which had been sadly lacking elsewhere".

These sentiments are still echoed today, over and over, by writers, directors and actors, by the backstage professionals, and also by the audiences as the Royal Court continues its commitment to creating theatre which has to do with the 21st century.

It has been noted by many people that the English Stage Company embodied a credo that George Devine probably stole from Bertolt Brecht's: "Stage new plays as if they were classics, and classics as if they were new plays!" To its audiences and theatre critics in the 21st century, this still seems to be a fair description of one of the fundamental approaches of the Royal Court theatre for the past half century at least.