Sir BARRY JACKSON
THIS is the first of two talks in tho
' Literature and Art ' series which form a brief survey of modern developments in drama in much the same way as Mr. Harold Nicolson has traced the modern spirit in literature. Nobody in the theatre today is better qualified than Sir Barry Jackson to describe the stata of the modern stage.
It is not too much to say that by founding the Birmingham Repertory Company in 1913, and by the work which he has done with that company since, he has changed the whole conception of the drama in England. He hag produced many plays that commercial managers would never have touched, and has always aimed at giving the public the very best of drama, past and present. Shakespeare, Ibsen, Shaw,
Yeats, and Pirandello are dramatists in whose work ho has helped to make the public take a real interest: he was responsible for the first production in this country of Drinkwatcr's Abraham Lincoln , Rutland Boughton's Immortal Hour, Shaw's Back to Methuselah and The Apple Carl, and other plays of great interest and merit. In this talk he will discuss the effect upon the drama of the enlarged outlook and the new valuos of the present century.