Repertory Theatre

Repertory Theatre, the system of producing several plays over the course of a single season and keeping them in the company’s repertoire. An actor would therefore be hired for a long period to play roles in a series of plays. Repertory theatre highlighted versatility in the actor’s craft and provided an excellent training ground and apprenticeship. An actor would perform in one play in the evenings, while rehearsing another in the daytime; the repertoire would range from Shakespeare to commercial potboilers. Sir Laurence Olivier, for example, owed much of his early success to the three years he spent with the Birmingham Repertory company.

In the 19th century, almost all theatres worked a repertory system, until this was overtaken by a preference for continuous runs. At the beginning of the 20th century, there was a move to revive the system through the setting up of repertory theatres. Two of Britain’s oldest surviving repertory theatres were the Liverpool Playhouse and the Birmingham Repertory Theatre.

In the early 1950s, there were over a hundred repertory companies in Britain. However, with the pressure of short rehearsal periods, often as little as one week, the standard was not usually high. Actors and directors were often tempted to rely on a superficial gloss rather than a deeper grasp of the play.

The spread of subsidized theatre changed all that. New regional theatres were built and companies could afford to rehearse for longer. Theatres such as the Sheffield Crucible, Manchester’s Royal Exchange, and the Nottingham Playhouse gained national reputations. Rising standards also meant that some of the best repertory productions transferred to the West End.

With the gradual decline of subsidy for the arts in the 1980s, most of these regional theatres were unable to support large companies. First they started doing plays with small casts, then they gave up the repertory system altogether. Today there are very few true theatre companies in Britain apart from the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre. (See also Drama and Dramatic Arts; Theatre Production.)