Challenging Times: Making Theatre During the War

This chapter examines the social and economic pressures and problems experienced by theatre-makers during the First World War. After outlining pre-war metropolitan production practices and regional touring patterns, I consider the ways the imperatives of wartime resistance impacted on the availability of actors and managerial capacity together with the means by which government policy both exploited and constrained theatre production through resource controls, taxation and censorship. I describe how different theatre managers coped with concerns about audience safety and dwindling personnel while fulfilling expectations of entertainment and patriotic reassurance or, as in the case of the new regional repertory theatres, a commitment to more ambitious artistic product. There is a particular emphasis on the role energetic women played as actors, directors, managers and all-round enablers in ensuring that theatres survived what could have been impossible circumstances