Harley Granville-Barker
Encyclopedia
Harley Granville-Barker (born Harley Granville Barker; stage name, Granville Barker; hyphenated surname adopted later; born 25 November 1877, London, died 31 August 1946, Paris) was an English
actor-manager
, director, producer
, critic
and playwright
.
Barker made his first debut and appearance onstage there at the age of 14. His acting work led to increasing discontent with the low standards of the commercial theatre. In 1899, he played the lead role in Richard II
under William Poel
, founder of the Elizabethan Stage Society
. In 1900 he became a leading member of the Stage Society
and this led to contacts with George Bernard Shaw
, William Archer
, Elizabeth Robins
, and William Poel
, among others. His first play, The Marrying of Ann Leete was produced by the Stage Society in 1900.
After success with the Stage Society, Barker turned his attentions to his own theatre company and with J.E. Vedrenne took a lease on the Royal Court Theatre
in London. There he managed three seasons of repertory theatre
. Among many of the works he produced were plays by Shaw, Henrik Ibsen
, Maurice Maeterlinck
, and new translation
s of Euripides
. These plays were produced successfully in repertory. In the period 1904-07, Barker also produced, directed, and acted in ten of Shaw
's plays at the Royal Court, establishing Shaw's reputation as one of the foremost playwrights of the time. In some cases, the great success of the productions was due in part to Barker's acting performances (for example, as Cusins in Major Barbara and Tanner in Man and Superman
).
During his years at the Court, Barker met and married his first wife, actress Lillah McCarthy
. Over the following decade, the two of them would produce and act in a number of plays around London. In 1910, he coached her while she played Jocasta in Max Reinhardt
's production of Oedipus
at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. Barker and Lillah were divorced in May, 1918. Barker then married Helen M. (Gates) Huntington, (ex-wife of Archer Milton Huntington and a niece of Collis Potter Huntington) on July 31, 1918.
His productions of Shakespeare's
plays at the Savoy Theatre
in 1912 and 1914 were highly influential. In 1912 he directed The Winter's Tale
and Twelfth Night for Evelyn Millard
; in 1914 he directed A Midsummer Night's Dream
. Granville Barker did away with "star" system of acting and instead concentrated on excellence in the entire ensemble
. He directed actors to speak Shakespeare's text rapidly, and used mainly curtains to create scenery, thus cutting down on the length of performance. He steered clear of elaborate, historically-"accurate" scenery and opted instead for symbolic patterns and shapes on stage. He extended the stage of the Savoy over the footlights and onto the first few rows of the stalls; thus his actors could play on an open stage, and connect more closely with the audience. In all of these innovations, Barker sought to capture the "spirit" of Shakespeare's plays.
As a playwright, Barker experimented with form, and proved an extremely gifted writer of dialogue and architect of ideas. His best known plays are The Voysey Inheritance
(1905) (later adapted by David Mamet
), Waste
(1907, not licensed
until 1936) and The Madras House (1909). All of his plays, except Vote by Ballot (1914) and Farewell to the Theatre (1916), have been produced at the Shaw Festival
in Canada. His plays have also been featured by director Sam Walters
at the Orange Tree Theatre
in Richmond upon Thames
. Farewell to the Theatre (1916) was given its World premiere performance at the Rose Theatre, Kingston
-upon-Thames, with Jane Asher
in the leading role of 'Dorothy' in September 2011.
Later in his career, Barker broke with many of his old theatre friends, including Shaw, and settled in Paris. He then added the more aristocratic hyphen between Granville (both his middle name and the surname of his mother, Mary Elizabeth Bozzi-Granville) and Barker (his original surname, after the his father, Albert Barker) while publishing volumes of criticism, his Prefaces to Shakespeare, and translations of Spanish plays
.
He was Director of the British Institute in Paris between 1937 and 1939.
He died in Paris
in 1946.
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
actor-manager
Actor-manager
An actor-manager is a leading actor who sets up their own permanent theatrical company and manages the company's business and financial arrangements, sometimes taking over the management of a theatre, to perform plays of their own choice and in which they will usually star...
, director, producer
Theatrical producer
A theatrical producer is the person ultimately responsible for overseeing all aspects of mounting a theatre production. The independent producer will usually be the originator and finder of the script and starts the whole process...
, critic
Critic
A critic is anyone who expresses a value judgement. Informally, criticism is a common aspect of all human expression and need not necessarily imply skilled or accurate expressions of judgement. Critical judgements, good or bad, may be positive , negative , or balanced...
and playwright
Playwright
A playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...
.
Barker made his first debut and appearance onstage there at the age of 14. His acting work led to increasing discontent with the low standards of the commercial theatre. In 1899, he played the lead role in Richard II
Richard II (play)
King Richard the Second is a history play by William Shakespeare believed to be written in approximately 1595. It is based on the life of King Richard II of England and is the first part of a tetralogy, referred to by some scholars as the Henriad, followed by three plays concerning Richard's...
under William Poel
William Poel
William Poel was an English actor, theatrical manager and dramatist best known for his presentations of Shakespeare.-Life and career:...
, founder of the Elizabethan Stage Society
Elizabethan Stage Society
The Elizabethan Stage Society was a theatrical society dedicated to putting on productions of drama from the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, particularly those of William Shakespeare. It was founded in 1895 by William Poel...
. In 1900 he became a leading member of the Stage Society
Stage Society
The Incorporated Stage Society, commonly known as the Stage Society, was an English theatre society with limited membership which mounted private Sunday performances of new and experimental plays, mainly at the Royal Court Theatre but also at other London West End venues...
and this led to contacts with George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...
, William Archer
William Archer (critic)
William Archer , Scottish critic, was born in Perth, and was educated at the University of Edinburgh, where he received the degree of M.A. in 1876. He was the son of Thomas Archer....
, Elizabeth Robins
Elizabeth Robins
Elizabeth Robins was an actress, playwright, novelist, and suffragette.- Early life :Elizabeth Robins, the first child of Charles Robins and Hannah Crow, and was born in Louisville, Kentucky. After financial difficulties, her father left for Colorado, leaving the children in the care of Hannah...
, and William Poel
William Poel
William Poel was an English actor, theatrical manager and dramatist best known for his presentations of Shakespeare.-Life and career:...
, among others. His first play, The Marrying of Ann Leete was produced by the Stage Society in 1900.
After success with the Stage Society, Barker turned his attentions to his own theatre company and with J.E. Vedrenne took a lease on the Royal Court Theatre
Royal Court Theatre
The Royal Court Theatre is a non-commercial theatre on Sloane Square, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. It is noted for its contributions to modern theatre...
in London. There he managed three seasons of repertory theatre
Repertory
Repertory or rep, also called stock in the United States, is a term used in Western theatre and opera.A repertory theatre can be a theatre in which a resident company presents works from a specified repertoire, usually in alternation or rotation...
. Among many of the works he produced were plays by Shaw, Henrik Ibsen
Henrik Ibsen
Henrik Ibsen was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as "the father of prose drama" and is one of the founders of Modernism in the theatre...
, Maurice Maeterlinck
Maurice Maeterlinck
Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck, also called Comte Maeterlinck from 1932, was a Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist who wrote in French. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911. The main themes in his work are death and the meaning of life...
, and new translation
Translation
Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. Whereas interpreting undoubtedly antedates writing, translation began only after the appearance of written literature; there exist partial translations of the Sumerian Epic of...
s of Euripides
Euripides
Euripides was one of the three great tragedians of classical Athens, the other two being Aeschylus and Sophocles. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him but according to the Suda it was ninety-two at most...
. These plays were produced successfully in repertory. In the period 1904-07, Barker also produced, directed, and acted in ten of Shaw
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...
's plays at the Royal Court, establishing Shaw's reputation as one of the foremost playwrights of the time. In some cases, the great success of the productions was due in part to Barker's acting performances (for example, as Cusins in Major Barbara and Tanner in Man and Superman
Man and Superman
Man and Superman is a four-act drama, written by George Bernard Shaw in 1903. The series was written in response to calls for Shaw to write a play based on the Don Juan theme. Man and Superman opened at The Royal Court Theatre in London on 23 May 1905, but with the omission of the 3rd Act...
).
During his years at the Court, Barker met and married his first wife, actress Lillah McCarthy
Lillah McCarthy
Lillah McCarthy was an English actress and theatrical manager.McCarthy was born in Cheltenham. She studied elocution under Hermann Vezin and Emil Behnke, and made her first appearance on the stage in 1895...
. Over the following decade, the two of them would produce and act in a number of plays around London. In 1910, he coached her while she played Jocasta in Max Reinhardt
Max Reinhardt
----Max Reinhardt was an Austrian theater and film director and actor.-Biography:...
's production of Oedipus
Oedipus
Oedipus was a mythical Greek king of Thebes. He fulfilled a prophecy that said he would kill his father and marry his mother, and thus brought disaster on his city and family...
at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. Barker and Lillah were divorced in May, 1918. Barker then married Helen M. (Gates) Huntington, (ex-wife of Archer Milton Huntington and a niece of Collis Potter Huntington) on July 31, 1918.
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
plays at the Savoy Theatre
Savoy Theatre
The Savoy Theatre is a West End theatre located in the Strand in the City of Westminster, London, England. The theatre opened on 10 October 1881 and was built by Richard D'Oyly Carte on the site of the old Savoy Palace as a showcase for the popular series of comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan,...
in 1912 and 1914 were highly influential. In 1912 he directed The Winter's Tale
The Winter's Tale
The Winter's Tale is a play by William Shakespeare, originally published in the First Folio of 1623. Although it was grouped among the comedies, some modern editors have relabelled the play as one of Shakespeare's late romances. Some critics, among them W. W...
and Twelfth Night for Evelyn Millard
Evelyn Millard
Evelyn Mary Millard was an English Shakespearean actress, actor-manager and "stage beauty" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries perhaps best known for creating the role of Cecily Cardew in the 1895 premiere of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest.-Early life and...
; in 1914 he directed A Midsummer Night's Dream
A Midsummer Night's Dream
A Midsummer Night's Dream is a play that was written by William Shakespeare. It is believed to have been written between 1590 and 1596. It portrays the events surrounding the marriage of the Duke of Athens, Theseus, and the Queen of the Amazons, Hippolyta...
. Granville Barker did away with "star" system of acting and instead concentrated on excellence in the entire ensemble
Ensemble cast
An ensemble cast is made up of cast members in which the principal actors and performers are assigned roughly equal amounts of importance and screen time in a dramatic production. This kind of casting became more popular in television series because it allows flexibility for writers to focus on...
. He directed actors to speak Shakespeare's text rapidly, and used mainly curtains to create scenery, thus cutting down on the length of performance. He steered clear of elaborate, historically-"accurate" scenery and opted instead for symbolic patterns and shapes on stage. He extended the stage of the Savoy over the footlights and onto the first few rows of the stalls; thus his actors could play on an open stage, and connect more closely with the audience. In all of these innovations, Barker sought to capture the "spirit" of Shakespeare's plays.
As a playwright, Barker experimented with form, and proved an extremely gifted writer of dialogue and architect of ideas. His best known plays are The Voysey Inheritance
The Voysey Inheritance
The Voysey Inheritance is a play written by the English dramatist Harley Granville-Barker. Originally written in 1905, it was revived at the National Theatre in 2006.It is currently in the public domain.- See also :*...
(1905) (later adapted by David Mamet
David Mamet
David Alan Mamet is an American playwright, essayist, screenwriter and film director.Best known as a playwright, Mamet won a Pulitzer Prize and received a Tony nomination for Glengarry Glen Ross . He also received a Tony nomination for Speed-the-Plow . As a screenwriter, he received Oscar...
), Waste
Waste (play)
Waste is a play by the English author Harley Granville Barker. It exists in two wholly different versions, from 1906 and 1927. The first version was refused a license by the Lord Chamberlain and had to be performed privately by the Stage Society in 1907; the second was finally staged in public at...
(1907, not licensed
Theatres Act 1968
The Theatres Act 1968 abolished censorship of the stage in the United Kingdom.Since 1737, scripts had been licensed for performance by the Lord Chamberlain's Office a measure initially introduced to protect Walpole's administration from political satire...
until 1936) and The Madras House (1909). All of his plays, except Vote by Ballot (1914) and Farewell to the Theatre (1916), have been produced at the Shaw Festival
Shaw Festival
The Shaw Festival is a major Canadian theatre festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, the second largest repertory theatre company in North America...
in Canada. His plays have also been featured by director Sam Walters
Sam Walters
Sam Walters MBE is a British theatre director and Artistic Director of the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, London, specialising in theatre-in-the-round productions...
at the Orange Tree Theatre
Orange Tree Theatre
The Orange Tree Theatre is a 172-seat theatre at 1 Clarence Street, Richmond in south west London, built specifically as a theatre in the round....
in Richmond upon Thames
Richmond upon Thames
Richmond is a town in southwest London, England and is part of the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames. It is located west-southwest of Charing Cross....
. Farewell to the Theatre (1916) was given its World premiere performance at the Rose Theatre, Kingston
Rose Theatre, Kingston
The Rose Theatre, Kingston is a theatre on Kingston High Street in the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames. The theatre seats 899 around a wide, lozenge shaped stage....
-upon-Thames, with Jane Asher
Jane Asher
Jane Asher is an English actress. She has also developed a second career as a cake decorator and cake shop proprietor.-Early life:...
in the leading role of 'Dorothy' in September 2011.
Later in his career, Barker broke with many of his old theatre friends, including Shaw, and settled in Paris. He then added the more aristocratic hyphen between Granville (both his middle name and the surname of his mother, Mary Elizabeth Bozzi-Granville) and Barker (his original surname, after the his father, Albert Barker) while publishing volumes of criticism, his Prefaces to Shakespeare, and translations of Spanish plays
Spanish literature
Spanish literature generally refers to literature written in the Spanish language within the territory that presently constitutes the state of Spain...
.
He was Director of the British Institute in Paris between 1937 and 1939.
He died in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
in 1946.
External links
- Granville-Barker Bio
- Theatre Database Bio
- Harley Granville-Barker Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at AustinUniversity of Texas at AustinThe University of Texas at Austin is a state research university located in Austin, Texas, USA, and is the flagship institution of the The University of Texas System. Founded in 1883, its campus is located approximately from the Texas State Capitol in Austin...