“Spare us a national theatre!” said Seymour Hicks, an early 20th Century dramatist. Beatrice Rubens explores the relatively young National Theatre’s bumpy road to success.
Disdain and hostility are not uncommon responses to major new cultural projects in the UK, but the venomous attacks levelled, over two centuries, against the idea of a national theatre leave a sour taste in the mouth even today.
Seymour Hicks, an early 20th Century dramatist and star of musical comedies, was against it being created and said: "The National Theatre! I wonder if there are really half a dozen people insane enough to think it will ever come into existence. We have national taxes, national schools, national horrors of every kind - spare us a national theatre!"
France has had a national theatre since 1680, Denmark since 1748 and Greece since 1901. The National Theatre in London is a youngster by comparison, which seems surprising, perhaps, for the country of Shakespeare. But this is a complex and singularly British story in which the arts, history, politics and changing ideas about national identity share the stage.
The story begins in 1848, when the radical publisher Effingham Wilson published a pamphlet called A House for Shakespeare.
Disdain and hostility are not uncommon responses to major new cultural projects in the UK, but the venomous attacks levelled, over two centuries, against the idea of a national theatre leave a sour taste in the mouth even today.
Seymour Hicks, an early 20th Century dramatist and star of musical comedies, was against it being created and said: "The National Theatre! I wonder if there are really half a dozen people insane enough to think it will ever come into existence. We have national taxes, national schools, national horrors of every kind - spare us a national theatre!"
France has had a national theatre since 1680, Denmark since 1748 and Greece since 1901. The National Theatre in London is a youngster by comparison, which seems surprising, perhaps, for the country of Shakespeare. But this is a complex and singularly British story in which the arts, history, politics and changing ideas about national identity share the stage.
The story begins in 1848, when the radical publisher Effingham Wilson published a pamphlet called A House for Shakespeare.