The Festival Theatre on Newmarket Road, Cambridge, was founded by Terence Gray, the son of an Irish aristocrat, in 1926. Gray had  been educated at Eton College (for two years) and at Magdalene College, Cambridge (for just one year before the outbreak of the 1914-18 War) and he had then tried to develop a career in Egyptology and as a writer of plays, mostly on Egyptian themes. He and Harold Ridge, his partner in the enterprise of a new theater, had planned to redesign the stage area of an old Regency theater of 1814 by taking away the proscenium (and thus widening the stage), building a stepped frontage, adding a curved cyclorama at the rear, and installing special modern lighting, with the hope that they could produce plays which responded to the new art of the theater as promoted by Edward Gordon Craig and others.¹

After a short season of three plays at the University A.D.C. Theatre because of a delayed opening (possibly the knock-on effect of the General Strike), the Festival Theatre eventually opened on 22 November 1926 with a sensational production of the Oresteia, produced by Herbert Prentice but inspired, as many critics were quick to notice, by the ex-Egyptologist with his flair for dance and drama. The Cambridge Review, a weekly paper published by the University of Cambridge, gave it headline news: “Last Monday, which saw the opening of the Festival Theatre, was a day of no small importance to Cambridge [. . .]. Let it be said here that an audience, of which many members had come prepared to be kind, burst out cheering at the end of the trilogy like a rugger crowd at Twickenham, and demanded curtain after curtain and a speech from the Manager.” The Gownsman described a “triumphant production,” the Cambridge Chronicle liked the “expressionist scenery,” and the Granta called Gray’s new theater “this palace of Imagination” (the first and last were student papers). News of the success spread throughout England, with reviews in national newspapers and magazines, and soon, through other international publications, news of what Gray and his colleagues were doing, in choice of plays and in terms of staging, and especially the new German lighting, spread into Europe and across the Atlantic. One (later) example was Alistair Cooke’s special report, “The Cambridge Festival Theatre, Ten Seasons of Dramatic Experiment,” in Theatre Arts Monthly, November 1931 (five years after the opening), in which he mentioned productions of The Hairy Ape and The Emperor Jones being among the Festival Theatre’s successes.²

Those involved in the creative life of the new theater in the first year, in addition to Gray and Ridge (an expert in stage lighting) and Prentice, included the young Ninette de Valois (Gray’s cousin, and later the founder of the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden), who provided the dance element for some of the new plays, a new young producer given his first opportunities by Gray called Norman Marshall, and an acting company which included Maurice Evans and Torin Thatcher, both known to American theater/film buffs,³ and a young actress called Doria Paston who Gray later trained to be his scenic designer (and whose work was admired by Komisarjevsky). The first year, 1927, included several Irish plays and one of Gray’s own Egyptian plays, as was perhaps to be expected, and a second Greek play, Oedipus Tyrannus. Gray’s own Irish epic, Cuchulainn, had been published in 1925 (Heffer), but was not staged.

On 2 May 1927 Gray indicated for the first time an interest in American theater by staging a production of The Adding Machine by Elmer Rice. A correspondent (F.G.B.) to the Festival Review, the theater’s own weekly program, called the production “a triumph” and “delightful entertainment for a packed house.” Still in the early days of the director’s control in the theater, the writer described Prentice as an “uncanny genius” and praised his brilliant use of the new lighting. Maurice Evans was cast as Mr. Four and Torin Thatcher appeared in two parts, as the boss and a policeman.

The audiences of the theater, mostly students and young dons,⁴ obviously wanted more of the new American plays, for 1928 saw five productions, three of which were by Eugene O’Neill. The other two were by Susan Glaspell (Inheritors) and a second play by Elmer Rice (The Subway). Gray described Glaspell in the Festival Review as “probably the most remarkable woman dramatist of the age,” and wrote that he regarded Inheritors as “one of the most vital plays of our time.” T.G. Saville, who had been recently promoted by Gray from actor to director to replace Prentice, directed the play in January 1928 and also played the part of Ira Morton. The Subway in November was produced by Peter Godfrey, who was the director of the Gate Theatre in London and a friend with whom Gray later formed a cartel of their two theaters, hopeful that they could eventually expand to three in order to share productions. The cast included George Coulouris, aged just twenty-five, as Eugene, and Gray. Coulouris was later in the year chosen to play Yank in O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape at the Festival Theatre.⁵

Eugene O’Neill, like Gray, had his family roots in Ireland and also his personal theatrical interests were immersed in just the kind of plays and playwrights selected by Gray for productions at the Festival Theatre: particularly Greek drama, Ibsen and Strindberg, Yeats and Wilde, and the recent German expressionist plays. Both men were known to be prolific readers of plays and were steeped in experimental drama using masks, movement and dance. A particular influence on O’Neill was Kaiser’s From Morn to Midnight, which Godfrey first produced for Gray at the Festival Theatre in February 1928; and there were many more of a similar kind, of interest to both men.⁶

Gray’s personal interest in the plays of Eugene O’Neill began in May 1928 with the mounting of productions of The Dreamy Kid, produced by T.G. Saville, and The Emperor Jones, produced by Norman Marshall, both presented on the same evening. The Dreamy Kid was the first production of O’Neill’s play in England. It was later given a revised production by Gray himself in January 1933 during his last season at the Festival Theatre, before he departed into the sunshine of his family’s vineyard in the south of France. Gray introduced the two 1928 productions in the April Festival Review as part of his “Forthcoming Season” report. “We have often been reproached for neglecting Eugene O’Neill, the outstanding American dramatist of the day,” he wrote, but added, thoughtfully, “The plays of Mr. O’Neill have to be taken with care.” The four actors in The Dreamy Kid were Doria Paston as Mammy, Bronwyn Rhys as Seely Ann, Esme Vernon as Irene (Reenie), and Raymond Calvert as the Kid. The Emperor Jones would have been well known at this time, when plays were more frequently read than seen, although the Festival Theatre production was probably only the third one in the British Isles. It had been produced at the Ambassador’s Theatre in London in 1925 with Paul Robeson in the title role and then at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1927, where Gray may well have seen it. But, and Gray often had a card up his sleeve, this was to be the first production in which the titular role would be played by a white man. The actor in question was Graveley Edwards. The other actors were Percy Goodyer as Henry, Esme Vernon as the old native woman, Hedley Briggs as the witch doctor and George Woodbridge as the native chief.⁷

The reviewer of the two O’Neill plays in the Cambridge Review (18 May 1928) wrote under the initials I.M.P. He was Ian Parsons, a young student in 1928 but later the director of Chatto and Windus, the highly influential London publishers. Parsons, like Gray, thought that the lack of productions of Emperor Jones in England was because of the unorthodox methods that O’Neill used and the difficulties posed for producers. Parsons stressed four major difficulties: one repeated situation as the main action, no “proper delineation of character,” an “inadequate presentation of conflict,” and an “artistically inexcusable” final scene. Even so, he thought that the Festival Theatre production was a “triumph” for author, actor and director. The two important qualities of O’Neill’s work, Parsons continued, were “the rigid and ruthless economy of detail” and the “essentially universal significance” of the story. He felt that it would be impossible to over-praise Marshall’s direction: the sense of balance, the movement, the values of the exits and entrances, and above all the “color effect” (colored lighting was a significant feature of the Festival Theatre’s productions). Edwards as the Emperor got nearly everything right, “a very remarkable attempt.” Leaving little room for a comment on The Dreamy Kid, Parsons added that Raymond Calvert gave a “very striking performance.”

Six months later, on 26 November 1928, there was a production of The Hairy Ape given with a short play by the poet Gordon Bottomley called A Parting (with Esme Vernon as the mother and Doria Paston as the daughter). Peter Godfrey of the Gate Theatre directed The Hairy Ape.⁸ In addition to Coulouris as Yank, the cast consisted of William G. Farrell as Paddy, Bertram Heyhoe as Long, Joan Drayson as Mildred, Peggy Calthrop as her aunt, Stephan Gillam as Second Engineer, Gerard Rendle as a guard and Noel Iliff as the secretary.

Again the Cambridge Review was enthusiastic. The student reviewer this time was T.W., the initials being those of T.H. White, later known worldwide for his book, The Once and Future King, published originally as four books beginning with The Sword in the Stone in 1939. White opened his review: “The Hairy Ape provided the best play we have seen this term” (great praise when you realize that the term had opened with Shaw’s Heartbreak House and had also included Shakespeare’s As You Like It, as well as The Subway by Elmer Rice). White listed the ingredients of the success of The Hairy Ape: “Mr. Coulouris, as a triumph of production [Godfrey], and as a play which contained the human value which we too frequently lack, nothing could have better earned the immense applause which it received. The first, the second, and the fourth scenes were staggering.” Godfrey, the reviewer continued, had used a kind of medieval morality theater convention, with a central wagon and heaven above and hell below. The problem came towards the end, when O’Neill failed to provide “enough matter [for] one man to bite on” and, understandably, the actor (Coulouris) was unable to sustain the impact, as the author moved from “power to pathos.” White also admired the work of Peggy Calthrop as Mildred’s aunt, and the speaking of W.G. Farrell and Esme Vernon.

Gray had adapted the Festival Theatre in a way that should have made it ideal for the staging of plays like The Hairy Ape. Box constructions were often used to provide a higher level of stage, while the steps down to the audience, and the exits through the rows of theatergoers, were ideal for a possible lower level. White mentioned the “morality [play] convention” of the use of a wagon with levels above and below, but he also questioned the placing of particular scenes at one of the three possible levels: “the titanic underworld [. . .] where Yank Smith belonged” should have been placed on the bottom level; also the Fifth Avenue scene, on the top level, made the sustaining of long speeches difficult. Even in his final paragraph, White returned to this major “carping,” as he called it. The play was “bottom heavy” (White did not make clear if he meant the excessive use of the lower stage, the acting or the writing) and this could have been cured if “Mr. Godfrey had kept the prison and the zoo [scenes] below” (at the lower level).

As already noted, Gray’s theater had been established in 1926 as part of the movement away from the realistic theater towards the expressionist, experimental theater of Craig’s Art of the Theatre, with minimal sets and a creative use of mime and dance and occasionally masks. A significant article by Norman Marshall in the Cambridge Review of 24 May 1929 condemned, as Gray often did, the “four-sided box” of the realistic theater.⁹ Marshall wrote: “It is only in theatres such as the Festival Theatre and the Maddermarket Theatre [in Norwich] that the actor can establish the easy and rapid contact with an audience [. . .] with its constant changes of scene.” He then referred to three plays by O’Neill, including The Hairy Ape and The Emperor Jones, which he thought would be impossible as well-made realistic dramas. “By using a succession of short scenes [O’Neill] is able to present everything important to his theme with the maximum of force and vividness. [. . .] When he wishes to reveal the laboring, confused minds of Yank or Emperor Jones he boldly resorts to the most direct and effective method—the long, frankly unrealistic soliloquy.”

Cambridge audiences had to wait nearly four years for a return of an American contribution to world drama: from The Hairy Ape in November 1928 to Marco Millions in February 1932. The exceptions were two productions in 1929, Beggar on Horseback by George Kaufman and Marc Connelly in April, directed by Norman Marshall, and Woman’s Honor by Susan Glaspell in October. Gray had leased the theater to Anmer Hall’s Company, which gave Tyrone Guthrie his first directing experience and also included the young, inexperienced actors Robert Donat and Flora Robson.¹⁰ Beggar on Horseback was described in the Festival Review as a “pseudo­expressionist burlesque of American life,” although the story, about a man who goes into the business owned by his wife’s wealthy father, was actually adapted from a German book. An experimental aspect of the production was that the trial scene at the conclusion of the play was choreographed by Ninette de Valois and had masks and scenery designed by Hedley Briggs. Margaret Christie played Gladys, and others in the cast included Vivienne Bennett, Alan Wheatley, Leonora Corbett and the man who cofounded the Festival Theatre, Harold Ridge. The Cambridge Review had asked George Rylands, the highly influential don at King’s College, to review the play. Rylands directed plays in Cambridge and in London (including Hamlet at the Haymarket Theatre with Gielgud in 1944). His comments in his review disparaged: “[the play was] not unamusing, although too long and over-acted, but as satire it is ludicrous” and “only the most obvious of elementary things are dealt with, and in the crudest way.” Woman’s Honor was a one-act play, performed with Marriage by Gogol (both productions were taken to Oxford). Anmer Hall wrote in the Festival Review that Glaspell “tackles deep moral issues with a supreme lightness of touch.” Flora Robson played the part of the Scornful One.

After two years without a single American play, another O’Neill production, Marco Millions, debuted on 8 February 1932 as part of Norman Marshall’s short season in Gray’s absence. It was the play’s first performance in England, just four years after its premier in New York in January 1928. A mammoth production, there were thirty-two named characters in the cast and, in addition, a group of extras from the Rodney (amateur) Theatre Club as People of Persia, India, Mongolia and Cathay. Marshall was the director, the music was by Gray’s resident composer, Walter Leigh,¹¹ and Hedley Briggs, who played Marco Polo, also designed the settings. Alison Drake was Princess Kukachin. The part of Kublai the Great Khan was given to a distinguished guest actor from London, against Gray’s usual practice of keeping to his own repertory company, a man who had links with Sarah Bernhardt in Paris, had played Romeo on the London stage in 1905, and had recently been the leading actor and producer of the Masque Theatre Company in London. After Marco Millions he went to America, where he played the Lord Chancellor in The Red Planet in New York. His name was S. Esme Percy.

The student-reviewer in the Cambridge Review this time was E.L.B., the initials of Edward Britton, who later became the General Secretary of the (British) National Union of Teachers. Still recovering from the previous week’s offering (Bastos the Brave by Regis and de Veynes), Britton gave Marco Millions a warm welcome. “[It] may not be one of O’Neill’s best plays,” he wrote, “but that still leaves it every opportunity of being first rate.” It made the writer ask why England, and the Festival Theatre in particular, “had been so loathe to recognize a man who in America is hailed as the greatest playwright of the day.” He admired Percy’s elocution but thought that his interpretation was “almost too grotesque,” making the character of Kublai Khan more of “a stylized one-man chorus.” But the production could not be praised too highly and the setting and costumes (with the use of pale blues, greens and yellows, giving the actors “an earthenware appearance against which the blustering red of Marco’s scarlet dress clashed very suitably”) were the best that Britton could remember at the theater. He also admired the use of two essential features of Festival Theatre productions: the cyclorama with the projected “shadow” effects and also the overall design and management of the lighting.

The program for Marco Millions included a page called “O’Neill’s Philosophy” (the author was not signified but it was probably Marshall). The writer of the article suggested that O’Neill “has used the life of Marco Polo to ask a question about Life—an agonized question—not to interpret it.” It is “as if O’Neill doubts the ultimate values; as if he questions fiercely whether, after all, the successful in the worldly sense are not doing Life’s work.” But, the short article concluded, Marco Millions is only incidentally a philosophy; O’Neill kept that for his next play, The Great God Brown.

Five weeks later, in the program for Marshall’s production of The Knight of the Burning Pestle by Beaumont and Fletcher (7 March 1932), there was an article by Burgoyne Miller entitled “Pattern in Plays,” in which the writer gave further notice of Marshall’s production of Marco Millions. Marshall had insisted, wrote Miller, “all through the play that the contrast between East and West should be emphasized, not only by dress and by movement, but also by grouping and by the intonation of speech.”

The American contribution continued at the Festival Theatre two weeks later with a production of Susan Glaspell’s play, Alison ’s House, by guest director Rupert Harvey. The son of Gray’s business manager, Harvey had acted at the Old Vic between 1918 and 1928. The cast included Brian Oulton as Richard, Alison Drake as Louise, Harold Young as John Stanhope, Frances Clare as Elsa and George Benson as Hodges.¹² The settings were again by Briggs. E.L.B. thought it was “the worst play I have seen at the Festival, so bad indeed that it is difficult to know where to begin to criticize it.” He felt that the plot was “wildly impossible,” the characters “overdrawn” and “pure Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer,” and the dialogue was the worst “Oh yeah type of American.” After listing the difficulties of the company with such material, he concluded, “it would have been kinder to both America and to us to judge the American theatre on Marco Millions.”

Eight productions later in a season presented by Rita John and Frank Birch,¹³ there was a production in May of See Naples and Die by Elmer Rice, notable, on reflection, for being part of a group of plays in which Jessica Tandy appeared as a young actress. She had first acted in London in 1929 and in New York in 1930. She had already appeared in the present season in Cambridge as Cressida in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, in which a twenty-year-old Anthony Quayle (later Director of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre and the star of many films) was Hector. In See Naples and Die, Clement McCallin, who had acted Troilus, was Charles, Tandy was Nanette, George Howe was Hugo and Ina de la Haye, who was Russian by birth, was Kunegunde.

Terence Gray, now in his new disguise as Quetzalcoatl (since January 1931), returned to Cambridge in October 1932 for what was to become his last year at the Festival Theatre. A short season of plays was shared with Peter Godfrey in what they termed their “cartel,” copying a similar arrangement operated in Paris by Baty, Jouvet, Dullin and Pitoeff. Gate productions came to Cambridge and vice versa. The arrangement never really took off, for reasons that are not really known, and was soon abandoned. But it did produce two American plays: Hotel Universe by Philip Barry and a production of one lesser-known one-act play by O’Neill called The Rope, its first (and possibly only) production in England. It had been intended that Marshall would direct Hotel Universe (the previous week he had directed Chekhov’s Three Sisters), but he gave way to, of all people, Gray’s business manager, Mortimer Harvey, for a maiden production. K.J.R. in the Cambridge Review called it “the worst [play] that we have seen at the Festival Theatre for a very long time.” It was not the acting, she stressed, which was “excellent” (the cast included Hermione Gingold as Lily and Vivienne Bennett as Ann), and “the show was never dull.” It had been claimed by the Festival Review that the Hotel Universe had been the outstanding play of 1931 in America, although it was not much liked by Joseph Wood Krutch in his book, American Drama, published in 1939.

O’Neill’s The Rope, which followed four weeks later, was presented with London Docks by William Rupke (also spelled Reupke), on 28 November 1932. The five members of the cast for The Rope were Enid Lindsey as Annie, Noel Iliff as Pat Sweeney, Roy Newlands as Luke Bentley, Ann Casson¹⁴ as Mary and J. Forbes-Williams as Abraham Bentley. The director was Godfrey. The critic in the Cambridge Review this time was again K.J.R., the initials of Kathleen Raine, who became a well-published poet after leaving Cambridge following a disastrous wedding and an emotional collapse.¹⁵ Raine was closely involved in the saga of Gray’s downfall at the theater, a complex story of literary intrigue within the English faculty coupled with the quasi­political feelings of the time. Raine described The Rope as “an admirable little curtain-raiser”: the secret of “O’Neill’s realism” is the way that he deviates from the language of real men. “The concrete imagery of common speech, as he employs it, is almost always metaphorical in relation to the conception of the play as a whole” and O’Neill’s conceptions are “often based upon Old Testament situations, clothed in Old Testament language [. . .].”

Gray opened his last two seasons (terms) in January 1933 with revivals of The Emperor Jones and The Dreamy Kid, to which were added another short play, The Lost Silk Hat by Lord Dunsany, making three plays in the evening. By now Gray was directing nearly every play himself (sixteen weekly productions out of twenty-three from October 1932 to June 1933) and, despite much emotion and much criticism, proceeded play by play to the bitter end. His last chosen play, which he also directed, was Chantecler by Edmund Rostand, the performances at the Festival Theatre coinciding with a university student-revue (by The Footlights) in the New Theatre, in which Gray received much personal ridicule.

The settings for both O’Neill revivals were by Doria Paston, by now Gray’s regular designer of stage settings, who was in a close relationship (to put it politely) with Gray. The choreography for The Emperor Jones was by the dancer Sara Patrick, who (like Ninette de Valois ) had already done much good work for the Festival Theatre. The casts this time were, for The Dreamy Kid, Doria Paston again as Old Mammy, Vera Birch (wife of Frank Birch) as Seely Ann, Godfrey Kenton as the kid, and Vivienne Bennett as Reenie; and for The Emperor Jones, Joseph Macleod (another white actor) as Brutus Jones, Percy Goodyer again as Henry Smithers, Vera Birch as the native woman, Vivienne Bennett (replacing Briggs) as the witch doctor and Bertram Heyhoe as Lem. Gray once again gave his personal assessment of O’Neill in the Festival Review, stressing that The Emperor Jones was “unique in dramatic literature,” that it was “a marvelous piece of theatrical material” and “a live and pulsing piece of sheer drama.” K.J.R. reviewed the production and thought it was admirable in choice and execution. O’Neill’s “episodic method,” she wrote, employed “disastrously in Marco Millions,” here reaches perfection. O’Neill had rediscovered a primitive dramatic form in The Emperor Jones, a fact which makes the play so important. At the Festival Theatre, continued Raine, the scenery and lighting could not have been better. Macleod “succeeded admirably in moving and looking, as well as speaking, his part.” Kenton, the kid in the second play, “succeeded in producing remarkably good Negro inflections in his speech.”

So it was that Terence Gray ended rather sadly his seven fruitful years at the Festival Theatre. Joseph Gordon Macleod, selected by Gray to be the Emperor Jones, was then chosen as Gray’s successor and he stayed at the theater, as the new supremo, for another two years, from 1933 to 1935. Macleod was just thirty when he took over Gray’s reins in the summer of 1933. Educated at Rugby, and Balliol, Oxford, he had also studied at the Inner Temple and had been “called to the Bar” in 1927, the year before he married. He had published three books, including The Ecliptic (a poem in twelve signs of the zodiac). Macleod was given magnificent support by theatergoers in a very difficult situation, considering the emotions of the last years when Gray was almost in revolt with the reviewers of the Cambridge Review. In many ways Macleod’s two years were as interesting as those of the previous seven under Gray. Five American plays were presented, including rare performances in England of Before Breakfast (a short one-person play) and “Anna Christie.” The others were two by Elmer Rice, Cock Robin and a new production of See Naples and Die, and The Silver Cord by Sidney Howard.

Theatergoers had been offered the chance to see one more O’Neill play, Gold, when it was listed as a coming production in October 1934, but the performances had to be cancelled when Macleod’s own play, Overture to Cambridge, was extended for an extra week. The alteration of the program or cancellation of planned productions was common practice even in Terence Gray’s time. The production of Gold, which never reappeared on the program, had been anticipated by Macleod and described by him as “one of O’Neill’s low-life seaman dramas [. . .] almost a melodrama” in which “the central figure is driven mad by his own ignorant greed” (Festival Review 9 October 1934).

Cock Robin, the first in the sequence, was introduced to potential theatergoers in the Festival Review (7 May 1934) as an example of “American drama too seldom seen on the English stage.” What the writer condemned as the common English view of American drama (“all-talking, all-singing, all­dancing monstrosities”) was clearly wrong, for many recent American plays “have in them considerably more artistic merit than most of the dilettante European mediocrities.” Cock Robin, it was claimed, was set in a medium different to that of the previous three Rice plays seen at the Festival Theatre. In a short article in the Festival Review (now renamed the Festival Theatre Programme) called “American Drama and Elmer Rice,” the unnamed writer concluded: “It is in such dramatists as Eugene O’Neill, and, less widely appreciated, Elmer Rice, that the expressionist technique comes to a head. [. . .] In writing The Adding Machine Elmer Rice forgot his previous melodramatic successes and turned his attention to expressionism, a medium particularly suited to the formulation of a new set of values which came to him chaotically in the middle period of his life.” The play was directed by John Hamilton, who was officially the Theater Manager and number two director.

In the Cambridge Review of 25 January 1935 there had been a notice of a coming one-act play festival at the A.D.C. Theatre sponsored by the British Drama League, which was to include a production of The Long Voyage Home by Eugene O’Neill performed by the Rodney (amateur) Dramatic Club. The Rodney, a senior amateur group in Cambridge, had a close association with Gray at the Festival Theatre and he used their members as extras for several plays with long casts. At one time the club had a small studio theater within the Festival Theatre. The production may well have been one of the first performances of one of O’Neill’s Glencairn plays in England.

Another O’Neill rarity was a short one-acter, an early monologue (1916) called Before Breakfast (produced at the Gate Theatre in 1926), which was directed by Peter Powell with Jean Anderson as Mrs. Rowlands, who, alone on stage, abuses her husband in the next room and drives him to suicide. John Hamilton opened the production on 11 February 1935 on a bill with Squaring the Circle by Valentin Kataev (in a translation revised by Ashley Dukes).

The Silver Cord by Sidney Howard was described by R.G. in the Cambridge Review as the work of “America’s profoundest dramatist [. . .] superior to either Rice or O’Neill.” He praised the “devastating wit” and thought that the play was “brilliantly produced [by John Hamilton] and acted.”¹⁶ Margaret Inchbold was Christina, the part played by Lilian Braithwaite in London. Sidney Howard, who had used a Freudian case study for The Silver Cord, is mainly remembered today as the screenwriter for Gone with the Wind, which followed in 1939.

“Anna Christie” was seen in the week of 29 April 1935, in a production by the number three director at the Festival Theatre, Peter Powell. Michael Ripper played the small part of Larry, the bartender, David Raven was Chris and Jean Anderson was Anna Christie. Because of the perceived low quality of R.G.’s reviews (claimed by the management of the Festival Theatre) during the 1934-35 academic year, the performance invitation to the Cambridge Review had been withdrawn. The ban lasted only two weeks but unfortunately that period included the week of the production of “Anna Christie.” It had been altogether a bad year for the Cambridge Review. In the edition of 15 February, a correspondent who signed himself “Marxist” had described the editor, F.W. Clayton, as “the sort of man a mob likes to hang” and another writer attacked the “underhand campaign of malicious and abusive propaganda which you have been conducting against Communism.” Such were the under­currents of the 1930s in Cambridge. To the editor’s credit, he had been willing to print these comments.

The performances of American plays at the Festival Theatre, 1926 to 1935, concluded during the week of 27 May 1935 with a revival of See Naples and Die. The new production was also staged by John Hamilton and the cast included Michael Ripper as Hugo, Jean Anderson as Mrs. Evans, David Raven as Charles and Margaret Inchbold as Nanette, the part previously played at the Festival Theatre in 1932 by Jessica Tandy.¹⁷

Joseph Gordon Macleod departed from the Festival Theatre exactly two years after Terence Gray. After his final performance, a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he made a curtain speech in which he thanked the audience but confessed that he had been fighting against what he called a “prejudice.” The Festival Theatre survived under various managements until 1940, the last four years being in direct competition with the new Cambridge Arts Theatre which had opened in 1936. The Festival Theatre then became a store for a local electronics firm until the Arts Theatre Trust bought the rat­infested building from Sir Harold Gray M.P. (Terence Gray’s father), took out all the seats and turned the space into a scenery store and paint shop. Several people since have lamented the loss of this fine old Regency theater, which under Terence Gray had become world-famous, but attempts to revive interest in bringing the theater to life again have been short-lived. Iain Mackintosh, one-time director of the flourishing Prospect Theatre Company based in Cambridge and now an architectural advisor, wrote in 1993, just twelve years ago: “[Gray’s transformation of the building] was magical and today the Festival remains tantalizingly recoverable, having slept for over fifty years but remaining still largely intact” (48). Instead the theater has become a Buddhist Center, but why not? For from 1958 to 1974 Terence Gray took on the identity of Wei Wu Wei and wrote eight books of his own form of Zen Buddhism, beginning with Fingers Pointing to the Moon in 1958. He died, aged 92, in Monte Carlo in 1987, leaving a surviving wife, Princess Natasha Mrs. Gray, and a daughter, Sonia Gray, and a theatrical legacy of creative output that was probably unique in theater history. The full story of the life of Terence Gray reflects the fact that it is the doers of this world and not the observers and critics who ultimately succeed.¹⁷

NOTES

1. Craig’s books (particularly On the Art of the Theatre (1911 [New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1956]) and his theories of masks and movement influenced both Gray and O’Neill.

2. Alistair Cooke’s time in Cambridge is described in chapter 3 of Nick Clarke’s Alistair Cooke: the Biography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999). Cooke founded a new dramatic society called The Mummers, which allowed women students to act on the stage for the first time at Cambridge University, and he took an active interest in the Festival Theatre.

3. Evans played Orestes in the Oresteia and stayed for just one season. He went to the old Vic in 1934 where he played Richard II, Petruchio and Iago. He moved to the USA in 1935, where he acted in Shakespeare and Shaw. He made 40 films, including Androcles and the Lion and Gilbert and Sullivan. Thatcher also went into films in America and appeared in Major Barbara with Robert Morley (also ex-Festival Theatre).

4. Dons are head tutors or fellows in a college of Oxford or Cambridge (Webster’s).

5. George Coulouris was just one of several Festival Theatre actors who were attracted by the new cinematic art of talking pictures. Theatergoers in Cambridge would possibly have seen the films of Anna Christie (with Garbo, 1930), The Emperor Jones (with Robeson, 1933) and The Silver Cord (with Irene Dunn and Joel McCrea, also 1933). Coulouris himself appeared in over eighty films beginning in 1933 with Christopher Bean (a film of a play) that starred Marie Dressler and Lionel Barrymore. On the stage he played Antony in Orson Welles’s production of Julius Caesar.

6. The plays at the Festival Theatre included The Stronger by Strindberg and On Baile’s Strand by Yeats (January 1927), Strindberg’s Miss Julie (June 1927), Oedipus Tyrannus by Sophocles (October 1927), The Spook [Ghost] Sonata by Strindberg (November 1928, presented by Oxford Players), Hoppla by Toller (February 1929), Intoxication by Strindberg (April 1929), Twelve Thousand by Frank (a Gray production, May 1929), Toller’s Masses and Man (May 1929), Salome by Wilde (June 1929, also a Gray production), and The Machine Wreckers by Toller (Guthrie, January 1930).

7. Briggs was a key member of Gray’s theater as a dancer, actor and designer. In 1934 he designed for Sadler’s Wells the first production of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker outside Russia, starring Alicia Markova. Edwards had acted at the Old Vic Theatre in London, 1924-27.

8. The Gate Theatre had opened in October 1925, almost exactly a year before Gray opened the Festival Theatre, in what Marshall was to describe as a “ramshackle warehouse in Covent Garden.” Peter Godfrey went to America in the late 1930s and later opened a second Gate Theatre in Hollywood.

9. The other professional theater in Cambridge at the time was the New Theatre, which was often criticized by writers in the Cambridge Review for staging too many musicals and comedies in realistic sets.

10. Donat was 24 and Robson 27. At the Festival Theatre Donat acted in 20 plays in one year and Robson 22 plays in a year and a term. Donat made his film debut in 1932 as Culpeper in The Private Lives of Henry VIII. His part as Mr. Chips (for which he received an Oscar) in the much-loved film was based on the life of a real teacher at the Leys School, Cambridge. Donat was Romeo at the Old Vic in 1939. Robson went to the Old Vic in 1933, where she repeated her Cambridge performances in The Cherry Orchard and Measure for Measure for Tyrone Guthrie, her director at the Festival Theatre and in London. Robson became known for her performances in plays by O’Neill: Abbie in Desire under the Elms (Gate 1931), Ella in All God’s Chillun Got Wings (Embassy 1933) and Anna in “Anna Christie” (Westminster 1937). For a full account of her career, see Kenneth Barrow, Flora: An Appreciation of the Life and Work of Dame Flora Robson (London: Heinemann, 1981). Another ex-Festival Theatre actor was Beatrix Lehmann, also known for her performances in O’Neill: Ella in All God’s Chillun (Gate 1929), Lavinia in Mourning Becomes Electra (Westminster 1937) and Abbie in Desire under the Elms (Westminster 1940). She acted Salome in Gray’s production at the Festival Theatre (1931).

11. Leigh studied in Cambridge and later with Hindemith. He was killed in action during the Second World War, bringing to an end a promising future. He composed a wide range of music including a comic opera Jolly Roger, which had been admired by Benjamin Britten and ran for 199 performances at the London Savoy Theatre in 1933.

12. Oulton appeared in over sixty films and directed thirty others; Young was the director in 1934 of The Scarlet Pimpernel with Leslie Howard; Benson was in The Winslow Boy in New York in 1947 and later appeared in London in revue.

13. Frank Birch, a King’s College don, was a great inspiration to Gray before he opened the Festival Theatre. Gray had admired Birch’s production of Troilus and Cressida in Cambridge (the production was also seen at the Everyman Theatre in London). He directed sixteen plays at the Festival Theatre and several in London. A letter from Birch appeared in the Cambridge Review of 3 June 1932 in defense of Rice’s See Naples and Die, in which Birch suggested that the play was “more representative of modern life than—say—the more pretentious dramas of Eugene O’Neill.”

14. Ann Casson was the daughter of Lewis Casson and Sybil Thorndike. Although only seventeen at the time, she had already appeared in several films since 1930, including Dance, Little Lady, which starred Flora Robson.

15. On graduation Raine agreed to marry Hugh Sykes Davies, the current editor of the Cambridge Review. In her second book of autobiography (The Land Unknown [London: Hamish Hamilton, 1975]) she admitted that it had not been a happy union, and following her emotional collapse, the Marxist poet Charles Madge carried her off to London.