Did you know?

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

Oxford Playhouse has had a reputation for thriving Greek drama throughout its history. Production of Aeschylus (Agamemnon) in 1880 led to creation of original Oxford Playhouse. This October as part of the 70th celebrations, the Playhouse sees the world premiere of a new opera Burial at Thebes based on Sophocles' Antigone, with words by Nobel laureate, the poet Seamus Heaney.

The first home of the Oxford Playhouse was a former big game museum opposite Somerville College in Woodstock Road. It is now the University Language Centre. The museum's prize exhibit, a six-metre tall giraffe, now graces the foyer of the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter.

The first director of the Playhouse was JB Fagan. His most famous production was The Cherry Orchard in January 1925, which transferred to London with ohn Gielgud playing Trofimov and Fagan's wife, Mary Grey, playing Mme Ranevsky. It was the first successful Chekhov production in England.

Stanford Holme

The second Playhouse director was Stanford Holme, a waggish personality, who had difficulty remembering his lines and broadened the appeal of the theatre. These were the days of weekly rep, when actors appeared in one play at night while rehearsing next week's play during the day. Part of the entertainment was Holme's speech at the end. The editor of Cherwell, Harry d'Avigdor-Goldsmid, wrote in 1931:

'What does it matter if people miss their lines at the beginning? We know that Stanford will apologise divinely at the end.'

Until the present Playhouse opened in October 1938 the Oxford University Dramatic Society staged its indoor productions at the New Theatre. It mounted only one major production at the Playhouse, in June 1938, and then only because no college would lend its lawns. Constance Cummings was Katharina to Willoughby Gray's Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew. The director was Jack Hawkins, the musical director E.R.G. Heath, Britain's future Conservative prime minister.

The influx of military personnel, evacuees and refugees during the Second World War, all hungry for entertainment, made it the most prosperous period in Playhouse history. The future West End actress, Pamela Brown, noted:

'When I first joined the Playhouse company the audiences were very small and our work was almost heartbreaking; Oxford people did not seem to know that the Playhouse existed. But now that has all changed.'

Deborah Kerr

The Second World War also brought a fresh influx of actors, among them the future film star, Deborah Kerr. Angela Wyndham-Lewis, who shared a dressing room with her, told the Playhouse historian Don Chapman:

'She would sit naked to the waist in front of the mirror looking at herself for long periods ... And who could blame her? She was very pretty.'

Until 1950 the Playhouse staged weekly rep, in some years during the war mounting as many as 50 productions. But they were not necessarily of inferior quality. John Moffatt, who played Constantine in the 1948 revival of Chekhov's The Seagull remembered: 'People think that weekly rep must inevitably have been very tatty. But I can remember thinking then: if we'd had another week this wouldn't be as good.'

The Playhouse was successful in attracting actors and directors with a future. In 1951 two made their debut in Elsa Shelley's Pick-Up Girl. 'Among the minor characters,' wrote the Oxford Mail critic, S.P.B. Mais,

'I was particularly impressed by the quiet earnest manner of Ronald Barker.'
The future Ronnie! Also in the cast was an Oxford Playhouse Theatre School student, Margaret Smith. The future Maggie!

In the 1950s Frank Shelley failed to make the Playhouse pay. So did two directors who had not long left Cambridge University, Peter Hall and Peter Wood. It closed in the spring of 1956 to reopen in October run by Oxford graduate Frank Hauser, the longest serving artistic director in the theatre's history.

In 1963 the future novelist, Joanna Trollope, was production secretary for Braham Murray's University College Players' revival of A Man For All Seaons. She recalled:

'The production, although it was only a college one, was so successful that Robert Bolt actually came to see it, and I sat next to him. I was too in awe of him to say much, but he was plainly quite impressed.'

Diana Quick

In 1967 Diana Quick celebrated her election as OUDS' first woman president by playing Ophelia in Hamlet. Don Chapman said when she was on-stage the production had real stature.

'When she is off the stage it becomes a thing of shreds and patches.'

Chris Gray wrote in the Oxford Mail of ETC's 1976 summer term revue After Eights:

'There is an astonishing talent in the form of Rowan Atkinson of the Queen's College. Any man who can have an audience laughing nonstop for five minutes by doing nothing more than pulling faces ... has got to go far.'