Harley Granville Barker (1877-1946)

(signed postcard, gloss, Rotary Photo, 1794K, c.1907)

Harley Granville BARKER was born in Kensington, London. In 1891, at the age of 14, he made his first stage appearance at Harrogate (GB) in Vice Versa. After spending some months training for the stage with Sarah Thorne and performing in her stock company at the Theatre Royal, Margate, he made his London debut in 1892. At the age of seventeen, he joined the Ben Greet players. With his striking Italianate good looks, his expressive voice and total dedication, he was soon attracting considerable attention.

In 1899, he toured with Mrs Patrick Campbell in The Weather-Hen, a play he had written jointly with Berte Thomas. The same year saw the foundation of the Stage Society which arranged private Sunday performances of experimental plays in London. Growing discontent with the commercial theatre, Granville Barker joined the society in 1900.

Baker's first appearance in a Stage Society production was in The Coming of Peace, a translation of Gerhart Hauptmann's Das Friedenfest. Among the audience was Bernard Shaw who was later to say, 'His performance of this part - a very difficult one to cast - was, humanly speaking, perfect.' Shaw clearly was smitten by the handsome actor, who was twenty years his junior, and decided that he was the ideal actor to play the part of Eugene Marchbanks in Candida, a play that he had written in 1895 but had not yet been performed.
The play was produced by the Stage Society at the Strand Theatre on July 1, 1900.

Over the next couple of years, Granville Barker appeared in productions both by Ben Greet and by William Poel, the founder of the Elizabethan Stage Society (1894-1905) - in 1903, Granville Barker played the title role in the society's production in Oxford of Edward II.

Poel's Shakespearean productions did not use scenery but had an Elizabeth-style open-platform stage and used swift and musical speech, rather than the more laboured, didactic style that was then the vogue. It was a staging approach that was possibly the most important influence on modern Shakespeare productions. It also had a considerable influence on Granville Barker.

In 1904, Granville Barker - who, in 1902, had already produced his own play, The Marrying of Ann Leete, for the Stage Society - was given the opportunity to direct his first Shakespeare play. John Highfield Leigh, a barrister and theatre manager, had purchased the lease of the tiny Court Theatre, adjoining  Sloane Square underground station in Chelsea, so that his wife, the actress Thyrza Norman, could appear in a series of 'Shakespeare Representations'. For the third of these, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Leigh engaged Granville Barker both to produce and act in it. The play opened on April 9, 1904, and, while it was still running, Granville Barker arranged to put on a series of six matinées of Shaw's Candida, beginning on April 26.

While at the Court Theatre, he had discussions both with Leigh and his business manager, J E Vedrenne. As a result, it was agreed that, for the following season, the Barker-Vedrenne Management would take over the direction of the theatre, producing repertory in the evenings and special matinée performances. They agreed to spend no more than £200 on each production. A significant theatrical revolution was about to begin.

Although it appears that Bernard Shaw was the main financier of the Court Theatre project, it was clear that, with the limited budget, Granville Barker would, in addition to producing, also have to act in many of the plays. He chose as his leading lady Lillah McCarthy, who had also acted in the Ben Greet Players.

During the next three seasons, there were 988 performances at the Court Theatre, 701 of these were of the eleven Shaw plays that were presented - most of them premieres.  Shaw directed and cast his own plays: their performances established him as a major playwright. In Shaw's new plays, Granville Barker created many famous roles, including John Tanner in Man and Superman, Valentine in You Never Can Tell, Adolphus Cusins in Major Barbara and Louis Dubedat in The Doctor's Dilemma. Lillah McCarthy played Anne Whitefield in Man and Superman, Jennifer Dubedat in The Doctor's Dilemma and Nora in John Bull's Other Island. 

Lillah McCarthy & Harley Granville-Barker in Man and Superman, Court Theatre, 1905.

Apart from the Shaw plays, there were new works by progressive playwrights which Granville Barker produced. They included his own most successful play, The Voysey Inheritance, and Prunella, which he wrote with Laurence Housman. There were new plays by John Galsworthy, St John Hankin, Elizabeth Robins (Votes for Women) and John Masefield, as well as translations of plays by Ibsen, Hauptmann, Schnitzler, Materlinck and three by Euripides, translated by Granville Barker's friend, Gilbert Murray.

During these three hectic years at the Court Theatre, Granville Barker and Lillah McCarthy fell in love and married in 1906.

At the end of the 1906/07 season, Barker decided to end his relationship with the Court Theatre and to move, the following season, to the much larger Savoy Theatre, where he hoped to establish a repertory program similar to that introduced so successfully at the Court. During the year, there were yet more Shaw plays and Euripides Medea, but the experiment did not attract the anticipated audiences and so was a commercial failure.

In 1909, another opportunity arose. The American impresario, Charles Frohman, took over The Duke of York's Theatre with the intention of presenting mainstream plays in the evening and a repertory season of new plays in matinée. He arranged that the main program would be directed by Dion Boucicault (who had directed J M Barrie's Peter Pan for Frohman in both London and New York) and the repertory plays would be directed by Granville Barker.

Things do not go well. Henry James and Somerset Maugham did not deliver their promised plays. Nor did Arthur W Pinero provide a new play: instead, there was a revival of Trelawny of the Wells. Granville Barker's new work, The Madras House, and Shaw's Misalliance were both discussion plays that did not appeal to the public. The Times theatre critic called Misalliance 'a debating society of a lunatic asylum'. Playing to half-empty houses, Misalliance was given only eleven performances in the first ten weeks of the season and The Madras House only ten. Frohman was delighted to be able to use the death of King Edward VII as his excuse for bringing the experiment to an end.
In 1911, Lillah McCarthy and Granville Barker took over the management of the Little Theatre. On April 19, they presented yet another new play by Bernard Shaw, Fanny's First Play, which he had written especially for Lillah. Although he considered it to be 'a potboiler', the audiences loved it and it ran for 622 performances - a record for a Shaw play.

Harley Granville Barker's 1912 production of Twelfth Night

Between 1912 and 1914, Granville Barker presented at the Savoy Theatre his ground-breaking productions of three Shakespeare plays - The Winter's Tale, Twelfth Night and Midsummer Night's Dream. He remodeled the theatre, adding an apron stage. With his designer, Norman Wilkinson, he created a set that, while using a bare stage, had draped curtains brightly painted with symbolic designs. Some of the costumes were elaborate - the fairies, for example, had gilded body-paint and gold-bronze dresses that jangled as they moved. Adhering closely to the original text, the lines were delivered at a normal, fast-moving pace, rather than the drawn-out oration that had been the norm.

In 1915, Granville Barker and Lillah McCarthy set off for New York where his productions of Midsummer Night's Dream and Shaw's Androcles and the Lion were presented at Wallack's Theatre. After this successful season, Lillah returned to England and the company moved on to present plays by Euripides at American universities, including Harvard, Yale and Princeton. During this tour, Granville Barker met and instantly fell in love with the American novelist and poet, Helen Huntingdon. He contacted Shaw, demanding that he should obtain Lillah's consent to a divorce. When he approached her, she was, of course, dismayed.

Granville Baker's action ended his marriage, his acting career, and his friendship with Shaw, whose socialism Helen Huntingdon found unacceptable. When he returned to England, Granville Baker enlisted in the Army and, by the end of the First World War, was divorced from Lillah McCarthy and married to his new love. Shortly afterwards, the couple moved to Paris and collaborated in translating Spanish plays. He also wrote his much acclaimed Prefaces to Shakespeare (1927-48).

This is part of an article on Harley Granville Barker that was published in The Theatre World, February 1926: