Liverpool Playhouse
A Theatre and Its City
Distributed for Liverpool University Press
Since its opening in 1911, Liverpool’s Playhouse has been inextricably linked to the history of the city in which it was built. The impetus to create it, Ros Merkin reveals in this chronicle of the oldest surviving repertory theater in Britain, grew out of the city’s new sense of civic pride and largesse in the early twentieth century. Her book asks both how the city has shaped the theater and what the theater has brought to the city, and along the way she dispels the myth that the Playhouse is Liverpool’s conservative theater, revealing that from its inception it was breaking new ground and issuing challenges.
The start of the experiment
From trial to theatre
Basil Dean, 1911–1913
Laurence Hanray, 1913–1914
World War One and the Commonwealth
William Armstrong, 1922–1944
Maud Carpenter
War and the Old Vic
John Fernald, 1946–1949
Gerald Cross, 1949–1951
Willard Stoker, 1951–1962
Bernard Hepton, 1962–1963
Ronald Settle and Joan Ovens
David Scase, 1963–1967
Kay Gardner, 1967–1969
Antony Tuckey, 1969–1975
Studio 1
Leslie Lawton, 1975–1979
William Gaunt, 1979–1981
Gang of Four, 1981–1984
Studio 2
Jules Wright, 1985–1986
Ian Kellgren, 1986–1991
‘It’s too good to lose’
Bill Kenwright, 1991–1996
Studio 3
Richard Williams, 1996–1998
Jo Beddoe, 1999–2003
Gemma Bodinetz and Deborah Aydon, 2003–
Bibliography
Index
History: European History
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