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Theatre and Urban Space: the Case of Birmingham Rep
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2009
Abstract
In NTQ61, Deborah Saivetz described the attempts over the past decade of the Italian director Pino DiBuduo to create ‘invisible cities’ – performances intended to restore the relationship between urban spaces and their inhabitants, through exploring the actual and spiritual histories of both. Earlier in the present issue, Baz Kershaw suggests some broader analogies between the theatre and its macrocosmic environment. Here, Claire Cochrane, who teaches at University College, Worcester, narrows the focus to a particular British city and the role over time of a specific theatre in relation to its urban setting. Her subject is the history and development of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in relation to the city – of which its founder, Barry Jackson, was a lifelong resident – as an outcome of the city's growth in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, which made it distinctive in terms of its manufactures, the workers and entrepreneurs who produced them, and a civic consciousness that was disputed yet also shared. She traces, too, the transition between old and new theatre buildings and spaces which continued to reflect shifting class and cultural relationships as the city, its politicians, and its planners adapted to the second half of the twentieth century.
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References
Notes and References
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17. An ancillary issue for the historian is that commercial managers who maintained this system but with genuine artistic aspirations have been substantially excluded from the historical record. In Birmingham, the commercial management of the Alexandra Theatre by the Salberg family from 1911 to 1977 included well-supported periods of twice-nightly popular rep. The Alex never achieved the historical status of the Rep. See Salberg, Derek, Ring Down the Curtain: a Fascinating Record of Birmingham Theatres and Contemporary Life through Three Centuries (Courtney Publications, 1980)Google Scholar.
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35. Cherry, p. 103.
36. Most of the material on the ‘new’ Birmingham Rep comes from my own forthcoming The Birmingham Repertory Company 1961–1999, to be published by the Sir Barry Jackson Trust.
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