Shaw accepts the deeds for the National Theatre, 1938
Black with eyes were slots in the hoardings round Sou' Ken's* National Theatre site yesterday afternoon: G.B.Shaw can still draw the newsreelmen whose arrival anywhere draws a crowd. He was there to receive theatre's deeds from hands of Sir Robert Vansittart' (*Metrolanguage for South Kensington's)
So begins a newspaper account of the ceremony documented in the video above. The ceremony marked a high point and one of great promise in the long running campaign to found a national theatre. Shaw had actively supported the movement from its earliest days after Harley Granville Barker and William Archer had collaborated to publish in 1904 'A National Theatre: Scheme and Estimates.' Shaw, as much a provocateur off the stage as on, would later write up his speech for the occasion as a letter to the editor of the Daily Telegraph and Morning Post, 13 June 1938. (see below).
Geoffrey Whitworth, in his fine history of the movement, The Making of a National Theatre (Faber & Faber, 1951), vividly describes the hope that day of realizing a long-struggled for goal and the foreboding that the intervention of war would as with the movement's earlier effort dash all their plans and more (see below).
The Unfelt Want
To the Editor of "The Daily Telegraph and Morning Post"
Sir - People ask me "Do the English people want a National Theatre?" Of course they do not. They never want anything.
They have a British Museum; but they never wanted it. They have Westminster Abbey. They never wanted that either; but now that it stands there, a mysterious phenomenon that came to them they don't know how, and don't care, they quite approve of it, and feel the place would be incomplete without it. What we have to do is to produce the phenomenon of a National Theatre on the site that has been acquired at South Kensington, London.
We have not only got the site, but we have paid for it; and we are not yet at the end of our resources. The first thing we have to do, in order to fill this site worthily , is to find an architect, and we have found one in the person of Sir Edwin Lutyens.
He will find this site a very appropriate field for his efforts, because most of what the 19th century was able to do for London in the way of public buildings was done in South Kensington.
You have the Natural History Museum, Waterhouse's masterpiece; but it is really 13th century architecture. You have the Albert Hall. What sort of architecture that is no human being has been able to say; but at any rate there is is. you have the building which replaces what used to be called Brompton Boilers. And now you have the church of the Oratorians. Now I think we may depend on Sir Edwin Lutyens not to go back to the 13th century, but to give us something belonging to our own time.
Although, as i have said, the site is paid for, we cannot really afford it; but we can go ahead for some distance, far enough to oblige the Government who will have to come and help to keep on foot an indispensable national institution when we have solidly founded it.
The way the National Gallery, the British Museum, and all these places begin is always by a small group of people who understand their national cultural importance. They make a beginning, and after a time the beginning becomes an institution. Then the government comes along, or rather the Government does not come along, but the created institution confronts the Government; and the Government which never wanted it, says, "Here is something which for some reason or other we have got to keep going."
Now we have to carry the this institution to the point at which the Cabinet will be up against it. I remember the year 1922, which was when we were on very good terms with our neighbours the French, the third centenary of the birth of Molière, the great French dramatist, who stands in France as Shakespeare does here. For the sake of the Entente Cordiale we were expected to celebrate it. The business fell, in due course, into the hands of the Foreign Office.
When the heads of the Foreign Office heard that we had to celebrate Molière, they naturally said, "What or who is Molière?" and nobody could answer the question until a young attaché - perhaps it was Sir Robert Vansittart - said, "My governor has a library of which he is very proud, and there is a row of books in it called 'The Works of Molière'." The Foreign Office said "Ah! Works. Good! This is one for the Commissioner of Works."
Accordingly, the First Commissioner of Works took the thing in hand. By an extraordinary peice of good luck the Commissioner at that time was Lord Crawford, who with some three or four other peers - Lord Lytton and Lord Howard de Walden among them - represented culture in the House of Lords.-
G. BERNARD SHAW
London, S.W.1, June 8.
The Making of a National Theatre, p. 212
by Geoffrey Whitworth
We tried to keep our spirits with the wishful thought that it was incredible that history should repeat itself so exactly that what had happened five-and-twenty years ago should again dash the cup of victory from our hands when all seemed hopeful...And as the summer wained, more plans were made for the autumn, and we were told of mysterious millonaires who might at any moment transform the shadowed scene into a glorious finale. What had been done hitherto, was mere spadework. The seeds that had been scattered so opulently would now begin to fructify. And so it might have been, had not our secret fears proved to be justified, and had not fate intervened with a far different climax, in which not only the National Theatre project but the world was overwhelmed.
