The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare

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National Theatre, Royal

National Theatre, Royal.
The long political campaign to have in England a state-supported National Theatre comparable to continental institutions was launched with a pamphlet A Home for Shakespeare in 1848. By 1907 William Archer and Harley Granville-Barker had published A National Theatre: A Scheme with Estimates, but, although committees met and a site in South Kensington was acquired, nothing had been achieved by the outbreak of the Second World War. The Old Vic Company in London and the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford each contended to become the nucleus of a national theatre. Successive post-war governments dithered, and it was the London County Council's offer of a site on the South Bank of the Thames which finally prompted parliamentary approval. In 1963 the first director Laurence Olivier assembled an acting company and production team at the borrowed Old Vic theatre, opening with Hamlet. By the time the National took...

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