Manchester Repertory Company
The day after resigning his position with the Abbey, he received a note from Horniman, the Abbey patron. She was unhappy with her relationship with the Irish National Theatre (the unhappiness was mutual) and she wanted to sponsor a new theatrical venture, under Payne's direction. Payne proposed establishing a repertory company in Manchester, a major provincial city in England and Payne's boyhood home. With Horniman's funding he established the Manchester Repertory Company, the first true repertory company in theatre in England. He directed many of the early plays of George Bernard Shaw and John Galsworthy.
In 1907, Payne used William Poel to direct Measure for Measure, by William Shakespeare, with the Manchester Repertory Company. Poel was an early-twentieth-century innovative advocate of producing Shakespeare plays as written, without the heavy scenery and butchered text of grand nineteenth-century productions by the likes of Henry Irving. Poel's production at Manchester Repertory may have been his best, as Payne had cast it with talented, professional actors, and not the amateurs Poel usually worked with.
The next year, Payne produced Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing as a Christmas play at Manchester. To keep the pace of the play flowing, without long interruptions during scene changes, he staged played connecting scene in front of a neutral curtain drawn across the proscenium. This was an early experiment in staging Shakespeare plays as continuous action, as was the style at the Globe Theater when the plays were first written and produced.. Payne resign as director of Manchester Repertory in 1911, both for personal reasons (his wife, Mona Limerick, did not get along with Horniman) and because he believed new management could produce more popular plays that might stem the red ink of the operation.
Read more about this topic: Ben Iden Payne
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“Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one—and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that’s a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)
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—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, and Samuel Beckett one—and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that’s a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)
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—Sarah Fielding (1710–1768)