Tyrone Guthrie - Career

Career

In 1924 Guthrie joined the BBC as a broadcaster and began to produce plays for radio. This led to a year directing for the stage with theScottish National Players, before returning to the BBC to become one of the first writers to create plays designed for radio performance.

During the period from 1929 to 1933 he directed at various theatres, including a production of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author in 1932. During 1933–1934, and 1936–1945 he was director of the Shakespeare Repertory Company. While in Montreal, Guthrie produced the Romance of Canada series of radio plays for recalling epic moments in Canadian history. The series was broadcast on the Canadian National Railway radio network.

Butler translated the text for Guthrie's 1934 production of Anton Chekhov's Cherry Orchard, for perhaps its first English-language production.

In the 1940s Guthrie began to direct operas, to critical acclaim, including a realistic Carmen at Sadler's Wells and the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He also returned to Scotland where, with James Bridie in 1948, he staged the first modern adaptation, by Robert Kemp, of Sir David Lyndsay's grand-scale medieval comedy Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis for the Second Edinburgh International Festival; a landmark event in the modern revival of Scottish theatre. Staged in the city's General Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland on the Mound, specially adapted for the occasion, it was here that Guthrie's hallmark thrust stage first proved its full worth.