In honour of Dr. Soudabeh Ananisarab’s theatrical book launch, I have come to Birmingham’s Old Rep in character as a conk head. 

Conk-head

/kȯŋk hɛd/

noun

1. an obsessive supporter/reader/cult member of Concrete Brum.

2. a person with a conked (bumped) head (conk).


The day before curtains up, I attached a small toy helicopter to my face via suction cup in a frenzied attempt to make an infant laugh. The final result: a huge circular bruise on my forehead. So, cursing my papery skin – and my beloved and ungiggling niece – I take my adequately conked head, and point it towards the action on the intimate stage. 

The seating is steep, the stalls clamber red to the ceiling. A seam of light opens beside the stage as one or two latecomers arrive, suitably embarrassed, through the specifically-designed-for-maximum-embarrassment-doors. Birmingham based talent and theatrical history are the subject and the substance of this Shavian story. Our narrator is Dr. Ananisarab, senior BCU Drama lecturer and archival researcher, illuminating the interwoven histories of regional theatre and the singular playwright/ activist/ critic, George Bernard Shaw. Brum-born Shaw-specialist and actor-writer-director Jonas Cemm plays the convivially contemptuous GBS himself, interrupting the research with reimagined conversations with his contemporaries, and barbs about Brum, bin strikes and being purposefully misrepresented by big racist bigots. The small ensemble cast is formed of BCU Drama students, who also provide lighting and film the production. The Old Rep plays itself, but younger.

The story opens with a familiar refrain: the fragile balance between art and survival, the weight of London rents and rates pulling a dream out of shape. But these aren’t the production companies of tomorrow, fleeing extortionate LDN into the inexpensive embrace of Digbeth-in-renaissance. It is the early 1900s, and Shaw is conferring with his friend – actor, theatre manager and director, Harley Granville Barker. Barker is also an absolute GBS stan. Under his management, the Court Theatre in the capital staged a 70% Shaw-based repertoire, which helped launch the playwright to pre-eminence, second only to Shakespeare at the height of his fame. Their dream is a new national theatre movement, a non-commercial, subsidised space for experimentation with New Drama. Such unconventional, realist plays, featuring complex characters and realistic political and social contexts, were becoming financial failures in the star-driven and often risk-averse mainstream culture of the West End. The two friends discuss the draw of the provinces, the creative space opening up in places like Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool, where the regional repertory movement would find its home.

Through collaboration and a kind of mutual necessity, a symbiosis develops between Bernard Shaw and the newly emerging regional reps; he offers avant-garde plays to stage, appealing to a new audience of serious readers of literature, and working-class intellectuals, while the reps give him a place to share his radical works outside of the commercial pressures of London. The star of our show, Birmingham’s Old Rep, is merely ‘The Rep’. Back in its modest neo-Georgian glory, it is the first of its kind built in the UK, the original repertory theatre. A gong sounds to announce the start of a performance. Functionality comes first, and there is no bar: no half pints to be sloshed humiliatingly onto the red cushioned seats or crinkling silver sweet wrappers to disturb the awaiting ears of the audience. The Rep’s founder, Sir Barry Jackson, has decided to stage a late Shaw play, Back to Methuselah. Not exactly a safe bet, it had lost its backers $20,000 during its premier in New York: a four-day extravaganza set across a timespan of 35,924 years, featuring locations like the Garden of Eden, an oasis in Mesopotamia, Galway a thousand years into the future, and a bedroom in Hampstead Heath, flute players, and expertly painted abstract backdrops. In the end more people work on the show than come to see it, but it attracts glowing reviews from London critics, and Shaw himself, who marvels at its positive reception: he has achieved a miraculous thing, awakening the slumbering intellect of mankind, and in Birmingham of all places! Besides, as GBS intones, ‘Art does not bow to convenience’. Doesn’t even nod to be fair.

Despite this triumphant tale of extravagant community art over mundane commercial interests, a Shavian story is never straightforward. Reactions to the first Malvern Festival in 1929, dedicated to the works of Shaw and produced by The Rep’s Sir Barry Jackson, were mixed at best, and not only due to the seeming incoherence of the then modern and experimental works of the famous Fabian Socialist playwright, parading through the ‘perpetually sleepy’ parochialism of peaceful spa-town Malvern. Locals also questioned the decision for the council to finance theatre at a time of economic depression and unemployment. Neither was Shaw a simple champion of the oppressed and downtrodden, despite his progressive drive to bring arts to communities, critique the unjust British class-system, and decry the horrors of war. Dr. Ananisarab convincingly characterises GBS as more an intellectual elitist, believing in his superiority, his right to direct changes to theatre from on high, for the sake of the mush-minded masses, who knew no better (pp. 40-41). Jackson, during the festival, would bring into Malvern critics from the cultural elite – a specialised class of conspicuous consumers, eager to demonstrate their higher morals, principles and intellect through their appreciation not of mainstream West End shows, but plays by Shaw and his ilk (Dr. Ananisarab, pp. 44-45). 

Bernard Shaw was contradiction – born into poverty and dying, almost 100 years and two world wars later, as one of the best known and richest playwrights in British history, an atheist who conceptualised his own religion, a declared pacifist who gave funds to war, a believer in clean living and middle class genteel reform, who yearned for an all-powerful leader to help evolve a new Superhuman race –at once obnoxious and kind-hearted, at times advocate for the exploited and subjugated, variously seriously, hideously indefensible, or a contrarian clown– as Dr. Ananisarab explains, ‘Shaw made very different statements about precisely the same issues at different periods in his life.’

Our story reaches its end: the ensemble bow out backstage through applause. Though there is no formal Q&A, this petit drame of a book launch leaves our distinguished audience in discussion. I ask about the lure of Shaw, centuries after his birth, and members of the Shaw society, BCU lecturers and students tell me this: it is his arrogance and humour, his willingness to provoke, to expect more from the audience, to ask them to listen closely, to think, to think again, which keeps them interested in the works and the man. Birmingham’s cold-ish November evening flicks my umbrella inside out, indifferent to my desperately grasping fingers and the thoughts rattling round in my conk-head. In there – those experiments in drama through the regional repertory movement and their familiar aims, the AI-slop saturated present, and the need to experience art to-make-me-think in real life. Here’s to everyone trying to bring arts into communities, and communities into the arts, building interconnections with the complex human beings who make up audiences, experimenting and trying to survive in times which, like Shaw’s lifetime, feel absurd and ‘hostile to comprehension and analysis’ (Dr. Ananisarab, p. 250) with all the complexity, contradiction and push-back that comes with it.

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Bernard Shaw and the British Regional Repertory Movement, by Dr. Soudabeh Ananisarab, available at Springer and Waterstones
https://www.waterstones.com/book/bernard-shaw-and-the-british-regional-repertory-movement/soudabeh-ananisarab//9783031876684
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-87669-1

George Bernard Shaw and the Malvern Festival, Dr. Soudabeh Ananisarab 
Click to access Soudabeh%20Ananisarab.pdf

The council says striking bin workers are violent. The union says that’s rubbish, The Dispatch, Kate Knowles 
https://www.birminghamdispatch.co.uk/the-council-says-striking-bin-workers-are-violent-the-union-says-thats-rubbish/