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Theatre Management

A succinct guide to the many aspects of managing a presenting theatre

For a succinct guide to the many aspects of managing a presenting house like the Grand Theatre today, we commend Essential Theatre, an interactive manual by theatre consultant Crispin Raymond.

The author can be contacted at: Crispin Raymond & Associates, Kereru, Herring Stream Road, RD1 Motueka, New Zealand. Telephone: +64 (0)3 526 8812 or email: crispinraymond@hotmail.com


Theatre Management, 1933-style!
For a 1930s guide to front of house management, see the Howard & Wyndham Limited Manual for Theatre Managers. An extract of their politically-incorrect rules shows how far we have progressed in personnel management.

“Few things may be contemplated with greater pleasure to the eye or more rest to the spirit than the unveiling to our view of a stage setting. By means of the art of perspective one receives the impression of superb palaces, vast temples and other splendid buildings. We may see upon the stage various intermedii beautifully decorated, and comedians, dancers, acrobats and musicians strangely and fantastically clothed. Sometimes one sees men and women in the disguises of animals who play tricks…These things give so much pleasure to the eye and to the intelligence that we imagine nothing made by man to be more beautiful than the theatre, and nothing more popular than the laughter play.”

The theatre must be carried on as a business or it will fail as an art. A theatre is not the easiest thing to manage: it needs foresight, tact, urbanity, thrift, good taste, eternal vigilance and, above all, the support of the public.

- Henry Irving, Speech to the Manchester Philosophical Society,1898

There never was, and there never will be, an ideal theatre. The theatre is far too complex and delicate a machine, depending on the harmonious cooperation of too many talents and influences, ever to reach perfection for more than a passing moment. The very greatest theatres at their greatest periods have been severely criticised, not, as a rule, without reason. The reader, we are sure, will not let his craving for what is ideally desirable render him careless of what is practically desirable as an improvement upon exisiting conditions. And he will not fail to bear in mind, we trust, that it is no magical recipe we are offering, no instant and miraculous cure for all the shortcomings of our theatrical life......

- William Archer and Harley Granville-Barker, A Scheme and Estimates for a National Theatre, 1903

Downloadable PDF's

Howard and Wyndham Limited Manual
Essential Theatre Interactive Version 2006