In Britain, the repertory movement was a theatrical movement that originated in the early years of the twentieth century, was continued and developed between the two world wars, and became, after 1950, the prevailing kind of theatrical organisation outside London. The earliest repertory companies were created and introduced as a protest against London’s domination of the theatres in the regions, along with a desire to counter-balance the commercial successes of the ‘West End’. My argument in this essay is that the time has come for a renewal of that protest in the face of a modern domination of British theater by ‘The West End’.

By the second half of Queen Victoria’s reign, most people earned extra money and worked shorter hours than ever before. This meant that for the first time, ordinary workers had  leisure time to enjoy pastimes. By the mid-1800s, most of the huge towns had several theatres, providing a range of ‘song-and-dance’ shows that entertained the whole family. By the 1860s, theater became so successful that not only were we decorated to make them more comfortable with proper cushioned seats and carpet, but also matinées were introduced and the representational style of theater was replaced with a new realism, pioneered on the continent by writers such as Ibsen. This meant box-sets were placed on the stage to generate a proper room or rooms and the set would then be decorated with all the household items appropriate to that type of room; the set would appear exactly like a real-life room. at the beginning of the nineteenth century, theatres had stayed open plenty of hours, often until midnight, showing tragedies, farces, pantomimes and other forms of entertainment that appealed to a mass audience. Theatres were not always the most salubrious places to visit. However, by the finish of the century theatres were more stunning, stayed open for much shorter periods of time and the theater programmes again consisted of just a single play. Banks and Marson (1998, p.45) claim that:

The court of Queen Victoria and so-called Victorian morality and attitudes affected the theater. The Queen invited actors and companies to give ‘command performances’ at Windsor Castle;

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