the speculative feature out of production,
had been preached in England for some time. Granville Barker had tried
it at the Court Theater, where the Shaw plays had been produced
originally. The movement lagged; it needed energy and money.

Barrie had been a disciple of the Repertory Theater from the start. He
knew that there was only one man in the world who could make the attempt
in the right way. One day in 1909 he said to Frohman:

"Why don't you establish a Repertory Theater?"

Then he explained in a few words what he had in mind.

Without a moment's hesitation Frohman said, briskly:

"All right, I'll do it."

With these few words he committed himself to an enterprise that cost him
a fortune. But it was an enterprise that revealed, perhaps as nothing in
his career had revealed, the depths of his artistic nature.

With his marvelous grasp of things, Frohman swiftly got at the heart of
the Repertory proposition. When he launched the enterprise at the Duke
of York's he said:

_Repertory companies are usually associated in the public mind with
the revival of old masterpieces, but if you want to know the
character of my repertory project at the Duke of York's, I should
describe it as the production of new plays by living authors.
Whatever it accomplishes, it will represent the combined resources
of actor and playwright working with each other, a combination that
seems to me to represent the most necessary foundation of any
theatrical success._

Frohman stopped at nothing in carrying out the Repertory Theater idea.
He engaged Granville Barker to produce most of the plays. Barker in turn
surrounded himself with a superb group of players. The most brilliant of
the stage scenic artists in England, headed by Norman Wilkinson, were
engaged to design the scenes. Every possible detail that money could buy
was lavished on this project.

The result was a series of plays that set a new mark for English
production, that put stimulus behind the so-called "unappreciated" play,
and gave the English-speaking drama something to talk about--and to
remember. The mere unadorned list of the plays produced is impressive.
They were "Justice," by John Galsworthy; "Misalliance," by Bernard Shaw;
"Old Friends" and the "The Twelve-Pound Look," by James M. Barrie; "The
Sentimentalists," by George Meredith; "Madras House," by Granville
Barker; "Chains," by Elizabeth Baker; "Prunella," by Lawrence Ho