Toting Up Tyrone Guthrie

Tyrone Guthrie (1900-1971) accomplished so much in the English speaking theatre that it almost strikes me as an injustice what he is chiefly known for in the States, which is being one of the founders of our regional theatre movement.

This is an effect of the Minneapolis theatre that bears his name, founded in 1963 (and the web site for which does this giant of the theatre very little honor, I must say. I had to dig to find anything about him on the site, and it’s precious little). The Guthrie is an important regional theatre, but in the context of its founder’s entire career, it’s almost like an after-dinner burp. It has always seemed kind of crazy to me that someone who was a giant in London, Edinburgh, and New York, who had directed at the Old Vic and Sadler’s Wells in the time of Laurence Olivier,John Gielgud,Alec Guinness, Peggy Ashcroft, Edith Evans, Sybil Thorndike, Vivien Leigh, Michael Redgrave, Maurice Evans, Wendy Hiller, Charles Laughton, and Elsa Lanchester, and was the founding artistic director of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, cradle of Christopher Plummer and (yes) William Shatner, would trouble himself to make a theatre happen in this medium-sized midwestern city surrounded by cornfields and iron ore. It’s the entire point, I guess, but why him?

Tyrone was born into theatrical nobility. His great-grandfather was the original Tyrone Power; the eponymous movie star was his second cousin. His paternal grandfather Thomas Guthrie was a famous Scottish clergyman. Shortly after graduating Oxford, he began creating radio plays for the BBC. In the ’20s he directed at the Scottish National Theatre and other regionally. In the ’30s’ and early ’40s he conquered London. He was one of the pioneers of breaking out of the proscenium, bringing action out onto thrust stages and open-air spaces. He also acted in two pictures made by Charles Laughton’s Mayflower Productions, The Beachcomber, and The Sidewalks of London, both in 1938.

Guthrie directed on Broadway as early as 1936, and returned nearly two dozen times. Some notable credits include the original productions of Thornton Wilder’sThe Matchmaker (1955), Leonard Bernstein’s musical Candide (1956), and Paddy Chayefsky’sThe Tenth Man (1959) and Gideon (1961). He did new adaptations of Sex Characters in Search of an Author (1955) and Tamburlaine the Great (1956). He did Troilus and Cressida (1956) with Jeremy Brett and Rosemary Harris, and Mary Stuart (1957), with Irene Worth and Eva Le Gallienne.

This is the tip of the iceberg, really, and obviously skewed to the modern American sensibility. But we’ve had occasion to mention Guthrie and the theatre which bears his name before. It seemed high time to give him a star on our sidewalk.