A report on West End theatre, George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde

The Palace Theatre, in the City of Westminster, London, built in 1891

The London Palladium in Soho opened in 1910. While the Theatre has a resident show, it also has one-off performances such as concerts. Since 1930 it has hosted the Royal Variety Performance 43 times.

Shaw's birthplace (2012 photograph). The plaque reads "Bernard Shaw, author of many plays, was born in this house, 26 July 1856".

Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Opened in May 1663, it is the oldest theatre in London.

Original interior of Savoy Theatre in 1881, the year it became the first public building in the world to be lit entirely by electricity.

William Archer, colleague and benefactor of Shaw

Photograph by Elliott & Fry of Baker Street, London, 1881

The Lyceum Theatre, home to Disney's The Lion King.

William Morris (left) and John Ruskin: important influences on Shaw's aesthetic views

1881 caricature in Punch, the caption reads: "O.W.", "Oh, I eel just as happy as a bright sunflower, Lays of Christy Minstrelsy, "Æsthete of Æsthetes!/What's in a name!/The Poet is Wilde/But his poetry's tame."

Queen's Theatre showing Les Misérables, running in London since October 1985

Shaw in 1894 at the time of Arms and the Man

Wilde lectured on the "English Renaissance in Art" during his US and Canada tour in 1882.

The restored facade of the Dominion Theatre, as seen in 2017

Gertrude Elliott and Johnston Forbes-Robertson in Caesar and Cleopatra, New York, 1906

Keller cartoon from the Wasp of San Francisco depicting Wilde on the occasion of his visit there in 1882

The St Martin's Theatre, home to The Mousetrap, the world's longest-running play.

Caricature of Wilde in Vanity Fair, 24 April 1884

Dublin city centre in ruins after the Easter Rising, April 1916

No. 34 Tite Street, Chelsea, the Wilde family home from 1884 to his arrest in 1895. In Wilde's time this was No. 16 – the houses have been renumbered.

The Royal Court Theatre. Upstairs is used as an experimental space for new projects—The Rocky Horror Show premiered here in 1973.

The rotating hut in the garden of Shaw's Corner, Ayot St Lawrence, where Shaw wrote most of his works after 1906

West End theatres on Shaftesbury Avenue in 2016

Wilde reclining with Poems, by Napoleon Sarony in New York in 1882. Wilde often liked to appear idle, though in fact he worked hard; by the late 1880s he was a father, an editor, and a writer.

Gilbert and Sullivan play at the Savoy in 1881

Wilde by W. & D. Downey of Ebury Street, London, 1889

Victoria Palace Theatre (showing Billy Elliot in 2012) was refurbished in 2017.

"The strenuous literary life—George Bernard Shaw at work": 1904 caricature by Max Beerbohm

Plaque commemorating the dinner between Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle and the publisher of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine on 30 August 1889 at the Langham Hotel, London, that led to Wilde writing The Picture of Dorian Gray

Jokanaan and Salome. Illustration by Aubrey Beardsley for the 1893 edition of Salome.

Lake Windermere in northern England where Wilde began working on his first hit play, Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), during a summer visit in 1891.

St James's Theatre, London in the 1890s. The Importance of Being Earnest was Wilde's fourth West End hit in three years.

The Marquess of Queensberry's calling card with the handwritten offending inscription "For Oscar Wilde posing Somdomite [sic]". The card was marked as exhibit 'A' in Wilde's libel action.

Wilde in the dock, from The Illustrated Police News, 4 May 1895

Oscar Wilde's visiting card after his release from gaol

Oscar Wilde on his deathbed in 1900. Photograph by Maurice Gilbert.

The tomb of Oscar Wilde (surrounded by glass barrier) in Père Lachaise Cemetery

A Conversation with Oscar Wilde – a civic monument to Wilde by Maggi Hambling, on Adelaide Street, near Trafalgar Square, London. It contains the inscription, "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars".

Oscar Wilde Memorial Sculpture in Merrion Square, Dublin

One of the most popular playwrights in London in the 1890s, Oscar Wilde premiered his second comedy, A Woman of No Importance, at Haymarket Theatre in 1893.

- West End theatre

Constructed in 1897, Her Majesty's Theatre hosted a number of premieres, including George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion in 1914.

- West End theatre

In the 1890s Shaw's plays were better known in print than on the West End stage; his biggest success of the decade was in New York in 1897, when Richard Mansfield's production of the historical melodrama The Devil's Disciple earned the author more than £2,000 in royalties.

- George Bernard Shaw

Wilde became the sole literary signatory of George Bernard Shaw's petition for a pardon of the anarchists arrested (and later executed) after the Haymarket massacre in Chicago in 1886.

- Oscar Wilde

Peter Raby said these essentially English plays were well-pitched: "Wilde, with one eye on the dramatic genius of Ibsen, and the other on the commercial competition in London's West End, targeted his audience with adroit precision".

- Oscar Wilde

Of contemporary dramatists writing for the West End stage he rated Oscar Wilde above the rest: "... our only thorough playwright. He plays with everything: with wit, with philosophy, with drama, with actors and audience, with the whole theatre".

- George Bernard Shaw

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Gielgud as Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, 1959

John Gielgud

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English actor and theatre director whose career spanned eight decades.

Centre: Marion, Kate and Ellen Terry and, far right, Fred Terry at Ellen's Silver Jubilee matinée, Drury Lane, 12 June 1906. Everyone shown was a member of the Terry family.

Noël Coward with Lilian Braithwaite, his, and later Gielgud's, co-star in The Vortex

Mrs Patrick Campbell and Edith Evans, 1920s co-stars with Gielgud

The Old Vic (photographed in 2012), where Gielgud honed his skill as a Shakespearean

Mabel Terry-Lewis, Gielgud's aunt and co-star in The Importance of Being Earnest

Gielgud in a publicity photograph for Secret Agent (1936)

Gielgud and Dolly Haas in Crime and Punishment, Broadway, 1947

Edmond O'Brien (Casca, left) and Gielgud (Cassius) in Julius Caesar (1953)

Much Ado About Nothing: Gielgud as Benedick and Margaret Leighton as Beatrice, 1959

Gielgud (left) as Joseph Surface, and Ralph Richardson as Sir Peter Teazle, The School for Scandal, 1962

After studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art he worked in repertory theatre and in the West End before establishing himself at the Old Vic as an exponent of Shakespeare in 1929–31.

The Times observed, "Mr Gielgud and Miss Terry-Lewis together are brilliant ... they have the supreme grace of always allowing Wilde to speak in his own voice."

He played Sir Sydney Cockerell, director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, in a representation of a friendship between Cockerell, Bernard Shaw and Laurentia McLachlan, a Benedictine nun.