A report on West End theatre and John Gielgud

Laurence Kerr Olivier, Baron Olivier, (22 May 1907 – 11 July 1989) was an English actor and director who, along with his contemporaries Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud, was one of a trio of male actors who dominated the British stage of the mid-20th century.

In 1930 he had his first important West End success in Noël Coward's Private Lives, and he appeared in his first film.

Coward played in the piece in 1911 and 1912 at the Garrick Theatre in London's West End.

Relative Values (1951) addresses the culture clash between an aristocratic English family and a Hollywood actress with matrimonial ambitions; South Sea Bubble (1951) is a political comedy set in a British colony; Quadrille (1952) is a drama about Victorian love and elopement; and Nude with Violin (1956, starring John Gielgud in London and Coward in New York) is a satire on modern art and critical pretension.

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.

Although Shaw's works since The Apple Cart had been received without great enthusiasm, his earlier plays were revived in the West End throughout the Second World War, starring such actors as Edith Evans, John Gielgud, Deborah Kerr and Robert Donat.

Broadway and London's West End together represent the highest commercial level of live theater in the English-speaking world.

Classical revivals also proved popular with Broadway theatre-goers, notably John Barrymore in Hamlet and Richard III, John Gielgud in Hamlet, The Importance of Being Earnest and Much Ado About Nothing, Walter Hampden and José Ferrer in Cyrano de Bergerac, Paul Robeson and Ferrer in Othello, Maurice Evans in Richard II and the plays of George Bernard Shaw, and Katharine Cornell in such plays as Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, and Candida.

The Noël Coward Theatre, formerly known as the Albery Theatre, is a West End theatre in St. Martin's Lane in the City of Westminster, London.

The following year and for most of 1927 the New was home to a dramatisation of Margaret Kennedy's The Constant Nymph, which ran for 587 performances, starring first Coward and then the young John Gielgud as Lewis Dodd.

He went on to take over the Memorial Theatre at Stratford, and to create the permanent Royal Shakespeare Company, in 1960, also establishing a new RSC base at the Aldwych Theatre for transfers to the West End.

Oedipus by Seneca translated by Ted Hughes, directed by Peter Brook, with John Gielgud as Oedipus, Irene Worth as Jocasta (1968)

A Broadway production followed in 1931, and the play has been revived at least a half dozen times each in the West End and on Broadway.

Directors of new productions have included John Gielgud, Howard Davies and Richard Eyre.

Two years later, at the age of 22, he played the role of Osric in Hamlet in the West End and joined the Old Vic.

He was one of the greatest British actors who, along with Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud, made the transition from theatre to films after the Second World War.

She won the Academy Award for Best Actress twice, for her definitive performances as Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939) and Blanche DuBois in the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), a role she had also played on stage in London's West End in 1949.

John Gielgud directed Twelfth Night and wrote, "... perhaps I will still make a good thing of that divine play, especially if he will let me pull her little ladyship (who is brainier than he but not a born actress) out of her timidity and safeness. He dares too confidently ... but she hardly dares at all and is terrified of overreaching her technique and doing anything that she has not killed the spontaneity of by overpractice."

The Theatre Royal Haymarket (also known as Haymarket Theatre or the Little Theatre) is a West End theatre on Haymarket in the City of Westminster which dates back to 1720, making it the third-oldest London playhouse still in use.

Wartime presentations included the London premiere of Noël Coward's Design for Living (1939) and John Gielgud's 1944–1945 repertory season of The Circle (Somerset Maugham), Love for Love (Congreve), Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Duchess of Malfi.