Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The Plan of the Theatre as School CASTLE-BUILDING it had better be, and from foundations up. One could plan for the development of work already in being, and in practice no doubt, and for purposes of experiment, some such nucleus would be helpful. One could both devise and complete a fine new institution suited to a small community making limited demands. But it will be more to our purpose to imagine in broad outline a theatre as school, fulfilling its widest mission under the most exacting circumstances and to beg the question of how it could be brought into being. Details will give verisimilitude, and they are half the fun of castle- building. One sees this theatre as school — to attempt first a parallel — in its status and outward relations, as one of those great specialist schools 7® ., which form part of the already very scope catholic University of London. Its intersmall audience into a small auditorium; it is extravagant — when, as may be, plays of small casts are making the larger appeal — to leave the overplus of actors unoccupied. Besides this, the scope of the study and its exemplifying, the call, for instance, for student performances, would easily burst the bounds of one playhouse. The carrying on of school-work and theatre- work under one roof would probably be a physical convenience, and its amalgamation in one educational plan is a fundamental point of the scheme. The rest of the building equipment would be classrooms, lecture theatres — much the same, indeed, as that needed for any other sort of specialized education. nal organization would be, one cannot deny, both complex and costly. And if one says, to begin with, that the building containing it should accommodate two fully equipped and actively working professional playhouses, that might be enough to ...