Ian McKellen launches new book examining the Bloomsbury Group and the theatre

McKellen has provided the foreword to Bloomsbury & British Theatre: The Marlowe Story, in which author Tim Cribb, also speaking at the launch, investigates the Group’s role in the foundation of such institutions as the Royal Shakespeare Company.

The Bloomsbury Group, which included such luminaries as Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes and E.M. Forster, are well known for bringing modernist ideas to fields from literature and art to economics and psychology. Their impact on theatre, however, has not received the same attention until now.

Cribb begins by tracing the friendship between war poet Rupert Brooke, an early and active member of Cambridge’s Marlowe Dramatic Society and Bloomsbury members Woolf and Lytton Strachey.

He goes on to chart the Group’s growing importance in Cambridge theatre, as George Rylands, eminent Shakespeare scholar, fellow of King’s College and long-time friend of Strachey and Woolf, becomes the Society’s director in 1929.

Keynes, one of the Group’s earliest members, funded the Cambridge Arts Theatre in 1936. The theatre has been the home of the Marlowe Society ever since and nursery of the Cambridge talent responsible for the foundation and success of the RSC, including Trevor Nunn, Derek Jacobi, and McKellen himself.

The book also contains interviews with John Barton, Sir Peter Hall, Sir Derek Jacobi and Sir Trevor Nunn by Shevaun Wilder. Wilder, an alumna of Lucy Cavendish College, is a successful producer and actress, as well as former director of the Marlowe Society.

The launch will take place on Monday 10 March at 6:30pm in Heffers Bookshop, 20 Trinity Street. It is free and open to all but requires a ticket, which are available from Heffers on 01223 568568. All profits from book sales will go to the Marlowe Society.