In his obituary of Colin George, Paul Allen conflates two separate road-to-Damascus moments when he suggests that “Tyrone Guthrie had discovered the ‘thrust’ configuration in Edinburgh when, working with Laurence Olivier, a production had to be moved into a hall with seats arranged on three sides.”
In 1936 a sudden torrential thunderstorm on the first night at Elsinore Castle in Denmark forced Guthrie to move Olivier’s Hamlet, with the Old Vic company, into the hotel ballroom. In an hour and a half he arranged the chairs on three sides. In 1948 Guthrie chose the 19th-century General Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland, holding 1300 on three sides, for Sir David Lindsay’s 16th-century morality play Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaites at the second Edinburgh International Festival – a production that I saw. This led to the Guthrie theatres at Stratford Ontario in 1953 (tent) and 1957 (building), Minneapolis in 1963 and the Sheffield Crucible in 1971.
Though the design of the open stage of the Chichester Festival theatre in 1962 is often pointed to as Britain’s first modern thrust stage, it had 80% of its audience to the front. Guthrie had no input there, and the true first was the Crucible. Sadly Guthrie died just weeks before Colin opened the theatre, which remains a living memorial to them both.
