ENGLISH TOURING SCHEME.

Evening Post, Volume CXXI, Issue 1, 2 January 1936, Page 14

ENGLISH TOURING SCHEME.

Since the English provinces are given stars on the screen every week, they will accept hardly anything in the theatres unless it is done as a star attraction and on the same scale as a London production. This statement was made in an interview for the London "Observer" last month by Mr. Harry Tennent, general manager of a firm which often has several plays running in. London and supplies more than a score of theatres up and down the country. Recently a northern theatre took in one week, with a London company, more than £2000. In the following week, with a touring company, it took £250. Many of the great provincial theatres, it seems, have gone over to the talkies. The problem now is to keep one legitimate theatre open for seven months in the year. By long experience the firm has calculated that there are only about fifteen London stars who are capable of drawing full i houses in the provinces. The difference between the old and new touring, scheme is that whereas a London success went on tour with as many as twenty-four companies at a time, the shows for London are now taken on i tour prior to their performance in the capital. These preliminary tours may | last for five weeks before the London i opening. A clause appears in all j actors' contracts providing for this ! arrangement. The new Marie Tempest ; play, "Short Story," in which Sybil Thorndike will appear—the two . actresses have never been in the same cast before—will tour Edinburgh, Glas- I gow, Manchester, Birmingham, and Leeds before it opens in London on October 28. Asked what he thought of young Mr. Sydney Bernstein's idea of building a chain of theatres, equally equipped as cinemas and theatres, with the plan of showing films for three weeks and stage plays for one week in each month, Mr. Tennent said: "I think it is a very good idna, only he will I have to have a first-class company for each of his weeks of plays."