ELLEN TERRY THEATRE SOCIETY

Evening Star, Issue 23370, 13 September 1939, Page 12

ELLEN TERRY THEATRE SOCIETY

SEASON IN ELIZABETH BARN When Henry Irving bought Sinallhythe Place, in Kent, as a retreat for Ellen Terry, he can have had no idea of the pleasures that other people would derive from it when death had taken him from her life and her from ours, states a writer in the ' Queen.' At the hack of her lovely oldfashioned house there.is an Elizabethan barn, and in the later years of her life, when she lived almost entirely in the country, she often spoke of waking the barn into a small theatre and watching her young friends on the stage acting in it. That dream-was never fulfilled while she lived, but her daughter, Edith Craig with her great force of character, has not only achieved the little theatre, but established a society in connection with it—the Ellen Terry Barn Theatre Society—which has a season of plays each year. The seventh season began recently. Gwen Ffrang-con-Davies and Geoffrey Wincott inaugurated it with a Sunday afternoon performance of the Paul Claudel play, ' Exchange,' which Edith Craig produced. To newcomers to the society the performance was something of a revelation, and not only the performance, but the whole idyllic atmosphere which was created. The barn stands in what was Ellen Terry's old-world garden, and as act succeeded act the audience of a hundred or so flocked out from the barmto stroll along the grassy paths, sit about in the sunshine, and capture something of the spirit which this greatest of English actresses has left in this tiny village. Miss Craig was, of course, there to watch the play, active and alert in, spite of her 69 years, and very much like her mother in appearance.