Chronicle Summer 2024

32 ST EDWARD’S CHRONICLE

The cast of A Christmas Carol , 1918

another who would go on to an acting career, before dying young. He would star in Twelfth Night in 1925 and Macbeth a year later, both to rave reviews. 1927 saw a rare outing for Richard III . A sizeable cast and all sorts of special effects and lighting didn’t stop the impression that this one was ‘not one of Cowell’s best’ – was the old man losing his touch? The OSE critic thought the acting ‘competent, the scenery adequate, except where it was maltreated, and the audience seemed to enjoy itself’. The last two plays of Cowell’s very long tenure were both challenges. Coriolanus (for the third time – and never a success before) and lastly his swansong, The Merchant of Venice . One feels that Coriolanus was Cowell’s last chance to surmount a particular challenge which had defeated him before. This time he had the help in a lead role of Richard Warner, another who went on to a long stage career with the Old Vic and on the West End stage. It received moderate reviews, mainly due to the efforts of Warner and others, and the critics felt it was mainly a problem of the ‘wrong choice of play for a schoolboy cast’.

Room tables with highly coloured lanterns around their necks to give a whole new experience. It was a huge success, although the audiences felt decidedly chilly. Sixteen-year-old Laurence Olivier’s performance as Puck was widely praised with the Chronicle publishing a review which said that Olivier ‘seemed to put more go into it than others and succeeded in individualising the part, he showed by his gestures that he has a knowledge of acting and a good mastery of technique’. Another on stage, Edward Beuttler, did not receive such generous praise for his rendering of Helena, although he would go on to the Central School of Speech and Drama at the Albert Hall in London, before joining the first ever staging of Dracula on the West End stage in the title role. The Warden, Henry Kendall, arrived in 1925 and he quickly sensed that while Cowell was now too old to manage one of his new boarding Houses, he should continue to run the school play if he felt he could manage it. In 1925 and 1926 Cowell was fortunate to have the services of Richard Haines,

G.M.G. Gillett ( centre ) as Horatio with H.A. Watson and G.B. Ford as Marcellus and Bernardo in the 1899 production of Hamlet