Repertory
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For other meanings of repertory, please see repertory (disambiguation).
Repertory or rep is a term from Western theatre. It is traditionally applied to the practice of a single company putting on a variety of plays successively for short runs, typically from a week to a fortnight. In the form repertory company or rep company it may also apply to a theatre company which takes this approach. These are to be distinguished from a company performing a single play for a long run; and from a number of different companies (and hence different actors) putting on short-lived plays in the same theatre one after the other. Different again is a repertoire system, which features two or more plays alternating in the same theatre but with different casts. The repertory system of theatre flourished in Britain in the twentieth century.
Typically a rep company would aim to perform a wide variety of styles: a comedy, a thriller, a mystery, a play by a recent playwright, a play from fifty years ago, and so on. While performing one, it might well be rehearsing its next.
While the repertory system in its original form is less common today than it was (in say, for example, in the 1950s), a period "in rep" was and remains an early stage in the careers of many British theatre (and TV/film) actors: Jeremy Brett, Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, and Imelda Staunton are a very small sample of a host of actors who began in the repertory system.
A form of touring repertory existed which involved transporting the set for about five different plays, which were performed on consecutive nights. This form was called fit-up.
Note that Birmingham Rep, one of the largest theatres and companies in the UK, defines modern repertory theatre slightly differently: "The Rep presents a season with each play generally having an unbroken run, of between three and six weeks. This is the form of repertory theatre that the majority of theatres like The REP — which are also called producing theatres — now follow." ([1]) This longer period for each performance is not a new phenomenon: the Newcastle Playhouse in Newcastle upon Tyne ran seasons in which largely the same cast performed a wide variety of plays for four weeks each in the seventies and eighties.
In Russia and much of Eastern Europe Repertory Theatre is based on the idea that each company maintains a number of productions which are performed on a rotating basis. Each production’s life span is determined by its success with the audience. However, many productions remain in repertory for years as this approach presents each piece few times in a given season, not enough to exhaust potential audience pool. After the fall of the Soviet regime and the substantial diminution of government subsidy repertory practice has required reexamination.
Moscow Art Theatre and Lev Dodin’s Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersburg are the world’s most notable practitioners of this approach.
However repertory is still produced in the UK on the more traditional time scale: for example the producer Charles Vance still produces weekly rep in Sidmouth (12 plays), Wolverhampton (8 plays), Burslem and Taunton (4 each),