P. P. Howe’s description of the state of British theatre in the last years of the Edwardian era is, with hindsight, both true and misleading. What is missing from his view is the later perception that this was both a luxuriant, golden era for theatre and a period of ideological and aesthetic ‘revolution’. Critics and chroniclers, born in the late nineteenth century and growing up in the British provinces, often write with passion of their early experiences of the actor-managers who visited their towns and cities. But they also decry the commercial ‘revolution’ that mostly destroyed the actor-manager system after World War One, as well as championing the fragmented experiments that brought about another type of ‘revolutionary change in the character of the theatre’ in Britain. Allardyce Nicoll describes this new theatre as ‘possessed of an animating spirit the like of which the nineteenth century … had never known.’