After WWI the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-on-Avon appointed Barry Jackson as its new Artistic Director, in the hope that he would enliven the run-down Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. Jackson faced a difficult challenge to try to make the theatre more forward-thinking and increase its international reputation, especially as rationing was still enforced and the cost.mes workshops had only 2000 coupons for each production. As the proverb says ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ and the cost.mes s from previous years’ productions were taken out of storage to be re-used. Many of them were very old and half-eaten by vermin, but those that were not beyond repair were mended, adapted and re-imagined by the talented men and women who worked in the cost.mes studio. Jackson invited his friend Laura Knight, with whom he had become close in the 1920s, to join him at Stratford to observe and paint the back-stage activities. The pictures she painted over the next couple of seasons are among her most fascinating; ‘… the intense colours gave Knight the perfect excuse to bring a new brilliance and vitality to her work after the misty landscapes and sunsets which had occupied her in Malvern.’ (Timothy Wilcox, Laura Knight at the Theatre: Paintings and Drawings of the Ballet and the Stage, 2008, p. 99)
‘For the first year at Stratford I concentrated my work on the old wardrobe opposite the theatre; the contents of this building, still only half reorganized after the war, was a gold mine for me. Here I found activity in the employment of needle and thread on dummy actor and actress; cutting, pinning and fitting; the floor strewn with odd lengths of material, scissors, reels of cotton, in the effort to readjust cost.mes s fetched out of store for present wear. Made of silk, satin and velvet of considerable antiquity, these superb pieces of colour, cutting and workmanship, in spite of their moth-chewed fur trimmings, were historical – worn long ago by performers of fame. I believe I did some of my best work in the wardrobe before it was eventually put into perfect order.’
In The Theatre Wardrobe Knight has brilliantly captured the vibrant colour of the old sky-blue silk gown and the intense concentration in the eyes of the woman inspecting it. The Theatre Workshop was exhibited at the Royal Academy summer exhibition in 1948 with another picture painted in the cost.mes department at Stratford, Theatre “Prop” Basket (Bonhams, London, 19 November 2008, lot 39) in which the busy industry of the seamstresses is at the periphery of the picture. In 1949 she exhibited The Yellow Dress (Worcester City Museum and Art Gallery) which may be seen as a pendant to The Theatre Workshop with a male figure making alterations to a cost.mes . 1950 saw the exhibition of the last of the series of pictures painted at Stratford A Cloak for Pericles – The Wardrobe Department at Stratford (sold in these rooms, 19 July 1967, lot 168) which had caused Knight great problems as each actor or actress who came for a fitting brushed against the mannequin and disturbed the folds of the cloak that she was so faithfully trying to render – she resorted to working all day on two Sundays so that she would not be disturbed.
This picture will be included as number 0511 in the Catalogue Raisonné on the artist's works, currently being compiled by Mr R. John Croft FCA, the artist's great nephew.