Wilson Barrett

Wilson Barrett, born William Henry Barrett on 18 February 1846 in Essex, England, was an English actor, playwright, theatre manager, and book writer who died on 22 July 1904 in a London nursing home. He made his first stage appearance at Halifax in 1864 and subsequently performed in the provinces, including productions alongside his wife, Caroline Heath, in East Lynne. Barrett and Heath married in 1866 and had five children together: sons Frank and Alfred, and daughters Ellen, Katherine, and Dorothea.

Barrett leveraged his early acting success to pursue a career as a theatre producer. He gained managerial experience at the Grand Theatre Leeds before taking over the Old Court Theatre in 1879, where he introduced Madame Helena Modjeska to London audiences in an adaptation of Schiller's Maria Stuart, as well as productions of Adrienne Lecouvreur and La Dame aux camélias. In 1881 he assumed management of the Princess's Theatre, where his melodramatic productions drew the largest crowds the venue had ever seen. Among these was The Silver King, which debuted on 16 November 1882 with Barrett in the role of Wilfred Denver — a production widely regarded as the most successful melodrama of the nineteenth century in England. Barrett performed the role for three hundred consecutive nights. He also found success at the Princess's Theatre with The Lights o' London and W. G. Wills's Claudian. In 1885, he co-produced Hoodman Blind with Henry Arthur Jones, and the following year collaborated with Clement Scott on Sister Mary. Barrett departed the Princess's Theatre in 1886, the same year he made his first visit to America.

Though Barrett attempted Shakespearean roles, including Hamlet in 1884 and Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, he found limited success in that repertoire and returned primarily to melodrama. His touring company remained one of the most profitable of the decade, generating an average yearly profit of £2,000 from the Grand Theatre Leeds alone. His brother and nephew were members of the company, and his grandson later joined as well. Barrett was also the producer of the performance of The Romany Rye whose opening night coincided with the Exeter Theatre Royal fire, the deadliest theatre incident in United Kingdom history, in which 186 people were killed.

By the 1890s, shifting tastes on the London stage had diminished Barrett's standing in melodrama and left him in financial difficulty. Beginning in 1894, he toured the United States, performing at Broadway venues including the American and Knickerbocker theatres. His Broadway appearances included The Manxman, Lucky Durham, Scarlet Sister Mary, and The Sign of the Cross. The Manxman was Barrett's own adaptation of Hall Caine's novel of the same name, and a marked script of the play is held in the Playscripts and Promptbooks Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

The Sign of the Cross, a historical tragedy Barrett wrote and first produced in the United States at the Grand Opera House in St. Louis, Missouri on 28 March 1895, became the most successful work of his career. The play subsequently opened in the United Kingdom at the Grand Theatre Leeds on 26 August 1895, in London at the Lyric Theatre on 4 January 1896, and in Australia at Her Majesty's Theatre, Sydney on 8 May 1897. Barrett played Marcus Superbus, a Roman patrician during the reign of Nero who falls in love with a young Christian woman named Mercia, originally portrayed by Maud Jeffries, and ultimately converts to Christianity, with both characters sacrificing their lives in the arena. The production drew audiences composed substantially of people outside the usual theatregoing public, many of them encouraged to attend by local clergymen. Barrett attempted to replicate this success with additional plays of a religious character, though none achieved comparable results. In 1932, Cecil B. DeMille produced and directed a film adaptation of The Sign of the Cross, starring Fredric March as Marcus Superbus, Claudette Colbert as Poppea, Charles Laughton as Nero, and Elissa Landi as Mercia.

At the turn of the century, Barrett co-founded a company that would eventually become Waddingtons, established initially as a printing firm serving the theatre industry. Despite periods of financial difficulty in his later years, the success of The Sign of the Cross enabled Barrett to leave an estate of £57,000 at the time of his death. His grandson, also named Wilson Barrett, became an actor-director with the Brandon-Thomas Company before founding his own repertory company in 1939, the Wilson Barrett Company, which performed at Edinburgh's Lyceum, the Alhambra Theatre in Glasgow, and for a period in Aberdeen, as well as at the Edinburgh International Festival and in South Africa. The company ceased operations in 1954.

Barrett's papers, placed at the Harry Ransom Center by his descendants, comprise more than thirty boxes of materials including manuscript works, business and personal correspondence, financial records, legal agreements, photographs, playbills, and programs. The collection also includes Barrett and Heath family papers, as well as letters by Barrett found within the literary manuscript collections of Richard Le Gallienne, John Ruskin, William Winter, and Robert Lee Wolff. Costume design records from the B. J. Simmons Co. for The Sign of the Cross are also held at the Ransom Center. Additional letters by Barrett are held at the British Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the University of Leeds Special Collections Library. The Victoria and Albert Museum Theatre and Performance Archives holds designs by Edward William Godwin for Barrett's productions of Juana, Claudian, Hamlet, Junius, and Clito. The papers of Wilson Barrett the younger are located in the Scottish Theatre Archive at the University of Glasgow.