The Arena: Season 1975, Episode 1

1975 - 1: Theatre

This week, the director Ronald Eyre looks selectively and critically at what's coming on, or doing well, and recommends his own personal ' best buy.'

Kenneth Tynan talks to Laurence Olivier about Lilian Baylis, the eccentric founder of The Old Vic. Kenneth Tynan says: "The theatre is the cockpit of society: it is here that ideas are argued out, laughed at and worked over. It is our job in Arena: Theatre to make the theatre accessible and comprehensible to the largest possible audience. We hope to celebrate plays, players and playwrights as they are working now and we shall also pass judgement of our own. When a dictatorship takes over, the first cultural institution to be suppressed is the theatre."