Arthur Pelham Collins (1864–1932) was an English playwright and theatre manager. He was perhaps best known for his many Christmas pantomimes produced at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, which he managed during the late Victorian and Edwardian era.
Collins was born in London to the architect Hyman Henry Collins (1833–1905). Arthur was one of nine children; his younger brothers, Alphonse and Horace were both in the theatrical business with the former having had a brief music-hall career and Horace being a Press agent for the Drury Lane Theatre, later becoming Secretary of the Theatrical Managers' Association. Collins' youngest brother Frank was Charles B. Cochran's general stage director. Another of his brothers, Marcus Evelyn Collins, was a successful architect.
Collins began his working life in a Holborn seedsman's shop before beginning an apprenticeship to Henry Emden, who was the scenic artist at Drury Lane Theatre, during the tenure of the impresario and dramatist Augustus Harris. From 1881, he was associated with the theatre continuously for 43 years. There he also learned from scene-painter William Beverley, whom he described as being "the most celebrated scenic artist of the day." Collins met the dramatist W. S. Gilbert, who directed his own plays; the meeting was, for Collins, "one of his pleasantest recollections. Gilbert always knew what he wanted. He would look at a scene model, point out defects and suggest alterations in a sympathetic manner."
Following the death of Augustus Harris in 1896, Collins became managing director of the Drury Lane Theatre, a post he held until 1924. Collins's brother Horace remembered that, after Harris died, Collins had at short notice to raise £1,000 "with which he took up the option on the lease. He then had to interview the Duke of Bedford's agent. It was the Duke's intention to pull down the historic building and use the site for a new potato market. There was a loud outcry in the Press against the destruction of the [theatre]. The agent was somewhat diffident about granting a long lease of the theatre to an inexperienced man of thirty-one, but Arthur overcame his objections and, probably impressed by the results of his management under Harris, he advised the Duke to grant Arthur a forty years' lease, which was subsequently extended to eighty." The first Drury Lane production under the proprietorship of Arthur Collins was a play called White Heather, by Cecil Raleigh and Harry Hamilton, for which Collins invited his sister-in-law's sister, the fashion and society writer Eliza Davis, to assist in designing the costumes. She wrote, under her pen name "Mrs Aria": "There were no less than ninety frocks altogether".