Purcell Operatic Society

The Purcell Operatic Society was a short-lived but influential London opera company devoted to the production of stage works by Henry Purcell and his contemporaries. It was founded in 1899 by the composer Martin Shaw and folded in 1902. Its stage director and production designer was Gordon Craig whose productions for the company marked the beginning of his career as a theatre practitioner. Their debut production of Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas in 1900 was one of the earliest staged performances of the work in modern times.

Martin Shaw founded the Purcell Operatic Society in 1899 on the suggestion of his Hampstead neighbour, Nannie Dryhurst, who became the Society's secretary. Interest in Purcell's long-neglected stage works had been revived four years earlier on the bicentenary of his death when Dido and Aeneas received its first major staging in almost two hundred years. Shaw recruited his close friend, Gordon Craig, to create a new staging of the opera for the Society's debut production. Both men were in their mid-twenties at the time, and it was to be Craig's first major outing as a stage director. Craig and Shaw decided to rent lodgings closer to Nannie Dryhurst while they prepared their first production, and moved into a house at 8 Downshire Hill which was to serve as their living quarters, studio, and the offices of the Purcell Operatic Society.

To pay the initial rent on the Downshire Hill house, Shaw sold many of his books and Craig pawned the gold watch which Henry Irving had given him. From the outset, the Society was run on a shoe-string using gifted amateur musicians and singers (75 in all), recruited from Martin Shaw and Nannie Dryhurst's Hampstead friends, supplemented by two professionals for the leads. Shaw arranged the scores, rehearsed and trained the singers and conducted all the productions. Craig not only designed and directed all the productions, he also produced and illustrated the programmes and designed the Society's stationery and posters. Neither of them took any pay. Craig's sister, Edith Craig, also worked on their productions as did the painter Jean Inglis and the scenic artist William Thompson Hemsley. Rehearsals took place in private houses in Hampstead, first in a large room in Guyon House lent to them by William Boulting, and later at Lested Lodge in Well Walk.

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