man subsequently came to Newcastle to see the Clarion production of his play Man and Superman in 1921. After this, Shaw offered in future a percentage of royalty terms instead of performance fees - a generous gesture. The theatre had by now changed its name to the People's Theatre and went on to give the first provincial performance of Shaw's Heartbreak House. In 1926, the theatre gave the British premiere of Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale and Rutland Boughton himself came to conduct his popular The Immortal Hour. In 1929, the People's acquired new premises at Rye Hill in the west end of the city, where they converted an old chapel into a theatre in which they would stay until 1962, staging over 500 productions. During this period the theatre was visited by a number of well-known figures from the theatrical world, including Sybil Thorndike in 1931. In March 1933, J. B. Priestley visited the theatre whilst travelling around the country gathering material for his book English Journey; in it, he writes at some length about watching a rehearsal of The Trojan Women. G.B. Shaw visited for a second time in 1936, upon which occasion he made what was to be his last speech from a stage. He remarked: "This being my last speech in the theatre, I like it to be this one." Both Shaw and Dame Sybil took part in a BBC radio programme about the People's Theatre produced by Cecil McGivern an ex-People's member, in 1939. In this programme, Shaw opened his remarks with the words 'I like this People's Theatre.' The theatre remained open and producing plays throughout World War II. It gave the public premiere of one of Shaw's very last works, Farfetched Fables, in 1951. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s the People's continued to perform drama by playwrights whose work at that time would have otherwise been unperformed in northeast England, or, in some cases, anywhere else. The People's staged the World Premiere of Seán O'Casey's play Cock-a-Doodle Dandy in 1949. Another premiere was that of W. H. Auden's The Ascent of F6. Auden was in Newcastle at the time, and his friend, the Newcastle poet Michael Roberts wrote the programme notes. Other such writers included: John Whiting, Harold Pinter, Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, John Arden, John Osborne, Ugo Betti and Fritz Hochwälder; many of these productions were regional, if not national premieres of works