Harley Granville Barker (1877-1946) was the most brilliant British director of the first quarter of the twentieth century. His best known plays, including Waste (banned by the Lord Chamberlain), were written as contributions to his Company’s repertoire of provocative modern drama for a national theatre. In The Voysey Inheritance, a young man deals with the discovery that the inheritence due to him has been mismanaged by his own parents; Waste tells the story of a young man’s whose life has been thrown away; The Marrying of Ann Leete, is a thinly veiled costume drama, using an 18th-century tale to reflect on 19th-century reality. It follows the story of Ann, a ‘new woman’ who is surrounded by a society of manoeuvres and lies.