Career
After leaving university he worked with various small touring companies and in 1926 he joined the Cambridge Festival Theatre, first as a press agent, then as a stage manager and in 1932 he became their resident director In 1934, he bought the lease on the small club theatre, the Gate Theatre Studio, where in the next six years he produced popular intimate revues and many successful plays, some of which later transferred to the West-end stage. In his 1947 book The Other Theatre he documented the histories of a number of small, committed, independent theatre companies including his own, the Oxford Playhouse, the Arts Theatre Club and the Cambridge Festival Theatre.
These theatres were able to avoid the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship by operating as theatre clubs, where membership was obligatory, and took risks by producing new and experimental plays, or plays by writers thought to be commercially unviable on the West-end stage,
The Gate Theatre Studio was destroyed during the Blitz and after the war Marshall set up a production company and produced several plays in the West-education
In his book The Producer and the Play he described the history of theatrical production together with his own experiences.
