Background
Ashley Dukes was born on May 29, 1885, in Bridgwater, Somersetshire, England. He was the son of Edwin J. Dukes, a minister, and Edith Mary Pope Dukes.
Oxford Rd Manchester M13 9PL UK
Dukes was the graduate in the science of Manchester University.
Ashley Dukes was born on May 29, 1885, in Bridgwater, Somersetshire, England. He was the son of Edwin J. Dukes, a minister, and Edith Mary Pope Dukes.
Dukes was the graduate in the science of Manchester University. His postgraduate study was at the University of Munich.
Dukes’s career as a dramatist began when, like R. C. Sherriff and C. K. Munro, he was given his first hearing by the Incorporated Stage Society. In 1910, Civil War opened at the Aldwych Theatre, London. Pride of Life was produced there the next year. Dukes wrote plays always on historical or imaginative themes which recall early Romanticism, but which are treated in a light, detached, modern way by an analytical mind. However, with the notable exception of The Man with a Load of Mischief, almost all of his works were of a “special” kind, not apt to make an appeal beyond the limited range of a circle of like-minded literatures.
In 1933, Dukes founded the Mercury Theatre, London and wrote plays that appeared in the West End and on Broadway. The Mercury Theatre was opened on the strength of an unexpected 10,000, his earnings from The Man with a Load of Mischief. With the proceeds of the play, Dukes converted a parish hall and two adjoining houses into a bijou theater. It was first established in 1931 as the Ballet Club, where ballets, primarily for Mrs. Dukes, were presented. In 1933 it was licensed as a public theater to Dukes, who emphasized poetic drama at a time when commercial managers were uninterested in the genre. He ran the small theater in Notting Hill, London. A subsequent talk with W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot persuaded Dukes to run the Mercury as a poet’s theater and Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral (1935) was the opening venture.
As a drama critic, Dukes worked for New Age, Vanity Fair, Star, and Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News. He also contributed to Theatre Arts Monthly, a periodical he edited at one time.
Quotes from others about the person
Dukes is perhaps better known as a manager, critic, theater enthusiast, scholar, and translator and adapter of Continental drama than he is as a playwright of original works,” asserted E. H. Mikhail in the Dictionary of Literary Biography
"Dukes is praised as a dramatist and critic who always cared for the spoken word in the theater, and whose The Man with a Load of Mischief excited people whose ears had been dulled by the dialogue of the Noel Coward school, by the folk who, as Mrs. Patrick Campbell said, talked like typewriters, tapping away into the night. In the Gay Twenties, Dukes strove in his work to salvage the former language of the theater.” - E. H. Mikhail
“Dukes is a critic who knows his drama not only in the library but from both sides of the curtain. So much that he has to say is suggestive and inspiring, so shrewd is the practical advice that he dispenses to playwrights and translators, to actors and producers, that one can the less afford to overlook his lapses if for an instant we concede - or allow critics like Mr. Dukes to imply - that the dramatist is not the motive force of the theatre, then our case will be hard indeed.
Dukes married Marie Rambert, a dancer, teacher, and founder of the Ballet Rambert.