Theatre of the United Kingdom rise of satire in 1960s Britain. The Chichester Festival Theatre was Britain's first modern thrust stage theatre. It was inspired by the Festival Theatre of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival launched by Tyrone Guthrie in the Canadian city of Stratford, Ontario. The inaugural Artistic Director of the Chichester Festival was Sir Laurence Olivier, and it was at Chichester that the first National Theatre company was formed. Chichester's productions would transfer to the National Theatre's base at the Old Vic in London. The Theatres Act 1968 abolished the system of censorship of the stage that had existed in Great Britain since 1737.
John McGrath (artistic director) the artistic director of the Contact Theatre in Manchester (1999-2008) and the founding artistic director at National Theatre Wales (NTW) (2009 - end of 2015). During his time at the NTW the actor Michael Sheen starred in and was creative director of "The Passion", a 72-hour secular passion play staged in Sheen's hometown of Port Talbot, Wales with over 1,000 local residents taking part. In 2013 McGrath was interviewed alongside a number of other theatre practitioners in Wales for the It Gets Better Project. The project was set up in response to the suicides of teenagers who were bullied because