While this book is concerned with investigating Shaw’s connections with regional theatres, these collaborations must first be contextualised through Shaw’s involvement with theatres in the capital. As this chapter demonstrates, a significant contributing factor to the development of the regional repertory movement was the lack of opportunities for staging more experimental work in the West End. This chapter explores several London ventures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that aimed to present a more varied repertoire of plays than those offered by the capital’s commercial theatre district. These ventures include the Independent Theatre, the Stage Society and the Vedrenne-Barker seasons at the Court Theatre. The failure of these projects to become financially sustainable ventures accompanied by the rise of interest in theatre in the regions as demonstrated by the rapid growth in the number of amateur dramatic societies active outside London (several of which performed Shaw’s work at rates considerably lower than that expected by the playwright) resulted in Shaw’s collaborations with professional regional theatres and the development of the regional repertory movement.