The origins of The Rep lie with the 'Pilgrim Players', an initially amateur theatre company founded by Barry Jackson in 1907 to reclaim and stage English poetic drama, performing a repertoire that ranged from the 16th century morality play Interlude of Youth to contemporary works by W. B.

[4] Over the next five years the company staged a total of 28 different productions, aiming to "put before the Birmingham public such plays as cannot be seen in the ordinary way at theatres", but also performing as far afield as London and Liverpool.

[4] By September 1912 Jackson had bought a site in Station Street in Birmingham City Centre and appointed an architect to design what would become Britain's first purpose-built repertory theatre.

[11] Jackson encouraged his development into a dramatist, presenting a series of his one-act plays and culminating in the 1918 premiere of his first full-length work Abraham Lincoln, whose triumphant success marked a turning point both for playwright and theatre.

[14] This was the first performance of Shakespeare to take place in modern dress[15] and it "bewildered" critics, leading to what Jackson happily called "a national and worldwide controversy".

Actors who first rose to prominence at the pre-war Rep included Laurence Olivier, Cedric Hardwicke, Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, Edith Evans, Stewart Granger and Ralph Richardson.

By the outbreak of the Second World War the Rep was, alongside the Liverpool Playhouse, one of only two British theatres presenting programmes of quality drama outside London in accordance with the original aims of the repertory movement.

"[31] All British theatres were closed for the first month of the war, and when the Rep reopened ticket sales were poor and staff had to take pay cuts.

Other post war actors included Stanley Baker, Albert Finney, Ian Richardson, Julie Christie, Derek Jacobi, Colin Jeavons and Timothy Spall (Cochrane 2003).

Despite the success of Oh Fair Jerusalem, the Rep board decided against staging Destiny because of its strong theme of racial tension,[34] putting The Importance of Being Earnest on instead.

The Studio became popular during the 1980s and in 1988, Kenneth Branagh temporarily relocated his Renaissance Theatre Company to the Rep which gave Birmingham the opportunity to showcase plays by guest directors such as Judi Dench and Derek Jacobi.

During the 1970s and 1980s the Studio was a regular home to the Birmingham Youth Theatre, a company which launched the careers of actors such as Andrew Tiernan and Adrian Lester.

In 2004 the company controversially cancelled a series of performances of Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's play Behzti after protests from Birmingham's large Sikh community.

Recently, the Young Rep have put on productions on the Main House Stage such as "The Rotters Club" and E. R. Braithwaite's "To Sir With Love".

In the autumn of 2020, The Rep revealed that they would hire spaces to operate a Nightingale Court from December that year to until the summer of 2021 to secure its future in the face of closure due to the Covid-19 pandemic.