Ben Iden Payne
During his second year at the Manchester Grammar School he appeared in his first Shakespearean role, Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice.
It was inspired by the founder of the Elizabethan Stage Society, William Poel, and developed during Payne's time in Pittsburgh.
This could be achieved by creating a more intimate space, where the audience was not separated from the actors by "the proscenium arch, footlights, or orchestra pits".
After a four-week trial engagement with Benson, Payne spent a season touring Britain with a much smaller company.
[2] He returned to Benson the next year, but this engagement was cut short when a fire at the Theatre Royal in Newcastle upon Tyne destroyed the company's stock of scenery and costumes.
In 1902 he returned to Benson, where he worked both as an actor and an assistant stage manager, his first non-acting theatrical experience.
Shortly thereafter, and unexpectedly, Payne was approached by William Butler Yeats, one of the Directors of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin.
Unknown to Payne, Granville-Barker had recommended him for the position; equally unknown to him at the time, the English financial patron of the Abbey, Annie Horniman, insisted on an English professional stage manager as a condition for a three-year subsidy she was making to the theatre.[1]: p.
66 Payne was engaged as stage director of the Abbey Theatre, but with strict instructions that he was not to participate in the production of Irish folk plays.
Payne was not aware at the time that his employment was made at the insistence of Horniman, nor that Lady Gregory and Synge were opposed to bringing in a British play director to the Irish National Theatre.
[4] The engagement lasted only a few months; after taking the company on a British tour from Glasgow, Scotland, to London, Payne resigned his position.[1]: p.
84–92 [7] Poel was an early-twentieth-century innovative advocate of producing Shakespeare plays as written, without the heavy scenery and butchered text of grand nineteenth-century productions by the likes of Henry Irving.
103 [2] Payne resigned as director of Manchester Repertory in 1911, both for personal reasons (his wife, Mona Limerick, did not get along with Horniman) and because he believed new management could produce more popular plays that might stem the red ink of the operation.[1]: p.
[9] According to Angus L. Bowmer, founder of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, a financial backer demanded that Barrymore be replaced, fearing a disastrous drinking binge.
128 In 1917, Payne accepted a position as a stage director of the Charles Frohman Company, a leading American producing organisation.
[11] Payne was unhappy with the work at Frohman, with its emphasis on type casting, and a star system where engaging a celebrity actor (who cared more about their own performance than the good of the play as a whole) was the main concern, and he left in 1923.[1]: Chap.
[9] In 1934 Payne and Thomas Woods Stevens edited and produced several short (one hour) productions of Shakespeare plays that were presented during the second year of the Chicago World's Fair (Century of Progress) at a crude reconstruction of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre.[1]: p.
