Haigh's performance in the role on stage was critically acclaimed as a prototype dramatic working-class anti-hero in post-Second World War English drama.

Haigh's performance in a 1958 Broadway theatre production of that play so moved one young woman in the audience that she mounted the stage and slapped him in mid-performance.

Coincidentally, Haigh went on to portray the explorer and adventurer Richard Francis Burton in the BBC production of The Search for the Nile.

[5] He had already played, three years earlier, another pilot, in High Flight, and had portrayed Pat Casey in Lionel Bart's Maggie May.

He had spent his last years in a nursing home after oxygen deprivation led to brain damage in 2003, following his accidental swallowing of a bone in a restaurant in Soho.