Nigel Playfair
After a time in F. R. Benson's company he made steady professional progress as an actor, but the major change in his career came in 1918, when he became managing director of the Lyric, a run-down theatre on the fringe of central London.
He transformed the theatre's fortunes, with a mix of popular musical shows and classic comedies, some in radically innovative productions, which divided opinion at the time but which have subsequently been seen as introducing a modern style of staging.
[1] The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says that the doctor is notable nowadays for "his unintended contribution to medical ethics" by breaching the confidentiality of one of his patients, and for popularising the Weir Mitchell "rest-cure", a treatment criticised by Charlotte Perkin Gilman in The Yellow Wallpaper.
Destined for a career as a lawyer he was called to the bar by the Inner Temple in 1900, performing in his spare time with two well-known amateur societies, the Old Stagers and the Windsor Strollers, before giving up the law for the stage.
[3] Playfair's first professional appearance was in Arthur Bourchier's company at the Garrick Theatre, London, in July 1902, playing Mr Melrose in a curtain-raiser, A Pair of Knickerbockers.
[3] In 1903 he played his first professional Shakespeare role, Dr Caius in Herbert Beerbohm Tree's production of The Merry Wives of Windsor at His Majesty's Theatre.
[1] In 1905 he married the actress Annie Mabel Platts (1875–1948), the daughter of a senior officer in the Indian Imperial Police; her stage name was May Martyn.
[3] His roles between then and the First World War included Flawner Bannel in Fanny's First Play (1911), Steward in The Winter's Tale (1912), Sir Benjamin Backbite in The School for Scandal (1913) and Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1914).
[7] A biographer of Playfair writes that the Lyric was "a derelict playhouse in what was then little more than a slum … this theatre seemed the last place in the world where high-class entertainment could possibly succeed".
Among the productions were Abraham Lincoln by John Drinkwater, and The Beggar's Opera, which, in Frank Swinnerton's phrase, "caught different moods of the post-war spirit",[9] and ran for 466 and 1,463 performances respectively.
[3] Playfair interspersed the classics with new musical shows with scores by Dennis Arundell, Thomas Dunhill and Alfred Reynolds and words by himself, A. P. Herbert and others: Riverside Nights (1926), Tantivy Towers (1931) and Derby Day (1932).
[6] Sharp writes that Playfair gathered "a loyal and happy team of young players, musicians, and designers who, under his genial leadership, not only began to make their reputations and confirm his, but also helped to create a specific Lyric style".
