Actor Knighted

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 376, 9 June 1928, Page 24

Actor Knighted

Nigel Playfair, who Revived “The Beggar’s Opera ”

GREAT MAN OF THE THEATRE The only actor to figure in the last birthday honours was Nigel Playfair, who teas knighted. It was he ivho first conceived the idea of reviving “The Beggar’s Opera,” which became a wonderful success. In the following article in an English magazine W. It. Titterton wrote of Sir Nigel; — Not many actors or managers, and even few actor-managers of our time, are men of the theatre. I exclude from consideration all such actors who enter the profession with no more vocation than the Vicar of Bray had for Holy Orders, and all managers, single or syndicate, with whom it was a toss-up whether they went in for rubber or stage-plays. I am thinking only of actors who do like their job and do not regard it as the irksome means of equipping then., as persons of fashion, and managers who like their job and do not think that the only office they need in a theatre is the box-office. And of these select few, very few again are “hommes de theatre.” For reasons which I shall not here divulge, I shall not give a list of the chosen few (though I have one of them). But one of them undoubtedly is Nigel Playfair. As Canning selected his Cabinet when at school, so Playfair at Oxford may have sketched out his plans for management. I cannct believe he ever meant to be content with acting—though at that he she ne, too. He did much for the 0.U.D.5., the Old

Stagers, and the Windsor Strollers, and made his first appearance on the professional hoards at the Garrick in 1902, as Mr. Melrose in “A Pair of Nickerbockers.” He was then just turned 27. What had he been doing with himself from the Varsity days until then? Well, of course, he had done a great deal of amateur acting, but in his business hours he was a barrister. He must have been a very cherub of a barrister, learned in the law, no doubt, and possibly liking the trappings, but longing himsfelf to “produce” the dull tragi-comedy, tighten up the dialogue and the situations, abolish the stage-waits, establish a just key and tempo, aud devise better groupings than the blase stage-mana-ger of the court allows. Perhaps a certain spruce primness remains to him from the law, though that belongs, one fancies, rather to solicitors, and even then to a celestial sort.

Or shall we say, rather, that he is of a period—that almost endless Restoration period which he loves.

He has always been a very busy man. but be has, nevertheless, that delicious satisfying air of being a man of leisure. He has style and poise, he has composure. He gives the impression of having just heard something good and of relishing it sedately.

His first London appearance in old comedy seems to have been in 1913, at His Majesty’s, as Sir Benjamin Backbite, in “The School for Scandal,” his second in 1916 at the Shaftesbury, as Dangle in the operatic version of “The Critic.” But the performance which gave me the greatest delight -was his Crawshaw in Milne’s first and finest stage-piece, “Wurzel-Flummery.” But, though an excellent actor, he was not one of our greatest, as he is certainly one of our greatest managers aud producers. Aud the turning point in his career was when, with the help of a few bold he acquired the Lyric Opera House, Hammersmith.

The Lyric seemed no use to anybody. It was nearly half-an-hour by Tube from Shaftesbury Avenue. It was in an alley off a market of vociferous and pungent stalls. There seemed no profitable way of telling people where it was and getting them to go there. The late Mr. Mullliolland was offered the rental of it for a nominal sum—£soo a year, it is said —and laughed at the offer.

But Playfair knew w'hai; he was about. A place of pilgrimage may be anywhere so long as it is near a Tube, and he meant to make and succeeded in making the Lyric, Hammersmith.

Yet it was touch-and-go. Perhaps in grateful remembrance of “WurzelFlummery,” Playfair started in December, I9IS, with a children’s piece by A. A. Milne—“ Make Believe.” It was a frost, and Playfair had nothing

ready to take its place. So he -wrote (or wired—accounts vary) to Barry Jackson, asking if the Birmingham Repertory Company would bring “Abraham Lincoln” to the Lyric. It came there and ran for a year. St. John Ervine’s “John Ferguson” followed it and ran for two months. But Playfair only began to get the measure of his house and its opportunities with his next production: a revival of “As You Like It.” Here his very individual flavour—that whimsical twist of his, that dancing yet logical sense of style in grouping, costumes, settings, and musical background—was first displayed. But it was only an overture; the curtain rose on Nigel Playfair when “The Beggar’s Opera" was staged in June, 1920.

This was something new —and exquisite. Everything, from the stagesets of Lovat Fraser to the songsettings of Frederic Austin, was perfectly in tone, and yet gave you a delicious sense that it was unpremeditated. Where others laboriously reconstruct a period and give you only a monument, Playfair caught it to the life with a few spirited strokes. The piece ran for 18 months, and was successfully revived in 1925. That was his first great hit. His second was a revival of Congreve's “Way of the World,” in which Edith Evans was revealed as incomparably our greatest actress of Restoration drama. His third is now running—a revival of Farquhar's “Beaux Stratagem,” with Miss Evans, to my mind, greater than ever.

With Playfair’s modern productions, at the Lyric and elsewhere, I am not here concerned. His ventures have been bold, but he has come back to the shrine and the period. To the ordinary English play-goer, such as myself, he has opened a new world, an unsuspected world of great comedy. It is true we had read the plays, but we, at least I, had not the vision to realise how marvellously they would act.

An Australian actress of whom little has been heard in Australia is Adrienne Brune, who has had good parts in many English musical comedies and revues. She is in the latest C. B. Cochran show at the Pavilion, “This Year of Grace.” Miss Brune, in some of her early appearances, was known as Billie Browne. Her first appearance in Australia was as Mustard Seed, one

of the child fairies, in the MusgroveCourtneidge production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Princess in 1904. Following provincial tours in England, she made her first London appearance at the Kingsway in 1922 as Jenny Diver in ' Polly,” the sequel to “The Beggar's Opera.” A year or two later, at the Lyceum, she was Sonia in “The Merry Widow.”

Annie Croft, who has made a big success in “The Girl Friend” at the Theatre Royal, Melbourne, is already in love with Australia. Her appetite to travel to that country has been whetted by meeting various Austra% lian artists in America. Miss Croft had never taken a real holiday out of her native England until in August last year she went to New York. M hiie there she met Sir George Tallis and was persuaded to sign on with the firm. She considers that Australian and English artists have made a deep impression on the American stage and theatrical art in that country. “It is a very difficult proposition,” she said, “that managers in America have to face, for they have to cater for * mixed population of most variable tastes.” In New York she met Alfred Frith, Robert Greig, Beatrice Hollo--way and others who were doing well-