A Life in a Wooden O Memoirs of the Theatre [Paperback]

Ben Iden Payne spent more than seventy years in the theatre in England and America. On his retirement at the age of ninety it was a very different theatre from the one he entered at nineteen on joining Frank Bensons touring Shakespeare company. That change was due in no small part to his own efforts. Payne could point to many experiences that would have guaranteed him a place in theatre annals: He was a director of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. He staged plays for such stars as John Drew, William Gillette, John and Ethel Barrymore, Otis Skinner, and Helen Hayes. And for eight years he was general director of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon.

Though Paynes career fills three columns inWhos Who in the Theatre,two unique achievements stand out from the others. In 1907, as director of Miss Hornimans Gaiety Theatre company in Manchester, he initiated the repertory movement in England. In four years he brought it to a peak of excellence that has never been surpassed. Later, in America, he began a career in educational theatre that would span half a century. At the Carnegie Institute of Technology he developed his modified Elizabethan staging  a technique that has left an indelible mark on the production of Shakespeares plays.

In this memoir Payne recalls the English theatre at the turn of the century with wit and affection. His accounts of the popular actor-managers, the fit-up companies, the Playboy riots, and of Yeats, Miss Horniman, and William Poel vividly depict an era. He captures the spirit of the American theatre of the teens, twenties, and thirties  the flamboyance of its producers, the foibles of its stars, and the casting practices that reduced able actors to types.

Above all, Payne tells of his consuming desire to recreate the basic conditions of Shakespeares own theatre in order to present his plays most effectively. No antiquarian, he does not quibble over structural detaillcÀ