Nigel Playfair

Biography

When one thinks of the great English actors who have been knighted, one thinks of Sir Henry Irving, the greatest actor of the middle-to-late Victorian period who became the first thespian to have a sovereign's sword patted on both shoulders in 1895, or the likes of Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, the greatest Hamlet of his generation. In the 20th Century, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, who became at the age of 40 the youngest actor to ever be knighted, made his reputation in the works of George Bernard Shaw and had a distinguished career both on-stage and on-screen, gracing the silver screen as an A-List character actor. (Sir Cedric also gave the world of British theater one of its best anecdotes. When he went to Buckingham Palace to be knighted in 1934, as he knelt before King George V, the King's courtier whispered the name of the actor into the King's ear. The hard-of-hearing sovereign, after anointing the thespian with a swat of the sword on both shoulders, then solemnly intoned, "Rise, Sir Cedric Pickwick," conflating him with a character out of Charles Dickens. Starting his career in 1912, Sir Cedric Hardwicke flourished on stage after the Great War (he served in the British Army from 1914 to 1921), a decade before the flowering of Sir Laurence Olivier(acclaimed as the greatest actor of his generation and the first of three actors to be made a peer) and Sir John Gielgud (considered by many critics to be the greatest Shakespearean actor of his generation and possessor of what Olivier called "The voice that wooed the world"). Seldom does one think of the name of Nigel Playfair as one of the immortals of the English stage, but in 1928, he became the tenth actor to receive a knighthood. Playfair (1874-1934) made his reputation as the actor-manager of the Lyric Theatre after completing his studies at University College, Oxford. From 1904 to 1924, Playfair made The Lyric a success. His 1919 production of William Shakespeare's As You Like It (1936), first staged at the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford-upon-Avon in April 1919 and then re-staged at the Lyric a year later, was attacked by conventional critics. However, the production was a watershed, revolutionizing the presentation of The Bard on stage by bringing Shakespeare into the modern age. Playfair broke with the tradition of hidebound presentations of classical Elizbethan and Jacobean theater that had remained rooted in the spectacle-driven, fancy dress Romantic productions of Irving and his contemporaries, a tradition evoking their predecessors and a style of presentation dating back to David Garrick. By the time Playfair and other modernizers tackled Shakespeare, his plays had been heavily bowdlerized and amended with rewritten business by the likes of Colley Cibber, in which the play was no longer the thing but a vehicle for star-actors. Aside from bringing Shakespeare simultaneously back on his own term and into the 20th Century, Playfair's other great contribution was his involvement with the British Broadcasting Corp. In 1923, as a radio show producer, he oversaw the BBC's first transmissions of Shakespeare plays on the "wireless". As a BBC producer, he commissioned the first radio play to be broadcast in England, Richard Hughes's three-men-caught-in-a-coal-mine potboiler "Danger", which was broadcast on January 15, 1924. For his contributions to the theater, Nigel Playfair was knighted in 1928. He died in 1934.