Ben Iden Payne (5 September 1881 – 6 April 1976), also known as B. Iden Payne, was an English actor, director and teacher. Active in professional theatre for seventy years, he helped the first modern repertory theatre in the United Kingdom, was an early and effective advocate for Elizabethan staging of Shakespeare plays, and served as an inspiration for Shakespeare Companies and university theatre programmes throughout North America and the British Isles. A theatre at the University of Texas is named after him, as well as annual theatre awards presented in Austin, Texas.

Early life

Born on 5 September 1881, in Newcastle upon Tyne, he was raised and educated in Manchester. He was the youngest of four children. His father, a Unitarian minister, died at age 52, when Payne was eleven years old. As a young child, the first Shakespeare play he saw was a touring production of Twelfth Night. During his second year at the Manchester Grammar School he appeared in his first Shakespearean role, Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice.

Modified Elizabethan staging theory

Payne called his method "modified Elizabethan staging". It was inspired by the founder of the Elizabethan Stage Society, William Poel, and developed during Payne's time in Pittsburgh. He drew on actual stages from the Elizabethan period. An audience member, said Payne, should feel that "he was sharing in the action—not looking at something outside himself". This could be achieved by creating a more intimate space, where the audience was not separated from the actors by "the proscenium arch, footlights, or orchestra pits". Additionally, audience members were, according to this method, better able to focus in on the actors and the play itself when they were not distracted by "falling curtains, blackouts, planned pauses for resetting scenery … or any other forced interruption" of the action of the play. He returned to Benson the next year, but this engagement was cut short when a fire at the Theatre Royal in Newcastle upon Tyne destroyed the company's stock of scenery and costumes. Payne signed on with the touring troupe of Carlyon and Charlton, a "fit-up" company that travelled with their own stage proscenium, stage curtains, lighting and scenery. In 1902 he returned to Benson, where he worked both as an actor and an assistant stage manager, his first non-acting theatrical experience. He toured with Benson and several other companies the next several years, performing Shakespeare in Jamaica with the Benson Company, participating in the first production (staged by the Arthur Hare Company) of The Importance of Being Earnest performed after the trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde. During that period, he married the actress Mona Limerick; they had three children.]]

As the tour with McIntosh petered out, Payne auditioned for director and producer Harley Granville-Barker. Granville-Barker referred him to Cyril Keightley, who took him on tour to Ireland. Shortly thereafter, and unexpectedly, Payne was approached by William Butler Yeats, one of the Directors of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. Unknown to Payne, Granville-Barker had recommended him for the position; equally unknown to him at the time, the English financial patron of the Abbey, Annie Horniman, insisted on an English professional stage manager as a condition for a three-year subsidy she was making to the theatre.

Payne met Yeats and the other two directors of the Abbey, Lady Gregory and J. M. Synge, for an interview the weekend that Synge's masterpiece, The Playboy of the Western World, opened. Payne was in the first row of the audience when the famous "Playboy" riots broke out in the house, with audience members breaking out in a pandemonium of shouting during the second half, over the alleged scandalous content of the play. Payne proposed establishing a repertory company in Manchester, a major provincial city in England and Payne's boyhood home. With Horniman's funding he established the Manchester Repertory Company, the first true repertory company in theatre in England.

In 1907, Payne used William Poel to direct Measure for Measure, by William Shakespeare, with the Manchester Repertory Company. Poel was an early-twentieth-century innovative advocate of producing Shakespeare plays as written, without the heavy scenery and butchered text of grand nineteenth-century productions by the likes of Henry Irving.

The next year, Payne produced Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing as a Christmas play at Manchester. To keep the pace of the play flowing, without long interruptions during scene changes, he staged played connecting scenes in front of a neutral curtain drawn across the proscenium. This was an early experiment in staging Shakespeare plays as continuous action, as was the style at the Globe Theatre when the plays were first written and produced. He had been referred to that company by Horniman. to 1950, excepting the Stratford years of 1935–1943. Payne was unhappy with the work at Frohman, with its emphasis on type casting, and a star system where engaging a celebrity actor (who cared more about their own performance than the good of the play as a whole) was the main concern, and he left in 1923. Bowmer went on to incorporate these staging concepts when he founded the Oregon Shakespeare Festival five years later. Payne directed Shakespeare's Cymbeline at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 1956, and A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1961. The exhibition was such a success that the recreated Globe in San Diego was preserved following the exposition, and became the home of the Old Globe Theatre. Payne returned to the Old Globe in San Diego in 1949 to direct its first Summer Shakespeare Festival, a production of Twelfth Night in 1949, and directed there several summers until 1964. He directed no fewer than thirty seven productions at Stratford. He served as Chairman of the Department of Drama 1947–1947 and again 1951–52. He directed 29 plays at Texas, 24 by Shakespeare, and retired as Professor Emeritus of Drama in May 1973. awarded to actors, directors, and designers for outstanding contributions to theatre in Austin, Texas, are named in his honour. In 1976, one of the three theatres on campus (now seven theatres) at the University of Texas in Austin was named after him.

References

  • Franklin Heller Collection of B. Iden Payne and B. Iden Payne Papers at the Harry Ransom Center