From The Times
May 16, 2008

Frith Banbury
Director whose 1950s reign at the Haymarket Theatre championed writers such as Robert Bolt and Rodney Ackland


Frith Banbury was totally wedded to the West End theatre. He shared in its glories and its shortcomings; he was at one with its intrigues and its way of life. And his own fortunes tended to rise and fall with the strength of the commercial theatre. Banbury’s power as a director was at its zenith during the 1950s, when H. M. Tennent, under Hugh “Binkie” Beaumont and his feline assistant John Perry, ruled over Shaftesbury Avenue and its gilded outpost, the Haymarket Theatre. During that decade the West End did not look like the West End without a Banbury-directed drama on somewhere. The leading playwrights of the day were placed into his hands and he nurtured them: Robert Bolt, John Whiting, Wynyard Browne and N. C. Hunter.

He brought strictly professional skills, honed by a lifetime in the theatre as first an actor and then a director, to their scripts. Banbury was a play doctor, strengthening a character here and tightening a plot there, as well as the man who put the show on the boards. With Beaumont’s backing he assembled glossy casts and worked with the names that made the box office happy: Michael Redgrave, the dames Edith Evans and Sybil Thorndyke, the young Paul Scofield (obituary, March 21) and Ralph Richardson. He was known as a safe pair of hands, adept at dealing with the theatre’s more difficult characters: female monstres sacrées and male alcoholics.

His directorial style was carefully unobtrusive. A Banbury production contained neither eccentricities nor displays of ego. Its overall hallmark was one of theatrical polish. With rare exceptions, such as his stubborn championship of Rodney Ackland, he preferred middle-class plays with middle-class actors designed for middle-class audiences. On the whole Terence Rattigan’s Aunt Edna would have approved of him, although she might have some reservations about his private life, which followed the lines of discreet homosexual preference endorsed at the top of the Tennent organisation.

He stood firm against the revolution that began at the Royal Court in the mid-1950s with Look Back in Anger and changed the face of British theatre. Banbury was a Shaftesbury Avenue man and he stood up to be counted as such. He directed only twice at the Court and neither play was typical of the Court or of Banbury himself. He never worked with the RSC or the National and his only excursion into Shakespeare was a production of Love’s Labour’s Lost, a play he confessed he rather liked, at the Old Vic during Michael Benthall’s rule there. He had no desire to direct either for the cinema or for television. The West End,home of the well-made play, was where he belonged and he did his best to stay there.

Frith Banbury was the son of a rear-admiral, but otherwise his background was rather raffish. His paternal grandfather had served a prison sentence for forgery and his mother’s father, a Jewish emigrant from Lvov, went bankrupt on a grand scale in Australia. Frith showed his first signs of rebelliousness at Stowe by refusing to join the cadet corps and got far more pleasure from being taken out by Mrs Patrick Campbell, whose grandson was a school friend.

He went half-heartedly to Hertford College, Oxford, to read modern languages and acted alongside Terence Rattigan, with whom he was to work in the future, in James Elroy Flecker’s Hassan. He preferred partying to studying and was sent down. In common with all the aspirant actors of the day he joined RADA.

His fellow students there included Robert Morley and Peter Bull. They all had a little private money and life was not too hard. Within days of graduation in 1933 Banbury got a walk-on part in London and was soon understudying Glen Byam Shaw in the title role of Richard of Bordeaux at the Shaftesbury; Morley was also in the cast. He avoided the grind of repertory theatres, apart from a couple of seasons with a happy-go-lucky summer company assembled by Peter Bull to play in Perranporth. Morley was again in their number and soon after he and Banbury played together in a French drama about Oscar Wilde. Morley took the title role and his career was launched.

Banbury, with attractive looks and a good, though not over-powerful, speaking voice, had no trouble in ensuring that new, if less flamboyant parts came flowing in. He acquired a reputation as a dependable light actor. When the war came he registered as a conscientous objector, after his earlier Stowe decision, and was rather gratified to find that his application was approved “provided he continued his career as an actor”. Some other thespians found themselves directed to heavy manual work.

He dabbled, reasonably successfully, in revue where his slightly camp manner was an asset. He was also offered a number of jeune premier roles while other leading men were off at the war or waiting for demobilisation. One of these was the Free French officer, Lieutenant Colbert, in Terence Rattigan’s While the Sun Shines. The production toured Europe before ending up at the Globe in Shaftesbury Avenue. It was here that Banbury first came to the attention of H. M. Tennent and Binkie Beaumont.

His first attempt at directing arrived courtesy of RADA in 1947. The academy had been let down by another director and Banbury was approached to take over a Pinero farce. He obviously enjoyed the experience and perhaps, in his mid-thirties, realised that the romantic leads would begin to dry up.

That same year the actor Michael Gough brought him a first play by a little-known writer called Wynyard Browne, Dark Summer. Browne, like Banbury, had been a “conchie” and the two men felt instant rapport. Banbury thought he could make something of it, took the script to Tennent, who decided to back it with him as director. The play had considerable success, despite the tantrums of the leading lady, Joan Miller. Its history is described in detail in Charles Duff’s The Lost Summer: The Heyday of the West End Theatre, which despite its title is basically a biography of Banbury.

At this point he decided he would be better employed staging plays than appearing in them. He was convinced of Browne’s talent and, bolstered by £10,000 from his mother, set himself up in management and used £1,000 to take an option on the next four Browne plays. Word got round acting circles that Banbury was a “rich” director, a reputation he never really shook off. Browne’s most successful piece was The Holly and the Ivy, a gentle study of family relationships, which quickly became a repertory favourite after its West End run. Browne owed everything to Banbury, but still gave his final play, shortly before his early death at 52, to another director.

It was not the only occasion that Frith suffered “disloyalty” from those he had helped. Robert Bolt was another case. His first play, Flowering Cherry, came into Banbury’s hands in 1957, and Banbury shaped it and succeeded in controlling on stage Ralph Richardson, not famous for taking direction. Cherry had a long run and went to Broadway in Banbury’s care. Its success persuaded Bolt to give up schoolmastering. His next play, The Tiger and the Horse, was written for Michael Redgrave, who was becoming another of the West End’s more difficult characters. Banbury knew how to handle him. But he was not rewarded and was almost certainly disappointed when later passed over in favour of another director for Bolt’s best play, A Man for All Seasons.

The playwright with whom he was most associated in these rich days of the 1950s was, like Bolt, a schoolmaster: N. C. Hunter. Hunter, now almost as forgotten as Wynyard Browne, became the darling of the Haymarket Theatre and its audience, which demanded polished and good-looking productions with starry names. Hunter provided the lines, slowly but surely, and Banbury directed them, starting with Waters of the Moon and moving on to the more accomplished A Touch of the Sun, which starred both Redgrave and his daughter Vanessa. In between he staged Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea, with Peggy Ashcroft and Kenneth More, then unknown. It turned out to be one of Rattigan’s best plays and one of Banbury’s best productions.

Banbury did not confine himself, as some have suggested, to surefire commercial successes. He directed Marching Song by John Whiting, who was considered by some critics to be Britain’s great theatrical prophet but who had a habit of emptying the box office. And he was ceaseless in his championship of the raffish and unreliable Rodney Ackland. Back in 1952, the year of The Deep Blue Sea, he had directed The Pink Room, an almost surrealist version of Britain seen through the eyes of a Soho drinking club. Over the years Banbury helped Ackland to keep the Inland Revenue at bay and rescued him from scrapes with lovers, male and female. In 1995 “Nanny Banbury” as Ackland liked to call him, was still delivering praise — and supporting prose — when the National Theatre risked reviving a revised version of The Pink Room under the title of Absolute Hell.

When the Tennent empire went into eclipse, Banbury’s stock fell. The public’s taste for the well-made play declined and he utterly refused to follow fashion. He turned mainly to plays derived from literary sources: The Wings of a Dove, a revival of The Aspern Papers (both Henry James), The Day After the Fair (Hardy). In his seventies he staged revivals of The Admirable Crichton and The Corn is Green. Screamers, an Anthony Davison play with homosexual themes, came in 1989. Although he suffered ill-health in the 1990s he returned with D. L. Coburn’s The Gin Game in 1999 and in 2003, at the age of 91, directed a revival of Ackland’s The Old Ladies at Richmond Theatre.


He lived in Central London, close to his theatrical colleague of long standing, Christopher Taylor.

Frith Banbury, stage director and actor, was born on May 4, 1912. He died on May 14, 2008, aged 96