Nigel Playfair

Nigel Playfair

Sir Nigel Playfair (1874–1934) was the actor-manager of the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, London, in the 1920s. He was educated at Harrow and University College, Oxford.

Playfair starred in the Mermaid Society's well-received 1904 London production of The Way of the World by William Congreve and went on to produce a very effective modern run twenty years later at The Lyric with Edith Evans as Millamant (1924).

He produced Shakespeare's As You Like It for the opening night of the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford-upon-Avon in April 1919, and brought it back to the Lyric in April 1920. Critics derided an unconventional set and costumes by Claud Lovat Fraser, but in what Shakespearean scholar Sylvan Barnet calls the play's "first modern production", their spare, evocative design was later acknowledged as a groundbreaking departure from the unimaginatively literal Shakespearean production typical of the time.

As early as 1914, Fraser had also begun to think up designs based on John Gay's The Beggar's Opera. He has been credited with a major influence on the BBC's 1923 wireless Shakespeares, the first produced by that organisation. He continued to work as a BBC producer for some years, and is credited with having commissioned Richard Hughes to write the world's first radio play, Danger, which was broadcast on January 15, 1924. Playfair also appeared in a few motion picture films during the last years of his life.

He was knighted in 1928. The National Portrait Gallery holds a pen and ink caricature portrait of Sir Nigel Playfair by Harry Furniss.