A Life in a Wooden O: Memoirs of the Theatre

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 Benson's 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 the 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.