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Dateline: 18th May, 2008
Frith Banbury (1912 - 2008) Director Frith Banbury died on 14th May at the age of 96, just ten days after his birthday. After leaving Oxford at the end of his first year he trained at RADA as an actor. "Ten days after leaving RADA," he said, "I had a job, understudying and playing the piano in a review called Hard to be a Jew by Sholom Aleichem, renamed If I Were You,at the old Shaftesbury Theatre for 30 shillings a week." He appeared in rep and (in a non-speaking role) in Gielgud's 1934 Hamlet. However it was not supposed to be a non-speaking role but Gielgid took his lines away. "Being in John Gielgud's Hamlet in 1934 almost destroyed my self-confidence," Banbury said in 1991." Gielgud was renowned for saying whatever came ointo his head without thinking. His family, the Terrys, were the aristocrats of the theatre, and he was the crown prince. It wasn't that he enjoyed humiliating people, he just never thought of the effect of what he said. He was extremely critical but could not tell one how to make it better; only people like Peggy Ashcroft could cope with his vagaries." It was not until after World War II, when he was invited to direct a student production at RADA, that he began his career as a director. He worked primarily in the West End, although his professional directorial debut was at the Lyric, Hammersmith, with Dark Summer by Wynyard Browne (1947). That transfered to the West End and he formed a close rleationship with H M Tennant Ltd, which was run at the time by Binkie Beaumont. His speciality was the so-called "well-made play" and he directed works by the likes of Rattigan, Bolt ,Whiting, NC Hunter and Wynyard Browne with actors such as Michael Redgrave, Edith Evans, Sybil Thorndike, Ralph Richardson, Peggy Ashcroft, Flora Robson, Ralph Richardson, Celia Johnson and Paul Scofield. He turned down the offer to direct Look Back in Anger and described Wesker's Roots as "a bad stage version of The Archers", and so was regarded by the younger generation of writers as a "class enemy". When the Tennant empire dissolved he was less active, but continued to work until as late as 2003 when he directed, in Peterborough, a revival of Rodney Ackland’s The Old Ladies which starred Sian Phillips, Rosemary Leach and Angela Thorne. His last West End production was a revival of D L Coburn’s The Gin Game in 1999, which starred Dorothy Tutin and Joss Ackland. He never moved into film or TV work.
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