Book Review: The Best of the West End: The Life and Work of Frith Banbury – Charles Duff

THE BEST OF THE WEST END: THE LIFE AND WORK OF FRITH BANBURY – Charles Duff (Zuleika Books)

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

Frith Banbury, actor, producer and director, worked with actors such as Sybil Thorndike, Edith Evans and Ralph Richardson between the wars, into the 1950s and beyond.

He was also long associated with Binkie Beaumont, arguably the 20th century’s most influential producer until Cameron Mackintosh arrived on the scene.

Charles Duff’s biography of Banbury is effectively a history of theatre during those decades which are often underrated. In fact the playwrights Banbury worked with include Terence Rattigan, Robert Bolt, John Whiting Wynyard Browne and NC Hunter. Although plays by the first two are familiar territory, for me at least the other three weren’t and it was good to learn more about the works of these men.

Browne for example was a quiet man who barely expected any play of his to succeed. Banbury, however was warmly enthusiastic about Dark Summer, a play “built on the conflict of four women and one man”. Stephen is blind for the duration of the summer in the play which changes his perceptions of two women.

There were cast arguments but, directed by Banbury, Dark Summer eventually opened in Hammersmith in October 1947 and then played in Bournemouth, finally going to the West End after touring. Another tour followed the nine-week West End run.

“For two and a half hours last night, we were buffeted and rocked by an emotional storm of a play which has some of the best acting seen in London for years,” wrote David Lewin, reviewing Dark Summer in The Daily Express.

Duff devotes a whole chapter to the genesis of Dark Summer and other work Banbury did with Browne in this immensely detailed but pretty readable book.

Edith Evans was a difficult woman to work with – and Duff gives us chapter and verse. Rodney Ackland was, Duff tells us “Frith Banbury’s Cause in Life” and “Beaumont was the first theatrical manager to treat his actors in the way that a solicitor or agent treats his clients: a different approach and manner for each”. Oh yes, there’s plenty here to interest theatre buffs and students of theatrical history.

When Duff’s book was written in the 1990s and published by Nick Hern Books as The Last Summer in 1995, Frith Banbury was still alive. He died in 2008, aged 96.

Now republished by Zuleika in 2022 the book has not, I’m afraid, been revised and edited as it should have been. People, long since dead, are referred to in the present tense, which grates.

There are irritating errors which a copy editor should/would have (such as “principle” for “principal”) have picked up and several times the printing and binding process has gone wrong so that there is a blank page apropos of nothing. The quality of the illustrative photographs is so poor, moreover, that they would have been better omitted.

It is a pity that an otherwise useful and interesting book should be marred by such avoidable presentational issues.

Susan Elkin