Past Pupils

Laurence Payne

I am grateful to Old Boy Eric Preedy for the following information.
You will want to record, I'm sure, that Laurence Payne, included as a prominent pupil, died on 23 February 2009. His obituary can be found, from The Times dated 24 March 2009, at the following link -http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article5962259.ece - which is reproduced here:

Laurence Payne first made his name on the postwar stage as the romantic lead in Shakespeare, then on “live” television in 1954 as D’Artagnan in The Three Musketeers and in 1967-68 as Sexton Blake, before — while continuing to act — turning to writing crime novels at the age of 40 from which he made a handsome living. He was also a skilful arranger of stage fights. Peter O’Toole sought him out to choreograph his swordplay in Hamlet.

Payne first came to prominence as Berowne in Peter Brook’s staging of Love’s Labour’s Lost at Stratford in 1946. His reputation grew as Romeo in Brook’s version of Romeo and Juliet (1947) at the same theatre; and as Hamlet at the Embassy, Swiss Cottage (1953). Most unusually for the times, he was a cockney with a rare ability to speak Shakespeare with a perfect received pronunciation.

He was not everyone’s idea of a great Shakespearean player, but having already spent eight years with the Old Vic, he seemed ready to become a star. At the Vic he had been playing “a well-spoken, intelligent and more than promising Cassio in Othello, and the deplorable Dr Caius in The Merry Wives of Windsor at the New (now Coward), going on to play Richard II and the Earl of Warwick in Shaw’s St Joan at lesser theatres.

It was a theatrical period brimming with competition. Apart from Brook’s peculiar if promising ideas, there was the commanding presence of 24-year-old Paul Scofield (obituary, March 21, 2008) as Don Armado in Love’s Labour’s Lost and as Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet.

Harold Hobson wrote of Payne’s Romeo: he “is young, darkly Italian, excellently spoken in the quieter passages, but unmelting in passion and hampered by lack of inches”. Kenneth Tynan added: “I did not wholly sympathise with Laurence Payne’s stocky Romeo. There was not an ounce of spontaneous melancholia in all his downright body. Masterly staging however came often to his aid.”

Brook also made drastic cuts in the text; and in trying to chip off what Barry Jackson, the director of the Birmingham Rep, had described as the barnacles of complacency and confusion among traditionalists (“especially senior critics”) Brook became their whipping boy with Romeo.

With Brook high-handed about young RADA-trained English actors, and Scofield adored for his new personality, Payne’s casting as Romeo looked inadequate. Brook dismissed the outraged reception.

As Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice Payne “finds a good burnish” said J. C. Trewin; and his Sebastian “spoke from the heart” in Walter Hudd’s revival of Twelfth Night.

With some of the cuts restored, Brook’s Romeo went to London for a season at His Majesty’s Theatre. The notices were respectable, short and lukewarm. Hobson said of Payne’s Romeo: “I wish I could praise it. But I can do no more than recall that Irving also failed in the part.” Of Payne’s idea of Hamlet at Guildford and the Embassy six years later, Trewin said that he played “with brisk certainty in a design for a more detailed portrait”.

Laurence Stanley Payne was born in London in 1919, one of three children, and educated at Tottenham Grammar School. His father, Earnest, a carpenter, died when he was 4. After a spell in the City as a clerk, he studied for the stage at the Old Vic. He made his first stage appearance walking on in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People.

At the Arts Theatre he played “the self-satisfied young lout from Cambridgeshire \ roused furies in Beverley Baxter’s middle-aged breast” in Somerset Maugham’s The Breadwinner. In Ronald Mackenzie’s Musical Chairs (Playhouse, 1948) Hobson thought that Payne as the ailing, febrile, irresistible Joseph Schindler “playing the piano among the bankrupt oil wells was better than his Romeo, but it lacks the tension John Gielgud gave the part 16 years ago”.

Joining the Bristol Old Vic company in 1951 Payne played Gaston, said Hobson, in Jean Anouilh’s The Traveller Without Luggage, “standing at the top of the stairs in the Renaud house, listening with controlled, grieved face to the story his brother was reluctantly telling him about the laming of his friend”.

He was a brilliant Tybalt, who arranged the fights so that “the blades flashed cleanly in the sun” in Hugh Hunt’s 1952 staging of Romeo and Juliet (with Claire Bloom). He won more plaudits as the dazzled and distracted bridegroom in a version from Bristol Old Vic promoted to the Old Vic of the French farce An Italian Straw Hat.

His films included Train of Events, Ill Met By Moonlight, Ben-Hur, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Court Martial of Major Keller and Vampire Circus.

His television appearances also included The Ivor Novello Story and The Trial of Spencer Cowper.

Payne wrote 11 novels, all but one of them crime stories written in a dry Raymond Chandler style, several of which were published by Penguin. The Nose of My Face (1960) was made into a film, Girl in the Headlines (1963) with Ian Hendry and Ronald Fraser.

Offstage Payne was a somewhat shy and retiring man, amusing, an operagoer, an accomplished pianist, a painter in oils and devoted to cats and dogs.

He was married first to Sheila Burrell, an actress, then to Pamela Alan, also an actress, and thirdly to Judith Draper, an equestrian writer, who survives him.

Laurence Payne, actor and writer, was born on June 5, 1919. He died on February 23, 2009, aged 89

Allan Bennett, a former TGS pupil writes:-
I met him a couple of times after I left school.  He had been a member of a Boys' Brigade Company near Turnpike Lane, and on 2 occasions I asked him to open my Company's Summer Fair.  The first time was at the height of  Sexton Blake's popularity, and I shall always remember that when he accepted he wrote "We are filming that week, but as far as I know it is in this country."  I guess he meant he would travel from anywhere for us.  It was the only time we needed to carry out crowd control at a Boys' Brigade Fair!!