George Devine

George Devine, the very influential theatrical manager, was born on November 20, 1910 in London to Georgios Devine, who was half-Greek and half-Irish, and the former Ruth Eleanor Cassady, who was Irish-Canadian. He became a member of the famous Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS) while reading in history at Oxford, becoming president of OUDS in 1932. He met his future wife, Sophie Devine (aka "Sophie Harris") when OUDS sponsored a production of "Romeo and Juliet", directed by John Gielgud, who had the costumes designed by "The Motley", a London design team that included Sophie and her sister, Margaret. The two married on October 27, 1939 after living together for several years. After graduating from Oxford, George Devine joined Sophie in London and became an actor, appearing in a number of Gielgud's productions and functioning as The Motley's business manager. He co-founded the London Theatre Studio in 1936 and, in 1939, he became a stage director with an adaptation of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations (1946), starring Alec Guinness. He was in an early BBC television production of William Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night", playing "Sir Toby Belch". During World War II, he was a member of the Royal Artillery, stationed in India and then Burma. Returning to London after the war, he helped co-found the Old Vic Theatre School and the Young Vic Company, though he was forced to resign in 1948, putting an end to the Young Vic until 1970. The dismissal did not hurt his career as he had established himself as a top director in the theater and in opera. He directed and acted at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon (later renamed the Royal Shakespeare Company). Tony Richardson, another Oxford graduate, began a collaboration with Devine after casting him in a TV adaptation of "Curtain Down", a short story by Anton Chekhov. Richardson shared Devine's ideas about transforming the English theater, and the two co-founded the English Stage Company. The two wanted to create a theater in which the writer was paramount. In the first draft of his unfinished autobiography, Devine wrote of his mission: "I was not strictly after a popular theater....but a theater that would be part of the intellectual life of the country.... I was convinced the way to achieve my objective was to get writers, writers of serious pretensions, back into the theater. This I set out to do. I wanted to change the attitude of the public towards the theater...." The company launched its first season in 1956 at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, launching itself with Angus Wilson's "The Mulberry Bush", which was a failure, as were the next two productions. However, the fourth production, John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1959), directed by Richardson, not only was a hit, it was a watershed that revolutionized the English theater, just as Devine and Richardson had set out to accomplish. The Royal Court quickly became the most important theater in the English language for a decade, nurturing the best writers and directors. "Look Back in Anger" launched the careers of Richardson and Osborne. When Richardson later filmed the Oscar-winning adaptation of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1963), with a screenplay by Osborne, he cast Devine as "Squire Allworthy", Tom's benefactor. Osborne's 1965 play, "A Patriot for Me", was to have a major impact on the English Stage Company and on Devine. The play, which dealt with the blackmailing of the Austro-Hungarian officer "Colonel Redl" (also dramatized in István Szabó's Colonel Redl (1985)), a homosexual and possibly a Jew in a pre-World War One society that was virulently anti-gay and anti-semitic, was opposed by The Lord Chamberlain, the theatrical censor in Britain. The Lord Chamberlain demanded, in exchange for an exhibition license, that the Royal Court make substantial cuts to sanitize it. The cuts would have resulted in the excision of half the play, according to Alan Bates in a B.B.C. interview during a 1983 revival of the play. Osborne and the English Stage Company refused. Denied a license for public exhibition, The Royal Court Theatre had to be turned into a private club in order to produce the play in London as to produce it legitimately would have been impossible as half the play would have been censored. "A Patriot for Me" won "The Evening Standard" Best Play of the Year award (as would one of his latter plays, "The Hotel in Amsterdam" in 1968), though it was a succès d'estime, as the English Stage Company was taking a heavy loss on the production. George Devine was appearing in "A Patriot for Me" when he suffered the heart attack that led to his death on January 20, 1966. He was 55 years old.