Browne, E(lliott) Martin

Browne, E(lliott) Martin (1900–80), English actor and director, closely connected with the revival of poetic, and particularly religious, drama in England. In 1935 he directed and played in T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, and thereafter directed all Eliot's plays. He was from 1939 to 1948 director of the Pilgrim Players, who toured England in a repertory of religious plays, and in 1945 took over the Mercury Theatre in London for the production of new plays by poets, among them Fry's A Phoenix Too Frequent (1946). In 1951 he was responsible for the production in its native city, for the first time since 1572, of the York Cycle of mystery plays which he revived several times. In 1945 he had succeeded Geoffrey Whitworth as Director of the British Drama League (later the British Theatre Association, see AMATEUR THEATRE), and he held this post until 1957, becoming in 1952 the first president of the International Amateur Theatre Association. He then went to the USA to inaugurate a programme of Religious Drama at the Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he remained as visiting professor until 1962. On his return to England he was appointed Honorary Drama Adviser to the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral; he was also President of Radius (the Religious Drama Society of Great Britain).