B. Iden Payne Award

Ben Iden Payne (September 5, 1881 – April 6, 1976), also known as B. Iden Payne, was an English actor, director and teacher. Active in professional theater for seventy years, he helped the first modern Repertory Theatre in the United Kingdom, was an early and effective advocate for Elizabethan staging of Shakespeare plays, and served as an inspiration for Shakespeare Companies and University theater programs throughout North America and the British Isles. His name lives on as the name of a theater at the University of Texas as well as annual acting awards presented in Austin, Texas.

Born September 5, 1881, in Newcastle-on-Tyne, he was raised and educated in Manchester. He was the youngest of four children. His father, a Unitarian minister, died at age 52, when Payne was eleven years old. As a young child, the first Shakespeare play he saw was a touring production of Twelfth Night. Too young to understand much of the play, he described himself as being "enchanted" by the actress who played Viola. During his second year at the Manchester Grammar School he appeared in his first Shakespearean role, as Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice. Soon thereafter, he saw a production of the same play performed in Manchester by the touring company of Henry Irving, one of the great nineteenth-century Shakespearean impresarios. Mr. Irving played Shylock and Ellen Terry performed as Portia.

While still in school, he started his career as a walk-on actor in 1899 at the F.R. Benson company, a renowned touring Shakespeare company (formal name: Mr. and Mrs. R. F. Benson's Shakespearean and Old English Comedy Company.) Upon being interviewed by Frank Benson, he was introduced to Mrs. Benson; he was astonished to see she was the actress who played Viola in the traveling production of Twelfth Night he had seen as a child. After a four-week trial engagement with Benson, Payne spent a season touring Britain with a much smaller company, Mademoiselle Gratienne. He returned to Benson the next year, but this engagement was cut short when a fire at the Theatre Royal in Newcastle upon Tyne destroyed the company's stock of scenery and costumes. Payne signed on with the touring troupe of Carlyon and Charlton, a "fit-up" company (fit-up meaning they traveled with their own stage proscenium, stage curtains, lighting and scenery, which could be installed in any open hall and did not require a formal theater for performances). In 1902, he returned to Benson, where he worked both as an actor and an assistant stage manager, his first non-acting theatrical experience. He toured with Benson and several other companies the next several years, performing Shakespeare in Jamaica with the Benson Company, participating in the first production (staged by the Arthur Hare Company) of The Importance of Being Earnest performed after the trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde, as well as working with the companies of Mr. and Mrs. A.B. Tapping, Norman V. Norman, Madge McIntosh and the Shakespearean actor Ian Maclarean. During that period, he married the actress Mona Limerick and had a son.

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