Stage Director At The Abbey Theatre
As the tour with McIntosh petered out, Payne interviewed with the famous director and producer, Harley Granville-Barker. Granville-Barker referred him to Cyril Keightley, who took him on tour to Ireland. Shortly thereafter, and unexpectedly, Payne was approached by William Butler Yeats, one of the Directors of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. Unknown to Payne, Granville-Baker had recommended him for the position; equally unknown to him at the time, the English financial patron of the Abbey, Annie Horniman, insisted on an English professional stage manager as a condition for a three-year subsidy she was making to the theater.
Payne met with Yeats and the other two directors of the Abbey, Lady Gregory and J.M. Synge, for an interview the weekend that Synge's masterpiece, The Playboy of the Western World, opened. Payne was in the first row of the audience when the famous "Playboy" riots broke out in the house, with audience members breaking out in a pandemonium of shouting during the second half, over the alleged scandalous content of the play.
Payne was engaged as stage director of The Abbey Theatre, but with strict instructions that he was not to participate in the production of Irish folk plays. Payne was not aware at the time that his employment was made at the insistence of Horniman, nor that Lady Gregory and Synge were opposed to bringing in a British play director to the Irish National Theatre. The engagement lasted only a few months; after taking the company on a British tour from Glasgow, Scotland to London, Payne resigned his position. He maintained a friendship with Yeats.
Read more about this topic: Ben Iden Payne
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