E. Martin Browne

Elliott Martin Browne was born on 29 January 1900 in Zeals, Wiltshire, England, the third son of Colonel Percival John Browne. He was educated at Eton College and Christ Church, Oxford, where his studies encompassed modern history and theology. He went on to become a British theatre director whose career centered on the production of twentieth-century verse plays, and he is particularly recognized for a decades-long creative partnership with T. S. Eliot.

Between 1923 and 1930, Browne held a range of drama-related positions in Kent, Doncaster, and London, as well as in the United States, where he served as assistant professor of drama at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. In 1924 he married the actress Henzie Raeburn, who appeared in numerous productions throughout his career. They had two sons together.

Returning to England in 1930, Browne was appointed by George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, to serve as director of religious drama for the diocese. His early work in that role included organizing a pageant called The Rock, for which T. S. Eliot wrote linking choruses; the pageant was performed by amateurs and presented at Sadler's Wells Theatre for a two-week run in the summer of 1934. That collaboration led directly to a commission from Bishop Bell for Eliot to write a play for the Canterbury Festival the following year, with Browne directing. The resulting work, Murder in the Cathedral, was staged in the chapter house at Canterbury with Robert Speaight in the role of Becket. The production subsequently transferred to London, where it ran for nearly a year, establishing Browne as a leading figure in the poetic drama movement.

The American premiere of Murder in the Cathedral took place in New York in February 1938, and it was on that occasion that Browne himself appeared on Broadway, performing the role of the Fourth Tempter. In March 1939 he directed Eliot's next play, The Family Reunion, in London, and later that year he founded a touring company called the Pilgrim Players, whose repertoire was built largely around the plays of Eliot and, to a lesser extent, those of Scottish dramatist James Bridie. Those tours continued through 1948.

In 1945 Browne assumed directorship of the 150-seat Mercury Theatre in Notting Hill Gate, dedicating it for three years to modern verse plays. During that period he directed first productions of works by Christopher Fry, Ronald Duncan, Norman Nicholson, and Anne Ridler. From 1948 to 1957 he served as director of the British Drama League, an organization providing support to amateur theatre. He continued his collaboration with Eliot during those years, directing The Cocktail Party in 1949, The Confidential Clerk in 1953, and The Elder Statesman in 1958, a partnership that ultimately spanned two decades.

In 1951 Browne was appointed to direct the York Mystery Plays in the ruins of St Mary's Abbey, York, the first major production of those plays since the mid-sixteenth century. He returned to direct them again in 1954, 1957, and 1966. He was appointed CBE in 1952. From 1956 to 1962 he spent six months of each year as visiting professor of religious drama at Union Theological Seminary in New York, and from 1962 to 1965 he served as drama adviser to Coventry Cathedral, directing medieval mystery plays there in 1962 and 1964. In 1967 and 1968 he directed productions at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford, including Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, Thornton Wilder's Our Town and The Long Christmas Dinner, and the medieval morality play Everyman. He also succeeded Bishop Bell as President of the Religious Drama Society of Great Britain.

Browne authored and co-authored several books, including Pilgrim Story: The Pilgrim Players 1939–1943, written with Henzie Browne and published in 1945; The Making of T. S. Eliot's Plays, published by Cambridge University Press in 1969; and Two in One, co-written with Henzie Browne and published posthumously in 1981. Following the death of Henzie Raeburn, he married Audrey Johnson in 1974. Browne died on 27 April 1980 at the Middlesex Hospital in Westminster, survived by his second wife.