Education
Playfair was educated at Harrow and University College, Oxford.
Playfair was educated at Harrow and University College, Oxford.
He starred in the Mermaid Society"s well-received 1904 London production of The Way of the World by William Congreve and went on to produce a modern run twenty years later at The Lyric with Edith Evans as Millamant (1924). He produced Shakespeare"s As You Like lieutenant for the opening night of the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford-upon-Avon in April 1919, and brought it back to the Lyric in April 1920. Critics derided an unconventional set and costumes by Claud Lovat Fraser, but in what Shakespearean scholar Sylvan Barnet calls the play"s "first modern production", their spare design was later acknowledged as ground-breaking.
Playfair has been credited with a major influence on the British Broadcasting Corporation"s 1923 wireless Shakespeares, the first produced by that organisation.
He continued to work as a British Broadcasting Corporation producer for some years and is credited with having commissioned Richard Hughes to write the world"s first radio play, Danger, broadcast on 15 January 1924. Playfair also appeared in a few motion picture films during the last years of his life.
He was knighted in 1928. The National Portrait Gallery holds a pen and ink caricature portrait of Sir Nigel Playfair by Harry Furniss.
Fortnum & Mason still markets Sir Nigel"s Vintage Marmalade and there is a Nigel Playfair Avenue in Hammersmith, near Ravenscourt Park tube station.
His house in Kensington, Thurloe Lodge, re-designed by him in the 1920s and referred to as "the most stylish house in London", was due for total demolition in 2013 following the death of the previous owner Mark Birley, to make way for a more modern "villa".
(London 1930 1st, 8vo., 310pp., photo illustrations, cloth...)
He is buried in the Eastern Cemetery in Street Andrews in Fife close to several other members of the Playfair family.