In the 1950s, my husband David Herbert, who has died aged 85, quit his job in a bank in South Africa to become an actor and was employed by the National Theatre Organisation. While working with black actors, he was cautioned by the State Security Bureau, eventually arrested and thrown into solitary confinement. After the intervention of an influential uncle, he was freed on the understanding that he must leave South Africa.
In jail, he had composed in his mind a play about apartheid, A Kakamas Greek, which he was able to write down only after his arrival in London in 1960. The play was performed by the New Africa Group in Brussels that year at the International Festival of Avant-Garde theatre, where it was judged the best entry. David acted in this three-hander alongside Athol Fugard and Clive Farel.
David was born and raised in Durban. His father, Sydney Herbert, an accountant, was absent during the second world war, as he was stationed in Kenya, and his mother, Kathleen (nee Collier), lived with Sydney’s sister, Lalla, in a big house with David, his brother, Martin, and their two cousins.
David sang tenor in the choir of the local Anglican church, where his father had been the organist. After leaving Durban high school, he worked at the Standard Bank in the city, appearing in amateur productions until he turned to acting full-time.
Throughout his life, David was a prolific writer of plays, poems, short stories and a novel. In 1967, the Royal Shakespeare Company accepted a play, Red Herrings, with the proviso that he change the ending they considered too abrupt and “gratuitous”. He refused and retorted that death could be “gratuitous”.
In Britain, he embarked on a long series of studies, finally gaining a PhD in linguistics and English teaching at the Institute of Education of the University of London. During this period, he was also lecturing, and from 1973 to 1993 was a senior lecturer at the London Central School of Speech and Drama, where he taught postgraduate students. After a four-year course at the London Centre for Psychotherapy, he started practising as a psychotherapist in 1993 and continued for the next 25 years.
He transitioned naturally from the world of theatre and lecturing to the world of psychotherapy, studying the approaches mainly of Jung, but also of Freud and Adler, and the ideas of Moreno, who pioneered the process of psychodrama in therapy. He was named in the February 2003 edition of the Tatler magazine as one of Britain’s “Top Ten Shrinks”.
David had two daughters, Josephine and Genevieve, from a first marriage, to Jonne Fennimore, which ended in divorce. He and I became partners in 1968 and we married in 1999.
David is survived by me, his daughters, two grandsons, Tobias and Felix, and a sister, Celia. His brother predeceased him.
