My friend Diana Devlin, who has died aged 79 of mesothelioma and pneumonia, was for 47 years a key figure in the development of Shakespeare’s Globe, the London theatre created by the American actor, director and producer Sam Wanamaker.
Wanamaker’s idea was to establish a permanent working memorial to Shakespeare by building a replica of the original Globe on or near its Bankside site in Southwark, so helping to regenerate the area. In 1972, at the suggestion of the theatre director E Martin Browne, he invited Diana to help set up and run the theatre’s first summer school. This was designed to complement the season of plays being performed in the project’s original tent theatre. For the rest of her life Diana was always involved with the Globe, as an adviser, board member or teacher.
She chaired the museum committee, was a member of successive boards and of the advisory committee, and in 1985 she became the theatre’s administrator. Crucially, she held the fort while Wanamaker was battling with a court case that threatened to kill the project stone dead. She helped train actors to run the theatre’s guided tours, and from 1995 led the popular public seminars Read Not Dead, performances of lost or forgotten Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. She became a Globe trustee when the theatre finally opened in 1997, and from 2013 she acted as the deputy chair of the council.
In June 2019 she received the Sam Wanamaker award, given since 1994 to honour work as pioneering as the Globe’s founder that has increased the understanding and enjoyment of Shakespeare. The event coincided with the launch at the theatre, on the centenary of Wanamaker’s birth, of her authorised biography Sam Wanamaker: A Global Performer. In it she traced his many achievements as an actor, director and producer on stage and screen, his powerful impact on the British theatre, and the inside story of his creation of the Globe.
Theatre was the lifeblood of Diana’s family. She was an only child, born in Porthmadog (then Portmadoc), Wales, in what was then Caernarfonshire. Her father, William Devlin, whom she first met at the age of four when he returned from war service, was a leading Shakespearean actor. Her mother, Mary, an actor and musician, was a daughter of the celebrated theatrical couple Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson.
Diana was educated in London, at Beaufort House primary school in Fulham, and Carlyle grammar school in Chelsea, where she was head girl. In 1960 she attended Girton College, Cambridge, obtaining a second-class degree in English. Stage-struck as a teenager, she acted in many Cambridge productions, including Brecht’s Galileo and Bernard Kops’ The Dream of Peter Mann; she also played Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Gertrude in Hamlet. As a fellow student I remember her fine performance as Saint Joan in Anouilh’s The Lark, a moving echo of her grandmother’s acclaimed playing of the title-role in Shaw’s Saint Joan.
After Cambridge, she spent several years in the US, where she married the actor Will Graham in 1968. Thanks to a Fulbright scholarship, at the end of the decade she gained a doctorate in theatre arts at the University of Minnesota. On her return to the UK she was made a lecturer in drama at Goldsmiths, University of London, which is when Wanamaker got in touch.
Teaching and theatre were Diana’s great passions. In 1980 she became an advisory drama teacher for the Inner London Education Authority, and in 1993 she was made head of theatre studies at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. She taught there until she retired in 2013, following keenly the careers of her former students, and attending scores of their performances.
She combined her teaching career with her work at the Globe. But she also had another string to her bow. After learning about heritage interpretation, she trained guides at Leeds Castle in Kent to interpret the castle for international visitors. Her success in the post led to her being invited by Buckingham Palace to train the guides who looked after visitors to the Royal Collection at the Queen’s Gallery.
Diana wrote extensively about theatre. A Speaking Part: Lewis Casson and the Theatre of His Time (1982) was an illuminating biography of her grandfather, which combined her strong interest in her family with her deep knowledge of theatre history. Her book Mask and Scene: Introduction to a World View of Theatre (1989) was a fresh and very readable overview of theatre history around the world. Subsequently a course in writing family history at the City Lit in London resulted in her final book, The Casson Family in North Wales: A Story of Slate and More ... (2019), a detailed exploration of her family’s Welsh roots.
She was very close to her famous grandparents, and attended many of their performances, as well as those of others in the extended Casson/Thorndike theatrical family, to which she was devoted. She devised and directed plays for her young cousins, created poetry readings and recitals for the adults, and invited the family round every Christmas to sing carols in her small but elegant house in Richmond, south-west London.
After her first marriage ended in divorce, in 1989 she married David Ogden, a member of Lloyd’s; that marriage also ended in divorce. A woman of incisive intelligence, abundant energy, immense enthusiasm, and a deep, distinctive voice, Diana had a wide circle of friends, who loved her for her interest in people, and her abiding sense of humour. Her cousin Dirk Campbell described her as “a warm, interesting and much-loved cousin with a real talent for maintaining friendships all around the world. She was the one with all the family knowledge, and she bound us all together.”
She is survived by 14 cousins.
• Diana Mary Devlin, drama teacher and theatre scholar, born 1 April 1941; died 27 September 2020
