The Aldwych Farces dominated early 20th-century programming, followed by Laurence Olivier directing Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire. The Royal Shakespeare Company then moved in for a 21-year tenure from 1960. Rix then had a brainwave and welcomed TV cameras into Whitehall. It was seen as a risky strategy and against the wisdom of the time, but far from driving audiences away from the theatre, the broadcast gave Reluctant Heroes a major box office boost some three years into its run. Over the next 17 years, the BBC's Brian Rix Presents… broadcast 80 specials and one-off productions. Often shown on public holidays, the laughter from the Whitehall Theatre began to spread into the nation's living rooms.

Andrew Lloyd Webber's Stephen Ward Will Premiere at West End's Aldwych Theatre in December". Playbill. 27 June 2013. Archived from the original on 20 October 2013 . Retrieved 26 October 2013.

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Ben Travers CBE AFC (12 November 1886–18 December 1980) was an English writer. His output includes more than 20 plays, 30 screenplays, 5 novels, and 3 volumes of memoirs. He is best remembered for his long-running series of farces first staged in the 1920s and 1930s at the Aldwych Theatre. Many of these were made into films and later television productions. The piece opened on 4 July 1927 and ran for nearly a year. Travers made a film adaptation, which Walls directed in 1932, with most of the leading members of the stage cast reprising their roles. Thark is a farce by the English playwright Ben Travers. It was first given at the Aldwych Theatre, London, the fourth in the series of twelve Aldwych farces presented at the theatre by the actor-manager Tom Walls between 1923 and 1933. It starred the same cast members as many of the other Aldwych farces. The story concerns a reputedly haunted English country house. Investigators and frightened occupants of the house spend a tense night searching for the ghost. In 1908, after the death of his mother, Travers returned to London to keep his father company. [1] He endured his work at the family firm for three more years until, in 1911, he met the publisher John Lane of the Bodley Head, who offered him a job as a publisher's reader. Lane's firm had been in existence for a little over twenty years and had an avant garde reputation; among Lane's first publications were The Yellow Book and Wilde's Salome. [12] Travers worked for Lane for three years, during which he accompanied his employer on business trips to the US and Canada. [13]

Private Lives (Preview 18 September, opened 19 September 1990 – 26 January 1991) starring Joan Collins, Keith Baxter. Limited season, extended.Andrew Lloyd Webber's STEPHEN WARD to Close at the Aldwych Theatre, March 29". broadwayworld.com. Broadway World. 24 February 2014 . Retrieved 24 February 2014.

Rix built a company of regular players who appeared in some or all of these shows. They included Leo Franklyn, Larry Noble, Dennis Ramsden and Derek Royle, [13] and members of Rix's family: his wife, Elspet Gray, his sister, Sheila Mercier and his brother-in-law, Peter Mercier. Others who appeared in one or more of the Whitehall farces include Terry Scott [14] and Andrew Sachs. [15] Rix starred in all five plays, in a range of roles: a "gormless recruit" to the army in Reluctant Heroes; [16] a timidly crooked bookie's runner in Dry Rot; [17] a street musician recruited as a secret agent in Simple Spymen; [18] four identical brothers in One For the Pot; [19] and a harassed civil servant in Chase Me, Comrade. [20] From Dry Rot onwards, Rix and his authors developed a double act for the Rix characters and those played by Leo Franklyn, in which the two performers played off one another rather as Ralph Lynn and Tom Walls had done in the Aldwych farces of the previous generation. [21]

THE ALDWYCH THEATRE, LONDON

Lynn was born in Salford, Lancashire, the son of Gordon James Lynn, an insurance manager, and his wife, Janet née Thomas. [1]