Wikipedia tells about Ben
Greet:
"Sir Philip Barling "Ben" Greet (24 September
1857–17 May 1936) was a Shakespearean actor, director, and impresario.
The younger son of Captain William Greet RN and his
wife, Sarah Barling, Greet was born on board HMS Crocodile, a Royal Navy
recruiting ship tied up at the Tower of London. He was educated at the Royal
Naval School, New Cross. His parents planned to make him a naval officer or a
clergyman, but instead he became a schoolmaster at a private school at Worthing.
His brother was theatre manager William Greet.
Greet made his professional stage debut in 1883,
playing Caius Lucius in Cymbeline. In 1886 he started staging open-air
productions of the classic English stage repertory; his companies, called the
Ben Greet Players, the Sign of the Cross Company, and the Woodland or Merry
Woodland Players, toured Great Britain and the United States. Greet, along with
William Poel, led a return to Shakespeare's original texts in simplified
productions, in contrast to the often elaborate and heavily-edited presentations
fashionable in their era. Greet did not limit his work to the Shakespeare canon,
but staged a range of other dramas; his production of the morality play Everyman
was acted for 35 years across Britain and America.
Greet toured North America with great success with
his "Elizabethan Stage Society of England" from 1902 to 1914. The company
included Sybil Thorndike and Sydney Greenstreet. He staged performances at
Harvard University and in Theodore Roosevelt’s White House and was a mainstay of
the Chautauqua Circuit. From 1914-18 he was director of the Old Vic Theatre in
London, making that theatre a center for Shakespearean production. Later he
concentrated on productions for London schoolchildren.
Greet was knighted in 1929.
In his four seasons at the Old Vic, Greet produced
35 plays, including 23 by Shakespeare, plus Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer,
Sheridan's The Rivals and The School for Scandal, the Medieval mystery play The
Star of Bethlehem, and Everyman among other works.
He is commemorated by a blue plaque on the facade of
160 Lambeth Road, London, where he lived from 1920 until his death in
1936."