Derek Forbes

Derek Forbes, who died on 31 January 2020 at the age of ninety-one, was (jointly or solely) Honorary Secretary to the STR from 1981 to 1990, and a Vice-President from 2006. He contributed to Theatre Notebook from vol. 28 to vol. 54 with reviews, notes and essays on a wide variety of topics from revivals of plays by George Peele through colour on nineteenth-century playbills to Man-monkeys.

He was a graduate of the University of Bristol, and worked as a schoolmaster, a drama lecturer in a College of Education, and a County Drama organiser, finally retiring as Head of the Drama Department at Middlesex Polytechnic (now Middlesex University).

He was a Quaker and a man of principle, but also a moderating influence on the Committee, given to seeking compromise solutions rather than confrontation. He put great care into answering members' questions, and his breadth of theatrical knowledge and kindness of heart was shown by the care he took in advising those applying for Research Awards, especially the young, the amateur, and those not used to making such approaches.

A role he particularly enjoyed in the 1980s and 90s was as the STR contact with the British Council for Distinguished Visitors from overseas with drama connections – once or twice a year he would meet them, tell them about the Society, take them to lunch (often at the SOAS canteen) and to visit the Theatre Museum, or the British Museum, or a walk along Bankside, give them any of the Society's books that fitted their interests, and a small sum from the President's Fund if appropriate. Sometimes they visited him and his wife Adrienne at home and became friends. He handed the Honorary Secretary role over to Eileen Cottis and Frances Dann with a wealth of useful advice, including not to stay in the job too long.

He published two books for the Society. The first, Lydgate's 'Disguising at Hertford Castle', the First Secular Comedy in the English Language, featured his translation of the play into modern English and an account of this translation's performance at Hertford Castle, venue of the original presentation. He had an unusually good eye for the pictorial as well as the literary, as can be seen in some of his articles for Theatre Notebook and in Illustrated Playbills, his second publication for the Society in 2002, a study of British playbill cuts and engravings with particular emphasis on blocks in the Steam Printing Works catalogue of 1865. He later wrote (2005) The Artist and the Organist: The Luppinos of Hertford and Ware, and articles for the Hertford and Ware local history Society, and he and his wife Adrienne together translated in 2001 Pulcinello as a Quaker: A Neapolitan commedia dell'arte pastiche from the Italian of Antonio Jerocades, Pulinella Da Quacqyero (1770).