Esme Filmer

A.E. (Esme) Filmer first directed at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1918 and in the following year became the theatre’s principal director. In his history of the Repertory Theatre, critic J.C. Trewin described Filmer as an ‘earnest perfectionist’: ‘with his centrally-parted dark hair, intent gaze, dangling monocle, and slender figure: the Repertory’s most elegant director, happiest when the play was Spanish, but ready to concede that there could be other countries and other drama.’ Filmer had success with productions of Martinez Sierra’s The Romantic Young Lady and The Two Shepherds, and he also directed work by Shaw, Shakespeare and Vanbrugh and was credited with raising the ‘Rep’s' standard of production. He left Birmingham at the end of 1922, but returned in 1925 to direct an adaptation of the French medieval drama, The Marvellous History of Saint Bernard.