Queer Places:
Smarkham Orchard, Madgehole Ln, Shamley Green, Guildford GU5 0SS, UK
George Laurier Lister, OBE (22 April 1907 – 30 September 1986) was an English theatre writer, actor, director and producer, best known for a series of revues in the late 1940s and 1950s.
Laurier Lister was born in Sanderstead Croydon, Surrey.[1] In the 1930s he acted in a number of plays in the West End, including Death Takes a Holiday (1931), The Long Christmas Dinner (1933), Twelfth Night (1933), Cabbages and Kings (1933), Hervey House (1934), A Kiss for Cinderella (1937), and People of Our Class (1938). He also wrote, with Hilda Vaughan, She Too Was Young, a romantic comedy set in Wales in the 1870s, which had 110 performances in London in 1938.[2]
Lister served in the Royal Air Force in the Second World War. After the war, he became involved as a theatre director in London.[3] His series of successful revues, either as director or producer, included Tuppence Coloured (1947), Oranges and Lemons (1949 – the first in an eight-year series of writing and singing appearances by Michael Flanders and Donald Swann),[4] Penny Plain (1951), Airs on a Shoestring (1953), Joyce Grenfell Requests the Pleasure (1954), and From Here and There (1955).[5]
In 1965 he became the first Director of the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford,[6] and was awarded the OBE in 1976.[7]
Lister had a lengthy personal relationship with the Northern Irish actor Max Adrian (1903–1973), with whom he often worked.[3][8] Lister died in 1986, aged 79.
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