In early 1961, four young men – a doctor, a history lecturer, a jazz pianist and a writer of comedy sketches – gathered at the flat of the director Eleanor Fazan, known as Fiz. She had been hired by the producers Donald Albery and William Donaldson to prepare their student revue, which had been a hit at the Edinburgh festival, for a possible West End run. It would be a routine, umpire-cum-production manager job, she was told. She would be paid £10 a week.
But when Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett, Dudley Moore and Peter Cook put on a run-through of Beyond the Fringe, Fiz was alarmed. “The show was badly put together and their attitude was typically undergraduate,” she said in 2005, when I was researching a biography of Donaldson. Adding material for a full-length revue and giving it visual variety would take work, and “the boys” as she called them – they were about three years younger than her – disliked rehearsing.
