Hampstead Theatre has unveiled a memorial plaque to its founder James Roose-Evans, who died last year.
The image is taken from a photograph of the director, who in 1959 announced he was setting up the Hampstead Theatre Club in the pages of the Ham&High.
It shows him above the Three Horseshoes - now The Horseshoe - in Heath Street where rehearsals were held. The plays were staged in a Scout hall in Holly Bush Vale, and the box office was in a local bookshop.
Within months the Hampstead resident had scored a hit with a double bill of The Room and The Dumb Waiter by Harold Pinter. Roose-Evans ran the theatre until 1971 and went on to champion both new writing, and neglected work by Tennessee Williams and Noel Coward.
His final decades were spent in Belsize Park when he continued to work as a director, author, and ordained Anglican priest. He died last October aged 94.
Praising his "relentlessly curious spirit" Hampstead Theatre boss Greg Ripley-Duggan said: "I used to go to his flat in Upper Park Road to catch up on gossip, take advice, and record him talking about the history of Hampstead Theatre.
"He said 'it was a stupid thing to launch a theatre with no experience of running one, but my motto is leap and the net will appear'. Then he said: 'of course sometimes the net doesn't appear, but in the main I have been pretty lucky. I was driven by passion and energy. I think I still am.'"
Ripley-Duggan added: "He knew a good play when he saw one, he was a great judge of actors and kept on doing extraordinary work, building fantastic relationships with writers like Pinter and Tennessee. He encouraged a whole range of directors such as Richard Eyre, and gave Richard Wilson his first job. He put Hampstead on the map with a famous production of Private Lives that re-established Coward to some degree, and he had an extraordinary passion for experimentation.
"You can still see traces of his DNA across London in work that he created or championed. He died a couple of weeks before we lost our Arts Council funding so here we are; leap and the net will appear...with a shove in the back from Nadine Dorries."
Unveiling the memorial, Dame Siân Phillips, who starred in Roose-Evans' debut production at Hampstead Theatre, said: "I first met James at the Everyman in Hampstead. He said 'Hampstead needs a theatre, you have to do the play', and that was that.
"He was a dreamer and an innovator not afraid to get his hands dirty. I lived in Hampstead at the time, and you would see him everywhere with a large red bucket, at the grocers shop, raising money to make a theatre or to make theatre. He saw the theatre as a spiritual quest. Many of his dreams did happen and this theatre has done him proud.
"We did a series of conversations not long before he died, he wore a wonderful cream suit and a silk shirt. He looked absolutely magnificent, and that's how I remember him."
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