James Bridie was the name used by Osborne Henry Mavor (1888–1951), a practising doctor in Glasgow who began writing plays in the late 1920s and rapidly became a major force in British theatre. The Anatomist and Tobias and the Angel were both produced in London in 1930, and by the time of his death Bridie had had forty-two plays produced, many of them on London West End stages. He became a full-time writer in 1938.
Throughout his life, Bridie played a key role in the development of Scottish theatre. He was a board member of the Scottish National Players until their refusal to turn professional led to his resignation and then, during the Second World War, was instrumental in the establishment of the Citizens’ Theatre in Glasgow, of which he was Chairman until his death. He was also involved in the establishment of the Glasgow College of Drama as an extension of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and was an adviser to the early Edinburgh Festivals.
Bridie’s works have often been compared with those of George Bernard Shaw for their argumentative wit, but Bridie, unlike Shaw, had no strong ideology to assert. He regarded himself as primarily a clever entertainer, diverting an audience for an hour or two, but in fact his plays, like Barrie’s, constantly challenge the underlying assumptions and apparent certainties of the modern world.
Mr Bolfry was written during the Second World War: its comic engagement with the conjuring of the devil reflects directly on the rediscovery of the power of evil unleashed by Fascism. The Calvinism that was so much derided by twentieth-century liberal thinkers becomes the medium for confronting — and containing — the threatening reality of an evil which modern rationalism has failed to banish from the world. In this it prefigures the early novels of Muriel Spark and connects to the tradition of Hogg (Confessions of a Justified Sinner) and Stevenson (Jekyll and Hyde).
Bridie was both the most internationally successful of Scottish- based dramatists and the most important shaper of Scottish theatre in the first half of the twentieth century.