Baal
Babies Grow Old
Back to Methuselah
Bad Weather
George Baker
Sean Baker
The Balcony
Bandits
Teresa Banham
Barbarians
Frances Barber
The Barbican
Howard Barker
Peter Barnes
Desmond Barrit
Bartholomew Fair
John Barton
Linda Bassett
Bastard Angel
Alan Bates
Simon Russell Beale
Sean Bean
The Beast
Maureen Beattie
Francis Beaumont
Beauty and the Beast
The Beaux' Stratagem
Becket
Samuel Beckett
Beckett Shorts
The Beggar's Opera
Brendan Behan
Katy Behean
Aphra Behn
Belcher's Luck
Believe What You Will
Christopher Benjamin
Paul Bentall
John Berger
Sarah Berger
Cicely Berry
Suzanne Bertish
Kirsty Besterman
Paul Bettany
The Bewitched
Bingo
Birdsong
The Birthday Party
The Bite of the Night
Colin Blakely
Claudie Blakley
Marjorie Bland
Brian Blessed
The Blue Angel
The Body
Michael Bogdanov
Robert Bolt
Edward Bond
Samantha Bond
Ken Bones
Hugh Bonneville
Laurence Boswell
John Bott
Dion Boucicault
John Bowe
Raymond Bowers
Robert Bowman
Stephen Boxer
Michael Boyd
Danny Boyle
David Bradley
John Bradley
Cathryn Bradshaw
Kenneth Branagh
Brand
Breaking the Silence
Bertolt Brecht
Howard Brenton
David Brierley
The Bright and Bold Design
Stephen Brimson Lewis
Jasper Britton
Brixton Stories
Jim Broadbent
The Broken Heart
Richard Brome
Peter Brook
Siân Brooke
Brooklyn Academy of Music
Bille Brown
Susan Brown
Brenda Bruce
Emily Bruni
Giordano Bruno
Robert Bryan
Georg Büchner
Mikhail Afanaseyev Bulgakov
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
The Bundle
Anthony Burgess
Alfred Burke
Alan Burrett
John Bury
Judy Buxton
Patsy Byrne
Lord Byron
Desmond Barrit worked as an accountant before breaking into professional acting at the age of thirty-five. He appeared with a children's theatre company, and then in repertory at Lincoln, Swansea, York, Cardiff and East Grinstead. He was 'discovered' by Nicholas Hytner, who cast him as Brogard in The Scarlet Pimpernel (Chichester and Her Majesty's, 1985). He next joined the National to play Chauffeur in Jacobowsky and the Colonel (Jonathan Lynn, Olivier, 1986), Achille Blond in The Magistrate (Michael Rudman, Lyttelton, 1986), and Charlie in Three Men on a Horse (Lynn, Cottesloe, 1987).
Hytner was partly responsible for his entry into the RSC (1988-89 cycle). As well as his remarkable Trinculo—a massive, mournful clown with a collapsed pudding of a face—in Hytner's The Tempest (RST, Barbican), he was Tom Errand in The Constant Couple (Roger Michell, Swan); Ross/Porter in Macbeth (Adrian Noble, RST, Barbican); Banjo in The Man Who Came to Dinner (Gene Saks, Barbican); Gloucester in King Lear (Cicely Berry, Almeida); and Feste in Twelfth Night (Stephen Rayne, RSC College Tour).
He went with his RSC colleague Alex Jennings to the Old Vic for Corneille's The Liar (Jonathan Miller, 1989), then returned to the National to play Toad in Hytner's production of Alan Bennett's The Wind in the Willows (Olivier, 1991). Over the next few years he played Brazen in The Recruiting Officer (Hytner, NT Olivier, 1992), Billy in David Ashton's The Chinese Wolf (Dominic Dromgoole, Bush, 1993), and Cotrone in Pirandello's The Mountain Giants (William Gaskill, NT Cottesloe, 1993).
For much of the 1990s he was at the RSC. He was in masterful comic form as Antipholus of Ephesus and Antipholus of Syracuse in The Comedy of Errors (Ian Judge, RST, 1990, Barbican, 1991); Malvolio—majestically ugly, vain and self-bloated—in Twelfth Night (Judge, RST, 1994, Barbican, 1995); and Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream (Noble, RST, 1994, Barbican, 1995, US Tour, 1996). Barrit's Bottom was a self-centred but talented amateur ham transformed into sweet incredulity ('methought I was, and methought I had …' was spoken with a downwards glance inside his trousers). He returned to play Falstaff in Henry IV (Michael Attenborough, Swan and Barbican, 2000-01). Injury forced his withdrawal from Gregory Doran's musical version of The Merry Wives of Windsor (2006).
Other theatre work includes: the sadistic Tropatchov in Turgenev's Fortune's Fool (Gale Edwards, Chichester, 1996); Dame Trott in Jack and the Beanstalk (Norwich, 1996); the revue Then Again (Lyric Hammersmith, 1997); Caryl Churchill's This is a Chair (Stephen Daldry, Royal Court at the Duke of York's, 1997); Birdboot/Harold in The Real Inspector Hound/Black Comedy (Gregory Doran, Comedy Theatre, 1998); Widow Twankey in his own production of Aladdin (Norwich, 1998-99); Monsieur Henri, death in a fedora, in Anouilh's Euridice (Simon Godwin, BAC and Whitehall, 1999); Zangler in Tom Stoppard's On the Razzle (Peter Wood, Chichester, 2001); leading Steven Pimlott's first season at Chichester (2003) as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice (Gale Edwards) and Sorin in The Seagull (Pimlott); and Pseudolus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (Edward Hall, NT Olivier, 2004).
On television he has been restricted to supporting roles: Somewhere to Run (1989); Jaggers's Client in Great Expectations (1989); Poirot (ITV, 1991); Boon (ITV, 1992); Dalziel and Pascoe (BBC, 1996); True Tilda (1997); Oliver Twist (ITV, 1999); Guillaumin in Madame Bovary (BBC, 2000); and Midsomer Murders (ITV, 2002). His films include Lassiter (Roger Young, 1984), Rebecca's Daughters (Karl Francis, 1991), and Prospero's Books (Peter Greenaway, 1991).
RSC: Joined 1988; Associate Artist (since 1995)
Seasons: 1988 (Strat.)-89 (Lond.); 1990 (Strat.)-91 (Lond.); 1994 (Strat.)-95/96 (Lond./International Tour); 2000 (Strat.)-00/01 (Lond.)
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