Kitty Black was a successful theatre administrator and distinguished translator of continental plays who eventually became a leading play agent.

While exploring the prewar West End for work as a junior shorthand typist Black found the job of her dreams. On Shaftesbury Avenue was a theatre called the Globe, now known as the Gielgud, and it housed the offices of H. M. Tennent. She progressed from junior secretary to aide and adviser before becoming assistant administrator of the Company of Four at the Lyric, Hammersmith, a non-profit-making branch of Tennent’s.

Black had brought a stenotype machine with her to the first meeting at Tennent’s and it was to this that all eyes were drawn. Harry Moncrieff Tennent was first to demand a demonstration; Noël Coward was the second.

Offered £2.10s for a start, Black learnt that there would be a rise of five shillings if she came up to scratch. In what was to become the most successful independent London management of the century, the new recruit prospered for 16 years.

Whether the immaculate Hugh Binkie Beaumont himself hooked the new theatre-struck employee or whether it was the prospect of other stage celebrities coming into the office, Black’s career progressed through a number of roles. She would become an occasional off-stage pianist to actors who lacked a musical education; a regular reader of plays and a trusted friend and comforter of some of the leading artists of the period.

She later recalled: “Binkie was in his mid-twenties. He was one of the most beautiful young men I ever saw. Medium height, with pale blue eyes and startlingly white skin of magnolia-petal quality, with white shirts and pale blue or gray ties — I never saw him wear stripes or a pattern — and was always immaculate.”

Long before the era of state subsidy or civic grants, Tennent’s kept on its books actors, dramatists, directors, designers and translators. It controlled most of the country’s leading theatrical talent.

Among actors were John Gielgud, Edith Evans, Ralph Richardson, Paul Scofield, Margaret Rutherford, Emlyn Williams and Peter Brook. Among dramatists were Christropher Fry, Terence Rattigan, Jean Anouilh, Jean Cocteau, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Jean-Paul Sartre.

To some — especially those who did not belong to it — it seemed like a monopoly. Black denied that blacklists existed but admitted that if anyone crossed Beaumont they would never work for him again.

This amounted to lifelong exclusion from the West End; Beaumont would have as many as 15 productions at a time in the West End or touring.

Though she got the post without having to argue her way into it — no need to mention music diplomas, her years of theatregoing or her experienced taste in drama — this intelligent, enthusiastic and highly talkative young woman knew her own mind.

While Black would leave Tennent’s after 16 years to set up as one of London’s most influential play agents, it was the spell from 1937 to 1953 on which she based her autobiography, Upper Circle: A Theatrical Chronicle (1985). In it she gave a lively impression of the wheeling and dealing and the crises, financial and otherwise, out of which plays are born.

Black’s relish, discipline, gossip and goodwill towards the theatre extended to editing translations for Peter Daubeny’s world theatre seasons at the Aldwych Theatre.

The daughter of a successful builder, Dorothy Black, known as Kitty, was educated at Roedean, Johannesburg, an offshoot of the English public school, and after attending a finishing school in Paris, trained to be a concert pianist. She and her family moved from South Africa to England and settled in London before the war.

When Black was establishing at the Lyric, Hammersmith, in 1945 the Company of Four (teasingly defined by Emlyn Williams as attracting an audience of two), parliamentary questions were asked about the definition of “educational plays” to avoid entertainment tax. Beaumont gave evidence to a parliamentary committee.

Black ran the Lyric with Murray Macdonald for eight years, and enjoyed the chance to produce new plays and satirical revues, picking her own directors and designers.

As the doyenne of play agents she dealt with Samuel Beckett and other leading figures in modern drama. She had no truck, however, with John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956); the playwright recalled a letter from her in which she wrote: “I feel like the headmistress of a large school in which I have to tell its most promising pupil that he must think again.” Black also translated plays by Sartre, Anouilh and Cocteau; and had a hand in more than 80 productions.

She never married.

Kitty Black, play agent and translator, was born on April 30, 1914. She died on December 26, 2006, aged 92