BOLTON School old boy Eric Bentley who went from having trod the boards at Bolton Little Theatre to becoming a fierce critic of Broadway has died at the age of 103.

Influential theatre critic Mr Bentley died at his home in Manhattan on August 5, but his name will forever live on in theatre history, not least for introducing the German playwright Brecht to English-speaking world.

The son of a former Mayor of Bolton, Mr Bentley won a scholarship to Bolton School, before continuing his studies at Oxford, where he was taught by CS Lewis.

Fellow old boy Irving Wardle, also a well respected theatre critic, said: "As a boy at Bolton School in the 1930s Eric Bentley played the role of the American in Galsworthy’s morality play The Little Man. Thereafter he was known in the school as the American and lost no time in emigrating to America in 1939 when he was awarded a scholarship that took him from New College, Oxford, to Yale.

" He never came back; but his many sided career in America ­— as a scholar, university teacher, translator, and theatre critic ­— yielded a body of work which had a far-reaching influence on both sides of the Atlantic.

"He has his place in theatre history as the man who brought the German playwright Bertolt Brecht to the English-speaking world, having first met the exiled Brecht in 1942 and worked with him as translator, advocate and co-director for 15 stormy years until Brecht’s death in 1956.

"No less influential was the series of European play collections which Bentley edited in cheap, well-translated paperback editions in the 1950s; and his two best known books, The Life of the Drama, which re-examined the basic dramatic categories as though no one had ever heard of comedy and tragedy, and The Playwright as Thinker whose self-explanatory title defines his central belief that drama earns its high name through its power to add something to peoples’ lives."

The New York Times described Mr Bentley as an "unsparing antagonist of Broadway" who preferred Brecht to Broadway

At one time Eric was an actor with the Bolton Little Theatre Company, where Mr Wardle's step-mother was a director.

In 2009 Bolton Little Theatre presented the European premiere of Silent Partners by Charles Marowitz, telling the story of the relationship between playwright Bertolt Brecht and Mr Bentley.

Michael Bertin Heinlein, who approached Mr Bentley in the early 1980s to ask if he would be agreeable to being the subject of his Yale School of Drama dissertation, also paid tribute to him.

He said: "As any cognizant person in theatre in those days, I of course met him much earlier through his works. I worked with him collaboratively, directing his plays at University, and serving, as he once said, as his unofficial secretary.

"Eric’s sheer intelligence and strict adherence to quality in art initially frightened some people. He made the transition from living a life in books to living one committed to people ­—not that the two are exclusive.)Over the years, he trained himself in all aspects of theatre, finally becoming an accomplished dramatist. This curtailed his critical career somewhat in that he felt he couldn’t very well offer criticism of other dramatists while at the same time working to promote his own plays."

He added:; "Eric was the kindest person I ever knew. As a mentor he was unmatched, always guiding you to a better understanding of plays, and through plays, life itself.

"Early on, he fought against War and poverty ­—a naive task as he later admitted ­­— but he kept at it, trying to change the world by changing the drama."

Mr Bentley and his friends set up the DMZ Cabaret, in New York as a protest to the Vietnam War, and his fight for human, specifically, gay rights.