Robert Leach was the first Artistic Director of the Lichfield Mysteries, and he selected and edited the plays in the cycle. He is a prize-winning poet, theatre director and academic. He has been Reader in Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham, and Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Edinburgh University. He has acted professionally in Britain and U.S.A., and directed plays in Russia as well as Britain. His production of I Want a Baby by Sergei Tretyakov at the Teatr u Nikitskikh Vorot in Moscow in 1990 was the Russian premiere of this 1920s play which was banned in the Communist Soviet Union for decades.