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They're both wordplay only clues. 10 is an anagram of h(husband) + out + mark. 40 is an anag of sir inside a 3-letter word for 'pulse'.

I should have added that both words need to be playfair - or as I prefer to think of it "playfoul" - encoded before entry.

Once you have the theme and you have located an on-line PlayFair solver, why is it not possible to enter the plain text last two words of the title of the source, then enter the last 10 initial letters of the down clues in order to get some idea of the PlayFair code words (the instructions)? Can anyone direct me to an online solver that will do this, or does it absolutely have to be ground out using pen & paper?

Turast. Playfair breakers work by looking at plaintext and cypher text pairs and calculating all the possible combinations of letters in the table which would give that result. They then check to see if any of the starting letters correspond to real words in on line dictionaries.
The problem here is the key phrase does not appear in any of the dictionaries so the breakers are stumped.
As said earlier I decided for the first time to have a go at manually cracking the playfair and found it is not as difficult as I had suspected it would be.
This is a really good link describing how to approach the problem.
https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/35722/how-to-find-the-keyword-of-the-playfair-cipher-given-the-plaintext-and-the-ciph?newreg=cf6b966e2eba452a94a8dc3e076a6e1a

I have the four places, the theme and the encoded title, yet I cannot solve 30 across and 26 down, though I’m sure 30a is staring me in the face! So hints would be appreciated. Mind you, the play fair is not for me, so I shall rest content with all the clues solved.

came in to this late as I went to Madeira for chrimbo. An excellent puzzle, but the instruction is a little oblique. I finally twigged that the instruction was in accordance with the three highlighted characters, RIP Dysart and long live JEG - an incredible person, fair but how he allowed that bloody hare will haunt me forever. I will we submitting my entry within a retirement card,

Eenk
30A definition first word; wordplay anagram missing 2 single letters standing for 'Troy' and 'see'.
26D definition last 2 words; wordplay 3+1+1. The three letters are an obsolete word meaning what 'rep can be an abbreviation of'. Highly obscure IMO! 70 is a mediaeval Roman Numeral.

I detest Playfair square puzzles and very rarely bother to start them. However, I have started this one and I only need the keyword/phrase to complete it. Drxx, your hints at post 58 were too subtle for me. Would it be possible within the rules of this forum for you to be more specific?

Thanks jbird. I agree with your opinion on the obscurity!

I'll try, 0pt0.

The 7th pairing is given by initial letters of the clues for 23d (an 'E') and 26d (an 'R') these code to the last two letters of the 3rd word of the thematic title (4th actually, but the first word has been discarded).
As one of these letters appears in both couplets all of these letters must appear in the same line (in this case a row, not a column). Because of the way letters in a line are encoded you know that the repeated letter should be in the middle of the other two.
The 5th pairing [9d & 10d with the two letters between the 1st and 2nd words of the theme title] contains all three letters of the 7th pairing plus one other letter (the additional letter must be at the far end of the same line because it codes to the letter at the start of the row).

Seeing these 5 letters in order should suggest a thematic word and completing it will contribute to the lines immediately above and below.