by When director Michael Blakemore, who has died aged 95, was named a double Tony winner in 2000 for his productions of Kiss Me Kate and Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, he said: “All I can say is that thank you America. And, when I say America, of course I mean New York. And when I say New York, I mean Broadway.”
It raised the roof in Radio City, but its ironic tone was lost on the enthusiastic audience. He was recognizing the parochialism of glamour. Blakemore was never lost in showbiz, despite the fact that he was one of its most skilled producers, a director whose command and respect for a true craft was a feature of his reputation. He thought (and wrote) long and hard about theater without ever clouding his work with conceptual arrogance or extraneous clutter. He was a master of finding the right actors, the right design and the right pace for plays, operas and farces. And he was a civilized, cultured person, whose taste was almost always impeccable.
He was particularly involved in the early plays of Peter Nichols and the later ones of Frayn, and was instrumental in Laurence Olivier’s tenure as chief artistic director of the National Theatre, over a period of five years (1971-76) which surpassed the arrival of Peter Hall, arch enemy, and which he anatomically, brilliantly, in his third book, Stage Blood (2013).
There is a classic 30-page log of his work with Olivier on Eugene O’Neill’s 1971 revival of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, in which he inspired the actor in one of his greatest performances during the organization’s run -cut. with Olivier’s illnesses, administrative obstacles and the treachery of others. But he received great support from Olivier’s literary manager, Kenneth Tynan, and enjoyed the talents and company of “difficult” colleagues such as director John Dexter.
Along with his co-director Jonathan Miller, he opposed the plans of the incoming Hall, Olivier’s successor (appointed, against Olivier himself, in 1973), to amalgamate the National with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and disliked the increasing tendency (as he said). he saw it) towards a lack of consultation on major decisions and (as he also saw it) Hall’s self-promotion.
The more congenial idea of a spit-and-sawdust theater in the Old Vic, with prefabricated, temporary offices around the corner in Aquinas Street, in Denys Lasdun’s monolithic concrete building on the South Bank, was inevitably transformed into an effort of corporate will. , with sponsorship, political and committee men, legions of staff and an endless output of productions in three auditions (two of which were, and are, extremely difficult).
Blakemore, an Australian, had learned his trade in Britain as a substitute actor, toured with Olivier behind the Iron Curtain in Peter Brook’s production of Titus Andronicus in 1955 and discovered the truth he had learned at Tyrone Guthrie, another fine director for him when they worked together at the Bristol Old Vic in the early 1960s: that the point of practice was to realize the potential of the actor and the theater to realize the potential of the audience out.
He was in the right place at the right time as co-artistic director of the Glasgow Citizens when the script Nichols’s A Day in the Death of Joe Egg landed on his desk in 1967. This black comedy was a hit at every major theater. in Britain. Vaudeville with a disabled child in the middle.
Blakemore’s performance caused a sensation, won the Evening Standard’s best play award when it moved to London, and went on to triumph on Broadway. His name was made.
Michael was born in Sydney, the son of Una (née Litchfield) and Conrad Blakemore, an eye surgeon. They separated when he was nine, and he was sent to King’s school, Parramatta, New South Wales, where, at the age of 16, he decided to become a film director after the 1944 screen version of Henry V to be seen by Olivier.
He went to Sydney University to study medicine but failed his third-year exams and left – but not before interviewing Robert Morley for the university’s paper; the actor toured in his own play, Edward, My Son (1947).
When Blakemore was surprised by the show’s lack of publicity, Morley offered him a job as a publicist at £6 a week and, after learning of his ambitions, wrote a letter of recommendation to Rada.
Blakemore subsidized his sea voyage to London by working as a steward on the ship. From Rada, where Joan Collins, Diane Cilento and Rosemary Harris were among his friends and contemporaries, he took up store theater in 1952, acting in Huddersfield, Derby, Hythe, Chesterfield and the Birmingham Rep, he succeeded writing a play and, eventually, his published novel, Next Season (1969), which transformed this experience into a classic comic fiction of the period and our post-war theatre.
Actor and writer Simon Callow said that no book has shown the creative, anarchic excitement of acting as the next season has shown. Elements of Blakemore’s work were also incorporated at Stratford-upon-Avon, where he was a member of the large company led by Charles Laughton, Olivier, Edith Evans and Paul Robeson in 1959, directed by Hall. Hall first fought him over Vanessa Redgrave’s relatives and then took over the whole shebang in forming the RSC in 1960. Blakemore returned to the regions and ended up in Glasgow where he directed, as well as Nichols play, great show. Leonard Rossiter in Brecht’s Arturo Ui (1969), a performance in the role that has never been surpassed in Britain, moving to the old Saville theater at the wrong end of Shaftesbury Avenue. In the same year, he directed his second Nichols play, The National Health, a glorious black comedy about an underfunded NHS, for the National Theatre.
In the early 70s, Blakemore’s output was remarkable: he not only directed his third great Nichols piece, Forget-Me-Not-Lane (1971), a nostalgic, autobiographical photo album but also an unusually experimental drama, from film. Greenwich Theater into the West End, he also oversaw the definitive national revival of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s 1928 classic, The Front Page (1972).
He also restored Noël Coward’s Design for Living to critical and popular favor (his three bohemians were Redgrave, John Stride and Jeremy Brett) at the Phoenix theater (1973), immediately after Coward’s death and directed the thriller Home Counties David Hare, Knuckle, starring Edward Fox and Kate Nelligan, at the Comedy (now the Harold Pinter, 1974).
There was a West End revival of Shaw’s Candida (1977) with Denis Quilley and Deborah Kerr, and, in the same year, a fourth hit with Nichols, his comic account of an army song and dance unit in Malaya (Malaysia) during the Emergency in the 40s of late, Privates on Parade, which started with the RSC at the Aldwych – Quilley as the treacherous Captain Terri Dennis in glorious full sail, Nigel Hawthorne as a more relaxed senior officer – and transferred to the Piccadilly.
Blakemore finished off at the National with another notable hit, his revival of the Ben Travers thriller Plunder, which moved across from the Old Vic to the new theater in 1976. Now he went to work with Frayn at the Lyric, Hammersmith, on Make. and Break (1980), with Rossiter and Prunella Scales, and then Noises Off (1982) which soon established itself, despite initial troubles in the third act, as the brightest modern thrillers.
Frayn’s Benefactors (1984) met with more muted acclaim at the Vaudeville and Anthony Minghella’s underrated play Made in Bangkok (1986), which opened at the Aldwych.
No other director in the last 30 years has taken so much pleasure in the smart wing of commercial theatre: Maggie Smith and Margaret Tyzack in Peter Shaffer’s Lettice and Lovage (1987), the two actors who won Tonys in New York; Jonathan Pryce as Uncle Vanya at the Vaudeville (1988); the Larry Gelbart/Cy Coleman musical City of Angels (Prince of Wales, 1993), in which the black-and-white action turned to color in a film noir matched with a Chandleresque private dick and the story he was investigating.
Frayn brought him back to the National (where Richard Eyre succeeded Hall) with Copenhagen (1998), his account of a historic meeting between the German physicist Werner Heisenberg and his Danish mentor Niels Bohr, a complex and knotty drama that against all odds i. its popular appeal. Also at the National, Frayn’s Democracy (2003) was equally interesting in its portrait of Willy Brandt, the West German Chancellor, played by Roger Allam, deciding to expose his secretary as a communist spy.
After these exquisite, beautiful productions, and his double Tony win, Blakemore remained as popular on Broadway as he was in London, and his 2009 New York revival of Coward’s Blithe Spirit, with Angela Lansbury as Madame Arcati as the main solution, to the Gielgud. in London in 2014. At the Southwark Playhouse he returned to The Life (2017), Coleman’s sleazy story with music about sex work in New York, where he directed it on Broadway 20 years earlier.
His second book, Arguments With Myself (2005), brought readers as far as the Death of Joe Egg with the slightly false statement that his restructuring of Nichols’ second draft was not acknowledged in the printed text.
There was nothing small about the rancor that fought with Hall, and its bitterness, which takes the edge from the enjoyment of Blood Stage, seems surprising in a man so serious-minded and light-mannered.
Like Hall, he had little success in films, although he directed A Personal History of the Australian Surf (1981) – surfing was his lifelong passion – the film Privates on Parade (1983), with John Cleese as Major Giles Flack, and Country Life (1994), Blakemore’s own version of Uncle Vanya, set in the Australian outback, in which he appeared.
It was a wonderful full-circle coincidence that in 2013 Stage Blood won the theater book prize named after Morley’s son, Sheridan Morley, who was also a personal friend over the years. In 2003 he was appointed both AO and OBE.
Blakemore’s 1960 marriage to Shirley Bush was dissolved in 1986; in the same year he married theater designer Tanya McCallin. Tanya, from whom he was separated, is survived by their daughters Beatrice and Clementine, and their son from his first marriage, Conrad.
• Michael Howell Blakemore, theater director, born 19 June 1928; he died 10 December 2023
