by Philip Hedley, who has died aged 85, was a protégé of Joan Littlewood, the radical founder of Theater Workshop, a group that toured shows aimed at working-class audiences and led an extraordinary revolution in British theater in the 1950s when he took up residence. at the Theater Royal in Stratford, east London.
Hedley started as assistant to Joan Littlewood in 1972, and after a break after she left the theater in 1974, he took up the position of artistic director of the Theater Royal Stratford East in 1979, remaining in the post for 25 years.
He remembered Joan Littlewood telling him at his interview that she had built her life “on the rock of change”. “She was totally against anything that came up, when people thought they had developed safe rules for behaving,” he said. “If an actress had a great laugh on a line, that’s the line she’d change the next night.”
Hedley remained true to his vision, maintaining the theatre’s reputation for innovative productions and bringing in new audiences, despite years of battles with the Arts Council over funding.
It took her faith to create work to represent and engage the local community, which became much more culturally mixed in the 1980s and 1990s, so that the theater eventually featured white people in the home borough of Newham. his period. minority.
He championed the work of black and Asian actors and writers, and attracted a more diverse audience with different nights (described in the Evening Standard as consisting of “geriatric gigs and brand new sketches, weird contortionists and dress drag queens, loud, sarcastic and often extremely rude”) and annual pantomimes (usually with a central black character) and joint productions with major black and Asian companies.
The musicals included Moti Roti Puttli Chunni (1993), a spin on Bollywood; and Clarke Peters’s Five Guys Named Moe (1990), based on the music of the American band Louis Jordan, which transferred to the West End and Broadway.
In 1999 Hedley established the theatre’s Musical Theater Workshop to encourage local writers and composers. The workshop was instrumental in the production of Da Boyz (2003), a hip-hop adaptation by Ultz (born David Ultz) of the 1938 Broadway play The Boys from Syracuse, in which all the seats were removed from the stalls to capacity of young members of the audience. dance.
In the United States, the entertainment weekly Variety devoted its entire front page to the show and expressed surprise that a small theater in London had successfully negotiated the rights to modernize Rodgers and Hart’s original in a way that no theater had been allowed to do. American made.
The hit ska musical Windrush The Big Life (2004), written by Paul Sirett and Paul Joseph, became the first black British musical to play in the West End. He won Hedley’s first Arts Council Eclipse award for tackling racism in theater – and it was his swan song.
While Joan Littlewood risked official displeasure with the anti-war satire Oh, What a Lovely War!, Hedley provoked official outrage by staging the first English-language production of Federico García Lorca’s controversial play The Public in 1988 against the newly initiated. Section 28 of the Local Government Act was enacted which prohibited the promotion of homosexuality (although one actor noted that the play was “so wrapped in symbolism no one had any idea what it was about”) .
Hedley, moreover, was delighted when “questions” were asked in the House of Commons about another show, in which Mrs Thatcher was doing a striptease, stripping off her clothes as she announced each new cut in public spending. Other productions tackled racial prejudice and violence, the poll tax (treated not as an occasion for agitprop but as a springboard for farce), or simply life in East London.
He stopped at almost anything to get publicity for his theater. The Telegraph critic, Charles Spencer, recalled that he had promised a dog that would dance on one of his various nights, although he had no such dog: “When national newspaper photographers demanded a photo call, he borrowed a dog from an actor . But why wasn’t he dancing? asked the photographers. He was suffering from the flu, the explanation came, and he could not dance that day. But it would definitely be All Right On The Night.
“As the performance approached, Hedley realized that the missing dog would have to die. The press was solemnly informed that the Terpsichorean hound was run over by an articulated lorry on its way to the theatre. Reporters trying to interview the ‘owner’ about her tragic loss were told she was too hard to reach on the phone.”
Michael Bertenshaw, a veteran pantomime bantam in Theater Royal productions, many of which were directed by Hedley, recalled that his shows “all had that rough and ready quality you’d expect from music hall”: “Directors others I have worked with are getting worse. if things are not going well. But sometimes Philip would get lost and you’d look at the end of the crowd and you’d see that he was rolling his eyes, crying with laughter because everyone was a mess and he somehow managed to get away with it. .
“Some directors are very autocratic; Philip is a great person for celebrating actors and for pulling chaos together and putting it on stage.”
But beneath Hedley’s theatrical manner, his publicity stunts and his infectious high-pitched reeds, Charles Spencer sensed a man of “almost puritanical idealism”. He was one of the most outspoken critics of business sponsorship of the arts, arguing that an over-reliance on sponsorship could lead to arts organizations self-censorship, while trying not to offend their patrons.
Hedley himself remembers being approached by the West End management company. “They offered me double my salary without knowing what it was, and an office in Wardour Street with air conditioning and wall-to-wall carpet. If they thought those values were important to me they were talking to the wrong person.”
Philip David Hedley was born into a working-class family in Manchester on 10 April 1938 and emigrated to Australia with his family in 1951. His love for theater began at the University of Sydney, where “on paper” he studied English and on education but participated more in drama.
On his return to Britain, he went to the Theater Royal to see Ben Jonson’s play, Every Man in His Humour, and heard two tea ladies chatting in the cafe beforehand. “The Cockney accent was really new to me then,” he said. “I delayed going into the theater because I wanted to hear their stories. When I entered the play it was exactly the same with both women – the same rhythm, sparkle and presence. It was amazing.”
Afterwards he went out to the foyer and asked the house manager what he could do to be a part of it: “That question changed the course of my life.”
Hedley was one of the first students to enroll at the E15 Acting School, founded by members of Joan Littlewood’s company in 1961. But he soon realized that he was more of a director than an actor, and spent a few years working to freelance around the country and the world – “from West End musicals to a school playground in Khartoum” – before going back to see Joan Littlewood, who he interviewed for five hours to become his assistant.
He recalled that she was “demanding and challenging… amazing and hellish. She used to attack people and eventually she went to me. She attributed everything imaginable to my offspring and my testicles in me.”
When Joan Littlewood moved to France in 1974, due to the death of her partner Gerry Raffles, a turbulent period followed in which three artistic directors came and went, Ken Hill, Maxwell Shaw and finally Clare Venables. By 1979, when Hedley agreed to take over, the Arts Council was threatening to withdraw its subsidy if the theater could not, within two years, justify its continuation.
Hedley soon began to make his mark, playing the country’s first black boy in Jack and the Beanstalk. Other early successes included new plays such as Mustapha Matura’s Welcome Home Jacko, Barrie Keeffe’s Sus and Nell Dunn’s Steaming. He produced and directed more than 160 productions before retiring to become “director emeritus” in 2004. He was succeeded by Kerry Michael, the theater’s associate director and former Hedley assistant.
Hedley remained active, teaching, lecturing, running workshops and serving on many Arts Council and other committees. He was appointed CBE in 2003.
Philip Hedley was unmarried.
Philip Hedley, born 10 April 1938, died 5 January 2024
