by When director Michael Blakemore, who has died aged 95, received the double Tony Award in 2000 for his productions of Kiss Me Kate and Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, he said: “All I can say is, thank you America. And when I say the United States, of course I mean New York. And when I say New York, I mean Broadway.”
He raised the roof at Radio City, but his wry tone went unnoticed by the enthusiastic audience. He was recognizing the provincialism of glamour. Blakemore was never lost in the world of entertainment, despite being one of its most skilled exponents, a director whose mastery and respect for pure art was an aspect of his supreme intelligence. He thought (and wrote) a lot about theater without ever clouding his work with conceptual arrogance or superfluous disorder. He was a master at finding the right actors, the right design and the right pacing for plays, musicals and farces. And he was a civilized and cultured man, whose taste was almost always impeccable.
Particularly associated with the early works of Peter Nichols and the later ones of Frayn, he was a key associate in Laurence Olivier’s tenure as inaugural artistic director of the National Theatre, for a five-year period (1971-76) that overlapped with the arrival of Peter Hall, his archenemy, and which he brilliantly anatomized in his third great book, Stage Blood (2013).
Contains a classic 30-page record of his work with Olivier in the 1971 revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, in which he persuaded the actor to give one of his best performances while the organization’s operations were down. tense. with Olivier’s illnesses, administrative setbacks and the betrayals of others. But he had great support from Olivier’s literary director, Kenneth Tynan, and enjoyed the talent and company of even “difficult” colleagues such as director John Dexter.
With fellow associate director Jonathan Miller, he resisted plans by the incoming Hall, Olivier’s successor (appointed, in defiance of Olivier himself, in 1973), to merge the National with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and disliked the growing trend (as he saw it) towards the lack of consultation on important decisions and (as he also saw it) Hall’s self-aggrandizement.
The nicer idea of a spit and sawdust theater in the Old Vic, with prefabricated and temporary offices around the corner on Aquinas Street, was inevitably transformed, in Denys Lasdun’s monolithic concrete building on the South Bank, into a effort of corporate will. , with sponsorships, politicians and committees, legions of staff and non-stop production of productions in three theaters (two of which were, and are, extremely difficult).
Blakemore, an Australian, had learned his trade in Britain as a representative actor, had traveled with Olivier behind the Iron Curtain in Peter Brook’s 1955 production of Titus Andronicus, and discovered the truth of what Tyrone Guthrie, another fine director, had taught him when they worked together at the Bristol Old Vic in the early 1960s: the aim of rehearsals was to realize the potential of the actor and the theatre, to realize the potential of the audience.
He was in the right place at the right time as co-artistic director of Glasgow Citizens when the script for Nichols’ A Day in the Death of Joe Egg landed on his desk in 1967. Every major theater in Britain had rejected this film noir. and funny. vaudeville with a disabled child in the center.
Blakemore’s production caused a sensation, winning the Evening Standard’s best play award when it moved to London, and from there it triumphed on Broadway. Her name was made.
Born in Sydney, Michael was the son of Una (née Litchfield) and Conrad Blakemore, an eye surgeon. They divorced when he was nine and sent him to boarding school at King’s School, Parramatta, New South Wales, where, at the age of 16, he decided to become a film director after seeing the film version of Olivier’s Henry V. in 1944.
He went to the University of Sydney to study medicine, but failed his third year exams and left, but not before interviewing Robert Morley for the university job; the actor was touring his own play, Edward, My Son (1947).
When Blakemore expressed surprise at the lack of publicity surrounding the programme, Morley offered him a job as a publicist for £6 a week and, hearing of his ambitions, wrote a letter of recommendation to Rada.
Blakemore subsidized his sea passage to London by working as a steward on the ship. From Rada, where his friends and contemporaries included Joan Collins, Diane Cilento and Rosemary Harris, he immersed himself in repertory theater in 1952, performing in Huddersfield, Derby, Hythe, Chesterfield and the Birmingham Rep, managing to write a play and, finally, one published his novel Next Season (1969), which transformed this experience into a classic comic fiction of the time and of our post-war theater.
Actor and writer Simon Callow said no book has so faithfully depicted the creative and anarchic excitement of acting as Next Season. He also incorporated elements of Blakemore’s work at Stratford-upon-Avon, where in 1959 she was a member of the large company led by Charles Laughton, Olivier, Edith Evans and Paul Robeson, directed by Hall. Hall first competed with him for Vanessa Redgrave’s affections and then took matters into his own hands by founding the RSC in 1960. Blakemore returned to the regions and ended up in Glasgow where, in addition to Nichols’ work, he directed a sensational Leonard Rossiter in Brecht’s Arturo Ui (1969), a performance in the role that has never been surpassed in Britain, moved to the old Saville theater at the wrong end of Shaftesbury Avenue. That same year, he directed his second Nichols play, The National Health, a glorious black comedy about a chronically underfunded NHS, for the National Theatre.
In the early 1970s, Blakemore’s output was truly prodigious: not only did he direct his third major Nichols piece, Forget-Me-Not-Lane (1971), a frankly autobiographical, acidly nostalgic but also unusually experimental, photographic album of a play, from Greenwich in the West End, also oversaw a definitive national revival of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s 1928 journalistic classic, The Front Page (1972).
He also returned critical and popular favor to Noël Coward’s Design for Living (his bohemian trio were Redgrave, John Stride and Jeremy Brett) at the Phoenix Theater (1973), just after Coward’s death, and directed the David Hare’s Home Counties thriller Knuckle, starring Edward Fox and Kate Nelligan, in the Comedy (now Harold Pinter, 1974).
There was a West End revival of Shaw’s Candida (1977), with Denis Quilley and Deborah Kerr, and, that same year, a fourth triumph with Nichols, his hilarious account of an army song-and-dance unit in Malaya (Malaysia). ) during the Emergency of the late 1940s, Privates on Parade, which began with the RSC in Aldwych (Quilley as the scandalous Captain Terri Dennis in all her glory, Nigel Hawthorne as a calmer senior officer) and moved to Piccadilly.
Blakemore had signed at the National with another notable success, his revival of the Ben Travers farce Plunder, which moved from the Old Vic to the new theater in 1976. He now began working with Frayn at the Lyric, Hammersmith, in Make and Break ( 1980), with Rossiter and Prunella Scales, and then Noises Off (1982) which, despite initial problems in the third act, soon established itself as the most brilliant of modern farces.
There was further muted acclaim for Frayn’s Benefactors (1984) at the Vaudeville and an underrated work by Anthony Minghella, Made in Bangkok (1986), which flopped at the Aldwych.
No other director of the last 30 years perpetrated such pleasure in the intelligent wing of commercial theater: Maggie Smith and Margaret Tyzack in Peter Shaffer’s Lettice and Lovage (1987), both actors won Tony Awards in New York; Jonathan Pryce as Uncle Vanya in Vaudeville (1988); the Larry Gelbart/Cy Coleman musical City of Angels (Prince of Wales, 1993), in which the action alternated between black and white and color in a film noir comparison between a Chandleresque private penis and the story that was doing research.
Frayn brought him back to the National (where Richard Eyre had 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 thorny work that defied all expectations. expectations in its popular appeal. Also at the National, Frayn’s Democracy (2003) was equally fascinating in its portrait of Willy Brandt, the West German chancellor, played by Roger Allam, who decides to expose his secretary as a communist spy.
Following these exquisite, beautifully cast productions, and its double Tony win, Blakemore remained as much in demand on Broadway as it did in London, and its 2009 New York revival of Coward’s Blithe Spirit, starring Angela Lansbury as Madame Arcati, moved to Gielgud. in London in 2014. At the Southwark Playhouse she reprized The Life (2017), Coleman’s sordid tale with music about sex work in New York, where she had directed it on Broadway 20 years earlier.
His second book, Arguments with Myself (2005), took readers back to Joe Egg’s death with the slightly spiteful comment that his drastic restructuring of Nichols’s second draft was not recognized in the printed text.
There was nothing slight about the rancor of his feud with Hall, and his bitterness, which reduces the enjoyment of Stage Blood, seems surprising in such a serious, mild-mannered guy.
Like Hall, he never had much success in film, 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, and in which he appeared.
It was a beautiful coincidence that Stage Blood won, in 2013, the drama book award named after Morley’s son, Sheridan Morley, who was also a personal friend over the years. In 2003 he was appointed AO and OBE.
Blakemore’s marriage to Shirley Bush in 1960 was dissolved in 1986; That same year he married theater designer Tanya McCallin. He is survived by Tanya, from whom he was separated, his daughters, Beatrice and Clementine, and his son from his first marriage, Conrad.
• Michael Howell Blakemore, theater director, born 19 June 1928; died December 10, 2023
