When director Michael Blakemore, who has died aged 95, was named a double Tony Award winner 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 America, I of course mean New York. And when I say New York, I mean Broadway.”
He raised the roof of Radio City, but his ironic tone was lost on the enthusiastic audience. He recognized the parochialism of glamour. Blakemore was never lost on showbiz, despite being one of its most skilled exponents, a director whose mastery and respect for sheer craftsmanship was an aspect of his supreme intelligence. He thought (and wrote) long and hard about theater, without ever clouding his work with conceptual arrogance or external clutter. He was a master at finding the right actors, the right design and the right pace for plays, musicals and farces. And he was a cultured, cultured man, whose taste was almost always impeccable.
Particularly associated with the early plays of Peter Nichols and the later plays of Frayn, he was a key collaborator in Laurence Olivier’s tenure as inaugural Artistic Director of the National Theatre, during a five-year period (1971–76) that overlapped with the arrival by Peter Hall, an archenemy, and which he brilliantly anatomized in his third major book, Stage Blood (2013).
It includes a classic 30-page log of his work with Olivier on the 1971 revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, in which he coaxed the actor into one of his biggest performances while running the organization was fraught. with Olivier’s illnesses, administrative setbacks and the betrayal of others. But he received strong support from Olivier’s literary manager, Kenneth Tynan, and enjoyed the talents and company of even ‘difficult’ colleagues such as director John Dexter.
Together with his fellow deputy director Jonathan Miller, he opposed the plans of the new Hall, Olivier’s successor (appointed, in defiance of Olivier himself, in 1973), to merge the National with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and he resented the increasing trend (as he saw it) towards a lack of consultation on major decisions and (as he also saw it) Hall’s self-aggrandisement.
The more sympathetic idea of a spit-and-sawdust theater at the Old Vic, with prefab, temporary offices around the corner in Aquinas Street, was inevitably transformed in Denys Lasdun’s monolithic concrete building on the South Bank in an attempt at the will of the business. , with sponsorship, politicians and committee members, legions of staff and a non-stop production of productions in three halls (two of which were and are extremely difficult).
Blakemore, an Australian, had learned his trade in Britain as an actor in turmoil, toured behind the Iron Curtain with Olivier 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: that the purpose of rehearsals was to realize the potential of the actor and that of theater to realize the potential of the audience.
As co-artistic director of the Glasgow Citizens, he was in the right place at the right time 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 melancholy film. vaudeville with a disabled child at its center.
Blakemore’s production caused a sensation, winning the Evening Standard award for best play when it moved to London, and from there triumphed on Broadway. His 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 he was sent to King’s school in Parramatta, New South Wales, where he decided to become a film director at the age of 16 after seeing Olivier’s 1944 film adaptation of Henry V.
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 paper; the actor was touring in his own play, Edward, My Son (1947).
When Blakemore expressed surprise at the lack of publicity surrounding the show, Morley offered him a job as a publicist for £6 a week, and upon hearing of his ambitions wrote a letter of recommendation to Rada.
Blakemore subsidized his ocean voyage 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 turned to repertory theater in 1952, acting in Huddersfield, Derby, Hythe, Chesterfield and the Birmingham Rep, and succeeded in to write a play and eventually a play. published the novel Next Season (1969), which transformed this experience into a classic comic fiction of the period and our post-war theater.
Actor and writer Simon Callow said no book has captured the creative, anarchic excitement of acting as well as Next Season. It also incorporated elements of Blakemore’s work at Stratford-upon-Avon, where in 1959 he was a member of the large company conducted by Charles Laughton, Olivier, Edith Evans and Paul Robeson, directed by Hall. Hall first vied with him for the affections of Vanessa Redgrave and then took over the whole thing when the RSC was founded in 1960. Blakemore returned to the regions and ended up in Glasgow, where he directed a sensational play in addition to Nichols’ play . Leonard Rossiter in Brecht’s Arturo Ui (1969), a performance in the role that has never been surpassed in Britain, transferring to the old Saville Theater on the wrong side of Shaftesbury Avenue. The 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 indeed prodigious: not only did he send out his third major Nichols piece, Forget-Me-Not-Lane (1971), a downright autobiographical, acidly nostalgic but also unusually experimental photo album of a play, from the Greenwich Theater to the West End, he also oversaw a definitive national revival of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s 1928 newspaper classic, The Front Page (1972).
He also restored Noël Coward’s Design for Living to critical and popular favor (his trio of bohemians were Redgrave, John Stride and Jeremy Brett) at the Phoenix theater (1973), just after Coward’s death, and directed David Hare’s Home Counties thriller, 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 triumph with Nichols, his hilarious account of an army song and dance unit in Malaya (Malaysia) during the Emergency in the late 1940s, Privates on Parade, which started with the RSC on the Aldwych – Quilley as the outrageous Captain Terri Dennis in all his glory, Nigel Hawthorne as a more sedate senior officer – and transferred to the Piccadilly.
Blakemore had signed with the National with another notable hit, his revival of Ben Travers’s farce Plunder, which moved from the Old Vic to the new theater in 1976. He now went on to work with Frayn at the Lyric, Hammersmith, on Make and Break (1980), with Rossiter and Prunella Scales, and then Noises Off (1982), which, despite its teething problems in the third act, quickly became famous as the most brilliant modern farces.
There was more muted acclaim for Frayn’s Benefactors (1984) at the Vaudeville and an underrated Anthony Minghella play, Made in Bangkok (1986), which flopped at the Aldwych.
No other director of the past thirty years has had so much fun in the intelligent wing of commercial theatre: Maggie Smith and Margaret Tyzack in Peter Shaffer’s Lettice and Lovage (1987), both actors winning Tonys 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 match of a Chandleresque private dick and the story he was investigating.
Frayn took him back to the National (where Richard Eyre Hall had succeeded) with Copenhagen (1998), his account of a historic meeting between the German physicist Werner Heisenberg and his Danish mentor Niels Bohr, a complex and intricate piece that defied all expectations. went upstairs. its popular appeal. Also at the National, Frayn’s Democracy (2003) was equally fascinating for its portrait of Willy Brandt, the West German chancellor, played by Roger Allam, who decided to expose his secretary as a communist spy.
After these superb, beautifully cast productions and his double Tony triumph, Blakemore remained as in demand on Broadway as he was in London, and his 2009 New York revival of Coward’s Blithe Spirit, starring Angela Lansbury as Madame Arcati, moved to the Gielgud. in London in 2014. At the Southwark Playhouse he returned to The Life (2017), Coleman’s messy story set to music about sex work in New York, where he directed it on Broadway twenty years earlier.
His second book, Arguments With Myself (2005), brought readers to Joe Egg’s death with the somewhat vindictive comment that there was no acknowledgment in the printed text of his drastic restructuring of Nichols’s second draft.
There was nothing small about the rancor of his feud with Hall, and its bitterness, which takes the edge off Stage Blood’s enjoyment, seems surprising in such a serious and gentle guy.
Like Hall, he never had much success in films, although he did direct 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 nicely rounded coincidence that Stage Blood won the 2013 theatrical 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 marriage to Shirley Bush in 1960 was annulled in 1986; the same year he married theatrical designer Tanya McCallin. He is survived by Tanya, from whom he was divorced, their daughters, Beatrice and Clementine, and by his son from his first marriage, Conrad.
• Michael Howell Blakemore, theater director, born June 19, 1928; died December 10, 2023