Chris Parr, who has died aged 80 after affected by Parkinson’s illness, was a champion of recent writers all through his days as a theatre director, when he gave breaks to Howard Brenton and David Edgar. On his subsequent transfer to the BBC as a tv producer, then government, this coverage dropped at the display screen difficult dramas similar to Graham Reid’s Billy trilogy – that includes Kenneth Branagh in his breakthrough position – and Takin’ Over the Asylum, Donna Franceschild’s serial set in a Glasgow psychiatric hospital.
Parr took his leftwing, anti-establishment views to the agitprop theatre motion of the Nineteen Sixties. He and Brenton, a former classmate at Chichester highschool for boys, had been members of the experimental theatre group on the Brighton Mixture “arts lab”. Then he directed Brenton’s anarchic play Revenge, a couple of legal getting his personal again on a police officer, with ethical ambiguity on either side, on the Royal Court docket theatre in London in 1969.
The partnership continued when Parr grew to become the primary fellow in theatre at Bradford College (1969-72), forming its drama group, then on the Royal Court docket once more and later throughout his tenure as creative director of the Traverse Theatre Membership, Edinburgh (1975-81). Displaying inventive inspiration, he staged Brenton’s mock “cabaret on ice” Scott of the Antarctic (1971) at Silver Blades rink in Bradford.
Edgar, an area newspaper journalist, was one other commissioned by Parr to jot down materials for Bradford college students. The group took a number of of his performs to the Edinburgh competition fringe, together with Acid (1971), transposing the Charles Manson murders to Britain.
The Finish (1972), Edgar’s drama in regards to the nuclear disarmament debate, was one other spectacle. The Bradford viewers, given the possibility to vote on the finish, opted on at the least one evening to launch a nuclear assault – leaving them in shocked silence when the play completed with an infinite explosion.
Parr’s swap to tv got here in 1981 when BBC Northern Eire noticed his expertise for commissioning unique writing. Because the founding script government and producer in its drama division, he was answerable for Reid’s Play for In the present day manufacturing Too Late to Speak to Billy (1982). It starred Branagh because the title character, a son in battle along with his fiery father, performed by James Ellis, and left politics out of the story, set in Belfast, at a time when the Troubles had been at their top. Branagh himself praised the play for portraying “humour and heat and keenness in working-class household life”. Sequels adopted in 1983 and 1984.
After switching to BBC Pebble Mill in Birmingham as a producer in 1984, Parr made a string of critically acclaimed dramas. Good Work (1989), starring Haydn Gwynne and Warren Clarke, was David Lodge’s four-part adaptation of his personal novel a couple of feminist college lecturer having an affair with the engineering agency boss she shadows. It received a Royal Tv Society award. Training was firmly the main target of Chalkface (1991), the teacher-turned-writer John Godber’s account of the frustrations of complete college workers in a disadvantaged space.
Parr labored with Reid once more on You, Me & Marley (1992), about pleasure driving in Northern Eire, and continued to sort out onerous topics with Dangerous Firm (1993), Don Shaw’s dramatisation of the real-life killing of the newspaper supply boy Carl Bridgewater, questioning the imprisonment of the suspects. 4 years later their convictions had been overturned.
One of many suspects was performed by Ken Stott, who then starred as an alcoholic hospital radio DJ in Parr’s Bafta award-winning BBC Scotland manufacturing Takin’ Over the Asylum (screened in 1994), with David Tennant among the many sufferers. Parr, involved to deal with the subject sensitively, ran the script previous Scottish Motion for Psychological Well being.
At Pebble Mill, he additionally produced Combating Again (1986), starring Hazel O’Connor as a single mom, and Lodge’s adaptation of Martin Chuzzlewit (1994). From 1993 he was head of tv drama, based mostly at Pebble Mill and overseeing the territorial military comedy All Quiet on the Preston Entrance, launched in 1994, and accountable the next yr for introducing Shaw’s widespread sequence Dangerfield, starring Nigel Le Vaillant as a police surgeon.
Parr moved to London because the BBC’s head of drama sequence (1995-96), then government producer of its drama group (1996-98), making the six-part Ivanhoe (1997) and the crime novel diversifications The Ice Home (1997) and The Scold’s Bridle (1998). From 1998 to 2002 he was UK head of drama on the impartial manufacturing firm Thames Tv, accountable, amongst different programmes, for the second sequence of the authorized saga Wing and a Prayer (1999) and for 2001 and 2002 episodes of The Invoice.
He was born in Dorking, Surrey, to Jane Parr, a restaurant proprietor, and Serge Dohrn, an writer and anti-Nazi German emigre who died within the bombing of a cinema shortly earlier than his son’s delivery throughout the second world conflict. Chris grew up in Littlehampton, West Sussex, and whereas finding out classics at Queen’s School, Oxford, he began directing performs. Such was his enthusiasm for it that he was despatched down in his third yr for lacking tutorials.
Parr was ultimately awarded a bursary to coach as a director at Nottingham Playhouse (1965-66), the place Richard Crane was an actor. Crane, who went on to grow to be the Nationwide Theatre’s resident dramatist, was commissioned by Parr to jot down performs on the Brighton Mixture and Bradford College.
John Byrne, with the Slab Boys Trilogy (1978) and different performs, and Tom McGrath, with works similar to The Laborious Man (1978), about Jimmy Boyle, had been newly rising writers throughout Parr’s time on the Traverse, the place Robbie Coltrane started his appearing profession.
The one drama that Parr directed (versus produced) for tv was Anne Devlin’s play The Lengthy March (1984), made for BBC Northern Eire, a couple of lady returning to Belfast because the IRA starvation strikes are about to begin.
Devlin grew to become Parr’s third spouse in 1985, following his marriages to Tamara Ustinov (1973) and Theresa Crichton (1980), which each led to divorce, and she or he tailored DH Lawrence’s novel for his 1989 manufacturing of The Rainbow.
He’s survived by Anne and their son, Connal.
