Christopher Fettes, who has died aged 94, was, together with the director John Blatchley and the Swedish dancer and trainer Yat Malmgren, one of many three founders, in 1963, of the Drama Centre in London, maybe probably the most radical drama faculty created within the UK, the place I educated in 1970.
Born in Edinburgh Fortress, the one baby of Brigadier David Fettes, a navy surgeon, and his spouse, Hilda (nee Harvey), Christopher went to Marlborough faculty after which studied English at Magdalen Faculty, Oxford (the place his tutors have been CS Lewis and AJP Taylor), earlier than doing his nationwide service in postwar Germany.
Following this, he was briefly and disappointingly an actor with Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop, later showing within the first season of the English Stage Firm on the Royal Courtroom in London in 1956. Quickly after, he met Yat, turning into his accomplice after which assistant, first at Yat’s motion studio in London then at Rada; on the invitation of Blatchley, they each went as lecturers to the Central Faculty of Speech and Drama. In 1963 all three males, on the urging of their college students, broke away to arrange their very own faculty.
On the fledgling Drama Centre, established in a crumbling former Methodist chapel in Chalk Farm, Christopher took on the duty of forging the syllabus, creating an built-in programme that had no parallel in British drama faculties on the time: masks and mime drawn from the work of the French director and theorist Michel St Denis; Stanislavsky, taught by the American appearing trainer Doreen Cannon; Brecht, by Theatre Workshop veterans; and German expressionism, his personal private fiefdom. On the core of the syllabus was Yat’s work, “motion psychology”, extrapolated from the work of Rudolf Laban, who had bequeathed his remaining notes to Yat.
All of those strands fed into one another, but it surely was Christopher who cast them right into a imaginative and prescient of theatre that encompassed your entire historical past of western playwriting: from Euripides to the Elizabethan and Jacobean writers, to Molière and Racine, Restoration comedy and tragedy, French Nineteenth-century comedy, the nice Viennese interwar writers (Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal), on to Brecht and to the British moderns of the day, Edward Bond, Harold Pinter, Heathcote Williams.
After I arrived on the Drama Centre, Christopher had simply shaved off his Viva Zapata moustache, a concession to his having turned 40, however even clean-shaven he possessed the fireplace of the Mexican revolutionary, as he unfolded his imaginative and prescient of drama and its centrality to civilisation. He noticed us, it quickly grew to become clear, as recruits to a kind of theatrical SAS: who dared, would win. We have been being educated, not for the theatre of the current, however for the theatre of the longer term.
Christopher was not a straightforward man; certainly he had a basic remoteness, however behind this lay nice kindness and a deep concern for his college students. He was a revelatory director of our scholar productions. Later he had some success within the industrial theatre – notably a Physician Faustus (1980) which starred Patrick Magee and transferred from the Lyric Hammersmith to the West Finish, in addition to a number of operas. At coronary heart he was a born trainer, vastly demanding, however beneath his tutelage casements flew open for his college students – amongst them Frances de la Tour, Piers Brosnan, Colin Firth and Michael Fassbender – who carried away with them the conviction that life and artwork have been thrilling and harmful adventures.
Christopher continued to show on the Drama Centre till 2001. He and Yat remained companions till Yat’s dying in 2002.
