My buddy and fellow director John Burgess, who has died aged 77, performed a key function within the growth of recent writing for the theatre.
In 1984 John helped discovered the Nationwide Theatre Studio, a crucible for the event of playwrights, and in 1989 he was appointed head of recent writing on the NT. He commissioned and championed modern work, with a selected dedication to marginalised voices. Certainly, he directed extra performs by ladies (Debbie Horsfield, Sarah Daniels, Judith Johnson and others) than some other male director within the NT’s historical past.
After leaving in 1994 John continued to work with writers, first with the group on the Nuffield theatre in Southampton after which by means of the exceptional John Burgess Play Writing Course, which he ran as its sole tutor. The course, which has simply accomplished its 14th yr, helped launch the careers of dozens of playwrights.
John as soon as defined to me that you could possibly inform whether or not a play was any good by studying the primary couple of pages. If the dialogue had crackle, if it flew off the web page into the mouth of the actor, it was more likely to work, no matter occurred within the plot. A passionately political determine, he thought performs ought to bear witness to the way in which that peculiar folks dwell their lives.
Born in Birmingham, to Hilda (nee Holden) and Thomas Burgess, a headteacher, John attended King Edward’s college within the metropolis and studied classics at St John’s Faculty, Cambridge. In 1969 he went to the New Wolsey theatre in Ipswich as assistant to the creative director, Nick Barter, and in 1973 secured a Churchill scholarship to check with Roger Planchon on the Théâtre Nationale Populaire close to Lyon. He was literary supervisor on the Open House in London for 3 years and directed new performs in Birmingham, Colchester and elsewhere.
He first assisted the director Peter Gill on the Royal Court docket in London in 1976, and was his affiliate within the nice days of the Riverside Studios. He accompanied Gill in 1981 to the Nationwide Theatre, the place he directed productions of Kleist’s Prince of Homburg, Sophocles’ Antigone and John Arden’s Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance.
John, who was exceptionally effectively learn, was a dedicated internationalist and spoke fluent French and German. In 2005 he wrote the Pocket Information to Greek and Roman Drama for Faber and Faber.
For 25 years from 1969 his accomplice was Brigid Panet. He’s survived by his sister, Elizabeth, and brother, Thomas.
