Keith Dewhurst obituary

The journalist turned playwright and screenwriter Keith Dewhurst, who has died aged 93, was part of an extraordinary informal ensemble of actors, designers and musicians who collaborated for more than a decade with the inspirational director Bill Bryden.

Members of this group worked first with Bryden in the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs in 1970, and later at the National Theatre when Bryden was invited by Peter Hall to let rip on plays by Eugene O’Neill and David Mamet, as well as on two promenade performances in the NT’s Cottesloe (now the Dorfman) theatre, scripted by Dewhurst and the poet Tony Harrison.

Harrison’s ebullient, idiomatic version of the Wakefield Mystery plays – The Mysteries (Brian Glover as God in a flat cap on a fork-lift truck) – started on Easter Saturday in 1977, and was followed by Dewhurst’s glorious adaptation, in two plays (1978-79), of Flora Thompson’s elegiac Lark Rise to Candleford, an account of an agrarian village community in Oxfordshire in the pre-industrial 1880s.

Bryden’s irregulars on Lark Rise included Glover, Dinah Stabb, Edna Doré and Jack Shepherd, the designer William Dudley – evoking vistas of wheatfields at harvest time, stars and bleakness in winter on an overhanging sky cloth – and the electric folk rock of the Albion Band with the singer Martin Carthy from Steeleye Span.

Dewhurst’s magical adaptation of Thompson’s trilogy of novels threw shadows of enclosure and poverty around the quotidian joys and back-bending work of the community. The overall effect was one of deep and poetic poignancy, sometimes akin to Jean-François Millet’s painting of The Gleaners.

He and Bryden complemented this success with a more ecstatically political and vivid version of the historian Christopher Hill’s account of ideological turmoil in the English civil war, The World Turned Upside Down (1978); and, on the NT’s Olivier stage in 1982, Paul Scofield as Don Quixote, in which he made a glorious rendition of the epic grandeur in Cervantes’ picaresque novel. The Don’s trusty steed, Rocinante, was a knackered old penny-farthing tricycle, suitable for a nostalgist of knight errantry.

Dewhurst’s fifth and final show at the National was a fleet and funny adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Black Snow in 1991, sharpening the fangs of the novel’s backstage bitchery after the author, writing in the 30s, had fallen out of love with the Moscow Art theatre. The director was William Gaskill who, as artistic director at the Royal Court, had first ratified Dewhurst’s and Bryden’s connection.

Dewhurst had preceded this illustrious career as a football reporter on the Manchester Evening Chronicle in the 1950s, detailed to follow the fortunes of Manchester United, then in the flowering of the Busby Babes era. He became a trusted insider at the club, and indeed chronicler, before and after the Munich air disaster in 1958, when United’s plane had stopped for refuelling on the way back from a European cup-tie in Belgrade, then crashed on take-off.

A close colleague on the Chronicle, Alf Clarke, was one of many journalists and players among the 23 who were killed. The team’s manager, Matt Busby, and fledgling star Bobby Charlton were among the survivors, and Dewhurst was on hand to recount the trauma and extraordinary recovery the club made on a tide of nationwide grief and sentiment.

Born in Oldham, Lancashire, Keith was the son of Joseph Dewhurst, who worked in the cotton industry, and Lily (nee Carter). He was educated at Rydal school in Colwyn Bay – where he had been evacuated during the war – and Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he graduated with a degree in English in 1953.

He worked for a while as a yarn tester for the Lancashire Cotton Corporation in Cheshire before joining the Chronicle in 1955, but he was determined to branch out. By the early 1960s he was writing plays for television and radio, which led to an important association with the radical new police series Z-Cars in 1968, and its sequel, Softly Softly: Task Force in 1971. And he wrote a dramatic biographical TV play for The Edwardians BBC series about David Lloyd George (1974), with Anthony Hopkins in the title role.

He had married the actor Eve Pearce in 1958 and moved to London in 1967. From 1969 he worked for a year as an arts columnist on the Guardian. His first theatre play in the capital was Rafferty’s Chant (1967) at the Mermaid, a farce involving a Mancunian conman selling the same car to a string of dupes, before he linked with Bryden on a single Sunday night epic production (without decor), Pirates, at the Royal Court in 1970.

This was the seed of the Bryden/Dewhurst collaboration, followed by the 1809 face-off between French and English soldiers in Corunna!, both with Steeleye Span – Maddy Prior and Carthy to the fore – prominent.

The battle of Corunna! was mind-blowing in the Theatre Upstairs, too big for its military boots, and the first expression of Bryden’s radical, extravagant musical style. Dewhurst went with him in 1972 to the Edinburgh Lyceum to write feisty new adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped and Molière’s The Miser.

His fine television writing continued with 27 episodes of Richmal Crompton’s Just William (1977-78), with Bonnie Langford as Violet Elizabeth Bott and Diana Dors as her mother; and two television movies adapted from Alexandre Dumas – The Man in the Iron Mask (1985) and a voiced cartoon of The Three Musketeers (1986).

His two notable movies were Chris Thomson’s The Empty Beach (1985), a thriller adapted from a novel by the Australian author Peter Corris; and David Leland’s The Land Girls (1998), adapted from a novel by Angela Huth about the women’s land army in Dorset during the second world war, with three new shooting stars: Rachel Weisz, Anna Friel and Steven Mackintosh.

He continued writing into his 90s, including several novellas as well as two books on football and a theatrical memoir with Shepherd. He also contributed regularly to the Manchester United fanzine, United We Stand.

Dewhurst and Pearce had two daughters, Emma and Faith, and a son, Alan, who died in 2023. The marriage ended in divorce in 1980 and, in the same year, Dewhurst married the Australian literary agent Alexandra Cann, with whom he lived in Fulham, south-west London, and latterly on the Isle of Wight. She survives him, along with his daughters and three grandchildren, Henry, Alex and Millie.

• Keith Frederick Dewhurst, playwright, screenwriter and journalist, born 24 December 1931; died 11 January 2025