Letter: Tim Woodward on stage

Tim Woodward had an extensive career in theatre. He was Laertes in Lindsay Anderson’s Hamlet at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, Claudio in the National Theatre’s Much Ado About Nothing (both 1981) and Hippolytus opposite Glenda Jackson in Phedre at the Old Vic (1984). With me, he founded The Group, which gave seven productions of plays mainly from mainland Europe on the London fringe (1983-88). He then went on to play the lead in my production of Arthur Miller’s After The Fall at the Lyric theatre, Belfast (1989).

Opposite Diana Rigg, he played Jason in Medea at the Almeida, Wyndham’s and on Broadway (1992-94). In 1998 he began a relationship with the Tricycle (now the Kiln) in north-west London with an Irish version of Dance of Death, followed by The Colour of Justice (1999), Ten Rounds, a Belfast La Ronde (2002), and The Riots (2011).

In 2000 he played Claudius opposite Mark Rylance’s Hamlet at the Globe, and in 2008 he was Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night and Capulet in Romeo and Juliet at the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park. In 2015, he played Mr Birling in a tour of Stephen Daldry’s production of An Inspector Calls, and his last stage appearance came in Another World: Losing Our Children to Islamic State, at the National Theatre (2016).