Philip Hedley obituary

From 1979 to 2004 Philip Hedley, who has died aged 85, was artistic director of the Theatre Royal, Stratford East. This was the fabled venue of the Theatre Workshop company created by Joan Littlewood, who had withdrawn from the place in 1975, grief-stricken at the death of her partner and manager, Gerry Raffles. She died in 2002.

Hedley kept the flame, and the theatre, alive, taking over in the middle of a crisis when the Arts Council threatened to withdraw their support unless he justified it within two years. He took up the challenge, instigating variety nights (hosted by the actor Kate Williams), poetry readings, a farce about Margaret Thatcher and a Lindsay Anderson production of Hamlet starring Frank Grimes.

He clinched the deal with Nell Dunn’s Steaming (1981), directed by Roger Smith, which was an allegory of his own endangered situation in the story of a threatened Turkish bath for ladies. It transferred to the West End, won an Olivier award, moved on to Broadway and became a film directed by Joseph Losey. The wonderful Stratford East cast included Georgina Hale, Patti Love and Brenda Blethyn.

Newly empowered, Hedley took a deep dive into one of the most racially mixed boroughs in Britain – Newham – creating work that reflected the social issues and experiences of the diverse local community. He championed black and Asian writers, directors and actors; commissioned new plays on care homes, library closures, curriculum shrinking in schools (particularly in the arts); and nurtured a string of talented names as associate and assistant directors: Indhu Rubasingham, now director designate of the National Theatre; Clint Dyer, current NT deputy director; Michael Buffong, artistic director of Talawa theatre company; the director Matthew Xia; and Kerry Michael, who succeeded him as artistic director.

Throughout his regime, Hedley, who had been both an Arts Council panellist and chairman of the board at Stratford East before taking over as director, remained an outspoken, impassioned campaigner against Arts Council cuts (“Always bite the hand that feeds you,” was his advice to directors and administrators) and disguised forms of censorship, maintaining a tireless presence in schools and social centres in Newham.

He was a dedicated advocate of pantomime as a genre, and those produced annually at Stratford East were usually the best in town, with original music, a live band of five or six musicians, a superb dame in the actor Michael Bertenshaw and beautiful, colourful designs by Jenny Tiramani.

Perhaps the greatest asset of the Theatre Royal is its local audience – committed to the theatre, and participatory with a vibrant, informal sense of occasion. I grew up in nearby Ilford and saw many shows there in my youth. The engagement of the Stratford audience, from the time of Littlewood right through to the present artistic directorship of Nadia Fall, has grown exponentially as the theatre has increased its involvement with the community on its doorstep. Hedley had a profound understanding of this. The spirit of the place is magical and indelible.

All the same, a second major crisis was looming at the end of the 1980s. Once again, the theatre was saved by a brilliant show. Five Guys Named Moe (1990), devised by the actor Clarke Peters, to the music and lyrics of Louis Jordan, was transformed into a money-spinning West End hit by Cameron Mackintosh, who made a good deal for the theatre, impressed by Hedley’s risk-taking bravery.

Hedley was born in Manchester, the second son of Leonard Hedley, a police officer and, later, a supermarket manager, and his wife Gladys (nee Addison). His mother later changed her name to Lois Gould, after she divorced Leonard and married Leslie Gould, head of music at Paramount films and later an executive at Philips, the record company; Philip grew up with Gould and always regarded him as his father.

He spent a year at Hutton grammar school in Preston before his mother and stepfather moved to London, where he attended the Stationers’ Company’s school in Hornsey. Gould’s work took the family to Australia in 1951, and Philip attended Hampton high school in Melbourne before they moved on to Sydney, where he read English at Sydney University.

Returning to Britain in 1960, and inspired by Littlewood’s work at Stratford East, Hedley enrolled in 1961 as a founder student at the E15 acting school run by Margaret Bury, which educated students in Littlewood’s practical rehearsal methods as well as in the teachings of Stanislavski and the movement analysis of Rudolf Laban.

After graduating, he took his first job as an acting assistant stage manager at the Liverpool Playhouse in 1963 where, he said, in the first week he was seduced by both the leading lady and the leading man.

He returned to the E15 acting school as a teacher and producer (1964-66), going on to teach at Lamda (1966-67) and working in rep as a freelance director before being appointed artistic director of the Theatre Royal Lincoln. There, between 1967 and 1970, he directed more than 20 productions, including The Marie Lloyd Story, which Littlewood had premiered in Stratford in 1967.

Before joining Littlewood as an associate, he served two years as artistic director of the Midland Arts Theatre Company in Birmingham, where he struck up creative relationships with the playwrights Henry Livings and David Cregan, both of whom would write for him at Stratford.

Either side of Five Guys, he hosted an important theatre double of Mike Leigh: first, in 1990, an 80-minute hilarious suburban nightmare, Greek Tragedy, which had been commissioned and performed by the Belvoir Street theatre company in Sydney; and then one of Leigh’s most powerful works, It’s a Great Big Shame (1993), taking its title from a Gus Elen music hall song, a superb double Stratford drama – ancient and modern – set around two separate murders in the same address across a century, starring Kathy Burke.

Other notable productions on his watch were several musical plays of Ken Hill – including The Phantom of the Opera, before the Lloyd Webber version, in 1984, and The Invisible Man in 1991 (which transferred to the West End in 1993); the British premiere in 1988 of Lorca’s The Public, directed and designed by Ultz, a surrealist party game with moments of great power and beauty; and, in the 1990s, the raucous comedy sketch shows from the Posse, a group of black male actors, and the Bibi Crew collective of black female writers and actors, which rocked the old place to its foundations with laughter and disrespect.

In 2004, Dyer’s production of The Big Life, a ska musical about the Windrush generation set to a Shakespearian plot line (of Love’s Labour’s Lost), written by the Stratford regular Paul Sirett and the composer Paul Joseph, was one of the best new works in that era.

Another strand of his work was commissioning popular shows about the lives of well-known showbusiness icons: Josephine Baker, Fatty Arbuckle, Sammy Davis Jr and Marilyn Monroe. These forged links with the older community on his doorstep with memories of Hollywood and variety.

Hedley never lost touch with his theatre, after stepping down in 2004, and only last year paid a moving tribute to one of Littlewood’s main actors, Murray Melvin, in a memorial held at the Teatro Technis, in Camden Town, where his protege Kerry Michael is now the director.

He was appointed CBE in 2005, held an honorary doctorate from the University of East London (2011), played the Queen in the raucous 1972 Littlewood production of British holidaymakers in Spain (Frank Norman’s Costa Packet) and occasionally amused his friends at parties with an impromptu version of the 19th-century musical hall song The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (who floats through the air with the greatest of ease). Hedley flew, but not that easily. Keeping Stratford going was always a struggle, but he never stinted on his heroic, ultimately rewarding effort.

• Philip David Hedley, theatre director, manager and campaigner, born 10 April 1938; died 5 January 2024