Frank Hauser; Theatre director who revitalised the Oxford Playhouse in the 1950s and
Hyfler/Rosner
Theatre director who revitalised the Oxford Playhouse in the
1950s and 60s, championing European playwrights
Eric Shorter
Thursday October 18, 2007
Guardian
In July 1956, soon after the opening of John Osborne's Look
Back in Anger at the Royal Court Theatre in London and the
media eruption around the "angry young men" and kitchen-sink
drama, Frank Hauser, who has died aged 85, was appointed
director of the bankrupt Oxford Playhouse. What he created,
in the following 17 years was an artistic legend.
In an era when repertory theatre was reeling from the impact
of television, the idea of taking on the long-neglected
700-seat playhouse verged on the quixotic. Only Neville
Coghill, Oxford tutor, man of the theatre - and one of the
playhouse governors - had any real faith in the project.
Coghill knew Hauser's work as a BBC radio director, as
director of the Salisbury Playhouse (1952-53) and from his
time running the Coventry-based Midland Theatre Company
(1954-55). The last had yielded a transfer to the West End
of Ugo Betti's The Queen and the Rebels.
Here was a clue to Hauser's talent. Who was Ugo Betti? Not a
familiar name on a London playbill, let alone provincial;
and the cast, for an out-of-town troupe, was interesting:
Irene Worth, Leo McKern and the much-praised, up-and-coming
Gwen Watford.
Evidently Hauser believed in good acting and European
dramaturgy. And that, roughly speaking, is how his
reputation would be known for the next 16 years - an
artistic director of highbrow-ish taste who would run two
companies based at Oxford, one to tour at home and abroad,
the other to wave the flag of Arts Council-backed regional
theatre.
Hauser was born in Cardiff, the son of an emigré Polish
property dealer. By the age of eight, he was ruminating on
whether he wished to be the world's greatest composer or
actor.
Educated at Cardiff high school, he went on to Christ
Church, Oxford. From 1942 to 1945 he served in the Royal
Artillery. He joined the BBC radio drama department as a
producer in 1948, working on a multitude of shows, including
Dick Barton: Special Agent and Mrs Dale's Diary. And,
significantly, he directed the youthful Richard Burton as
Henry V.
But then, in 1951 the BBC fired him. Hauser had applied to
become Alec Guinness's assistant on his Festival of Britain
production of Hamlet. Guinness had meant to direct it
himself, but when Hauser materialised Guinness told him,
"Don't be my assistant, be co-director."
The upshot was pretty dreadful, best remembered for
Guinness's sporting a beard and Kenneth Tynan's Player King
being called "quite dreadful" by the Evening Standard (Tynan
responded by contriving to get the critic fired and himself
appointed in his place). Hauser, meanwhile, by his account
then spent a lot of time in bed - "If I were born again, I
would like to be a dormouse," he observed later - before
moving to Salisbury.
The Oxford Playhouse was a special challenge. He knew it,
and so did the Arts Council. He was determined to prove
himself both as administrator and artistic director. He
believed fervently in his own taste; he had confidence in
his judgment; and if a production merited transfer to
London, why not? Soon enough, London would spend more and
more on such regional transfers. But it was the rarity of
some of the plays, the relatively unfamiliar authors, and
Hauser's own translations of many of them, that struck the
playgoer as refreshingly adventurous. There was Albert
Camus, Henri de Montherlant, Jean-Paul Sartre (the English
premiere of Kean), Jean Genet, Giraudoux, Racine, Molière,
Chekhov, Robert Bolt, Aristophanes - and Shaw galore.
Quietly spoken, affable, tactful and shrewd, Hauser had a
way of invoking goodwill. Today the sums sound feeble, but a
£1,500 grant from the Arts Council and nearly half as much
again from a university fund, were rated generous by rival
theatres; and what must have boosted Hauser's morale was the
gift of an undisclosed sum from his onetime Henry V and
former Oxford undergraduate, Burton. The star never forgot
his roots, indeed in 1966, with his then wife Elizabeth
Taylor, he would perform Dr Faustus at the playhouse.
Hauser stood apart from many colleagues by temperament and
instinct: money did not seem to matter as much as taste. By
the end of the playhouse's first season under him, the debts
stood at £800 and the overdraft at £200. Then came the first
big success, the English premiere of Jean Anouilh's Dinner
with the Family, which transferred to London in 1957, just
as another premiere, Bernard Kops's The Hamlet of Stepney
Green did in 1958. A dozen more transfers followed,
including the English premieres of Marcel Acard's Rollo
(1959), EM Forster's A Passage to India (1960) and Aleksei
Arbuzov's The Promise. This also played in New York in 1967
and the three-hander featured Ian McKellen, Judi Dench and
Ian McShane. In 1969, Hauser put on his own play, Curtain
Up - about putting on a play.
In the early 1960s, when Bernard Miles was undergoing a dark
hour at the Mermaid Theatre, London, Hauser consoled him and
his anxiety with the message: "No theatre of our kind has
ever failed for want of money, only from lack of momentum."
He had lived through a theatrical renaissance. But in 1973
when the Arts Council abruptly dug its heels in over
Hauser's budget, the golden era came to an end.
Ferenc Molnar's The Wolf reached the West End just as Hauser
was leaving the playhouse, and his last production there was
Cinderella. None of his successors could bring the same buzz
to the playhouse, or match his choice of eclectic European
playwrights.
Among Hauser's productions as a freelance were On Approval
(Haymarket, 1975), Dryden's All for Love (Old Vic, 1977),
The Importance of Being Earnest (Old Vic, 1980), Shaw's
Captain Brassbound's Conversion (Haymarket, 1982, with
Penelope Keith), Ibsen's An Enemy of the People (New York,
1985, with Roy Dotrice), Thursday's Ladies (Apollo, 1987,
with Eileen Atkins, Dorothy Tutin and Sian Phillips),
Candida (Arts, 1988), Getting Married (Chichester, 1993) and
Hobson's Choice (Chichester, 1995).
Hauser also directed numerous operas for Sadler's Wells and
Glyndebourne. He was made a CBE in 1968. He never married.
· Frank Ivor Hauser, theatre director, born August 1 1922;
died October 14 2007
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