Robin Midgley; Stage & TV director
Hyfler/Rosner
Resourceful director of stage and television whose work
ranged from Z Cars to The Wars of the Roses
Michael Coveney
Wednesday May 23, 2007
Guardian
Robin Midgley, who has died aged 72 from cancer, enjoyed a
wide-ranging career as a director in theatre, television and
radio. He was responsible for some of the earliest episodes
of Z Cars on BBC-TV, and for the faithful television version
of the Royal Shakespeare Company's Wars of the Roses, a
seminal production on both stage and small screen, with a
cast led by Peggy Ashcroft, Donald Sinden, Ian Holm,
Brewster Mason, Janet Suzman and David Warner.
In the West End, Midgley directed a diverse selection of
plays for the RSC at the Aldwych in 1964, including Boris
Vian's Victor, in which an actor was required to break wind
on cue - the lord chamberlain forbade this effect, so a
trombonist stood by in the wings each night to play at the
appropriate moment; Robert Morley in Alan Ayckbourn's first
runaway success, How the Other Half Loves, in 1970; and
Ralph Richardson and Peggy Ashcroft in William Douglas
Home's Lloyd George Knew My Father, a slight comedy in which
the critic Harold Hobson found spiritual nirvana, in 1972.
The following year, Midgley became the first artistic
director of the Leicester Haymarket, an imposing concrete
edifice next to a shopping mall now being replaced by a
state-of-the-art building, opening next year. He had further
productive stints in charge of the Cambridge Theatre
Company, based at the Arts (1988-91) and the Lyric Theatre,
Belfast (1992-98).
Midgley, an energetic and unfailingly courteous figure,
abstemious and vegetarian, was a doughty and resourceful
director. His exterior may have been officer class, but he
was not really "old school". He had an inquisitive intellect
and was deeply concerned about political injustice. Tariq
Ali, in his book, The Leopard and the Fox, published last
year, recalls that a three-part drama series about the trial
and execution of Zulifkar Ali Bhutto following the 1977
military coup in Pakistan, commissioned by Midgley when he
was head of drama at BBC Pebble Mill in 1985, was suppressed
when it became too controversial within the corporation
hierarchy.
The eldest of six children, Midgley was born in Torquay,
Devon, and educated at Blundell's school, Tiverton, and
King's College, Cambridge, where he directed plays with
casts including Jonathan Miller, Sylvia Plath and Daniel
Massey. His roots were in the north; his name (meaning
midge-infested wood or clearing) derives from one of the
outliers in the royal manor of Wakefield listed in the
Yorkshire Domesday survey; his grandfather was a mayor of
Halifax. His father, Dr Roy Lee Midgley, was medical officer
for Devon, ran a tuberculosis clinic on Dartmoor, and was
the first doctor in Britain to treat that disease with
antibiotics.
After Cambridge, Midgley started as a drama producer for BBC
Radio and was posted to Jamaica, where he worked closely
with the comedian and broadcaster Charles Hyatt (obituary,
February 27). His first London stage production, Kill Two
Birds, was at the St Martin's in 1961, and his first in New
York, Those That Play the Clowns, was in 1967. In between,
he worked for two seasons with Bernard Miles at the Mermaid
Theatre, then took charge of the Phoenix Arts Centre,
Leicester, in 1968, a post in which he continued while
simultaneously opening the new Haymarket.
Robert Morley famously trampled all over Ayckbourn's How the
Other Half Loves, but his box-office pulling power ensured a
two-year run. Morley liked Midgley: "Gets on with the job,
not as talented as [Tyrone] Guthrie perhaps, but not as
gloomy as Jack Minster," who, said Morley, used to tell his
actors not to look at the floor while acting because all
they would find down there was the play. "Midgley remains
more cheerful," he recounted in his autobiography, "holds
the balance between those of the cast who wish to find the
truth of the play and those of us who just wish to know
where to stand or, more importantly, where others were
planning to stand."
This was not the sort of testimonial to increase a
director's standing in serious circles, perhaps, but Morley
had also worked with Peter Brook and was more than capable
of spotting a charlatan or an incompetent. Midgley continued
to oscillate between television, where he directed Mille
Miglia, a fine 1968 play by Athol Fugard about Stirling
Moss, the racing driver; and the stage, directing a splendid
revival of Lionel Bart's Oliver!, starring Roy Hudd as
Fagin, at the Albery in 1977.
He was less lucky with a Petula Clark musical, Someone Like
You, at the Strand in 1990. It was set in a West Virginia
hospital in the aftermath of the American civil war and bled
to death within a few weeks of opening. Midgley had
co-written the final libretto with Fay Weldon. A year later,
at the Lyric, Hammersmith, he directed John Lahr's
adaptation of Richard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate, but
that flopped, too.
In his later years, Midgley gave acting lessons to young
singers at the Royal Opera House, and taught and directed at
Rada. He was also a volunteer for the Samaritans. He is
survived by four sisters and a brother; by his first wife,
the playwright and psychotherapist Liane Aukin, and their
two sons and five grandchildren; and by his second wife, the
dancer and choreographer Denni Sayers, whom he married in
1991.
· Robin Midgley, stage and television director, born
November 10 1934; died May 19 2007