Peter Wood obituary

In a long and illustrious career, the stage director Peter Wood, who has died aged 90, etched his name in the history books, not only by directing Harold Pinter’s first major play, The Birthday Party, in 1958 – it was reviled by the critics and closed after eight performances at the Lyric, Hammersmith – but also by collaborating with Tom Stoppard on 10 world premieres. The Stoppard collection included Jumpers, Travesties and Night and Day in the 1970s, The Real Thing and Hapgood in the 1980s and a string of reworked European classics at the National Theatre, where Wood was an associate director for 10 years in the Peter Hall era.

He was also a fine exponent of Restoration comedy, adopting the parrot, Sid, that appeared in one colourful production. Wood’s early career was entwined with that of Hall: he followed Hall as artistic director at both the Oxford Playhouse and the Arts theatre in London (where Hall directed the British premiere of Waiting for Godot) and directed Eric Porter as a notable Leontes in a well-remembered The Winter’s Tale in Hall’s inaugural Royal Shakespeare Company season at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1960.

Wood, who was born and grew up in Colyton, Devon, was the only child of Frank, a basket-maker, and his wife, Nell (Eleanor, nee Meeson), a seamstress. Raised as a Catholic – although he later converted to Anglicanism – Wood was educated at Taunton school and Downing College, Cambridge. At the Oxford Playhouse in 1955, he directed a young Maggie Smith in Pinero’s The Magistrate and Sheridan’s The School for Scandal before making his London debut at the Arts the following year with a double-bill of Eugene Ionesco, The Bald Prima Donna and The New Tenant.

His breakthrough year was 1958: he directed a triumphant London premiere at the Arts of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, with Ian Bannen as Hickey and Patrick Magee as Slade; The Birthday Party; Schiller’s Mary Stuart at the Edinburgh festival; and a television play, Sunday Out of Season, which got both Smith and Alec McCowen snapped up by the Old Vic in 1959.

Wood was now seriously in demand, not only for the craft and intelligence of his productions but, increasingly, for the respect in which he was held by the leading actors of the day. In the West End, in 1962, he directed Smith and Kenneth Williams in Peter Shaffer’s The Private Ear / The Public Eye (“They were like greyhounds,” said Wood, “the speed at which they could bat and ball it”); and, in 1966, both Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy, with Alec Guinness and Anthony Quayle, and Vanessa Redgrave in the first staging of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

He joined Laurence Olivier’s new National at the Old Vic in 1964, directing him and Smith in Ibsen’s The Master Builder, though Solness had originally been played by an ailing Michael Redgrave (“At his best,” said Wood of Redgrave, “he took audiences to levels of emotion even life itself has not provided for you.”) And he staged a breathtakingly beautiful Love for Love (1965) with Olivier as Congreve’s half-witted beau, Tattle.

Wood directed a Peter Shaffer double bill of White Liars and Black Comedy at the Lyric in 1968 (the second, a farcical masterpiece set in a blackout but played in full light, had been premiered at the National), and his cleverness – and eye for scenic ingenuity – made him a perfect match for Jumpers at the National in 1972, although his religious faith made him initially uneasy with the play’s facetiousness about belief.

In the event, this was the production that confirmed Stoppard’s arrival in the front rank, beautifully acted by Michael Hordern and Diana Rigg. Stoppard had also promised a new play to the RSC, so in 1974 Wood crossed the bridge and directed Travesties, starring John Wood, Tom Bell and John Hurt – another smash hit – at the Aldwych.

When Hall succeeded Olivier at the National, Wood provided him with some of the finest productions of the 1980s, Stoppard rewriting and indeed reimagining Viennese/mittel-European comedies by Arthur Schnitzler (Undiscovered Country, 1979, and Dalliance, 1986), by Johann Nestroy (On the Razzle, 1981) and by Ferenc Molnár (Rough Crossing, 1984).

On the Razzle was a particularly brilliant, pun-laden text, expertly played by Felicity Kendal, Dinsdale Landen and Michael Kitchen, on which audiences gorged delightedly. Wood led one of Hall’s several companies within the National, and this group also provided classic revivals of Vanbrugh’s The Provok’d Wife, a new look at Love for Love, the second of the National’s (to date) three productions of Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem, and – my personal favourite – a full-value revival of Sheridan’s The Rivals, with Hordern, Geraldine McEwan as Mrs Malaprop (“All men are Bavarians” instead of “barbarians”) and Fiona Shaw, in her professional debut, in 1983.

The Rivals, set in Bath, had a replica of the Royal Crescent on the stage designed by John Gunter. Wood worked with designers of visual flair and architectural vision – Gunter, Carl Toms, Timothy O’Brien – and even produced a Threepenny Opera in 1986, with Tim Curry and Sally Dexter, that eschewed, quite successfully, all hint of Brechtian austerity. Also notable in 1986 was Wood’s restoration of Miller with a wonderful staging of his kaleidoscopic Depression-era narrative The American Clock, which had flopped on Broadway.

There were four more notable Stoppard collaborations in the West End: Night and Day (1978) about adultery and press freedom, with John Thaw and Rigg; The Real Thing (1982) about a playwright and two actors (one of them Kendal), sincerity in art and Desert Island Discs (“Screw the whale, save the gerund” was Stoppard’s riposte – in his mouthpiece writer, played by Roger Rees – to a theatrical ideologue); Hapgood (1988) with Nigel Hawthorne, Kendal and Rees in a complex game of double agents and quantum mechanics (“She blew it and I’m blown; well, I’ll be blowed”); and Kendal again in a delightful, cinematic treatment of a radio play, Indian Ink (1995), about sex, colonialism, cultural crossed wires and the distortions of biography.

His later television work included an American stage-to-screen version of Olivier’s titanic National Theatre performance in Long Day’s Journey Into Night in 1973 and, in 1988, a Channel 4 screening of Stoppard’s radio play The Dog It Was That Died, a hilarious verbal melange of spying and eccentricity, with Alan Bates, Ciaran Madden and Alan Howard.

In his last decade of work, Wood tried to breathe fresh life into a 1975 “permissive age” Ben Travers comedy, The Bed Before Yesterday, at the Almeida in 1994; framed one of Alan Howard’s greatest performances in a melodramatic potboiler, The Silver King, at Chichester in 1990; and returned to the Sussex Downs with the first major revival of Stoppard’s Arcadia in 2000 and, in the following year, a second giddy, gaudy night with On the Razzle.

Wood had a flat for many years in north London, but settled in the monastic barn he restored in Batcombe, Somerset. He loved music and painting and often directed operas, as well as plays, in Europe and America. He is survived by two nephews, Tony and Neil, and a niece, Elizabeth.