Alan Dossor, radical theatre director – obituary

Dossor had been brought in from the Nottingham Playhouse where, as assistant director, he had acquired a reputation as a firebrand after staging an “anti-imperialist” production of Brecht’s Mother Courage, set in the Vietnam War, a production which, at three-and-a-half hours long, he later admitted had been “probably very boring”.

He was an admirer of the work of Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop in East London and wanted his company in Liverpool to acquire the same energy and commitment to radical causes. But where Theatre Workshop was hijacked by West End audiences, Dossor was determined to find a way to make what happened on stage spring from and be relevant to local communities in Liverpool.

“We were trying to get a young, articulate, working class audience,” he recalled. “We were targeting people who would be running their unions and community centres in 15 years’ time.”

An example of his approach was his 1972 staging of another Brecht play, The Caucasian Chalk Circle (which he subtitled A Play for Liverpool) on a Liverpool building site where the workers have gone on strike in protest at unsafe working conditions.

Jonathan Pryce, who appeared in the production, later claimed that he had been politicised by the experience, and he recalled his years at the Everyman as an “extraordinary time”: “People were taken care of. It was a family... For a lot of us, it formed the way we approached our work.”

In another Dossor production, Cantril Tales (1974), a version of the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer arrives at the worst pub on the post-war Cantril Estate in Knowsley and tries to get the customers to tell stories.

Dossor had a social mission, but he had a gift for comedy too. Of his 1975 production of Mike Stott’s Funny Peculiar, one critic wrote that “no one who saw the production… will forget the sight of Richard Beckinsale as the sexually inquisitive grocer Trevor Tinsley, having fallen into his own cellar while pursued by a village widow, being lovingly serviced under the bedclothes by his wife (played by Julie Walters) while trussed up like a plaster-cast chicken in hospital.”

 “I wanted the politics to be there,” Dossor explained, “but also high definition acting. We tried to combine the jokes of Morecambe and Wise with the skills that enable an actor to play Hamlet.”

Dossor also developed a speciality in pantomime-style musical documentary drama; many of the actors he auditioned played musical instruments or could sing. His first show in this genre was Stephen Fagan’s The Braddocks’ Time (1970), which used a boxing ring to tell the tale of “Battling Bessie” Braddock, Labour MP for Liverpool Exchange and leader of the council. “What this first season is about,” he declared, “is trying to put Liverpool on the stage.”

Later, Dossor commissioned a 26-year-old ex-Liverpool hairdresser, folksinging guitarist and trainee teacher called Willy Russell to write the “Beatles” musical, John, Paul, George, Ringo ... and Bert, which premiered at the Everyman in May 1974 with a cast including Antony Sher, Bernard Hill and Trevor Eve.

It transferred to the West End, where it was named “Best Musical of 1974” by the Evening Standard Theatre Awards and London Critics’ awards, launching Russell’s career as a playwright.

Dossor retired as artistic director at the Everyman in 1975 when the theatre closed for refurbishment, later moving into television and West End productions. His last Everyman production was Willy Russell’s comedy Breezeblock Park, set among the bickering families of a 1970s Liverpool council estate.

The son of a timber salesman and a housewife, Alan Dossor was born at Kingston upon Hull on September 19 1941 and was educated on a scholarship at the local grammar school, Hymer’s College. During school holidays he worked as a beach photographer at Bridlington.

His father lost his job while Alan was still at school and he and the rest of the family moved to Nottingham, where Alan joined them after taking his A-Levels, and where he worked at the Players cigarette factory for a year.

He took a degree in Drama at Bristol University, where he directed his first play as a student at Bristol Old Vic, then got a job as acting stage manager at Nottingham Playhouse under John Neville, later becoming assistant director, and acting in many plays.

His first wife, Dinah, recalled a seminal moment in his life when he took his parents to a performance of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, a play which deals with issues of redundancy and loss of personal dignity in work, and was struck that his father did not make the connection between the play and his own life. As a result he became determined to find ways to make theatre relevant to people’s personal experiences.

He was appointed Artistic Director of the Everyman in 1970, having directed Joe Orton’s Loot at the theatre the previous year.

After leaving the Everyman, Dossor went on to direct plays in the West End, at West Yorkshire Playhouse, Hampstead Theatre, the Royal Court Theatre, the Young Vic and the Lyric Hammersmith.

From 1977 he also directed much television drama, including serials such as A Touch of Frost and Between the Lines, many Plays for Today, notably The Muscle Market, starring Pete Postlethwaite and Alison Steadman, and the television films First and Last (1989, starring Joss Ackland and with a script by Michael Frayn), which won an international Emmy award; The Missing Postman (1997, starring James Bolam and Alison Steadman) and The Life and Crimes of William Palmer (1998, starring Keith Allen).

Dossor remained well informed and passionate about social and political issues until the end of his life.

His first marriage to Dinah, a lecturer at Liverpool School of Art, was dissolved, although they remained close friends. He married, secondly, the actress Elaine Donnelly. She survives him, with his former wife and their daughter, and a step-daughter.

Alan Dossor, born September 19 1941, died August 6 2016