David Conville obituary

David Conville, who has died aged 89, gave the air of being a patrician stage director and manager of the old school, but his colonial army background in India, followed by public school and Oxford, was in some ways a mask for a convivial and genuine theatrical all-rounder. He was immensely popular with the actors who appeared under his management at the Open Air theatre in Regent’s Park, London.

When he handed over the reins of the theatre to one of those loyal actors, Ian Talbot, in 1987, he resumed his career as a television actor in Richard Eyre’s remarkable film Tumbledown (1988), in which Colin Firth played a wounded Falklands war veteran, and in the superior sitcom Surgical Spirit (ITV, 1989-95) as George Hope-Wynne, a consultant surgeon caught in the crossfire between Nichola McAuliffe’s senior surgeon and Duncan Preston, as the anaesthetist she eventually marries.

Conville rescued the Open Air theatre, which had opened in 1932, when it had succumbed, in 1961, to financial crises and declining standards. Conville, together with the director David William, applied successfully to take on a lost cause at worst and a great challenge at best.

They found a scene of dilapidation, no fixed seating or lighting, no office, no records. At a time when Peter Hall was in charge of the fledgling Royal Shakespeare Company and Laurence Olivier launching the National Theatre, Conville rolled up his sleeves, raised money, signed up actors, fixed the lighting, brought in Clement Freud to do the catering and created the New Shakespeare Company, opening, in 1962 with A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Patrick Wymark as Bottom, David William as Oberon and Heather Chasen – “like a piece of animated Dresden china” said one critic – as Helena).

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The stage was reconstructed but remained impossibly wide, and still the audience of about 1,500 people sat in deck-chairs. But momentum was gathering. Conville led the company on British Council tours abroad, the Arts Council offered more help and sponsorship grew through donations and charity galas.

The result, opening in the late summer of 1975, at a cost of £150,000, was a new amphitheatre of 1,200 steeply raked tip-up seats. Toilets and dressing rooms were further enhanced and improved. “Is there any air-conditioning?” asked an American visitor. Conville, stationed near the box office, kept a straight face and said “Yes.”

The programme each year consisted mostly of Shakespearean comedies, though in 1976 Robert Stephens played Othello, with Edward Fox as Iago. A talented, loose-knit regular company over the years included Gary Raymond and Delena Kidd, David Weston and Philippa Gail (Conville’s second wife), Celia Imrie, Christopher Biggins, Gabrielle Drake and Linda Thorson, with early opportunities for Ralph Fiennes, Douglas Hodge and Hugh Bonneville.

Nonetheless, the Arts Council started to blow more cold than hot and cut the modest grant of £25,000 completely in 1981. The producer Peter Saunders promptly wrote Conville a cheque for that amount and saved the theatre from closure.

The 50th anniversary was marked with a royal visit by the Queen and Prince Philip in July 1982 to see Shaw’s Dark Lady of the Sonnets, in which the character of Shakespeare breaks into Whitehall Palace “almost to the very door of the Queen’s chamber”; three days earlier, in a notable breach of security, a man called Michael Fagan had shinned up a drainpipe at Buckingham Palace and entered the Queen’s bedroom, claiming later to have sat on the bed chatting to Her Majesty before she raised the alarm.

When Talbot took over, Conville remained as chair, and later honorary president, before he retired in 2012. But he remained a familiar figure at first nights, usually resplendent in a summer suit, Garrick Club tie and panama hat. He quietly regretted the move away from Shakespeare under Timothy Sheader’s regime in succession to Talbot, but he admired the gusto with which the theatre continued to thrive, especially in its musical productions, and paid his last visit at this year’s opening of Little Shop of Horrors.

David was born in Kashmir, the son of Lt Col Leopold Conville and his wife, Katherine (nee Gispert). He was educated at Marlborough college, Wiltshire, and St John’s College, Oxford, before commanding the Royal West African frontier force with the Royal Welch Fusiliers in 1948-49. He then took a diploma at Rada in 1952 and worked as an actor in rep in Ipswich, Colchester and Dundee.

At Stratford-upon-Avon (1955-57) he had small roles in John Gielgud’s notorious King Lear (“I look like a Gruyere cheese,” moaned the star when another hole was punched in his severely styled costume) and in Peter Brook’s production of Titus Andronicus with Olivier and Vivien Leigh, which toured mainland Europe.

He began presenting touring shows in 1959 and became particularly associated with Toad of Toad Hall, starring the bespectacled character actor Richard Goolden as a perennial Mole. Other notable productions included Pirandello’s Naked starring Diane Cilento at the Royal Court in 1963 and Eileen Atkins and Dinsdale Landen in Marguerite Duras’ Suzanna Andler at the Aldwych in 1973. Between 1962 and 1987 he produced and/or directed more than 100 productions of Shakespeare. This body of work was probably underrated as we attuned to a newer climate of innovation at the RSC and the National. In 1983 he was made OBE.

Conville also wrote plays, short ones produced on the London fringe at the Orange Tree in Richmond and the King’s Head in Islington, and he returned to his youth with Zindabad (2016), his last piece, at the Yvonne Arnaud, Guildford, with Frank Barrie and Thorson in a tale of private passion and public chaos during the partition in Punjab in 1947. Michael Billington hailed “a compelling drama” that deserved a longer run.

In 1956 Conville married Jean Bury; she died in 1967. He married Philippa Gail in 1970; she died in 1999.

He is survived by a daughter, Clare, from his first marriage, a son, Leo, from his second, and by three grandchildren.