In June 2007, the Guardian critic Michael Billington was asked to name the best theatre director in the UK. In selecting Howard Davies, who has died aged 71, over some of his better-known colleagues, Billington was confirming the profession’s worst-kept secret. Not only was Howard the master of 20th-century repertory, the supreme interpreter of Gorky, O’Casey, O’Neill, Albee, Miller and Williams. He was also one of the first names most playwrights would think of when asked whom we would like to direct our next play.
It was Howard’s fate only once to run a theatre of his own. For most of his life, he acted as a vital lieutenant, first to Val May at the Bristol Old Vic, then to Trevor Nunn at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and finally to successive directors at the National Theatre: Peter Hall, Richard Eyre, Nunn and Nick Hytner. All four artistic directors relied on him equally and turned to him first, occasionally in panic, when needing a guaranteed return to quality. It was Hytner who best summed up the professionalism and consistency of his work by referring to him as the “irreplaceable cornerstone” of his years at the National Theatre. “If only I had three Howard Davieses, running this place would be simplicity itself.”
Born in Reading, the son of Thomas, a miner turned glassblower who instilled in him a deep love of learning, and his wife, Hilda, Howard was propelled by scholarship to Christ’s Hospital, Horsham, where the teachers were bright enough to give a natural rebel a measure of authority which he immediately used to abolish fagging. The experience of being forced through the class and educational system bred in him a peppery radicalism which was evident both at Durham University and in Bristol, where he first worked at the Old Vic in the early 1970s, while living in a commune. It was there that he met his first wife, Sue Wall, with whom he had two adored daughters, Kate and Hannah.
From the start, the twin hallmarks of Howard’s work were evident. His early grounding in Brecht left him with a lifelong determination to dig out and make evident on stage the social and political context of the play he was directing. No Davies production was ever pitched in a void of pure style. But already at Bristol, he was developing – via a gifted group that included Kenneth Cranham and Tony Robinson – the astonishing affinity with actors that would enrich so many lives in the coming years. When he moved to the RSC, he decided, after a Troilus and Cressida updated to the Crimean war, that Shakespeare was not his playwright of choice. But he initiated relationships, in particular with Juliet Stevenson and Alan Rickman, that would bear glorious fruit in later years.
While at the RSC he came upon a disused banana warehouse turned rehearsal room in Covent Garden and persuaded Nunn to let him run it as a theatre for new plays. At the Warehouse, between 1977 and 1981, he presented 26 world premieres, which most famously included Educating Rita by Willy Russell, Piaf by Pam Gems, and Good by CP Taylor, but which also took in work by Brecht, Barrie Keeffe, Peter Prince, Howard Barker, David Mercer, David Edgar and Edward Bond. It was Howard’s sometimes embattled insistence that a Shakespeare company should also be working with living playwrights that led him to premiere Christopher Hampton’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the Other Place in 1985, with Stevenson, Rickman and Lindsay Duncan. Anyone lucky enough to have seen that production at such close quarters in Bob Crowley’s designs will remember holding their breath at its perfection.
After taking the Laclos adaptation to Broadway, he joined the National Theatre in 1988 as an associate director, and began his run of 36 productions in 28 years. His opening version of Tennessee Williams’s Cat On a Hot Tin Roof with Ian Charleson, Eric Porter and Duncan seemed to mark that moment at which British actors began to annexe the postwar American repertory for the first time without a sense of strain. After he had directed a definitive Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf at the Almeida in 1996 with Diana Rigg and David Suchet – “Amazing”, said Edward Albee on the first night, “how the old play buffs up in the right hands” – he asked Kevin Spacey to play Hickey in O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh (1998) and found himself with a massive international success, which accidentally introduced Spacey to the Old Vic, where the play transferred.
Howard’s subsequent production of Miller’s All My Sons (2000) was just as strong. But a period of living in New York left him doubtful whether he wanted to work in the commercial theatre. His love was for ensemble, and for deeply wrought work. Any compromise with theatre-for-money enraged him. Stubborn and plain-spoken, he never envied the emollience necessary to shove half-baked stars into the starting gate.
Instead, at the National, with the help of the designers Crowley, Bunny Christie and Vicki Mortimer, he continued to develop a unique language, a supple kind of deep-breathing spacious naturalism, particularly in the Lyttelton, which was his and his alone, and in which every single role was given its democratic focus. This method filled out Russian plays such as Bulgakov’s The White Guard and Gorky’s Philistines as richly as it did Irish plays such as Boucicault’s The Shaughran. By the time he took on Sean O’Casey’s notoriously difficult The Silver Tassie in 2014, his control was so perfect that he could pull into one flow scenes that are usually too wildly disparate to hold together.
Zoë Wanamaker once remarked that there are many directors who can tell actors whether what you are doing is good or bad. But she had known only three who could help you when you were in trouble. Top of her list was Howard. I saw for myself the beauty of his rapport with actors for the first time when he directed my play The Secret Rapture in 1988. “Oh by the way,” he announced one day, “I’ve given the play a new ending.” When I nervously asked what it was, he said “Wait and see.” I did, and it was better than the one I’d written. We were to work together six times on film and on stage – Maggie Smith and Judi Dench played in The Breath of Life (2002) at the Haymarket, Tamsin Greig and Nicola Walker played in Gethsemane (2008) at the Cottesloe – and each time I wondered at the total contrast between the person outside the rehearsal room, who might well arrive combative, antsy or discontent, with the serenity and focus of the maestro who directed inside it. You could feel the change as he passed through the door.
He always had a passion for walking, and he deliberately spaced out his trips abroad to work off some of the excess energy created by the concentration of directing. When I joked that his autobiography should be entitled Doing a Runner, he grinned and said, “Too right.” Only by getting away frequently could he be so intensely present when he was needed. He also lavished love on his three grandchildren, Sam, Iris and Ida. When, some years after his first marriage had ended in divorce, he met Clare Holman, they took to travelling together all over the world, and were married in 2005 at Coombe Valley in Devon.
His later work became more various. He directed a new play by Rory Kinnear at the Bush and a striking suffragette play by Rebecca Lenkiewicz. He nursed an unlikely desire to prove Noël Coward a radical and even made Somerset Maugham seem modern with a Chichester revival of For Services Rendered (2015) with Justine Mitchell and Stella Gonet in superb company. But a running thread throughout was his feel for the writing of Howard Brenton. He and Hytner persuaded Brenton back into the theatre after a stay in television with a drama about St Paul. The lucidity Howard then brought to 55 Days (2012) at Hampstead theatre, with Douglas Henshall’s Cromwell in fictional encounter with Mark Gatiss’s King Charles I, represented the art of stage direction at its most refined: complex information conveyed without effort, profound emotion conveyed without sentiment.
Howard was diagnosed with cancer this summer while directing Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People for Chichester festival theatre. The last time I went to see him, two weeks ago, he and Clare had laid out a feast of wine and food, which he could not manage, but which typically he said “I will hugely enjoy watching you eat”. That night, there was the usual generous love of good times and good talk, which rolled into his character as an artist. His stage had breadth, daring, light and, above all, movement. In a Howard Davies production you couldn’t disentangle interpretation from narrative or character. They were one. It’s rare that anyone’s whole. But Howard was.
He is survived by Clare, and by his daughters and grandchildren.
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