William Gaskill: a fighter who stayed loyal to his writers

William (“Bill” to everyone in the theatre) Gaskill was a great director and teacher. He was a product of the Royal Court who went on to work at the National and the RSC and his trademarks were precision, elegance and clarity of focus. I’d recommend all young directors to read Gaskill’s slim memoir, A Sense of Direction in which he scorns fashionable notions about creative auteurs and says: “I believe every play has an identity that it is the director’s job to reveal.”

That might have been Gaskill’s mission statement and, like most directors of his generation, including his friend and colleague John Dexter, he was hugely influenced by the visit of Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble to London in 1956. It was from Brecht that he learned that each stage picture must combine significance with aesthetic beauty. At the Royal Court, London, where he started work in 1957, he put that principle into practice in the early work of John Osborne, John Arden and NF Simpson. Laurence Olivier, always a canny operator, was quick to recruit Gaskill and Dexter when setting up a National Theatre company at the Old Vic in 1963. To this day, Gaskill’s production of Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer remains one of the benchmarks in the staging of period comedy. The social background was explored in detail, René Allio’s redbrick townscape was a thing of beauty and the company, including Olivier, Maggie Smith, Lynn Redgrave, Robert Stephens and Colin Blakely had a buoyant assurance that sprang from detailed improvisation – always one of Gaskill’s favourite rehearsal tools.

Gaskill’s return to the Royal Court as artistic director from 1965 to 1972 was a period that was rich, bloody and embattled. His decision to stage Edward Bond’s Saved in 1965 led to a prolonged fight with the Lord Chamberlain that helped to hasten the demise of stage censorship. Gaskill’s Spartan staging of Macbeth, with Alec Guinness and Simone Signoret in 1966, received dreadful notices that led to a ferocious tussle with the London critics. They were stirring times: I have an ineradicable image of Gaskill being interviewed by the police in the Royal Court foyer after a clandestine Sunday performance of Edward Bond’s banned Early Morning. But Gaskill was a fighter who always stayed loyal to the writers in whom he passionately believed.

After the Court, Gaskill went on to become a co-founder, along with David Hare, Max Stafford-Clark and David Aukin, of Joint Stock in 1974, for which he did much fine work, including the shared direction of a powerful play about Chinese peasants, Fanshen.

Gaskill, as the senior partner, had a huge influence on his younger colleagues. In later years, his work as a teacher also instilled his faith in clarity and economy into a new generation of actors and directors. But, while it would be easy to pigeonhole Gaskill as a theatrical puritan, he had an abiding love of classical ballet, which he first saw as a 12-year-old Yorkshire boy. Brecht and the ballet: these, you could say, were Gaskill’s twin lodestars and from them both he learned the importance in theatre of creating stage pictures that combined meaning and beauty.