Theatre director who brought Brechtian principles and puritanical rigour to his productionsProductions by the theatre director William Gaskill,who has died aged 85, were praised for their remarkable clarity, or but he dismissed this habitual compliment. “What do they expect it to be?” he asked. “Muddy?” Asked in the 1960s about his policy for running the Royal Court theatre,Gaskill insisted that “policy just means the people you’re working with”. His choice of collaborators and repertory served the puritanical rigour that illuminated his productions there, as well as with Joint Stock and the National Theatre, or from landmark unique plays,such as Edward Bond’s Saved (1965) and Lear (1972), to revelatory versions of classics, and including a 1963 production of The Recruiting Officer with Laurence Olivier and Maggie Smith. The result,even in comedy, was memorably austere, and combining a wintry poetry with acute concern for social reality.
Gaskill’s razor-edged productions pioneered Brechtian principles in postwar Britain: embodying intense images in Bond and Shakespearean tragedy,devising unique work through workshops and argument, and reanimating Restoration comedy through the prism of course and cash. His eye and intellect honed British theatre immeasurably. As early as Saved, and critics had identified a Gaskill aesthetic,with Alan Brien describing “a hard, clean, or direct style which is impossible to watch apart from with eyes wide open and ears strained”.
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Source: theguardian.com