Happy Birthday Peter Cheeseman
British theatre director Peter Cheeseman would have been 101 today. This blog is based on the entry I wrote for him in the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Theatre Directors, edited by Maria M. Delgado and Simon Williams.
Peter Cheeseman and a group of miners from Hem Heath, with whom he worked on the documentary play Miner Dig the Coal.
Peter Cheeseman was widely known during his lifetime for establishing the UK’s first purpose-built theatre-in-the-round, the New Vic in Newcastle-under-Lyme, as well as for a series of documentary productions that sought to unite the theatre with the industrial working-class communities of Staffordshire.
Cheeseman was born into a family that was regularly on the move. He attended 10 schools before going to the University of Sheffield to study English literature, history, and Latin. He graduated in 1955 and married Joyce Holliday, who would later produce the scripts of documentary plays and adaptations of Arnold Bennett’s Potteries novels that Cheeseman directed at the Victoria Theatre in Stoke. Their relationship later broke down, and Cheeseman married the actress Romy Saunders in 1985.
Cheeseman spent three years teaching in the RAF, but his long-standing enthusiasm for amateur dramatics led him to take a job at the Derby Playhouse in 1959 as manager and assistant producer. Two years later, he joined Stephen Joseph’s Studio Theatre Company, in summer residence in Scarborough, as its assistant director. Alongside Joseph, Cheeseman made plans to transfer the company to Stoke-on-Trent the following year, which they did, converting an old cinema to become the Victoria Theatre. Joseph quickly left the company, with Cheeseman as director in his place. When, in 1966, Joseph tried to displace Cheeseman as director and reduce him to an administrative manager, Cheeseman responded by relocating rehearsals to a nearby pub, where the actors joined him, and – with significant local support – sacked the board and took over the theatre. He would remain at the Victoria and then its replacement, the New Vic, until his retirement in 1998.
Cheeseman’s tenure at the Vic and New Vic saw him produce 392 main house productions, of which he directed 147. This repertoire was remarkable not merely for its size, but for the number of new plays it contained. Cheeseman was committed to employing writers-in-residence, including David Halliwell, Alan Plater, and Peter Terson, who worked in a demotic, socially realist style; in the 1960s he was producing more new plays than any other theatre outside London. At this time, Cheeseman was also developing a form of musical documentary theatre, exploring aspects of local community lives and histories. The most famous of these was The Knotty (1966), about the North Staffordshire Railway, and another, Fight for Shelton Bar (1974), was credited for delaying the decision to close a local steelworks. Despite being a lifelong socialist, Cheeseman did not see documentary theatre as a tool for political persuasion. Instead, he was driven to establish direct connections between the theatre and local people whose lives he sought to represent in a way that he felt was objectively accurate, a project that strongly influenced the young Mike Leigh among many others. Following his retirement, Cheeseman chaired the National Council for Drama Training and, in 2002, founded the Master of Fine Arts in theatre directing at Birkbeck College in London.
