Happy Birthday Stephen Joseph
The British theatre director, producer and teacher Stephen Joseph (1921-1967) would have been 102 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).
Stephen Joseph
Stephen Joseph’s career moved, unusually for a British director of his age, between the roles of director, theatre manager, and teacher of theatre in higher education. Joseph, however, saw these pursuits not only as complementary but overlapping, and, through them, he dedicated himself to advancing practices in theatre production.
The son of publisher Michael Joseph and actress Hermione Gingold (who divorced in 1926), at 16 Joseph became the youngest ever student on the Central School of Speech and Drama’s acting course. His training was interrupted, however, by the outbreak of WWII, during which he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his service in the British Navy. Subsequently he read English at Jesus College, Cambridge, which led to writing for ‘Footlights’ and directing, acting and working backstage in repertory theatres. From 1949-55 he also taught at Central.
In 1955, Joseph launched the experimental Studio Theatre Company (STC) in Scarborough with a summer season of new plays by unknown playwrights staged in the town library. Quickly, the company gained a reputation for reaching varied, local audiences with new plays. Famous among its early members were Harold Pinter (whose Birthday Party was commissioned by Joseph), and Alan Ayckbourn (whose first plays Joseph also commissioned). The Studio Theatre also gained recognition for staging plays in the round, which embodied the company’s commitment to the centrality of the actor and playwright and to the theatre as an event shared between performers and audiences. Rejecting scenographic complexity in favour of a direct, demotic style, but preferring challenging plays by lesser-known or contemporary writers over crowd-pleasers, as a director Joseph was both practical and radical.
The innovations Joseph developed with the STC bore fruit in 1961. That year, he was made a consultant to the newly established Association of British Theatre Technicians, which professionalised work on the architecture, technical infrastructure and management of the theatre sector, and teamed up with his assistant director Peter Cheeseman to create a permanent home for the Studio Theatre in Stoke-on-Trent. This became the Victoria Theatre, the UK’s first permanent theatre-in-the-round. In 1961, Joseph was also made a fellow of the University of Manchester, for which he left Stoke almost immediately upon opening the new theatre.
Joseph’s departure from Stoke was characteristic of his commitment to teaching and to further experimentation and reaching new audiences. Although his career was cut short by cancer in 1967, his work inspired not only Stoke’s New Vic (opened 1986), but Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre (opened 1963), and Ayckbourn’s work at the Library Theatre in Scarborough, which moved to the Stephen Joseph Theatre in 1976. Joseph, who believed that every theatre company should destroy itself after ten years, may not have been pleased to know that they are all still in operation today.
