Happy Birthday William Gaskill
The British theatre director William Gaskill would have been 93 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).
William Gaskill
William Gaskill (1930-2016) was best known as the Artistic Director of the English Stage Company (ESC) at the Royal Court Theatre from 1965 until 1972. He was an early proponent of the work of Bertolt Brecht in Britain and closely associated with a post-war generation of leftist playwrights, notably Edward Bond. Gaskill turned the Royal Court into a club theatre when his production of Bond’s Saved (1965) was refused a license for public performance by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office unless cuts were made. That decision led to the ESC’s prosecution under the Theatres Act of 1843, resulting in a fine for the company. The publicity generated by the case, however, and by Gaskill’s decision to stage Bond’s banned play Early Morning (1968) as a Sunday night club performance, has been widely credited with the 1968 repeal of the Theatres Act, which ended the censorship of plays in the UK.
Born in the market town of Shipley on the outskirts of Bradford, Gaskill was introduced to the theatre both by his father and the visits to Yorkshire of the Sadler’s Wells Ballet. He took classes at the theatre school established by Esme Church when she became director of the Bradford Civic Playhouse in 1944 and began directing while an undergraduate at Hertford College, Oxford. After graduating, Gaskill trained in corporeal mime with Étienne Decroux in Paris. He was also profoundly influenced by the 1956 visit to London of Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble, whose austere and frankly theatrical style both chimed with and challenged his own developing aesthetic, which he would subsequently extend and develop through his collaborations with the designer Jocelyn Herbert.
In 1957, a year after the Royal Court had become the base of George Devine and Tony Richardson’s ESC, Gaskill came to the theatre to direct a Sunday-night production of N.F. Simpson’s comedy A Resounding Tinkle. In 1958, Gaskill returned to the Court to direct an edited version of that play in a double-bill with Simpson’s The Hole. The same year, he had his first big success, when his Court production of John Osborne’s Epitaph for George Dillon, with Robert Stephens, transferred to the West End and Broadway. Gaskill’s success at the Court and his work with actors (including Stephens and Joan Plowright) and writers such as John Arden led to an approach from Laurence Olivier to join the National Theatre Company in 1963. There, he successfully reimagined Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer, which he staged in a materialist vein as a political comedy that exposed the social dynamics of war and money. When, in 1965, George Devine suffered a stroke, Gaskill returned to the Court as its Artistic Director, unmistakably setting out his intention to commit the theatre to controversial, politically engaged new writing with Saved and plays by writers such as Arden, Ann Jellicoe and Wesker. His productions of Bond’s Lear (1972) and The Sea (1973) are remembered by critics for their harsh beauty.
Gaskill’s commitment to Brecht was not, however, merely reflective of his leftist politics and a taste for austere theatricality. He was also dedicated to developing the creativity of his actors – unusually using improvisation as a rehearsal method – and to the development of ensemble. These two aspects of his work came together in the workshop-based company Joint Stock, which he co-founded in 1974 with David Aukin, David Hare, and Max Stafford-Clark, and for which he directed Hare’s Fanshen (1975) and an adaptation of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1978). In 1978, Gaskill returned to the National Theatre, this time under Peter Hall, but was not successful in establishing an ensemble there. He continued to direct through the 1980s, but increasingly turned to teaching, with regular work at RADA. He also published two books: A Sense of Direction, about his time at the Court, and Words Into Action, a guide to directing.
