![]() ![]() Rehearsing McCowen and Geraldine McEwan in a 1980 revival of Rattigan’s The Browning Version and Harlequinade double-bill was, he said, “the most fun I’ve ever had with the lights on”. He won the respect of actors, especially the most technically gifted, as he had a very good ear, and he relished their talent. His productions included a glorious revival of Somerset Maugham’s For Services Rendered in 1980, later televised by Granada for ITV a notable 1981 Caribbean version of Measure for Measure (one of his favourite plays), with Norman Beaton as Angelo, Peter Straker as Lucio and Stefan Kalipha as the Duke Kendal in the Ellen Terry role of Pinero’s The Second Mrs Tanqueray Frances de la Tour in Neil Simon’s touching autobiographical Brighton Beach Memoirs, which transferred to the Aldwych in 1986 and Brian Friel’s beautiful adaptation of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons with new shooting stars Ralph Fiennes and Lesley Sharp in a company led by Alec McCowen, Richard Pasco, and Barbara Jefford, all of them Rudman regulars. He programmed the Lyttelton auditorium for three years and continued to direct for another five after Hall changed the system to one whereby the companies worked across the three NT venues. This remarkable five years, stewarded by his Oxford friend and contemporary David Aukin as his administrator, and climaxing in Mike Leigh’s staging of his own play, Abigail’s Party (which he later televised), propelled Rudman into an associate directorship of the National Theatre with Peter Hall. Judi Dench (Isabella) and Christopher Hancock (Duke Vincentio) in Measure for Measure, 1965, at the Nottingham Playhouse, directed by John Neville assisted by Michael Rudman. His hero was Arthur Miller, whose greatest play, Death of a Salesman, he directed in three major productions: at the Nottingham Playhouse, where he was an assistant in the late 60s, with John Neville as Willy Loman at the National in 1979, with Warren Mitchell (who introduced him to Tottenham Hotspur, a football club he supported for the rest of his life) and on Broadway in 1984 with Dustin Hoffman as Willy and newcomer John Malkovich as Biff, both magnificent, in a Tony-award-winning “best revival” category.Īs the artistic director of the Hampstead Theatre Club in the 70s, he made his mark as a sensitive and intelligent director of good actors in good new plays, several of which transferred to the West End: Nigel Hawthorne and Alan Howard in the elliptical, magical The Ride Across Lake Constance, by Peter Handke Billie Whitelaw, Barbara Ferris and Felicity Kendal – the latter his future wife – in two of Michael Frayn’s early hits, Alphabetical Order and Clouds – the first an “office” play set in the cuttings library of a provincial newspaper, the second charting the adulterous love affair of two married journalists “covering” Cuba and Oscar James in Michael Hastings’s Gloo Joo, an award-winning comedy about a black British, Brixton resident being wrongly targeted by immigration officers and helped out by a progressive rabbi. Warren Mitchell as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller, directed by Michael Rudman at the National Theatre, 1979.
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