John Barton – theatre director, co-founder of the
Royal Shakespeare Company
Born November 26 1928; died January 18 2018.
John Barton, who has died aged 89, may not have had the
public flamboyance of Peter Hall, his former Cambridge contemporary who in 1960
drafted him in as associate director of the newly formed Royal Shakespeare
Company. Barton’s effect on post World War Two British theatre, however, was
just as seismic. There will be few drama graduates over the last three decades who
haven’t come into contact with Playing Shakespeare, the nine-part Channel 4
series filmed in 1982, and which featured a series of extensive workshops on
the bard.
Led by an avuncular Barton, whose cardigan-clad image
belied his forensic and gimlet-eyed knowledge of Shakespeare’s text, the
workshops featured a cast-list drawn from the RSC’s resident company of the
time. These included the likes of Judi Dench, Ian McKellan, Sinead Cusack and
Patrick Stewart. While watching such luminaries get to grips with Shakespeare
as guided by Barton has been much parodied since, the programme remains a vital
primer in speaking classical text which many younger actors today might benefit
from.
By the time laying Shakespeare was broadcast, Barton
had already spent two decades at the RSC. After diverting from what looked set
to be an academic career path at King’s College, Cambridge, he oversaw some of
the company’s early landmark productions. These included his epic staging of
Shakespeare’ history plays as The Wars of the Roses in 1963/1964, a production
of Troilus and Cressida with Helen Mirren in 1968, and one of Twelfth Night in
1969 featuring Dench as Viola. Barton also oversaw The Greeks, a mammoth 1980
adaptation of ten plays focusing on the Oresteia legend by Homer, Euripides,
Aeschylus and Sophocles. Working with playwright Kenneth Cavander and presented
at the Aldwych Theatre, London, Barton’s staging focused on the tautness of
each play’s original verse.
Such classical ambition was channelled later into
Tantalus, Barton’s ten-play cycle based on the Trojan War, and which took him
two decades to write. The end result, performed in Denver, Colorado after six
months of rehearsal, lasted ten hours, and caused a schism between Barton and
Hall, who Barton deemed to have made too many unnecessary cuts to his original
text.
For all his classical sensibilities, without ever
forcing the issue, Barton’s work helped shed light too on contemporary conflicts.
An anthology of work drawn from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War
and Plato’s Socratic Dialogues was staged three times by the RSC. The first
time was in 1967, when the Vietnam War was at its height; the second was
revived as The War that Never Ends during the 1991 Gulf War. As The War That
Still Goes On, the production was mounted in 2006, during the Iraq War. While a
long way from propaganda, Barton’s constructions featured post-show discussions
with the likes of Tony Benn and Enoch Powell, and later featuring the likes of
Germaine Greer and George Galloway. Even without such lively exchanges, the
plays themselves became critical mirrors on political discourse in turbulent times.
They were also monumental works of art.
John Barton was the son of Sir Harold Montague and
Lady Barton (previously Joyce Wale), and was educated at Eton and King’s
College Cambridge. It was here he found his theatrical feet, acting and
directing with various student drama societies, becoming president of the
Cambridge University ADC. He became a fellow of King’s in 1954, but his destiny
was diverted with the founding of the RSC in 1960.
The fusion of Barton’s academically inclined intelligence
and rehearsal room practicalities didn’t initially bode well following a
production of The Taming of the Shrew, when a cast featuring Peter O’Toole and
Peggy Ashcroft mutinied, and Hall took over. In retrospect, and with
workshopping and development now taken for granted as part of the theatrical
infrastructure, Barton now appears to have been ahead of his time. This was the
case too much later, when he went on record to state his belief that the
contemporary speech patterns of those living in the Appalachian Mountains was
closest to the accent used during Shakespeare’s time.
Over his forty years with the RSC, Barton directed more
than fifty productions. In what was arguably the perfect match, in 1968, Barton
married Anne Righter, a renowned scholar and critic on Shakespeare, and the
pair were together until her passing in 2013.
Beyond any donnish airs, Barton brought a gift for accidental
comedy to the rehearsal room. There are stories of him leaning so far back on
his chair while giving notes to actors that he ended up in the orchestra pit or
the stalls, only to continue with barely a beat to mark the incident.
It is Barton’s fierce intelligence as one of the world’s
greatest authorities on Shakespeare that will mark his legacy the most. Arguably
more than any other director, Barton dug deep into a canon sometimes feared as
impenetrable. In this way he helped embody Shakespeare’s classical richness
while at the same time enabling generations of actors to breathe fresh dramatic
life into the plays that changed their interpretation forever.
Barton is survived by his sister, Jennifer. His wife
Anne pre-deceased him in 2013.
The Herald, January 29th 2018
ends
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