Terry Lane – Theatre director, writer
Terry Lane, who has died aged 87, was a theatre director who inadvertently changed the theatrical lexicon forever. As one of the co-founders of Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre in 1962 in its original home in a former brothel off the High Street, it was Lane whose misreading of what was actually ‘transverse’ theatre – an auditorium with seating either side of the performing area – gave this new home of the radical and avant-garde its name. By the time anyone realised, the name had stuck, and a theatre legend was born.
The first night of Lane’s opening Traverse production in January 1963 of Jean Paul Sartre’s play, Huis Clois provided another legend, when actress Colette O’Neil was accidentally stabbed on stage by fellow performer Rosamund Dickson – also Lane’s fiancé and future wife. While O’Neil thankfully survived, the headlines the incident made attracted audiences, and the Traverse’s reputation was sealed.
Lane had become embroiled in the setting up of what would become the Traverse while working as a stage manager at Pitlochry Festival Theatre, where he and actor John Malcolm opined over the lack of adventurous programming in mainstream rep theatre. Malcolm had acted in mini productions hosted by American ex GI Jim Haynes in the basement of his Paperback Bookshop in Charles Street, close to the University of Edinburgh, where a lively social scene spearheaded by Haynes and future gallerist Richard Demarco held court.
During the 1962 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Malcolm hung out in the Sphinx, the lively Fringe club in James Court off the Lawnmarket where the likes of then Cambridge undergraduates John Cleese and Tim Brooke Taylor performed. After speaking to the building’s owner Tom Mitchell about the potential for setting up a permanent venue, and in cahoots with Haynes and Demarco, Malcolm approached Lane.
Lane had already worked with director Stephen Joseph, a pioneer of theatre in the round, so knew a thing or two about unconventional theatrical spaces. Since Pitlochry’s season had ended, Lane was back in London when Malcolm contacted him. As Joyce McMillan describes it in her book, The Traverse Theatre Story 1963-88 (1988), ‘when the telegram summons reaches him in London in mid-October, Lane packs a few necessaries (some clothes and a typewriter) and sets off for Edinburgh with nothing in his pocket but a last £5 of unemployment benefit.’
Taking his cue from Joseph, Lane designed the tiny new theatre’s ‘traverse’ set up, and in a hotbed of artistic ambition and highly charged discussion, became the Traverse’s first artistic director While Lane had a more pragmatic head on his shoulders than some of the more mercurial forces around him, his programme for the Traverse’s inaugural season was a bold one, and was described by one critic as ‘suicidally ambitious’.
As well as Huis Clois, Lane scheduled a host of international works never seen before in the UK, alongside new pieces by living writers. These included three works by the Spanish playwright Fernando Arrabal; Comedy, Satire, Irony and Deeper Meaning by Christian-Dietrich Grabbe; Scottish writer Stanley Eveling’s first play, The Balachites; Beebee Fenstermaker by William Snyder; and the Noh Plays of Yukio Mishima.
Following the first night of Lane’s production of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, one review declared that ‘If the Traverse should shut down… it would have justified its existence by Terry Lane’s production…’ The Traverse didn’t shut down, possibly due in part to Lane’s professional approach to running a theatre that set him at odds with some of the theatre’s newly established committee. Due largely to Lane’s efforts, the first Traverse season set down a benchmark of what was possible in studio theatres.
By 1964, however, Lane was gone, and the theatre took a more consciously experimental path. To have such an epithet as quoted above, however, helped define the myth-making legacy that came initially from Lane’s programming.
Lane later wrote a personal history of the Traverse, Side By Side: The Traverse Theatre – Before and after (2010). Lane described his book as ‘a blow by blow account of the problems, tensions, manipulations and successes encountered in its (the Traverse’s) formative years.’
Terence Lane was born in Woodford, Northamptonshire. He began his theatre career in the West End of London offices of the impresario Jack Hylton. He became a stage manager with Bromley Repertory, Pitlochry, Perth Repertory and for Stephen Joseph' s Theatre in the Round company in Scarborough and on tour. After leaving Edinburgh, he directed Joseph's Scarborough season before going on to direct the pilot Theatre go Round for the Royal Shakespeare Company in London. Returning to Scotland, he was one of the directors for the Pitlochry Festival Theatre company in 1965 and 1966.
In 1966 Joseph asked Lane to take charge of his company in Stoke on Trent during what became an inter-regnum season in 1967, during which he directed a Documentary Music Hall and Big Soft Nelly by Henry Livings. He became the first Director of Productions at the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham, where his productions included Eugene Ionesco’s Jacques played in masks, and medieval romp, Gammer Gurton’s Needle on a genuine hay-wain. The Birmingham Post described the production as “A sheer riot”.
Lane went on to direct seasons in Bournemouth, Cardiff, Kidderminster, as well as productions of My Fair Lady, Oh What a Lovely War, and on the Edinburgh Fringe, Peter Nichols' play, The National Health.
In a complete turnaround, Lane and Dickson moved to Helensburgh, where they opened and ran independent bookshop, Bookworms. They also became involved with the Scottish Community Drama Association.
Following Dickson’s death in 2005, Lane sold up and moved to Italy to write and paint portraits. Latterly he lived in Norwich. He wrote two books. The Full Round – The Several Lives and Theatrical Legacy of Stephen Joseph (2006) was an extensive biography of his mentor. Side by Side followed. As a personal history of the Traverse, it set the record straight regarding the venue Lane named, built and shaped into the major theatrical institution it would become.
He is survived by his and Dickson’s three children, Arthur, Robin and Eleanor, his in-laws and grandchildren
The Herald, October 11, 2025
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