Frank Dunlop – Theatre and opera director
Frank Dunlop, who has died aged 98, was a maverick theatre director, whose seven-year stint as director of Edinburgh International Festival between 1984 and 1991 brought major world theatre to the festival. Work by international heavyweights such as the Berliner Ensemble, Ingmar Bergman, Andrzej Wajda and Yukio Ninagawa was programmed alongside major revivals of Scottish classics. The latter included Tom Fleming’s epic staging of Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaites, Sydney Goodsir Smith’s version of The Wallace, and James Bridie’s Holy Isle. Dunlop brought both strands together in his own 1987 production of Schiller’s Mary Stuart, which featured a large Scottish cast led by Hannah Gordon as Mary.
Dunlop’s first year as director also featured a ten-day Samuel Beckett season at the Churchill Theatre, Morningside. The latter included works by New York’s Harold Clurman Theatre, and a staging of Beckett’s novel, Malone Dies, performed by comic genius Max Wall. This mix of the classical and the radical set the tone of things to come during Dunlop’s tenure.
Dunlop was already an internationally renowned elder statesman of the stage by the time he took over EIF. After working as an associate director with Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre at the Old Vic, based on The Cut in Southwark, Dunlop set up the Young Vic company in 1970 at the other end of the street with an emphasis on making theatre for younger audiences. The theatre opened with a bravura turn from Jim Dale in Scapino, a comic romp adapted by Dale from Moliere’s Les Fourbieres de Scapin. In 1972, Dunlop’s company brought the first professional production of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s breakout biblical musical, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, to Edinburgh at Haymarket Ice Rink.
Before that, he brought his tellingly named Pop Theatre Company to Edinburgh in 1966, with a starry ensemble including Flora Robson, Laurence Harvey, Jim Dale, Jane Asher, Hywel Bennett, Denise Coffey and jazz singer Cleo Laine appearing in productions of The Winter’s Tale and The Trojan Women.
Other highlights included directing Spike Milligan in Son of Oblomov (1964) at the Lyric; Delphine Seyrig in Antony and Cleopatra at the Young Vic (1976); and
Richard Burton in Camelot in New York (1981).
He also set up the BAM Theatre Company at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York in 1976.
On taking up his post with EIF, Dunlop discovered he had inherited a £175,000 deficit. If he had known of it, he said, he would never have taken the job. Once he did, he wasn’t shy of ruffling feathers. Given his long track record of popular successes, there was talk of EIF’s ‘ingrained elitism’, while his emphasis on theatre as the heart of his programming saw him pooh-poohed by some more used to taking opera’s precedence for granted.
Despite fallouts with the then Edinburgh District Council over funding issues and boardroom control, Dunlop’s notion of art for all was in accord with the inclusive ambitions of EDC’s equally visionary cultural leader, Paolo Vestri. Part of this came from a desire for the Festival to move beyond its city centre hub. This saw Dunlop programme work in glorious but neglected civic halls such as Leith Theatre and St. Bride’s Centre in Gorgie.
In the former, Mark-Anthony Turnage raised eyebrows in 1988 with his opera, Greek, adapted from Steven Berkoff’s play. Meanwhile, on a much larger scale uptown the same year, composer John Adams conducted the UK premiere of his opera, Nixon in China, directed by Peter Sellars.
Dunlop’s vision was probably captured best by his 1986 World Theatre season. While Wajda directed Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment at St Bride’s, the season included two productions by Bergman, as well as Spanish actress Nuria Espert’s stunning take on Federico Garcia Lorca’s play, Yerma.
Wild cards included the Chinese Magical Circus at the Playhouse, and the first UK appearance of the Wooster Group, Elizabeth LeCompte’s New York avant-garde troupe, who at the time included Willem Defoe, Spalding Gray and Steve Buscemi. The Woosters brought something called The Road to Immortality (Part 2) to the Churchill. The second piece in a trilogy, the actual title of this mind expanding four-part theatrical collage was L.S.D. Just the High Points.
The following year, the Churchill hosted the Royal Exchange Theatre Manchester’s production of Iain Heggie’s A Wholly Healthy Glasgow. This saw Gerard Kelly star in Heggie’s potty-mouthed gym set romp directed by Richard Wilson. This had nothing, however, on contemporary dance enfant terrible Michael Clark and company’s bare bummed ballet, I Am Curious, Orange, which featured Manchester post punk band The Fall soundtracking the show live for a week in 1988 at the King’s Theatre.
Other epochal moments during Dunlop’s reign came from Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa, who brought his epic take on Macbeth to the Lyceum in 1985, and a stunning version of Medea to the University of Edinburgh’s Old College Quad, with performances taking place whatever the weather.
The presence of a visual art programme as part of EIF was also key during Dunlop’s tenure. The Vigorous Imagination was a major 1987 group show presented in association with the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. The exhibition showcased seventeen Scottish artists who heralded a home-grown new wave that had burst onto the scene. Featured artists included Sam Ainsley, Steven Campbell, Adrian Wiszniewski, David Mach, Calum Colvin and Ken Currie.
At 1990’s EIF, Dunlop directed Treasure Island, with Hywel Bennett as Long John Silver. One of his parting shots in his final programme in 1991 saw the return of Ninagawa with Tango at the End of Winter, starring Alan Rickman as an actor who quits the stage to live in a dilapidated cinema haunted by dreams.
Frank Dunlop was born in Leeds to Charles Norman Dunlop and Mary Aarons. He attended Kibworth Beauchamp Grammar School (later Beauchamp College) in Oadby, on the outskirts of Leicester, before reading English literature at University College London.
Dunlop studied under French director and drama theorist Michel Saint-Denis at the Old Vic theatre school, co-founded by Saint-Denis with George Devine and Glen Byam Shaw in 1947 in the then war torn Old Vic theatre.
In 1954, Dunlop founded the Piccolo Theatre in Manchester, and in 1956 became resident director at Bristol Old Vic. From 1961-64 he was artistic director of Nottingham Playhouse before returning to the Old Vic with the National Theatre in 1967.
In 1977, he was awarded a CBE. A decade later the French government awarded him a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Literature.
After stepping down from EIF, Dunlop continued to direct around the world with the same expansiveness he had developed over decades. Throughout the full mercurial internationalist sweep of his work over more than half a century, Dunlop’s approach can be summed up by his comments in an interview with Michael Billington for the New York Times in the run up to Dunlop’s second Edinburgh programme in 1985.
When asked by Billington why, despite some of what he referred to as ‘hassles’, he was so keen to stay on as EIF director, Dunlop replied that it was ''Because I believe in helping to popularise things in the arts I think are worthwhile. I believe the arts are to do with education and assuaging man's curiosity. To me that is mankind's greatest characteristic: if people don't have curiosity about others and new things they are just animals. In Edinburgh,’ Dunlop concluded, expressing hope that EIF will have settled itself by the following year, “I believe we should be showing the best of the old and pointing the way forward.''
He was predeceased by his sister.
The Herald, January 17th 2026
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