Ronald Eyre (13 April 1929 – 8 April 1992) was an English theatre director, actor and writer.
Queer Places:
University of Oxford, Oxford, Oxfordshire OX1 3PA
St. John the Evangelist Churchyard
Barnsley, Metropolitan Borough of Barnsley, South Yorkshire, England
Ronald Eyre (13 April 1929 – 8 April 1992) was an English theatre director, actor and writer.
Eyre was born at Mapplewell, near Barnsley, Yorkshire and he taught at Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School, Blackburn and Giggleswick School. He became a leading director for the cinema, opera, television and the theatre. He was nominated for Broadway's 1975 Tony Award as Best Director (Dramatic) for London Assurance. He presented the BBC television documentary series The Long Search (1977), a survey of various world religions, which won a Red Ribbon at the American Film Festival. Eyre was the godfather of British actress Emma Thompson.[1][2]
Theatre directors are not by nature a reticent breed. Ronald Eyre was the exception. He was shy, at times almost reclusively so, apprehensive about being watched and judged by friends and critics alike. He could not pretend, as others could, to care nothing of first night notices. Indeed first nights were often a penance and on more than one occasion he could not bear to attend his own.
Ronald Eyre once described himself as a perennial new boy. He worked, usually with considerable success, for many of Britain's major companies: the Royal Court, the RSC, the National, Covent Garden. But he was a member of none of them and he never had the air of being a potential "company man". When it looked as though he had found his exact directorial niche --and he was just as likely to be found in the commercial theatre as in the subsidised one — he would slide away from it and surface somewhere quite different.
There was rarely in Ronald Eyre's career a feeling of natural progression, of success leading to success. In 1982 he was entrusted by Covent Garden with a prestige production of Verdi's Falstaff, which marked Carlo Maria Giulini's return to opera in the theatre. It had opened in Los Angeles and was in part responsible for that city's decision, later, to found its own opera company, it came to London and went on to Florence. It was an autumnal view of Verdi, introspective rather than rumbustious, and one much favoured by Giulini, with whom Eyre got on well. But the musical offers did not flow in thereafter as might have been expected. Seven years passed before Eyre directed another opera in a major house, Peter Grimes for Opera North.
The complex and often elusive character of Ronald Eyre had its roots in Yorkshire. He was a coalminer's son and, pushed quite hard by his parents, won his way to Oxford via intelligence, hard work and Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School, Wakefield. In some ways he resembled his fellow Yorkshireman Alan Bennett, two of whose plays he was later to direct in the West End (Habeas Corpus and the enigmatic Enjoy). He shone quite brightly at OUDS among the likes of Peter Parker and John Schlesinger, but drifted into teaching in the North of England, where Russell Harty was among his pupils.
Harty once wrote that Eyre was an inspiring master, but four years of dealing with less reponsive students was enough for him. In 1956 Eyre landed a job through an advertisement as a BBC drama director, mainly, he claimed, because he had already been turned down by the BBC's appointments board. That, the drama head at the time reckoned, was an excellent qualification. The BBC proved to be both training ground and stepping stone: Eyre learnt that to succeed a certain amount of guile was necessary and he became wary, even suspicious, of those around him. He wrote his own plays, for both radio and television, including a number of adaptations from Russian stories, and he began to understand the complexities of casting. He was meticulous in this latter area when he moved into the commercial theatre and some of his best productions, such as When We are Married (Whitehall, 1986), were marked by the attention he gave to even the smallest role.
He made his directorial debut at the Birmingham Rep and then soon found his way, like his fellow North countrymen and contemporaries John Dexter and Bill Gaskill, to the Royal Court, then home of all true theatrical liberals. There he made a success of his first production, Three Months Gone, a Donald Howarth comedy which paired Diana Dors and Jill Bennett. Earlier he had attracted some critical attention with a play about a young soldier by John McGrath at the Hampstead Theatre Club, Events While Guarding the Bofors Gun.
After first being staged in Guilford in 1969, the play Enemy! by Robin Maugham, came to London with Dennis Waterman and Tony Selby, directed by Ronald Eyre.
At the Court his biggest — and most controversial — success was Veterans by Charles Wood. It starred John Mills and John Gielgud as two dyspeptic actors on location in a big-budget movie. Insiders immediately recognised this as Tony Richardson's The Charge of Light Brigade. Sophisticates at the Court were not worried about some outspoken language (for those days) from the lips of the two theatrical grandees, but out-of-town audiences had been less open-minded on the pre-London tour and Veterans did not get its expected West End transfer.
In the same year as Veterans, 1972, Eyre had a success of a very different kind with the revival of a forgotten comedy by Dion Boucicault, London Assurance. This and Much Ado were the best of a number of productions he did for the RSC both at Stratford and at the Aldwych. For Boucicault he used his own skills as a playwright to remove quantities of fustian dialogue in restructuring creaking melodra ma to contemporary taste. Bolstered by performances by Donald Sinden and one of Eyre's favourite actresses, Elizabeth Spriggs, the results delighted Aldwych audiences and showed that Eyre the writer was just as skilful as Eyre the director.
The same talents were on view in his first venture into opera after he had spent much of the mid-1970s on a massive series for BBC2 on the religions of the world, The Long Search. The opera was Berlioz's Beatrice and Benedict, a work reckoned to be fine on the concert platform but full of pitfalls in the theatre. At the Buxton Festival, then only in its second year. Eyre covered over those holes with quite a lot of his own words. Drawing on the experience of that RSC Much Ado and realising the potential of a husband-wife team soon to become famous, Ann Murray and Philip Langridge, his first opera production was also probably his best.
In the 1980s Ronald Eyre could not always summon up the sureness of touch he had shown in the previous decade. A St Joan for the National was a failure and there is little doubt that he was wounded by the fact that Falstaff, by which he had set much store, did not bring an attractive return invitation from Covent Garden. But there were successes, notably a revival of John Osborne's A Patriot for Me (which he could well have seen during his Court days), and J.B. Priestley's When We are Married. He worked with Ronald Harwood: J. J. Farr had only a modest run despite the presence of Finney, and only a year before his death, he directed The Dresser in Tokyo. His final West End production was A Walk in the Woods (Comedy, 1988) with Alec Guinness giving a feline performance as the diplomat, Botvinnik.
A year before dying, most of Eyre's work was done for television, principally religious programmes made for both the BBC and the commercial channels. In some ways this marked a return to his continuing interest in matters spiritual, his own and those of others, which he had explored 15 years before in The Long Search.
My published books:
