The elegantly rumbustious West End theatre producer John Gale, who has died aged 95, made his name and his fortune when, in 1971, he produced the longest-running comedy of all time, No Sex Please, We’re British, by Alistair Foot and Anthony Marriott.
The play ran for 17 years in all, first at the Strand (now the Novello) and then the Garrick, with Michael Crawford giving the stage performance of his life as the fraught and frazzled bank clerk overrun with unwanted parcels of pornography. He was succeeded in the role by the differently, equally inventive David Jason, then an unknown.
This show was a kind of pivotal lode star in Gale’s CV, which included a roster of star-laden sex comedies – led by the brilliant Boeing-Boeing (1962), adapted by Beverley Cross from a French farce about a lubricious bachelor entangled in timetables and a trio of airline hostesses – and classy old-fashioned entertainments by Somerset Maugham and William Douglas Home involving box-office names such as Ralph Richardson, Celia Johnson and Wendy Hiller.
At the same time, Gale became a key administrative figure in the workings of the London theatre, serving as the president of the West End theatres’ managerial society, Swet, later Solt, in the 1970s, before becoming executive producer and then artistic director of the Chichester Festival theatre in the 80s – a venue he rescued from near collapse with a rigorous policy of classic comedies and star-casting – while maintaining his West End connections.
At Chichester, too, he strengthened the youth theatre, mounted immense community theatre projects and built the supplementary smaller Minerva theatre for new work, small-scale musicals and rare classics, appointing Sam Mendes – whom he had hired as an assistant – as the first artistic director of the Minerva in 1987.
Most critics felt Gale’s record of sex comedies diminished his credibility as a serious producer. His fellow producer Michael Codron took care of the best new commercial plays – Michael Frayn, Alan Ayckbourn, John Mortimer, and Simon Gray – but Gale also produced a huge amount of the sort of classical, canonical work the National Theatre today is abandoning: George Bernard Shaw (Candida, Caesar and Cleopatra); Henry James (The Wings of the Dove with Elspeth March and Alan Howard outstanding at the Haymarket in 1963); and Noël Coward, Maugham and Terence Rattigan – the latter’s last play, Cause Célèbre (1977), starring Glynis Johns, was a revelation of misguided passion at the end of its tether.
He was a great talent spotter. Not just of Mendes, but also of Nicholas Hytner, whose 1985 production of The Scarlet Pimpernel at the Royal Exchange, Manchester – starring an incandescently hilarious Donald Sinden – he presented at Chichester and then in the West End.
His creative longevity and canny sense of “the next thing” made him a great encourager, too, not least regarding the up-and-coming producer Cameron Mackintosh, with whom he co-produced several now forgotten shows in the early 70s.
The most significant upshot of their professional relationship was that – as a governor and trustee of Christ’s Hospital school in West Sussex, where he was educated – he helped facilitate Mackintosh’s purchase of the Shaftesbury Avenue island site freehold, owned by Christ’s Hospital, running from the Globe (now the Gielgud) to the Queen’s (now the Sondheim), and everything in between, including what are now the offices of the Delfont Mackintosh technical operation, and the Sprague terrace linking the theatres in a delightful homage to the original architect.
Born in Chigwell, Essex, John was the second son of Martha (nee Evans), a Welsh district nurse, and Frank Gale, a merchant seaman. After Christ’s Hospital, he did his national service in the army and trained as an actor at the Webber Douglas academy.
For 10 years he ploughed an anonymous furrow in regional rep and small parts on television, launching as a co-producer in 1960 on Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E Lee, a riveting courtroom drama of Darwinian/Christian intellectual argy-bargy in the St Martin’s theatre.
He followed in the same year with producing credits on Candida at Wyndham’s, with Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray, and, in 1961, with an old-stye revue, On the Brighter Side, at the Phoenix, with material by Johnny Speight and Vivian Ellis, featuring Stanley Baxter, Betty Marsden and Una Stubbs.
In that decade, there were classy revivals of Coward’s Present Laughter (with Nigel Patrick), Maugham’s The Sacred Flame (with Gladys Cooper and Hiller) and the first of several collaborations with Home, starting with The Secretary Bird, starring Kenneth More and Jane Downs, at the Savoy. It ran there for four years.
The latter, like so many Gale “new comedies”, did not dig that deeply into the complexities of social and sexual relationships which, to be fair, is how their audiences liked it. This was apparent with a muted, but slightly more searing, 1977 revival of Rattigan’s Separate Tables, starring John Mills, Jill Bennett and Margaret Courtenay.
His last West End productions were a spiky transfer from Greenwich of Alan Strachan’s 1980 production of Coward’s Private Lives, with Maria Aitken and Michael Jayston, and a rather tame account of sexual scandal in high political places, A Personal Affair (1982), by Ian Curteis, with Gerald Harper and Virginia McKenna.
Gale retired, effectively, as a producer three decades ago, but remained a constant member of the Chichester audience and enjoyed his continuing work with Christ’s Hospital and as chairman of governors at the Guildford School of Acting.
He married Lisel Wratten in 1950, and they settled in East Dean, West Sussex. His great passions were travel, membership of the Garrick club, underwater swimming and rugby football; he was chairman of London Welsh rugby football club from 1979 to 1981, and was made OBE in 1987.
Lisel survives him, as do their two sons, Tim and Matthew, and four grandchildren, Joseph, Alexander, Eleanor and Siena.
• Thomas Henry John Gale, theatre producer, born 2 August 1929; died 10 May 2025
