When Michael Boyd was appointed artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2002, he inherited nothing far short of a shambles.
His brilliant but foolhardy predecessor, Adrian Noble, had been allowed by a weak board of governors to abandon the Barbican theatre, leased to the company by the City of London at a peppercorn rent; tried to instigate a more “democratic” but imperfectly costed method of presenting the RSC’s work throughout Britain; messed up the successful annual residencies in Newcastle; decided to demolish and rebuild the Stratford-upon-Avon main house; and had run up a deficit of nearly £3m.
Boyd, who has died aged 68 of cancer, dealt with the deficit, saw through the new £112m Stratford theatre inside the shell of the old one, dropped the satellite RSC idea, supervised a much needed (in the wake of Les Misérables) income stream in the hit musical Matilda (2010) by Tim Minchin and Dennis Kelly, directed by Matthew Warchus, and restored belief and ensemble values to a demoralised workforce. He also provided some magnificent work of his own to boot.
By the time he handed over the reins to his close friend and associate Gregory Doran in 2012, the company was back on an even keel, even if the ensemble principle has been hard to fathom in recent years. There is still no London base, although Doran has slowly engineered his way back into the Barbican on occasion.
Boyd set about producing the first folio canon, the works published in 1623 after the playwright’s death – as indeed has Doran – and the centrepiece was a complete run of the history plays, from Richard II through Richard III, two tetralogies, designed by his regular associate, Tom Piper.
Following the example of another illustrious predecessor, Terry Hands, he presented the Henry VI trilogy – with the first RSC black king, David Oyelowo, succeeded by Chuk, now Chukwudi, Iwuji – complete and virtually uncut.
The cycle started with Henry VI and Richard III in Stratford-upon-Avon in 2001, went on a US tour, inaugurated the temporary Courtyard theatre in Stratford (during the main theatre’s restoration) in 2006 and, with the rest of the histories, played seasons at the Young Vic and finally the Roundhouse in 2008. This was a spectacular and triumphant achievement involving a company of 38 actors. Boyd returned with Piper to the Roundhouse in 2015 to direct his first opera, an acclaimed version of Monteverdi’s Orfeo in a new translation by Don Paterson, for the Royal Opera.
Born in Belfast, Michael was the son of Sheila (nee Small), an art teacher, and John Boyd, a doctor. His early years were in Northern Ireland until the family moved – for his father’s work – to London, where he attended Latymer Upper school in Hammersmith. Moving north, again for his father’s work, he attended Daniel Stewart’s college in Edinburgh and took an English literature degree at the University of Edinburgh.
Having decided on a career in the theatre, he won a British Council fellowship in 1978 to study as a trainee with the great director Anatoly Efros, a lifelong influence, at the Moscow Drama theatre.
Back in Britain, a regional theatre young directors scheme took him to the Belgrade theatre in Coventry, where I saw two spine-tingling, outrageous productions of his in 1981: Ron Hutchinson’s Risky City and George Etherege’s Restoration comedy, She Would If She Could, both steeped in the punk and ska music of that time in that city.
He went on to the Sheffield Crucible in 1982 as an associate of Clare Venables – another great influence on him; she offered similar encouragement to Tom Cairns, Stephen Daldry and Steven Pimlott in Boyd’s wake – and returned to Scotland in 1986 as the artistic director, in succession to Faynia Williams, of the Tron in the merchant city area of Glasgow. He stayed there for the next 10 years.
The Tron kirk of 1795 had opened as a theatre in 1981, but as a clearing house rather than a producing venue. Boyd changed that, exploiting the deconsecrated chapel element of the interior, with its wooden furnishing, stone statuary and stained glass, most notably in a stunning production of Macbeth with Iain Glen, Alison Peebles and child witches, a template for his opening production at the new Royal Shakespeare theatre in Stratford in 2011, led by Jonathan Slinger and Aislín McGuckin.
Scottish actors including Alan Cumming, Forbes Masson, Siobhan Redmond and Peter Mullan appeared at Boyd’s Tron, and most of the leading Scottish playwrights, as well as the Quebecois plays of Michel Tremblay, were featured there. Boyd’s own 1995 adaptation of Janice Galloway’s novel The Trick Is to Keep Breathing was a sensational success, with three actors, one of them Redmond, playing a Scottish teacher after her life has been devastated by the drowning of her married lover. The production was also seen at the Royal Court in London.
By this time Boyd had made an assured and exciting RSC debut with John Ford’s Caroline tragedy The Broken Heart in 1994, following that success with strong, muscular productions over the next few years of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, Measure for Measure (designed by Piper to convey a semi-Edwardian, semi-eastern European atmosphere), Troilus and Cressida and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Only a Romeo and Juliet in 2000, starring two key members of the company at that time, and indeed since, David Tennant and Alexandra Gilbreath, was a miscast misfire.
Other memorable excursions were made in The Tempest in 2002, Toby Stephens as Hamlet in 2004 (although Stephens, as he proved, is one of nature’s action men – Coriolanus, say – not inaction men) and a Russian season in 2009 that included The Grain Store by Natalya Vorozhbit, centring on a Ukrainian peasant community’s reaction to the Stalinist agricultural plan of the 1930s. When he returned to the RSC in 2018, his revival of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine in the Swan, with Jude Owusu in the title role, was the pick of the shows that season, although it played to scant houses halfway through the run.
Boyd, ferociously intelligent and always direct in his dealings and utterances, had an attractively unkempt appearance, as though just surfacing after deep sleep. This casual, dressed-down demeanour was not an act, but it certainly belied his innate steeliness and dyed-in-the-wool work ethic. “I don’t come to a rehearsal room knowing what to do,” he once said. That was the point of going there.
And after his opera debut with Orfeo, he certainly knew what to do with a string of revivals at Garsington Opera in the last few years of his life: Eugene Onegin, Pelléas et Mélisande, Don Giovanni – these are masterworks that only an instinctively gifted director can make soar, and soar they did.
His later theatre work included a compellingly moral play, The King of Hell’s Palace by the outstanding American-Chinese playwright Frances Ya-Chu at Hampstead theatre in 2019, and a brilliant revival of Liz Lochhead’s retelling of Medea at the Edinburgh festival last year. Both were designed by Piper.
Boyd was knighted in 2012 and made honorary DLitt at Edinburgh University in 2009 and a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2016. In 1982 he married the actor and playwright Marcella Evaristi.
After their divorce, he lived with his partner Caroline Hall in London from 1991; the couple married in 2004. He is survived by Caroline, their daughter, Rachael, twins, Gabriella and Daniel, from his first marriage, a grandson, Taliesin, and his elder sister, Susan.
• John Michael Boyd, theatre director, born 6 July 1955; died 3 August 2023
• This article was amended on 7 August 2023 to correct the spelling of Chukwudi Iwuji’s first name. Also, the first artistic director of the Tron was Faynia Williams, whom Michael Boyd succeeded in the role.
