In 1975 the stage director Susan Todd, who has died aged 83, teamed up with the actors Gillian Hanna and Mary McCusker to form Monstrous Regiment, a national touring company that would always have a majority of women members, and whose work would explore the experience of women, past and present.
Taking their title from the Scottish fundamentalist John Knox’s notorious treatise The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, the company started with Claire Luckham’s Paris commune-set Scum: Death, Destruction and Dirty Washing (1976); next came Caryl Churchill’s witchcraft play Vinegar Tom. Todd herself wrote Kiss and Kill (with Ann Mitchell) about domestic violence (1977-78), and – in 1979 – collaborated with me on the company’s first play involving a male writer, bringing the worlds of student revolution and schoolgirl romance into crashing contradiction, in Teendreams. As in all of the early Monstrous Regiment shows, Todd was also a member of the acting company.
Bryony Lavery’s Weimar-style cabaret show, Time, Gentlemen, Please (1978), caused controversy in its exploration of sexual desire and glamour (howled down in Leeds by what Todd described as “the Anti-Glitter Brigade”), as did an adaptation of Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (intended to rescue Loos’s feminist classic from the grip of the Monroe film) the following year.
Differences within the company led Todd to leave the Monsters in the early 1980s, but she put her skill at and affection for iconoclastic theatre to work as co-director of the endearingly titled National Theatre of Brent. Led by Patrick Barlow in the persona of the quixotic Desmond Dingle, the company aimed to demonstrate that, with enough persistence, two actors could perfectly well present the stories of The Charge of the Light Brigade, The Black Hole of Calcutta and Götterdämmerung.
As a freelance director, Todd returned to Monstrous Regiment to direct their 10th anniversary production (My Song Is Free, by Jorge Díaz) in 1986. Other noted productions include her own adaptation of Benefits by Zoe Fairbairn at the Albany Empire, Deptford (1980), Stephen Lowe’s Keeping Body and Soul Together at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs (1984), and the acclaimed English language premiere of Marguerite Duras’s Savannah Bay for the Foco Novo company (1988).
In the mid-80s, she directed two plays by Deborah Levy: Pax for Sphinx theatre and Heresies for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Todd joined Annie Castledine during the latter’s directorship of Derby Playhouse between 1987 and 1990, the pair producing highly visual theatrical presentation of rediscovered classics, such as Gaslight and Arsenic and Old Lace, continental plays and plays by women.
Todd was born Lily Susan into a working-class family in Stourbridge in the West Midlands (she was to use her middle name professionally, but reverted to Lily in later life). Her mother, Violet (nee Harrison), had a wide range of jobs, from working at a greyhound track to teaching assistant at a primary school. Her father, Peter, found it hard to hold down jobs, but was a passionate amateur actor, which opened his daughter’s eyes to the wonders of theatre.
She hated school, but her A-levels (studied by correspondence course) won her a place at the newly founded Sussex University in the mid 60s, which she adored, studying English and philosophy and being recruited into the Communist party by the aspirant theatre director Buzz Goodbody. The Communist party was attractive to Todd for its genuinely working-class base, but she was also increasingly influenced by the emergent women’s liberation movement, and caught up in the theatre that promoted it. There is still documentary footage of Todd on a demonstration singing – with bitter irony – Keep Young and Beautiful (“It’s your duty to be beautiful … if you want to be loved”).
In 1969, Todd inherited Goodbody’s first RSC job as the director John Barton’s assistant. Having directed As You Like It on the company’s main stage, Goodbody was asked to run the new, experimental studio space (the Other Place) that she had campaigned for. Her thrilling 1975 chamber production of Hamlet (with Ben Kingsley as the prince) would have turned the tide of her career, but proved too late: she killed herself four days into its run. In 2005, Todd would produce a commemorative event at the RSC, Remembering Buzz, to mark the 30th anniversary of her death.
Following her own apprenticeship at the RSC, Todd won a place on ATV’s repertory theatre trainee programme, learning her director’s craft in various regional theatres, with productions of Arthur Miller, Noël Coward, Arthur Schnitzler and others. By the mid-70s, however, it was clear that small-scale, alternative theatre had become the leading cultural site for the growing feminist movement of which Todd was a part.
In 1973, the expatriate American director Ed Berman handed over his Almost-Free theatre for a short season of plays by women. Todd was one of the directors of this groundbreaking season, which included work by Pam Gems, Michelene Wandor and Jane Wibberley, and gave birth to the first two of many feminist troupes, the Women’s Company and the Women’s Theatre Group. By 1975, there was also a growing cohort of feminist theatre-makers who were dissatisfied with male-dominated leftwing theatre groups such as 7:84 and Belt and Braces, including Hanna and McCusker, and Monstrous Regiment was born.
After her period with the Monsters, Todd combined directing with teaching, first at Wimbledon School of Art, where she headed an MA in scenography, and then at Dartington College of Arts, where she added further physical theatre skills to her rigorously text-based, Stanislavski-influenced approach. At Rose Bruford College she taught – among others – the writer Bernardine Evaristo and the director Paulette Randall. From 1997 to 2003, she was acting training tutor at Trinity College Dublin, where her productions included Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechuan, Ostrovsky’s Artists and Admirers, and Marivaux’s The Triumph of Love.
Returning to London, she both taught and directed at Central School until 2012, where her noted productions ranged from the American radical Clifford Odets’s Paradise Lost to Gorky’s Children of the Sun and Coward’s Semi-Monde.
In 1966 Todd had married Peter Horne. They divorced, and in 1998 she married Chris Wicking, who died in 2008. In 2011, after Peter was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, he and Todd remarried, moving to Aldeburgh in Suffolk until Peter’s death six years later.
Todd’s brother predeceased her. She is survived by a niece and a nephew.
• Lily Susan Todd, stage director, writer and actor, born 23 January 1942; died 4 December 2025
