John Fox obituary

The Guardian

08-04-2025

In 1968, when John Fox and Sue Gill named their newly founded street theatre company the Welfare State, it was because they felt that free art was as important as free spectacles and free dentures. Their mission was to create 'art as an entertainment, an alternative, and a way of life', eschewing theatres and art venues in favour of streets and parks. They wanted eyes on stalks, not bums on seats.
For Fox, who has died aged 86, there was never any need for a separation between life and art. In the early days of the Welfare State company, in Burnley, Lancashire, its members lived and worked together in a convoy of caravans. There were couples, single people and a number of small children – including John and Sue's son, Dan, and daughter, Hannah. Their first show was The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a tribute to William Blake that included stilt-walkers, fire-eaters, performing bears, Punch and Judy and trade union banners.
By the 1970s the shows had shifted up a scale, often involving elaborate sculptural builds. Parliament in Flames was performed at numerous sites between 1973 and 1981, featuring a replica of the Houses of Parliament and a 60ft-high Big Ben. A huge sculptural puppet of Guy Fawkes with a skull head confronted a gigantic dragonfly Margaret Thatcher, to the tune of the Sex Pistols' Anarchy in the UK. And yes, it all went up in flames, a blaze of pyrotechnic brilliance.
By then the company had changed its name to Welfare State International (WSI), reflecting its worldwide success, with site-specific commissions from Toronto to Tokyo. For Raising the Titanic, staged at the London International Festival of Theatre in 1983, an enormous team of artists and makers took up residence in the abandoned Limehouse dockyards. A 100ft metal construction resembling a ship was created, the stern hung from a mobile crane. The structure, animated by pyrotechnics, was surrounded by floating puppets, variety-style sideshows and bands.
That same year the company moved to Ulverston in Cumbria, after which the focus shifted into more community-related work, including the creation of harvest and yuletide festivals in Lancashire villages.
Following a trip to Japan, where John and Sue had witnessed a Shinto-Buddhist lantern festival, they decided to create their own version, with the lanterns made from willow sticks (withies) and tissue paper, lit by candles. Their modest first lantern walk grew into a much bigger annual event, the All Lit Up for Glasgow City of Culture lantern festival, launched in 1990 and the biggest in Europe.
In the 90s the company opened the Lanternhouse in Ulverston, an arts centre with residential accommodation, as well a number of prop-making, rehearsal and performance spaces that ran until 2006, when WSI was wound up. WSI's last event was a celebratory promenade show called Longline: The Carnival, the culmination of a three-year programme of works connecting the communities of Ulverston and Morecambe Bay.
Born in Hull in East Yorkshire, John was the only child of a sea captain, Horatio, and a schoolteacher, Lucy Hasnip. As a schoolboy at Hymers college he was an ink-on-the-fingers maker, creating homespun puppet shows. Sue, also from Hull, was his childhood sweetheart, and they would remain partners in life and work until his death.
While studying philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford University, Fox also went to the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art and took part in local experimental theatre projects. In 1967 he went on to work as a tutor-librarian at Bradford School of Art, two years later becoming a lecturer in fine art at Leeds Polytechnic (now Leeds Beckett University). Many of the artists involved in early Welfare State performances were his students, and he remained as a lecturer for several years while pursuing his theatrical interests.
Once WSI had been laid to rest, John and Sue continued to work together under the name Dead Good Guides, cultivating an artistic practice weaved more fully into the fabric of their lives. They set up courses, wrote books (including John's autobiography, Eyes on Stalks, 2002), mounted exhibitions, created ecological sculpture trails and set up the Wildernest project, based around a sanctuary garden on the Cumbrian coastal path and incorporating weathervanes and whirlygigs, poster poems and an observation pod.
The release from WSI duties also gave John the space to pursue his work as a poet, songwriter and print-maker, and to play saxophone and accordion in numerous bands, including BLAST Furness and the Fox-Gill family ceilidh band.
In 2012 he was made MBE for his 'unstinting contribution as an inventor of forms of creative participation and celebration'. Many now-familiar modes of artistic practice – immersive theatre, site-specific performance and community-engaged celebratory arts – were trailblazed by him and his company.
Once he was diagnosed with cancer in early 2024, Fox decided to create a booklet of five new poems and an essay on death, called Rehearsing a Future, which he sent to 100 artist friends.
He is survived by Sue, Dan and Hannah, and by five grandchildren, Rowan, Bel, Luca, Reuben and Rosa.
John Fox, experimental theatre director, born 19 December 1938; died 11 March 2025