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The Herald Scotland
27-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Tributes to Dundonian who became eminent director of the stars
Died: June 10, 2025 Alan Strachan, who has died aged 80, was a Dundonian who became an eminent theatre director and had success directing plays by the likes of Noel Coward, Terene Rattigan and Alan Ayckbourn. He also administered two theatres, the Mermaid in the City and the Greenwich Theatre, always choosing seasons that were attractive, imaginative and cast with stars that wanted to return to the live theatre after success elsewhere. His prestigious productions were often seen in Scotland and included a revival of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1994) with Patricia Hodge as the spinster Miss Brodie and Edith Macarthur as the headmistress. Another notable achievement was the 2007 production of Ayckbourn's How the Other Half Loves - of which The Herald critic wrote 'the evening features a superb central performance from Nicholas Le Prevost'. In 2009 Strachan also had a great success with Entertaining Angels by Richard Everett starring Penelope Keith. In 2021 Strachan directed A Splinter of Ice to reopen the King;s [[Theatre]], Edinburgh, after its refurbishment. The play dealt with Kim Philby, safe in Moscow, justifying his treachery. Alan Lochart Thomson Strachan was born in Dundee, the second son of Ellen (nee Graham), who worked in the city's jam factories, and Roualeyn Strachan, a seed and plants manager in D&W Croll. Strachan attended Morgan Academy then read English literature at St Andrews University and Merton College, Oxford. He was active in the various theatre groups at Oxford and in 1969 appeared in Twelfth Night directed by Jonathan Miller. At St Andrews he spent much of his spare time working backstage at the Byre Theatre. There he met Jennifer Piercey who was appearing on stage. They married in 1977. When he came down from Oxford, Strachan worked at the Mermaid Theatre then directed by Bernard Miles. He was appointed co-associate director and scored a hit with Cowardy Custard in 1972 which he co-devised and directed. Coward came to the first night and caused quite a stir. Patricia Routledge was one of the stars and said of that first night, 'Coward was really quite frail by then and he had to be helped in through a fire door. The audience gave him a huge welcome. It was a memorable night.' The show had long runs in the west end and on Broadway. It was seen at the Pitlochry Festival in 1984. Read more 'He never gave up': tributes to patriarch of Scottish undertakers | The Herald Tributes to 'Mr Stirling': journalist dedicated to his home town | The Herald Tributes to countess who modernised royal Scottish castle | The Herald One of Strachan's outstanding successes was to direct the (then) ignored plays of Terrence Rattigan. In 1988 he directed the first West End revival of The Deep Blue Sea, starring Penelope Keith. Strachan's subtle direction brought a fresh appraisal of the play and allowed Keith to display real dramatic skills away from TV's The Good Life. In 1971 Strachan directed at the Mermaid Theatre The Old Boys by William Trevor. He cast Michael Redgrave in the lead despite knowing the actor had serious memory and nerve problems. Rehearsals went well but as the first night approached, Redgrave was a bag of nerves. 'Lines which were ringing with assurance now were stumbled for or escaped him completely,' Strachan wrote. The previews were a nightmare and Strachan evolved an ingenious scheme. He climbed into a tiny cubbyhole off-stage and communicated with Redgrave on a walkie-talkie and cued the actor his lines. All went well except when the hearing aid fell from Redgrave's ear with a resounding crash and, worse, one night Redgrave fiddled with the volume and the audience heard an intercom with a London taxi. Penelope Keith (Image: Newsquest) Strachan had a keen insight into the plays of Coward. He keenly developed their subtle comedy and in 1981 directed a feisty production of Present Laughter with Donald Sinden playing the lead as a rascal. From 1978 Strachan directed the Greenwich Theatre for ten years where he staged a wonderful assortment of plays that established the theatre as progressive and forward-thinking. While running Greenwich he maintained a close interest in the west end and in particular with Alec Guinness. In 1975 Guinness played the lead and Strachan directed Julian Mitchell's adaptation of Ivy Compton-Burnett's novel, A Family and a Fortune, with Guinness and Rachel Kempson and then Yahoo an intense study of Jonathan Swift, the 17th-century Irish satirist. Strachan was also a noted biographer and in addition to writing biographies of Vivien Leigh, Michael Redgrave and Bernard Miles, he wrote the biography of his long-term collaborator, the West End producer Sir Michael Codron (Putting It On). In the past few years Strachan and his wife had lived in Invergowrie. She predeceased him and he is survived by his elder brother. ALASDAIR STEVEN At The Herald, we carry obituaries of notable people from the worlds of business, politics, arts and sport but sometimes we miss people who have led extraordinary lives. That's where you come in. If you know someone who deserves an obituary, please consider telling us about their lives. Contact
The Guardian
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Alan Strachan obituary
Although he never worked for the National Theatre or the Royal Shakespeare Company, the theatre director Alan Strachan, who has died aged 80, was an important, intelligent, civilising figure in West End and regional comedy and drama across five decades. He directed the first West End revival of Terence Rattigan's best play, The Deep Blue Sea, at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, in 1988, starring Penelope Keith in a revelatory performance (for her, and the play) in which the romantically conflicted heroine, Hester Collyer, rejected the suicide option with a grim, hard-won feminine independence. The play dates from 1952 (starring Peggy Ashcroft) but Strachan had also directed it, very well, at the Greenwich Theatre in 1981 with Dorothy Tutin as Hester and Clive Francis in the Kenneth More role of the raffish wartime pilot who offers an escape from Hester's marital entrapment. Strachan restored the play's status and reputation. Strachan worked often with Keith, and with Alan Ayckbourn and his London producer, Michael Codron, and was a perceptive exponent of Noël Coward – he co-devised a celebratory cabaret, Cowardy Custard, at the Mermaid theatre in 1972, and arranged a sparkish revival of Present Laughter with Donald Sinden as a slightly over-age and rough-edged Gary Essendine at the Vaudeville in 1981. His wide-ranging experience produced some wonderful, scholarly books, too. The latest of them, Adventurer: Bernard Miles and the Mermaid Theatre (2023) tells the story of that extraordinary pioneer and his theatre in Puddle Dock. Miles had taken him on as an associate director in 1970, and he responded with expert revivals of rarely seen Bernard Shaw plays (John Bull's Other Island and Misalliance), a Cole Porter cabaret to follow the Coward, and Children (1974), the first of several elegant, low-key plays by the American playwright AR Gurney Jr, chronicler of the well-heeled east coast Wasp community reluctantly adjusting to the changing world outside. After five years at the Mermaid, Strachan moved on to the Greenwich theatre for an even longer spell (1978-88), pursuing his dedication to an eclectic, but always interesting, repertoire, usefully tangential to the major houses. There was Gurney, Coward and Shaw, and JB Priestley's An Inspector Calls, decently and sensitively done but still awaiting the radical overhaul of Stephen Daldry's spectacular 1992 production at the National. While running Greenwich, Strachan consolidated his foothold in the West End, starting with two extraordinary projects with Alec Guinness in 1975-76: Julian Mitchell's adaptation of Ivy Compton-Burnett's 1939 novel, A Family and a Fortune, at the Apollo, a desiccated, acidulous pow-wow spoken in baroque, insinuating dialogue by a crack cast led by Guinness, Rachel Kempson and Margaret Leighton; and Yahoo, a close-up study of Jonathan Swift, the 17th-century Irish satirist and cleric, in his own words, co-authored by Strachan with Guinness, who played a quietly fulminating Swift. Of beaky profile, slight build and febrile temperament, Strachan was always the best read and best prepared person in the rehearsal room. And he was, always, very funny. At Oxford in 1969, he played the unrewarding role of Fabian in a student production of Twelfth Night directed by Jonathan Miller. He managed to extort a huge laugh on his blatantly inexplicable line during Malvolio's letter-reading scene, 'Sowter will cry out upon it for all this, though he be as rank as a fox.' He was born in Dundee, the second son of Ellen (nee Graham), who worked in the city's jam factories, and Roualeyn Strachan, a seed and plants manager in the Dundee firm of D&W Croll. Alan was educated in the city's Morgan academy in the late 1950s, before taking a literature degree at St Andrews University and a BLitt at Merton College, Oxford (1968-70), specialising in Shaw and Ibsen. At St Andrews, while moonlighting from his studies as an assistant stage manager at the tiny Byre theatre, he met the actor Jennifer Piercey, who was appearing there. They kept in touch, met up again in London in 1975 and married in 1977. As a performer at Oxford, he appeared in university revues and plays in a talented group of contemporaries including the writers Nigel Williams, Michael Rosen, Hermione Lee, the actor Diana Quick and television historian Michael Wood. His brush with Miller led to the assignment at the Mermaid, where Miller had recently worked. Strachan followed his successful West End premiere of Ayckbourn's bleakly funny Just Between Ourselves (1977, with Colin Blakely, Constance Chapman and Michael Gambon) by supervising one of the best solo performances of that decade: The Immortal Haydon, with Leonard Rossiter on fire as the inanely fanatical painter Benjamin Haydon, written by John Wells and performed back at the Mermaid. Other solo delights he nurtured were Maureen Lipman's Live & Kidding at the Duchess in 1997 ('A Jewish nymphomaniac,' said Lipman, 'is a woman who makes love on the same day she has her hair done'); and Keith as a tart and tetchy Mrs Pat Campbell (lover and adversary of Shaw) in Mrs Pat at Chichester in 2015. With Lipman, he also directed her skew-whiff, idiosyncratic tribute to the great Joyce Grenfell – Re: Joyce! at the Fortune in 1988 – and her wonderful performance in Peter Quilter's Glorious! at the Birmingham Rep and the Duchess in 1989, a celebration of the self-promoting soprano Florence Foster Jenkins, who, said one New York critic, when she hired the Carnegie Hall, could sing anything except notes. Strachan was always drawn to playwrights he believed in who might otherwise have slipped under the radar. Most recently, he championed Ben Brown, whose carefully researched dramas made telling ripples in some notable cultural pools and eddies: Larkin With Women (1999), in which Oliver Ford-Davies as the poet was revealed as an unlikely Don Juan ('I'd only had two women before I met you three'); Three Days in May (2011), a political cliffhanger as Churchill wrestles with his war cabinet over whether or not to sue for peace with Hitler in 1940; and A Splinter of Ice (2021), a bristling, last-ditch encounter between Kim Philby and Graham Greene in Moscow in 1987. He wrote biographies of Michael Redgrave (Secret Dreams, 2004) and Vivien Leigh (Dark Star, 2018), both superb, and modestly embedded his own career in a majestic survey of the postwar commercial theatre, Putting It On: The West End Theatre of Michael Codron (2010), and contributed obituaries to the Independent newspaper for many years. Latterly, Alan and Jeni had moved back to Scotland, where they settled in the village of Invergowrie, west of Dundee. Jeni predeceased him in 2022. He is survived by his elder brother, Graham, his nephews, Nicholas and Mark, his niece, Emma, and his cousin, Annette. Alan Lockhart Thomson Strachan, theatre director and writer, born 3 September 1944; died 10 June 2025
Wales Online
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Wales Online
Penelope Keith to star in programme celebrating 50 years of The Good Life
Penelope Keith to star in programme celebrating 50 years of The Good Life The actress and presenter, 85, played Margo Leadbetter on the show, which follows a couple who convert their garden into a farm (Image: Sergeant Rupert Frere RLC ) Dame Penelope Keith is to star in a special programme celebrating 50 years of sitcom The Good Life. The actress and presenter, 85, played Margo Leadbetter on the show, which follows a couple who convert their garden into a farm. The feature-length retrospective, titled The Good Life: Inside Out, will revisit set locations and look at props and artefacts from the programme's development, including original scripts and production notes. Dame Penelope will take viewers through the course of the sitcom's history and will be seen stepping back onto the set in a version of Margo and Jerry Leadbetter's drawing room, recreated by production company Double Yellow. Dame Penelope said: "I am delighted that (comedy channel) U&Gold has invited me to celebrate 50 years of The Good Life, a series that was important to me and is still so well loved by viewers. "I have such happy memories of making The Good Life – it was a wonderful cast and we were working with excellent scripts and a first rate production team. "The only thing I can't really believe is that it's 50 years since I first played Margo... where have the years gone?" The 120-minute special will also include archival interviews with co-stars Richard Briers, Felicity Kendal and Paul Eddington, as well as producer director John Howard Davies. The quintessential British sitcom ran for four series on the BBC from 1975 to 1978. Kendal played Barbara Good in the sitcom while the late Briers played her husband Tom and Eddington, who died in 1995, played Margo's husband Jerry. In 2010 a documentary titled All About The Good Life, celebrating the show's 35th anniversary, aired on the BBC. Helen Nightingale, head of factual and factual entertainment at broadcaster UKTV, said: "For a show to be remembered so fondly and to be such a reference point in British everyday conversation as The Good Life after 50 years is testament to its quality, and this new retrospective with Double Yellow will explore just how and why the show has endured." Article continues below The Good Life: Inside Out will air on U&Gold later this year.
RTÉ News
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
Penelope Keith to star in programme celebrating 50 years of The Good Life
Penelope Keith is to star in a special programme celebrating 50 years of sitcom The Good Life. The actress and presenter, 85, played Margo Leadbetter on the show, which followed a couple who convert their garden into a farm. The feature-length retrospective, titled The Good Life: Inside Out, will revisit set locations and look at props and artefacts from the programme's development, including original scripts and production notes. Keith will take viewers through the course of the sitcom's history and will be seen stepping back onto the set in a version of Margo and Jerry Leadbetter's drawing room, recreated by production company Double Yellow. She said: "I am delighted that U&Gold has invited me to celebrate 50 years of The Good Life, a series that was important to me and is still so well loved by viewers. "I have such happy memories of making The Good Life - it was a wonderful cast and we were working with excellent scripts and a first rate production team. "The only thing I can't really believe is that it's 50 years since I first played Margo… where have the years gone?" The 120-minute special will also include archival interviews with co-stars Richard Briers, Felicity Kendal and Paul Eddington, as well as producer director John Howard Davies. The quintessential British sitcom ran for four series on the BBC from 1975 to 1978. Kendal played Barbara Good in the sitcom while the late Briers played her husband Tom and Eddington, who died in 1995, played Margo's husband Jerry. In 2010 a documentary titled All About The Good Life, celebrating the show's 35th anniversary, aired on the BBC. Helen Nightingale, head of factual and factual entertainment at broadcaster UKTV, said: "For a show to be remembered so fondly and to be such a reference point in British everyday conversation as The Good Life after 50 years is testament to its quality, and this new retrospective with Double Yellow will explore just how and why the show has endured."
