Don Taylor

A prolific writer and director for the theatre, he was a key figure in the
golden age of television drama

Philip Purser
Thursday November 20, 2003
The Guardian

The director, writer and producer Don Taylor, who has died of cancer aged
67, was a figure of towering purpose and austerity in the years when
television drama was the true national theatre. His name was coupled with
that of David Mercer, a playwright who then filled the role, later taken
by Dennis Potter, of either delighting or confounding the audience,
nothing in between.
Both were of working-class stock, both were ardent, if troubled,
socialists. From 1961 to 1963 Taylor directed three Mercer scripts - Where
The Difference Begins, A Climate Of Fear and Birth Of A Private Man -
which had characters in common and eventually constituted a trilogy
graphically exploring the failure of socialism to live up to its ideals,
whether in this country or abroad.
Another strand at this time seemed to be concerned with eccentricity or
madness, such as And Did Those Feet (1965), a curious fantasy which Taylor
partly recorded in a public swimming pool at night. In For Tea On Sunday
(1963) the hero smashes up his friends' flat with an axe, which people did
find rather hard to comprehend. Taylor directed a second version 15 years
later. He said that it was meant to foretell the coming rage of a world
torn apart by capitalism and terrorism. Not a single critic had
appreciated the play either time, though I seem to remember one wretch
remarking that the axemanship was distinctly more professional in 1978.
Taylor directed other writers, of course, among them David Turner, NJ
Crisp and Hugh Whitemore. But with the appointment of the Canadian, Sydney
Newman, as BBC head of drama, Taylor began to feel that his choice of
plays was unwelcome. In the end, he claimed, he was blacklisted.
Instead, he made documentaries for Omnibus and other BBC arts programmes.
He was soon smuggling into his output what were little plays of his own
devising, about the poets Milton and Andrew Marvell - he was fascinated by
the English civil war - or the nature of the impulses to write and to act.
They are among the most original and entertaining things he saw on to the
screen.
He also began to direct for ITV, notably a scary thriller about rats from
Nigel Kneale. And in 1973 he was readmitted to BBC drama to direct his own
play, The Roses Of Eyam, set in the Derbyshire village which sealed itself
off with the Plague rather than risk spreading it.
Taylor was born in Chiswick, west London. His first acquaintance with TV,
aged 14, was watching his father assemble a set from a do-it-yourself kit.
His first involvement came a couple of years later when he was given
tickets to a Charlie Chester game show and was singled out from the
audience to sing "I belong to Glasgow" while standing on his head, a
humiliation which lost him his then girlfriend.
From the local grammar school he won a place at Oxford, took part in many
university theatricals, and was accepted as a BBC trainee in 1960. His
first directing credit was on an episode of a Robert Barr crime series,
Scotland Yard.
His return to the BBC fold in 1973 led him to what was, perhaps, the
boldest of all his achievements, The Theban Plays (1986). Greek drama had
been essayed on TV before, even on ITV once in Greek. But never had
Sophocles's great juggernaut of fate, retribution and death rolled by so
strongly and sparely. The cast ranged from Noel Johnson (radio's Dick
Barton) to Paul Daneman, from Gwen Taylor of the sitcom Duty Free to the
Royal Shakespeare Company's bright new star Juliet Stevenson.
A further venture into the classics, a trio from Euripides, was cancelled
half way through in 1990, and Taylor quit television for good. In their
spare time he and his wife, the writer Ellen Dryden, had, for 10 years,
been running a children's theatre in Chiswick, where they lived. It was
open to any child of any ability or disability as long as he or she was
committed to it. "No wasting time, no chattering in the wings," Ellen told
Stevenson. "If they do, Don screams at them to shut up."
"Do you think he would come to the RSC?" Stevenson asked keenly.
They now applied the experience gained here to a professional company,
First Writes, which they set up to produce radio plays for the BBC as well
as mount stage productions, the latter mostly in East Anglia. By now they
had moved to a country cottage near Norwich.
These last years were as busy as any in Taylor's career, and probably
happier. For all the austerity of his beliefs he was, says his wife, a man
of enormous joyfulness. They were married for 43 years and had two
children: Jonathan, an actor, and Lucy, who runs a communications company.
When Taylor's cancer of the colon spread to the brain, he forswore
morphine until the last two weeks, lest it impair his powers. He wrote 50
translations of Ovid poems, a stage play, a radio play, and a novel on the
English civil war. When he could no longer use a laptop he dictated.
His memoir Days Of Vision (1990) ends as follows: "Television does not
have to be cheap, depressing and second-rate. It is a beautiful, beautiful
medium, capable of anything and everything the human imagination can
conceive. It can be whatever we want it to be. Why are we throwing it
away?"
• Michael Billington writes: Aside from his TV work - the magnificent
production of Sophocles' Theban trilogy would be unthinkable today - Don
Taylor was a prolific writer and director for the theatre. As in
television, he combined an urgent contemporary awareness with a strong
sense of the past.
Taylor established his theatrical credentials at Oxford University in 1957
when he directed the stage premiere of John Osborne's Epitaph For George
Dillon: a considerable undergraduate coup highly praised by Kenneth Tynan.
And, even when working at the BBC, Taylor still managed to return to his
theatrical roots.
His first play, Grounds For Marriage, was staged by the Edinburgh Traverse
in 1967, and The Roses Of Eyam at the Northcott Exeter in 1970. He also
directed Shaw's Fanny's First Play and The Philanderer at Bernard Miles's
old Mermaid Theatre, as well as several Shakespeares at George Murcell's
St George's Theatre in Tufnell Park.
As a dramatist Taylor had strong associations with Hampstead's New End
Theatre, which staged Retreat From Moscow and When The Barbarians Came,
and with the Orange Tree in Richmond. Only in February this year, the
latter presented his own production of The Road To The Sea: an
extraordinary play tackling the major intellectual betrayals of the 20th
century and showing all Taylor's passion for politics and history. On the
first night came the shocking news that Taylor was seriously ill with a
brain tumour. But it's a measure of Taylor's overwhelming energy that
after the operation he was still writing prolifically. Taylor was a
formidable creative powerhouse who genuinely believed we could learn from
history.
• Don Taylor, television director and writer, born June 30 1936; died
November 11 2003