Philip Hedley, brilliant artistic director for 25 years of the Theatre Royal Stratford East

He built on Joan Littlewood’s belief in reflecting and attracting the local community and championed black and Asian actors and writers

Philip Hedley, who has died aged 85, was a protégé of Joan Littlewood, the radical founder of Theatre Workshop, a collective that toured shows aimed at working-class audiences and led an extraordinary revolution in British theatre in the 1950s when it took up residence at the Theatre Royal in Stratford, east London.
Hedley began as Joan Littlewood’s assistant in 1972, and after a hiatus following her departure from the theatre in 1974, he took over as artistic director of the Theatre Royal Stratford East in 1979, remaining in post for 25 years.
He recalled Joan Littlewood telling him at his interview that she had founded her life “on the rock of change”. “She was completely against anything that became established, where people thought they had developed safe rules for conducting themselves,” he said. “If an actor got a terrific laugh on a line, that was the line she would change the next night.”
Hedley remained true to her vision, maintaining the theatre’s reputation for both innovative productions and for bringing in new audiences, despite perennial battles with the Arts Council over funding.
He built on her belief in creating work to reflect and to attract the local community, which, in the 1980s and 1990s, became much more culturally mixed, so that by the end of his tenure white people in the theatre’s home borough of Newham were in a minority.
He championed the work of black and Asian actors and writers, and attracted more diverse audiences with variety nights (described in the Evening Standard as consisting of “geriatric gags and brand new sketches, bizarre contortionists and dressy drag queens, loud, brash and often extremely rude”) and annual pantomimes (usually featuring a black central character) and co-productions with leading black and Asian companies.
Musicals included Moti Roti Puttli Chunni (1993), a spin on Bollywood; and Clarke Peters’s Five Guys Named Moe (1990), based on the music of the American bandleader Louis Jordan, which transferred to the West End and Broadway.
In 1999 Hedley founded the theatre’s acclaimed Musical Theatre Workshop to encourage local writers and composers. The workshop was instrumental in producing Da Boyz (2003), a hip-hop adaptation by Ultz (born David Ultz) of the 1938 Broadway hit The Boys from Syracuse, for which all the seats were removed from the stalls to enable young audience members to dance. 
In the US, the entertainment weekly Variety devoted its whole front page to the show and expressed astonishment that a small theatre in London had managed to negotiate the rights to modernise the Rodgers and Hart original in a way no American theatre had been allowed to do.
Another huge success was the hit ska Windrush musical The Big Life (2004), written by Paul Sirett and Paul Joseph and billed as the first black British musical to play the West End. It earned Hedley the Arts Council’s first Eclipse award for combating racism in the theatre – and served as his swansong.
Just as Joan Littlewood had risked official disapproval with the anti-war satirical musical Oh, What a Lovely War!, Hedley did the same by staging the first production in English of Federico García Lorca’s controversial play, The Public, in 1988 in defiance of the newly enacted Section 28 of the Local Government Act banning the promotion of homosexuality (though one actor noted that the play was “so wrapped up in symbolism no one had a clue what it was about”).
Hedley was delighted, moreover, when “questions were asked” in the House of Commons about another show, which featured Mrs Thatcher doing a striptease, discarding a garment as she announced each new cut in public spending. Other productions tackled racial prejudice and violence, the poll tax (treated not as an occasion for agitprop but as a springboard for farce), or simply life in east London.
He stopped at almost nothing to gain publicity for his theatre. The Telegraph’s critic Charles Spencer recalled how, to drum up interest for one of his variety nights, he promised a dog that danced, although he did not have access to such a dog: “When the photographers on national newspapers demanded a photocall, he borrowed a dog from an actress. But why wasn’t it dancing? asked the photographers. It was suffering from flu, came the explanation, and was unable to dance that day. But it would certainly be All Right On The Night.
“As the performance approached, Hedley realised the non-existent dog would have to die. The press was solemnly informed that the Terpsichorean hound had been run over by an articulated lorry on its way to the theatre. Reporters trying to interview the ‘owner’ about her tragic loss were told that she was too distressed to come to the phone.”
Michael Bertenshaw, a veteran pantomime dame in Theatre Royal productions, many directed by Hedley, recalled that his shows “all had that rough-and-ready quality that you would expect from music hall”: “Other directors I’ve worked with get exasperated if things aren’t going right. But sometimes things would go horribly wrong with Philip and you would glance up at the end of a run and see he was wiping his eyes, crying with laughter because everybody had got in such a mess and had somehow managed to get out of it…
“Some directors are very autocratic; Philip is a great one for celebrating what actors do and pulling together the chaos and putting it on stage.”
But beneath Hedley’s theatrical manner, his publicity stunts and his infectious high-pitched giggle, Charles Spencer detected a man of “almost puritanical idealism”. He was one of the most outspoken critics of business sponsorship of the arts, arguing that excessive reliance on sponsorship can easily lead to self-censorship by arts organisations, anxious not to offend their patrons.
Hedley himself would recall being approached by a West End management company. “They offered me double my salary without knowing what it was, and an office in Wardour Street with air conditioning and a wall-to-wall carpet. If they thought those values were important to me they were talking to the wrong person.”
Philip David Hedley was born to a working-class family in Manchester on April 10 1938 and emigrated to Australia with his family in 1951. His love affair with theatre began at the University of Sydney, where “on paper” he studied English and education but became more and more involved in drama.
Returning to Britain, he went to the Theatre Royal to see a Ben Jonson play, Every Man in His Humour, and heard two tea ladies chatting in the cafe beforehand. “The real Cockney accent was new to me then,” he recalled. “I delayed going into the theatre because I wanted to hear their stories. When I went in the play was just the same as the two ladies – the same rhythm, sparkiness and immediacy. It was stunning.”
Afterwards he wandered out into the foyer and asked the house manager what he could do to be part of it: “That question altered the course of my life.”
Hedley was one of the first students to enrol at the E15 Acting School, founded in 1961 by members of Joan Littlewood’s company. But he soon realised he was more of a director than an actor, and spent a few years freelancing around the country and the world – “from West End musicals to a school playground in Khartoum” – before he went back to see Joan Littlewood, who gave him a five-hour interview to be her assistant.
He recalled her as “demanding and challenging… wonderful and hell. She used to attack people and eventually she went for me. She accused me of everything conceivable, down to my progeny and my testicles.”
When Joan Littlewood moved to France in 1974, prompted by the death of her partner Gerry Raffles, there followed a turbulent period which saw the arrival and departure of three artistic directors, Ken Hill, Maxwell Shaw and finally Clare Venables. By 1979, when Hedley agreed to take over, the Arts Council was threatening to withdraw its subsidy if the theatre could not, within two years, justify its continuation.
Hedley soon began to make his mark, casting the country’s first black principal boy in Jack and the Beanstalk. Other early successes included new plays such as Welcome Home Jacko by Mustapha Matura, Barrie Keeffe’s Sus and Better Times, and Steaming by Nell Dunn. He produced and directed more than 160 productions before he retired to become Director Emeritus in 2004. He was succeeded by Kerry Michael, associate director at the theatre and Hedley’s former assistant.
Hedley remained active, teaching, lecturing, running workshops and serving on numerous Arts Council and other committees. He was appointed CBE in 2003.
Philip Hedley was unmarried.
Philip Hedley, born April 10 1938, died January 5 2024