Essay published in The Routledge Companion to Director’s Shakespeare (2010)

Terry Hands: Director’s Shakespeare

Only an unfortunate accident prevented Terry Hands’ largely uncut 2004 production of Romeo and Juliet running straight through at two hours eight minutes. Christina Cole, making her professional debut as Juliet and in a flurry of first night excitement ran in to the stage left wing and fractured a toe. With no understudies, Cole played through the six week run in various stages of recovery. Sadly for the Clwyd audiences they were not swept along with the “the two hours traffic of our stage”, but were rather left to puzzle on why “so light a foot would ne’er wear out the everlasting flint”.

As assistant director, I was left to oversee the final run in the rehearsal room on a grey Saturday morning in winter, while Terry began lighting Timothy O’Brien’s set, and I was witness to work of clarity, power and emotional complexity. In this production the heat was palpable and the “mad blood” was stirring. There was not an ounce of Byronic whimsy about Daniel Hawksford’s impulsive, macho Romeo, and the group of Montague Boys lead by former Llanelli prop forward Bradley Freegard seldom discussed homoeroticism. They understood it far more profoundly than that; their scenes came straight out of the team bath. By watching and allowing their natural dynamic to evolve in rehearsal and by handing Freegard an earring to wear at the dress Hands had given the Clwyd audience a Verona that his company and his audience understood. Despite its injury the production was a hit, even though it did play at an epic two hours and twenty-five minutes, sadly including an interval.

With the interval we lost one of the more interesting discoveries of the rehearsal process, the impetus given to the tragic arc of the play and the rich irony of the “Gallop apace you fiery footed steeds” speech if it follows directly and swiftly on from the death of Mercutio. But nearly all the rough-hewn spirit survived. Swift articulation of scenes, swift playing style on a minimally furnished stage has become Hands style, his way of serving the play above all and the primacy of the actor and the line. He explains that his

“constant quest is to find ways of releasing the thought and the emotion together and finding ways to support the line. By that I mean the words that are spoken by the actor. You can often say to a young actor ‘new line, new thought, new movement’. It may just be a change of weight, a shuffle, it may, depending upon the energy within the line, be a full movement. That movement is part of the energy of the play. A skier doing slalom, doesn’t come to the flag, stop and ski off down the other side. It’s a drop of the shoulder and on to the next part. The same is true of a Shakespeare soliloquy.

Hands is sceptical of the ‘director as auteur’, preferring to think of himself as “co-ordinating the specialised talents of others”, an invisible hand serving the play. This is expressed in his commitment to the ideals of “the company” a group of actors that work together over a period of years who have an instinctive feel for how their fellow performers play. While much is spoken about abstract notions of ensemble, for Hands whether at the Everyman, Clwyd Theatr Cymru or most notably at the Royal Shakespeare Company it has always been a concrete reality, indivisible from his conception of the role of a director and is the beating heart of his work. For him “a company is worth six months of rehearsals” Hands it seems has always been part Jean Vilar, part Bill Shankly.

After graduating from Birmingham University and RADA in 1964, Hands was part of the group that founded the Liverpool Everyman Theatre. The Everyman was founded on a shoestring budget of £3,000 from Liverpool City Council, their first season of productions was a forty-four week programme commencing on the 28th September 1964 and a company that contained Susan Fleetwood and Bruce Myers two actors who subsequently worked with Hands at the RSC. The theatre was thrust into the civic consciousness of Liverpool part by accident and part by design. Their first venue in Hope Hall was used as a cinema on Saturday mornings and had a beat group in the cellar on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, so they had to find other ways to draw an audience. Hands hit upon an idea to produce plays on the syllabus of schools within a 30-mile radius of the theatre and avoid the perception that they were solely for schools by putting on evening performances on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday for their adult audience. They were perforce one of the first Theatre-In-Education (TIE) companies.

The demands of ‘TIE’ projects in Toxteth were far from the make-up classes at the Royal Academy that were still teaching their students how to apply 5 and 9. The Everyman auditorium itself resembled in shape and dynamic an Elizabethan playhouse with the audience below the stage level, a raised platform at the back of the stage and no fly-tower. This Everyman seated seven hundred and fifty on two levels. The thrust configuration necessarily imposed fluid movement - unlike the Swan at Stratford there were no gangways downstage left and right for an actor to rest during a scene – and the close proximity of the often raucous Liverpool kids compelled actors to play scenes directly and quickly. This was in contrast to the often rhetorical and fairly immobile productions of Shakespeare that were the norm at that time. Consideration of the unfettered responses of this audience was paramount for the Everyman Company in their early productions. Then, as now, Hands had the image of a fourteen year-old child in his mind when preparing for rehearsals.

“Why fourteen? Because they are hitting puberty and there’s a sudden interest in the world around them. We found when we were going out to schools that the kids were tough. They could smell out pretension a mile away. You don’t waste time with Liverpool kids, we drove it through very fast. In a sense it must have been like doing the plays for the groundlings in Shakespeare’s own time. When I first came into the theatre in the early 60s, there was a lot of disguise, artifice, wigs and what not. It didn’t fool the fourteen year olds. We asked them why they didn’t go to the theatre and they would say because there’s a better class of actor on the football field.

Hands’ achievements in Liverpool were recognised in 1966 when Peter Hall invited him to Stratford to join the Royal Shakespeare Company. Hall’s nascent RSC brought together a generation of directors, graduates in English Literature and Language who understood the context in which the plays were written, who made detailed studies of the texts, could offer it up to their actors and according to Michael Billington “shot British theatre forward 200 years almost overnight’. This group contained Hall himself, John Barton, Peter Brook and Trevor Nunn. According to Hands, one of Hall’s great achievements was that

“he made it a respectable job for a University graduate to become a theatre director. He allowed the art of the director to emerge and evolve”.

He also recalls that this group drew inspiration from the Berliner Ensemble’s visits to England in the 50s and 60s.

“No more four walls, no more painted cloths, real bits of wood and metal, people talking straight out, breaking the ‘fourth wall’. It was very exciting”.

As well as the profound influence on the directorate, the Berliner’s aesthetic was being introduced to the RSC by designers. John Bury in particular. Bury had been working with Joan Littlewood’s company in Stratford East, asking the audience to use their imagination; moving from the representational to the expressionistic and the abstract.

Thrust into artistically and intellectually vibrant company, Hands was initially given the brief to run Theatre-Go-Round the RSC’s Theatre-In-Education wing.

“Peter gave me a budget, an administrator and he told us we could rehearse in the tin shed (later the Other Place). He told us two things ‘do what you like’ and ‘break even. I said I’d have to go and pinch actors from all over the company and he said ‘if Peter Brook complains then we’ll talk again’. And within about three months we had about sixteen shows and demonstrations that we could take out on the road to schools and colleges all over the country. We even took out Peter Brook’s company to do US on the road”.

After a controversial production of pro-Castro Cuban drama The Criminals by Jose Triana, in 1967 (the first production Hands had directed in an end-on proscenium arch theatre) Peter Hall invited Terry to direct his first main stage Shakespeare production and was given the choice between Richard II and The Merry Wives of Windsor. He recalls that he

“read them both and didn’t want to do either. At that stage I was 27 and I couldn’t stand Richard’s page after page of self-pity. So I said, with my heart in my mouth, I’ll do The Merry Wives”.

Work began on the production in 1968 and Hands was given a remarkable cast which included Elizabeth Spriggs and Brenda Bruce as the Wives, Brewster Mason as Falstaff, Roger Rees as Fenton and Ian Richardson as Ford. A daunting task for a junior director and one that prompted fastidious study in preparation for the rehearsal room.

“The more I read the play in the folio, the less sense it made. Then I had a stroke of luck. Oxford University Press at that time were publishing the bad quartos of Shakespeare. I looked at the bad quarto of Merry Wives, and there, gaps were being filled in and plotting ‘mistakes’ corrected. There were missing links and clarifications. There’s no clarity in the Folio. There is in the ‘bad’ quarto. So I steadily built up my own script, one that made sense. I was excited by the detective work”.

The sleuthing continued.

“It does seem to me that a director has two jobs when working on a play. To discover the ‘conscious’ play and the ‘unconscious’ play. In the same way that we have a conscious mind and an unconscious mind, so with any playwright young or old, alive or dead if they’re any good there’s at least two plays in there. There’s the conscious play the one they set out to write and there’s the unconscious play that has written itself subliminally. The job of the director it seemed to me was to climb inside the writer’s head and to pick out both. With Merry Wives I analysed every word in every scene, I still have enormous notebooks to show for it. So whatever was said in the text, ‘good morning’, ‘it’s cold today’ for example, would go in one list, entitled ‘greetings’; that would record how they addressed one another, ‘master/sir’ or whether first names or surnames were being used. ‘Domestic’ would go in one list and ‘hunting’ would go in another list. All in all I had twelve categories, there were categories for emotion, hate, love; just the words that Shakespeare used and nothing else. I would write them down in lists and add them up at the bottom and see what choices of words were predominating in each scene. Then I could decide as a director whether to accentuate that or play against it. All very primitive really, but useful. When I was reading Merry Wives, my instinct was that the predominant imagery of the play was ‘hunting’. But in the overall summing up, ‘hunting’ came third behind ‘domestic’, the talk of laundry baskets, homes, carpets and what not. To a 27-year-old ‘domestic’ had absolutely no interest, so I didn’t see it. It taught me a valuable lesson.

From that came the realisation that what Shakespeare had written was a companion piece to Henry V, at around about the same time (c.1599-1600). In Henry V he writes about the unification of a nation, in a sense it’s his tribute to Elizabeth I. In the play you have four captains an Englishman, an Irishman, a Welshman, and a Scotsman and by the end you have a band of brothers, they are a united nation. The comic version of this story of national unity takes place at a cross roads called Windsor. Here, you have a Frenchman, a Welshman, you get the court coming down, you have got the heart of England, the peasantry and you have the Masters. To be a Master you had to be wealthy, and the soldiers who survived Agincourt were all made Masters. These were the ‘new’ English, the businessmen, the arrivistes, the people who were building the first British Empire and who would soon chop off the head of Charles I. And into this highly organised society is thrown the court and Falstaff, who get their comeuppance for trying to make a few quid by seducing a wife or two. The play is a celebration of the new nation, of the new renaissance nation.

Timothy O’Brien’s set reflected Hands’ vision of Windsor; that of a new town, newly wealthy, hewn into the forest by its land owning, professional inhabitants. The uprights of the trees were disciplined into a township. There were no walls, the audience was invited to imagine the boundary between the domestic and the forest. This gave each ‘domestic’ scene a broader social context, lightly pointing up the nouveau side of the characters, and by hanging a few dolls from the branches of forest, the darker suggestion that the characters were not very far removed from their pagan past. This gave the Horn’s Oak scene overtones of Hallow’een. Like the Berliner, social context and social relations were not incidental in this production, but became central to the drama.

“Before we get on to the ‘design’, the question of the space you are working in has to be addressed. If you can get that right, then you don’t need a set. Then you can move to the naked actor and what you need minimally to cover him or her to focus the play. I always want air to pass through a set and I want room to move the actors. I prefer to work with very little. Also, it seems to me, that everything that happens on stage whether it is movement or a response has to support the line. And, if you work without furniture, all the energy can be directed in to the play and its communication.”

Hands preparation enabled him to be a walking encyclopaedia in the rehearsal room, talking to the actors about who these characters are and continually offering fresh contexts for each scene, rarely interrupting, never pushing, never doctrinaire. As he puts it.

“I was not going to teach Ian [Richardson] or Liz [Spriggs] anything. All you can do is throw them a different colour ball each time and watch what they do with it. The more coloured balls you throw them, the more they’ll play and the more wonderful they’ll be”.

While Hands’ resistance to ‘blocking’, as illustrated by this example form the early part of his career, is rooted in respect for the actor’s craft, it also springs from the desire to serve the variety of Shakespeare’s text by preserving the variety of the actor performing it. Indeed it might be said that this is the main focus of his work, the thing that all aspects of his productions are geared towards. When talking about rehearsals for the Merry Wives he remarked

“I wouldn’t do blocking. I never do. I don’t to this day. You really can’t ‘block’. Because the way in which Miss A or Mr. B speaks and moves is going to be different each time. With ‘blocking’ you can erase masses of detail, and that detail has to come from the actor. And if you allow them to act freely, it does”.

This can also be said of his native suspicion of any ‘technique’ that interferes with the actor’s freedom of movement, anything that gets between the impulse of the actor and his text. For Hands, in the main, excavating and exploring what the playwright has written is difficult enough without muddying the water with extra-textual conjecture. As I witnessed during rehearsals for his 2003 production of The Crucible, when an actor asserted meekly “my character wouldn’t do that”, Hands curtly replied “there’s no such thing. Your character is you, plus what you say, start again”. However during the 1968 Merry Wives his assistant director, the late Buzz Goodbody said

“ ‘proper directors do improvisations’ I replied that I thought they were a waste of time And she said ‘let me do some’. So she took everybody off one day to The Other Place, and the whole ‘village’ went to church for the day. With a service conducted by Hugh Evans they sat in pews and had to decide who would sit next to who. It was actually hugely valuable. It aided and clarified their behaviour to each other on stage”.

This is a useful vignette demonstrating his willingness to explore something counterintuitive in the rehearsal room. But to any actor, assistant director, designer or stage manager who suggests something off the beaten track, his response will be “if it works we’ll keep it, if it doesn’t we won’t”. Little time is wasted on discussion, and filibustering is not tolerated.

During his 1971 Richard III for the RSC, Hands experimented further with the notion of ‘non-blocking’, pushing the freedom of his actors to the limit, allowing them almost total freedom to rebuild the stage action every night. His brilliant company (including Helen Mirren as Lady Anne, Norman Rodway as Richard and Ian Richardson as Buckingham) had only sporadic success with this method, finding it difficult to maintain in a busy repertory system. Hands regarded this experiment as a failure. In 1972 he was offered the opportunity to direct a new production of Richard III at the Comédie Française.

“I was about the fifteenth director to be invited as all the others had turned it down. I agreed to do it mainly because I’d had a flop with the play and I considered it unfinished business. The Comédie Française Richard III was a success. Robert Hirsch was an astonishing Richard, Jacques Charon played Buckingham, all the greats of the French theatre were in it. Abdel [Abd’Elkader Farrah, known professionally as ‘Farrah’ - 1926-2005] designed. It was at this time I began to learn the way that the French language worked. The French actors of course having a so-called ‘non-tonic language’ played the phrase, where we in England at that time were playing the ‘word’. What you would hear in the corridors and the rehearsal rooms at the RSC at that time, was “colouring the word”. The result was that we often played very slowly. We had problems in Stratford because our shows had to be down by 10.30 because the bus services back to Birmingham left at 10.50. As a result the texts of our productions were heavily cut. What I discovered with the French, because they played not the ‘word’, but the ‘phrase’, right the way through to the full stop was that their work was much faster and more meaningful. Instead of stressing every other word they were accentuating ‘the meaning”.

For the French classical actors playing through to the end of the sentence came from the tradition of the tirade. Actors could use the pattern of the verse line and the thematic repetition to build emotional intensity. Hands started to apply these ideas to English Shakespeare with his 1975 production of Henry V.

“After France, I suggested to Alan Howard that we could play like that, through to the full stop, ideally on one breath. It became a company joke at first, because sometimes the full stop didn’t come for fifteen lines, but even if they couldn’t do the line on one breath, they could have that point in mind as they started the sentence. Soon we found that we were playing far more of the text than we normally did and we were coming down well within our 10.30 limit. I played Julius Caesar without an interval and it was through in two hours fifteen. It became more and more popular because it released the actor’s instinct. Instead of the heavy preparation of a line, which was basically 19th century, now they were flowing through the play. Most importantly, far more lines were being played so you got more richness from the experience itself, rather than the last minute ad hoc cutting that used to go on in order to get it over with by the required time.”

Aesthetically also, Hands and Farrah were able to build on the lessons learned at the Comédie Française and bring them to their most vivid realisation here. For Hands this was the play about the theatre building, “the wooden ‘o’”. Director and designer decided to open up the Royal Shakespeare Theatre (RST) and place this epic theatre space at the centre of the production. The back wall of the theatre was revealed, as was the wing space, the stage was thrust as far out in to the auditorium as possible, this was the largest playing area ever used by the company. Farrah likened the set to an "aircraft carrier landing deck", upon which the play would take place and then concentrated on the detail of costuming, richness of decoration and a careful selection of props. He also demanded that the lighting should carry an equivalent impact. Hands had been lighting his own work since the all-hands-on-deck days of the Everyman, a skill he had acquired on the primitive Strand Junior 8 lighting board, at the same time as learning to run prompt corner and fumigate the seats. The introduction of computers in 1972 made it logistically possible for him to light work of this scale, and he credited himself as lighting designer for the first time on this Henry V.

With only an ugly bundle of grey rags centre stage to dress their epic, empty ‘wooden ‘o’’, Hands and Farrah were inviting their audience to “think, when we talk of horses that you see them” on a massive scale. They decided that this complicity between actor and audience should start with the actors on a bare stage in rehearsal clothes preparing themselves for the performance.

“In a way the beginning of the play is spent rehearsing for the play that is to come. The play doesn’t really begin until you get to Southampton. So we literally started with the actors on stage at 7pm doing their exercises in their ordinary rehearsal clothes, and the first costume we saw was that of the French Ambassador. We felt that this play, as often in Shakespeare is about an out-of-date, over-the-hill declining power confronting a new vibrant one. So if you play for twenty minutes in your rehearsal clothes and a spot-on replica of a medieval French Ambassador enters, he will look even more out of place and even more out of date because everybody else is so contemporary and relaxed.

The Queen was due to visit Stratford, in this the centenary year of the Theatre, certain sections of the audience were very keen that her majesty should not see the Royal Shakespeare Company play Henry V in their jeans. Within the company their was unrest too, as the actors attempted to persuade Hands that this lack of costume made the audience see “them and not their character”, he countered that this first section of the play “became about the words and not about the costume”.

The production hinged on the coup de theatre at the top of Act II that accompanied Emrys James thrilling delivery of the “Now all the youth on England are on fire” speech. The true scale of Alan Howard’s voice emerged through the indignance of the ‘tennis balls speech’ in Act I Scene ii, as he faced the costumed French ambassador; and over James’ speech the ugly bundle of rags exploded to form a great canopy over the stage as a huge cart packed with actors came hurtling on, carrying an enormous cannon.

“Often we played the first fifteen minutes to a 1,500 seat theatre in icy disbelief. But when the explosion came, the level of warmth that flooded the stage sustained the production from then right through to the end of the evening”.

Farrah’s costumes and Hands lighting design combined to create many memorable visual moments, punctuating the rapid tempo of the production,

“I remember saying to Abdel that we could only afford three actors to play the multitudinous French Army that was going to crush Henry. He asked me to keep the light in one tight area, his French knights came out in golden armour. When the light hit it was like a sunrise.

Hands later said of Farrah,

“For me he was more than a friend and collaborator. He was mentor, guide and the strongest artistic influence of my life”.

In Alan Howard too he found a strong and lasting collaborator. His vast vocal range and lupine, dextrous, butch physicality gave Hands, in some ways, his ideal leading man. An actor of charisma, technical prowess and variety able to play with speed but lose none of the articulation and definition in the text.

In this centenary year Hands directed all four productions in the RSC’s Stratford Season, including a revival of his Merry Wives and an acclaimed staging of both parts of King Henry IV. He was made joint artistic director of the RSC in 1978 and sole artistic director and Chief Executive in 1986 until his departure from the company he had helped to build in 1991 after twenty-five years.

After a successful career as a freelance director, winning accolades for productions in Paris, New York, London and Tokyo Hands took on the task of saving Theatr Clwyd a repertory theatre in Mold, North Wales. The theatre has two performance spaces the 550 seat Anthony Hopkins Theatre and the 200 seat Emlyn Williams Studio space. What began as a consultancy contract to re-open the theatre, became an enduring relationship and a new challenge. At the time of writing in early Spring 2007 he is still Artistic Director and Chief Executive of a thriving company, with a large audience in Wales and beyond. In 1998 Theatr Clwyd’s name was changed to Clwyd Theatr Cymru to reflect its commitment to its Welsh identity and to its Welsh audiences. It has been a galvanising force for Welsh actors, writers and directors. As part of its repertoire the company has mounted ambitious productions of repertory staples such as Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth (played by Owen Teale) and it has received critical acclaim for productions of King Lear (played by Nicol Williamson) and Troilus and Cressida, plays that are rarely mounted in regional repertory houses, due to a combination of cast size, perceived box office draw, and the monumental challenge for actors.

Clwyd Theatr Cymru continues to be a political lightening rod in Welsh Arts discourse, because of its status as the de facto national theatre in the English language, and the role that it might play in building a confident, bi-lingual Welsh identity in a devolved Wales in the 21st century. Shakespeare has had a central role in the discourse relating to the establishment of a Welsh National Theatre. A Welsh Assembly Nationalist once labelled Shakespeare a ‘London writer’, the writer of the English oppressor and as such should not play a role in the development of a Welsh Theatre culture. Unsurprisingly Hands disagrees

“If you want to create a true national theatre in any country, you do need to focus it on a particular writer or writers. In Norway they do the work of Ibsen, Sweden, Strindberg, and so on. England has predominantly Shakespeare but there are many others. It is noticeable in countries that have a ‘national’ writer, their second writer is almost invariably Shakespeare. Shakespeare in his richness of humanity, breadth of imagination becomes ‘notre Shakspeare’ or ‘unser Shakespeare’. Belonging as much to them as he does to us”.

With no dominant national author for the stage, Hands feels that Shakespeare could be

“crucial to the Welsh experience. If you start with the premise that you do not require special conditions to play it and that Shakespeare speaks immediately to the rich and the poor, to the educated and the non-educated. While of course it would be better if there were a Welsh O’Casey or a Welsh Moliere, there isn’t. Shakespeare should, I think, form the core of a national theatre repertoire.”

What then for the future of the production of Shakespeare’s plays, not only in Wales but in the broader UK, particularly, given the increased commercial pressures on actor availability and on production budgets? Placing this question in a broader historical context, Hands sees a trend not towards too little Shakespeare, but too much.

“[At the RSC] Every production we did had to be a major event. We tried to do each production so well that no-one would go near the play for five years. Sometimes we succeeded. We never sent a play out on tour until it had been showered with praise in both Stratford and London. Now I feel the attitude is ‘don’t worry if you miss this bus, there’ll be another one along in a minute’. Adaptation Shakespeare is championed partly by critics who are bored with Shakespeare, partly by bored practitioners. But the fourteen year-old coming to the theatre for the first time is not bored. Should a great play by Shakespeare (comedy or tragedy) be a great event? Or should it be part of a theme park? At present I feel it’s more theme park and I would like to see more event”.

But

“We can’t all be Peter Brook. Of course we can’t. I was sitting there on the first night of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and by the interval we all knew we were sharing a moment of history. I don’t mind trying the whole of my life to achieve one interval like that”.



Terry Hands CBE

Director Emeritus RSC, Hon. D. Litt. (Birmingham), Hon. D. Litt (Liverpool), Hon. Doct. (Middlesex), Hon. Fellow Shakespeare Institute, Hon. Fellow. Welsh College of Music and Drama. Hon. Fellow North East Wales Institute. He studied English Language and Literature at Birmingham University (BA Hons) and trained at RADA (Hons Diploma).  In 1964 he founded The Liverpool Everyman Theatre of which he is now Honorary Director.  He is a Vice President of the Llangollen International Music Eisteddfod and Joint President of the Arvon Foundation.      

In 1966 Terry became Artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Theatregoround, touring productions to the community. He became Associate Director of the RSC in 1967. His work included directing all four productions in the centenary season at Stratford 1975, Henry V, Henry IV parts 1 & 2.  Henry V also played to New York, and major European and British cities.  In 1977 he directed the three parts of Henry VI - the first time they had been produced in their entirety since Shakespeare’s day - they won two awards:  Joint Winner of the Plays and Players Award for Best Production and the SWET Award for Director of the Year in 1978.

In 1972 Terry directed Richard III at the Comedie Francaise which won the Meilleur Spectacle de L’Annee and later appeared at the World Theatre Season, London in 1973.  In 1975 he was appointed Consultant Director of the Comedie Francaise, and also Chevalier of Arts and Letters by the French Government.  He won the Meilleur Spectacle de L’Annee once again in 1976 for Twelfth Night.

In 1978 Terry was appointed Joint Artistic director of the RSC. During this period he directed many plays including:  Richard II and Richard III in 1980 starring Alan Howard, these completed the history cycle he had begun in 1975. In 1986 Terry became Chief Executive of the RSC.

His plays included The Winter’s Tale with Jeremy Irons, Coriolanus with Charles Dance and Love’s Labour’s Lost with Ralph Fiennes.  In 1991 Terry was presented with the Pragnell Shakespeare Award and he left the RSC after 25 years.

In 1996 he joined Theatr Clwyd as Artistic Consultant, and prevented its closure after Local Government Re-organisation.  In 1997 he became Director and Chief Executive. Renamed Clwyd Theatr Cymru the theatre won the nation-wide British TMA Awards Theatre of the Year in 1998.  In 1999 Clwyd Theatr Cymru was declared a WNPAC (Welsh National Performing Arts Company), alongside the Welsh National Opera and the National Orchestra of Wales. For Clwyd Theatr Cymru his productions have included:, Twelfth Night and Macbeth, King Lear with Nicol Williamson as Lear, Romeo and Juliet, and Troilus and Cressida.


© Phillip Breen