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
